The pre requisite would be to explain that hierarchies of values exist. If you get there, you are no longer facing a nihilist, hence you can focus on arguing the superiority of your moral value.
I disagree you'd no.longer be facing a Nihilist. You might get them to consider the merit of a viewpoint versus another, but they still wouldn't really care about any viewpoint presented. A dyed in the wool Nihilist would only provide objective judgement, but adopt no position.
"Explaining" wouldn't magically turn a lot of nihilists I agree. A dyed in the wool as you said would not even listen to an explanation, she would hear it, and camp on their no position. There is something contradictory about nihilists, only their view is valid. The view that no view other than theirs is better than any other, and even if some obviously are, they are meaningless anyway. Unless it impacts them as individuals of course.
I'm not arguing that a discussion with an entrenched Nihilist has much chance to have value, but since I'm not a Nihilist I see value in that discussion, even when it was a lost cause.
I don’t know why, but I hate that question (at least in this context). It seems like it is shifting the question of ethics into some sort of meta-ethics. I wonder if you professor was used to formulate an ethical argument, but I personally find it very hard. This might be a good advice in competitive debate, but when you are facing a real argument in the real world where somebody is claiming to be a moral superior I don’t know if this is a helpful advice. E.g. I have no idea how to explain to a nihilist that murdering humans is worse then killing animals for meat. Is that even possible?
I'm legitimately glad to see this is making so many uncomfortable - that's a base component of robust discussion, delving into the uncomfortable. If you're down voting, please share the reasons why to further discussion.
What's inexcusable is for a business entity to apply discrimination on moral grounds. Ideally, politicians should also stay away from the moral debate. We've seen what this can lead to.
Reality here is that godaddy gave an unreasonably small time window for a site shutdown, simply because of their fear of the backslash from the public causing PR damage hence revenue loss.
Yes, related to their area of business. What is “cold” about making profits to you? Personally, the locus of morality is my religious/ethnic community. Businesses should focus on making money so they can pay people who can use that money to be moral in their own communities.
What doesn't sit right with me is that a lot of this stuff is becoming very polarized. The same thing happened with Parler, when AWS et al just decided that it was too toxic to do business with and suspended the platform's infrastructure.
It seems to me that nobody on either side wants to tolerate freedom of speech. When you see something you don't like, the answer is tolerance, not "This person/thing/company" should go away and never come back. I'm just starting to see it far too often where something gets "cancelled" because it makes some subset of people uncomfortable. Inevitably the pendulum will swing the other way, and those who engage in this kind of activity aren't going to like the precedent they've set.
`the wise man bowed his head solemnly and spoke: "theres actually zero difference between good & bad things. you imbecile. you fucking moron"`
I don't want to add a ton of exposition to this, but I also don't want this to be a reddit-level comment where I just link to something and bounce so I will add that clearly someone doing something because it is moral and just like hampering the collection of abortion bounties is better than someone doing something immoral and unjust like hampering access to abortions.
It isn't about what I agree and disagree with, it's about what's actually right and wrong.
In prehistoric days, killing another man to protect your own food was "right".
The Aztecs had no problem sacrificing people, and many sought it out (it's theorized) given that it guaranteed you a place next to the sun and thus in paradise, eternally drunk.
Extremists even today believe in a paradise-after-death if they sacrifice themselves for god. To a lesser extent, self-flagellation (whipping oneself for religious purposes) is still prevalent in many cultures and sects of e.g. Christianity/Catholocism today.
"Right" and "wrong" change over time, and with culture. Thus they are subjective - there is no objective "right" and "wrong". In this sense, your last sentence relates two identical things - what you might agree with and disagree with are your own perception of "right" and "wrong".
It's a somewhat flawed and (in my opinion) dangerous way of thinking about social interaction and morality.
---
E: Because I know this will be mis-interpreted, let me be clear: the website in question is, in my opinion, abhorrent - but I think it's dangerous to celebrate a large company taking it down on the grounds of morality. I understand it was taken down as it specifically violated a pre-existing clause in their ToS which makes it make sense in this case. But to say that this is a great thing and we should do this for people that are "wrong" is beginning down a path that nobody really wants.
The dril tweet applies nearly equally to your response as it did when I first linked it.
You're incorrect about right and wrong changing over time. Even with that information though, it doesn't matter for what I said to still be correct both CURRENTLY (which fits your incorrect ideas of morality) and more broadly.
That likely lead their risk/policy people to go “wait, we’re hosting WHAT?!”
This wouldn’t necessarily have been something they’d know about up front. The group presumably didn’t write them an email on signing up saying “yeah, we’ll be violating your ToS”.
I mean I would be surprised if there are many humans at all vetting domains registered on godaddy. It's probably a mainly automated process with some smoke testing, and automated scanning for illegal content - if that.
Freedom of speech immediately forgotten when money is at stake.
no worries - there is a parallel economy rising from this leftist takeover.
sites like gab are growing like there is no tomorrow.
When you actively call for harm (civil suit + the danger that is getting an "illegal" abortion), don't be surprised when people kick you out. That's not a leftist takeover, that's a holy-shit-even-the-1800s-were-more-progressive-for-women takeover.
What this shows is that harm reduction (the principal moral foundation for “leftists”, “progressives” etc. according to Jonathan Haidt) is inadequate as the sole foundation for an ethic.
There is no unborn child. It's not even a thinking mass of cells. A fetus is not a life.
What this shows is that conservatives do not give a single shit about harm, but this is about their own little morals and ethic allows them to justify a miserable existence for a woman and a child because you, as a man who is never going to be in a situation where your only choices are either getting an abortion in secret or being sued for doing do, thought that you could control their bodies.
That reductionist argument is old and tired, and devoid of any truth. Just a clump of cells? Is it just as likely to grow into being a giraffe? or an oak tree? just some blob? Left unkilled, it grows to what it is -- a human being.[1]
A fetus is not a life? WTF? "Science" says it's a forming human. Are you anti-science?
When one turns on an enemy, the first thing is to dehumanize them. Doing horrible things (dismembering, killing) to a non-human is much easier. The tactics of the Left regarding abortion are very similar as what one does when ginning up a society for war: you convince them through repeated messaging that "they" they aren't human beings -- they're something less, and they're a problem for us.
I used to be a Democrat, and it was the callous tone the the Left took on re: abortion that was a factor in me deciding that the hypocrisy was too much. I support unrestricted first trimester abortions, and am of the now-rejected Bill Clinton philosophy that they should be safe, legal, ... and rare. It's very telling that it's the "rare" part that the Left takes exception with. Now, it's only conservatives who quote Clinton on that.
Add to that, 80% of abortions are black and brown babies[2], yet the organization known as "Black Lives Matter" is silent on the topic -- more hypocrisy.
> It's very telling that it's the "rare" part that the Left takes exception with. Now, it's only conservatives who quote Clinton on that.
This is complete nonsense. It's not "the left" that opposes teaching proper sex ed, easy and affordable access to contraception, or providing economic assistance for the mothers who cannot care for a child. Or, for that matter, reducing the economic inequality that leads to that problem in the first place.
Actually, it is true: "When Bill Clinton gave the country “safe, legal, and rare” in 1992...They translated into language the inchoate sentiments of millions of Americans so exactly that they had to hear it only once for it to become their firmly held position on abortion....Now, after a quarter century of mighty service...the phrase is being vigorously expunged from the pro-abortion-rights conversation, including from the plank of the Democratic Party (in 2012) and the official position of Planned Parenthood. "
Maybe you should include this later bit of explaining context?
> "Young feminists living in the age of dwindling access to abortion aren’t interested in a mantra that implies there is something shameful about the procedure"
> It's very telling that it's the "rare" part that the Left takes exception with.
The Left doesn’t. The “rare” was a reference to government providing sex education, contraception availability, and social support to attack the demand side so that even with abortion being ssfe, legal, and readily available at need, it would be rare that it would be sought.
> Now, it's only conservatives who quote Clinton on that.
While the right may quote it, they also oppose each and everything it stood for. In fact, that was the left-wing part of the formulation (and the part Clinton, as a center-right Democrat, was least sincere about, hence his cheerful collaboration with Republicans in destroying the social safety net.).
This is a fascinating comment to me as a window into the unexamined assumptions of a liberal mind. (Well, I don't know your politics but I think its safe to say this is typical of what American liberals think.)
> There is no unborn child. It's not even a thinking mass of cells. A fetus is not a life.
The fetus would grow into a life if it were not for the violent intervention of an abortion. Is the future relevant to a system of ethics? Take for example the debate over universal pre-k. What harm is there right now if a toddler in the ghetto doesn't learn their ABCs until a few years later. Or is it the proponents think it will lead to problems later on in life.
> What this shows is that conservatives do not give a single shit about harm
Maybe a single shit but harm/care is only one of several moral foundations. Read your Haidt. Or atleast this excerpt from the wikipedia page on moral foundations theory:
"Researchers have found that people's sensitivities to the five/six moral foundations correlate with their political ideologies. Using the Moral Foundations Questionnaire, Haidt and Graham found that libertarians are most sensitive to the proposed Liberty foundation, liberals are most sensitive to the Care and Fairness foundations, while conservatives are equally sensitive to all five/six foundations."
Incidently, another of Haidts' findings is that conservatives are much better at understanding why liberals are liberal than liberals are at understanding why conservatives are conservative.
> this is about their own little morals and ethic
Well duh! morals and ethics are by definition the principles that drive a person to act.
> allows them to justify a miserable existence for a woman and a child
From the childs point of view (what child is that btw? I thought a fetus wasn't one.) not existing at all seems to be as miserable as possible. But a better question might be is there no reason to oppose abortion except a desire to cause misery.
> because you, as a man who is never going to be in a situation where your only choices are either getting an abortion in secret or being sued for doing do
I'm never going to be a loser drug addict who got his neck stepped on by the police. Can I say nothing in support of George Floyd? In general, can one only express a moral opinion on subjects one has direct experience of?
> thought that you could control their bodies.
This is about a law. Law is an instrument by which human societies control the bodies of women and men. Law is also how those societies can discuss when to control and how much but control is what is going on. As I write this, there is this group of strangers called "doctors" who are attempting to control my body by covering my face and sticking me with needles. Can you think of a non-nefarious reason why they might be doing this?
A six-week old fetus would not grow into a life without a womb, and in my opinion the government should not get a right to force someone to provide one if they disagree.
But while I accept that this argument may be contested and there may be a debate on "generic abortion" in "benign circumstances", a key issue here is a non-exceptions law (it's six weeks even in case of rape or incest), which to me seems absolutely indefensible.
Let's look at a hypothetic but realistic example of a thirteen year old girl who is eight weeks pregnant after being raped by her mother's boyfriend. Would it be morally acceptable to prevent her from getting an abortion and force the victimized kid to carry it to term? If someone's answer is yes or maybe, then IMHO that does pass into the territory of just "a desire to cause misery" and their moral compass is so outrageously immoral that any of their arguments with respect to morality should be ignored without listening/reading. If the answer is no, then a law that implements a blanket ban without allowing for such circumstances (the example may seem outrageous but such cases, sadly, are not that rare) is not morally justifiable if it does not enable abortions at least in such cases.
What I'm trying to say is that this particular law is so outrageous that I would expect that both sides of the ordinary "pro-choice" vs "pro-life" argument should be against this particular law, because it does go to essentially misogynic extremes that do not have a sufficient justification in all the reasonable "pro-life" arguments.
I am not even a proponent of anti-abortion laws, but I can clearly see this argument is faulty. Newborns are about as helpless without somebody feeding them as an unborn child. And even in the fetus stage a transplant may be possible if somebody really cared enough to try.
Yes, newborns are a good analogy as they are about as helpless without somebody feeding them, however, we do not have a practice of state intervention forcing mothers to keep and feed their newborn kids if they refuse, quite the opposite, we provide means and process to relinquish these newborns and have the state take over their care. In a similar manner, if the state would want to take care of the fetus that a mother refuses - transplanting it instead of aborting - that would seem quite reasonable, but as far as I understand we don't (yet?) have the medical/technological capacity to do so at an early stage of the fetus.
> From the childs point of view [...] not existing at all seems to be as miserable as possible.
How can not existing be [as] miserable [as possible]?
Is existing not being? Is misery not possible? Or am I missing another option?
> what child is that btw? I thought a fetus wasn't one.
As far as I know nobody disputes that (unless there are complications with the pregnancy) a fetus usually evolves into a child when an abortion is made impossible.
Speaking in terms of a broad historical context, using tactics of dehumanizition to justify whatever it is you're doing typically puts you in really good company!
Don’t companies have the freedom to choose who they do business with?
What exactly is “leftist takeover” about not hosting a website that’s used to spy on and report citizens for “crimes”? This is something I expect to see in an authoritarian country. Not the United States. It’s something I expect from Big Government invading people’s lives. What’s next? Maybe a “leftist” state will create a site like this for reporting gun owners? Maybe you can start reporting people who drive from California to another state to purchase 30 rd mags instead of what’s legally allowed in California? Or better yet maybe you just don’t like the 2nd Amendment neighbors you have so you anonymously report them. What’s the worst that could happen? Maybe the police show up and make that person’s life a living hell. Nothing like passive aggressive SWATing. You can quickly see how this spirals out of control.
This website is like the exact opposite of what we need in the United States. It’s the kind of thing communist countries do.
Yea… plus honestly it’s just so un-American. Is this how we resolve problems? It’s gross.
My conservative friends (truly friends) would you rather confront someone in an honorable way to their face, or report someone anonymously on the Internet to the government. Which of these approaches really align with your own beliefs about resolving problems?
If someone backed into your truck or something are you going to work it out like gentleman/woman or would you not talk to them and sit on your phone and report them to the police anonymously? Seriously. Face your accuser and all that.
I agree with you on this specific issue but may I point out it isn’t really a new thing. For instance, every police car in my town and probably yours has a phone number you can anonymously call if you have information concerning a crime investigation. There is a number to call to anonymously report unsafe conditions on building sites. Another one lets you anonymously report unsanitary conditions in restaurants (including recently if they are not following mask policy.). And so on for illegal dumping, animal cruelty etc.
The danger is that the anonymity will be used by disgruntled people to make false accusations or get revenge instead of only by civic minded citizens trying to improve society but this is a danger in all the examples above not just the abortion one.
I get what you're saying, but I do think this is specifically different. The actions you mention, such as illegal dumping are reporting harm caused to another against their will. Or in the case of animal cruelty, it's an action against a helpless creature. They are kind of like branches on the hierarchy of murder or theft.
I think the unsanitary conditions is more similar to violence or misrepresentation so I don't see it as too different.
The mask thing I think is a little more controversial and could be argued probably. But in all of these cases it seems that there is a dispute between an injured party and the injuring party. You'd have to argue that a fetus is an injured party and that a physician and the mother are injuring the fetus against its will. Some probably will. I won't.
Given the precedent set by the Supreme Court, probably every gun owner and even people whose politics are deemed as "aiding and abetting" gun ownership being sued into bankruptcy by unrelated third parties, because the Supreme Court position has made it clear that a state setting civil penalties for something it wishes it could ban and permitting private bounty hunters to collect couldn't possibly be infringing on anyones' constitutional rights
Edit: anyone want to tell me how a law constructed to circumvent constitutional restrictions on the state banning something by allowing them to make it a civil offence unrelated third parties can sue for doesn't set a precedent that it would be OK for a state with different political priorities to try this by setting civil penalties for gun ownership or unacceptable speech?
I am 100% for this tactic being applied against gun owners. Not because I am against all gun ownership, or want gun owners to suffer, but because it's consistent with the law in Texas and there's not a snowball's chance in hell that the 5 justices who voted to allow the law to stay in place for now would have been fine with the gun law.
That's the problem with conflating everything to freedom of speech, then forgetting its exceptions while prioritizing it over every other right. You end up with these perversions wherein the right to violate someone else's Constitutional rights is just "speech".
I find it morally agreeable in the small but am worried about the larger implications.
Other than my agreeing with the moral position in this case, how is this different than a baker not making a cake for some particular customer?
We can’t reasonably be making “this type of refusal to do business is okay, but that one is not” based on moral agreements of individuals, especially when it comes to utility and infrastructure providers (which arguably bakers of cakes are not).
Society is purely a social construct. The fact that some things exist solely because we collectively agree they do doesn't make them less real. I still can pay my rent using money. I need a passport to enter another country. You will have issue with the authorities if you discriminate a protected group.
There's nothing stopping considering pro lifers or whatever they want to be called to include in that list, hell why not even under religion. Just some judge has to stamp it.
Unalienable rights are a purely social construct. Business is a purely social construct. Property is a purely social construct. Law is a purely social construct.
Sure but at what point is it inconvenient enough that the bakers are infrastructure? Like if there is a single baker in a town and the next one is idk 20 miles away?
This has absolutely nothing to do with religion. Unless the Texans protesting against abortion are surprisingly not Christians but members of some other faith that forbids abortion.
Some may claim abortion is against some vague "christian values" but those people either didn't read their own holy book or use it as a thinly veiled excuse to oppress other people.
They may be protected from discrimination, depending on local law. They’re not allowed demand that a company sell them something that it would not ordinarily sell to anyone, though.
Do you think every single political or religious group would be protected? If that's the case, everyone would be in one and nobody would be "not protected".
No because you are choosing to be in one. I was not born a Methodist but my parents took me to a Methodist church as a child. I was not born with the desire or need to go to a Methodist church.
As far as I can tell, GoDaddy did not add the section to the ToS that prohibits services from “violat[ing] the privacy or publicity rights of another User or any other person or entity [...]” in response to this site, so unless you either think that this site did not do that, or that GoDaddy does not have the right to have and enforce a ToS, I don't see what the problem is.
The idea that GoDaddy should need to make an exception to their ToS when a case is politically charged is scarier, IMHO.
GoDaddy also hosts crimestoppersusa.org, a site that has functioned as a similar "snitch line" for years, yet they have not been terminated for violating the ToS. The exception seems to be this enforcement action. Also, it's definitely not clear that reporting a perceived violation of Texas statute would be a violation of privacy rights.
Because these are massively different and we have to be fucking happy that when the courts have failed us there's at least some basic decency in companies.
Anyone working with the abortion ban of Texas should be publicly humiliated and BDSed.
This is to an extent what dual power in the US looks like.
It looks awfully similar to me. In both cases these are private entities that allow users to confidentially submit tips about potentially illegal behavior. And the "medical procedures" bit discussed below seems like a pretty blatant deflection. If someone were doing back-alley kidney transplants, would anyone really object to that being reported to Crime Stoppers? Or perhaps more plausibly, someone illegally performing FGM on their child?
The whole point of the website is that the stuff being reported isn't criminal, because Texas and the Supreme Court have decided that the state setting civil penalties and letting private vigilantes sue is a convenient way of circumventing instead of reversing the constitutional precedent that the state has no business excessively restricting abortion.
Violating a state statute is still illegal by definition, even if the remedy provided is civil rather than criminal. That makes the Crime Stoppers comparison still pretty fair, in my opinion.
And no, the Supreme Court didn't decide that, the people bringing the suit failed on procedural grounds and will get a chance to argue the merits when they re-file properly. My guess is that this whole thing will be a tempest in a teacup that will get sorted out in short order.
> Violating a state statute is still illegal by definition, even if the remedy provided is civil rather than criminal.
You wouldn't be "violating" anything, but if we sidestep that issue, you appear to be arguing that all behavior that someone has standing to sue over should be called "illegal". That seems like a semantic game most everyone should have a serious problem with.
Careful: you wouldn't want to be unfairly misrepresenting somebody else's views! That would be libellous. (You don't want to say something illegal, now, do you?)
But yeah: not all torts are crimes, and there's good reason for that. Lumping them together under the same “illegal” banner is how IP-as-control got started.
So I should be able to make a civil law in my state that says pseudo0 cannot post on the internet under the threat of civil suit? The issue here is you don't have the right to steal, but we do have the right both to communicating on the internet and to an abortion.
You are misunderstanding the Texas law. There is intentionally not a criminal statute being violated because Texas does not want the law to be overturned in court.
You're missing a massive distinction in your attempts of comparison.
Yes, your two examples are of a person commiting a crime.
The issue at hand is about the privacy of healthcare/medical status. You cannot say somebody aided in abortion if you cannot prove whomever they were around was pregnant. You cannot ask in a legal sense if somebody is pregnant, was pregnant, or is now not pregnant, and force them to give a truthful answer/disclosure, that's against pre-existing medical privacy laws. Does that make more sense to you?
And in an attempt to make slight sense of that to one of your answers - yes, the act of commiting FGM on a child, or perhaps an adult who was somewhat forcibly taken somewhere to have the procedure done against their will, is a crime committed by whoever did it. However - to convict this person of the crime, the person mutilated would have to testify. As it deals with medical privacy - they do have to and can choose not to testify. Especially with a child, it gets more tricky - the parent to a certain age can choose not to testify per their rights to their child's medical privacy. If somebody was hellbent on trying to make a child testify against the perpetrator, they could attempt a massive legal battle to get state custody of the child, who can then somewhat legally force the child to testify or face some sort of legal recourse. Otherwise, you're basically going to need video evidence of the crime being committed, or an eyewitness account from a law enforcement agent/FBI/etc for any chance of legal prosecution.
Legally they are similar, from a public PR perspective they have nothing to do with one another.
This is a situation of Optics, Communications and PR.
The lawyers would be tasked with finding the grounds necessary.
GoDaddy is not at risk of public outrage over CrimeStoppers, but with the very raw politics of Abortions in Texas hitting the front page ... I can see the Marketing team just sweating bullets over this, wanting to just 'get out' of the path of a fast moving vehicle.
The courts haven't failed. If you are referring to the SCOTUS emergency relief ruling, that was entirely procedural.
Important thing to know is that via emergency relief, judges cannot strike down a law, they can just stop people or groups from enforcing said laws. The case that went to the supreme Court was asking for a group of eight different people that have them blocked from enforcing the law. 7 of them were state employees of various positions, one was a private citizen. For the private citizen the plaintiff asked the court to consider the that person as a group, but they did not have time to get that through the courts (I think). The private person ended up signing an affidavit saying they would not try to enforce the law.
If you go search the news, you will find a pro life group has already had a temporary restraining order placed against them from applying this law or assisting other people and applying this law.
You can also bet as soon as anybody brings a lawsuit about this, it'll be immediately dismissed as being in violation of Casey (Roe).
> there's at least some basic decency in companies
I would exercise caution with this perspective. They stand to gain a bit of mind share from this action as it's a popular position to take. I am not saying virtuous companies don't exist. In general they act in the best interest of their bottom line (in this case public image).
I don't think crimestoppersusa.org actually has direct tip submission on its site? It looks to me like it links primarily to other crime stoppers programs (which do have tip submission).
Your argument definitely stands though: there's not much difference in private information that's requested on a crime stoppers form[1] vs the right to life form[2].
GoDaddy had a ToS that includes statements about inquiry of medical conditions
Crimestoppers or whatever isn't asking you to submit things regarding people's medical status, it's asking for crime reporting.
There's been a large amount of privacy with regards to healthcare in the US in general for the longest time. The fact anybody is surprised by this is somewhat unsettling.
“violates the privacy or publicity rights of another User or any other person or entity, or breaches any duty of confidentiality that *you owe* to another User or any other person or entity.”
Most people don’t owe any privacy rights in regards to others medical care.
GoDaddy can say “we don’t want to be involved in this sort of thing.”
But they should not pretend their clients are breaking the law.
There is lots of caselaw involving whether anti-abortion groups can gather this sort of information.
They can.
GoDaddy doesn’t have to be involved in it. But they shouldn’t pretend there is an obligation or duty being violated by the site owner.
"You will not collect or harvest (or permit anyone else to collect or harvest) any User Content (as defined below) or any non-public or personally identifiable information about another User or any other person or entity without their express prior written consent."
That seems way stronger in forbidding the exact purpose of this site. (With the privacy/publicity/confidentiality rights sometimes applying, but only to specific reports.)
“You will not collect any PII about any entity without their consent.”
There’s probably an implied “You will not use this service to collect …” at the start.
So basically, you can’t host a portal to gather PII on non-consenting parties.
It would be pretty easy for the website to get around that.
The website asked for the contact info of the user and then had a textarea field with the caption “If applicable: Do you have information about potential violations of the Texas Heartbeat Act?”
All they would have to do is change that textarea into a Yes/No radio button.
Edit: confusingly, it said, “we will not follow up or contact you” but also asked the best time to contact you.
Having not read the full TOS and all its definitions, I'll agree that would likely get around GoDaddy's objection.
GoDaddy could maybe argue that the fundamental purpose of the website was still to facilitate gathering that data, but that seems more of a stretch. "You are using our servers to gather this forbidden data" vs "you are using our servers to gather this allowed data, which will later be used to gather forbidden data elsewhere"...
I'd guess that the reason the website doesn't want to make this change would be that it'd greatly increase their own costs in terms of followup they'd have to perform. Makes it a more high-touch operation.
The ship on this sailed a long time ago. Hosting providers have refused to host content they consider objectionable for a long time. I think you could probably reasonably make a distinction between serving as a publisher for someone else and providing a service like baking.
> Other than my agreeing with the moral position in this case, how is this different than a baker not making a cake for some particular customer?
What this illustrates is that liberalism only "works" incidentally when people share the same ethos and moral standards or who submit to the ruling ethos and moral standards in relevant conduct, as it were. As those diverge, mutual coexistence becomes increasingly impossible. That's why libertarianism is such a joke.
IMO it's closer with the blitzchung and nba controversy with china lately. They have possibility of losing other customers when they didn't do this.
Furthermore I believe GoDaddy has already assessed the potential loss, made customer comparison between both parties and concluded this is better financially.
EDIT: additionally, they may also compared the hosting plan with the spam attacks and PR attacks they get.
Personally and morally I don't know whether this is the right thing or not, but financially I believe this is.
It's worth noting that the US Supreme Court upheld the right of those bakers to not serve cake at a gay wedding, 7-2.
Title VII protections tend to be applied to housing and employment discrimination, not restricting the general right of business owners to freedom of association with respect to who they'll take on as customers.
They didn’t rule on freedom of association. They ruled that the commission demonstrated anti-religious bias. It was a very narrow ruling for this particular case, and not on the larger question.
That is true, and frankly it seemed pretty cowardly on the part of the court to do that. Nonetheless, I can't think of much in the way of contrary rulings short of forced desegregation, which was a pretty special case because black customers weren't just being denied service by one provider, but systematically by all providers in an entire multi-state region of the country.
Most shops come with a sign posted saying they can refuse to serve you for any reason whatsoever, including total personal whim, and that doesn't get challenged.
Remember that the baker in that case wasn't even refusing to sell them a cake. The couple could choose any cake in the shop, and the baker was willing to make them a cake for almost any occasion - he just objected to making a customized cake specifically for a gay wedding, kind of like if you were a baker and didn't want to make a cake for the American Nazi Party or the KKK or the pro-lifers next door or the Mayor you oppose. If they wanted a generic cake and wanted to buy icing to decorate it themselves, he was still willing to sell them one.
Sure, and as far as I can tell, that is basically the position of GoDaddy as well. I just banged away at the whois database and they appear to be the registrar for prolifeacrossamerica.org, for instance. It's perfectly okay to be anti-abortion and do business with GoDaddy. It's just not okay to host a dox registry exposing the HIPAA-protected information of your neighbors.
That's a very interesting distinction that I didn't know about. I feel like reddit has intentionally left that part out because it shows the person was of reasonable mind. It was just something about it in particular they were not willing to cross.
Typically you'll only see those signs on establishments that serve alcohol, and that is just a CYA. Any group who can demonstrate that they were refused service due to being a protected class (such as a bar that refuses to serve alcohol to disabled people, as an arbitrary example) will still be acting illegally and likely face prosecution.
They actually do pretty easily find ways around that. My dad used to play in traveling sports teams when I was a kid and hated going to the midwest. All the bars were organized as "private clubs" where the rule was you needed a member to vouch for you before they'd let you in. Somehow, random strangers at the bars would magically vouch for all of his white teammates but not for him.
Heh, I find it morally disagreeable in the small but I agree with the larger implications.
Businesses don't have to do business if they don't want to. Tough for this website, sucks to be discriminated against for a political belief. It isn't like there is a shortage of domain registrars in the world.
If there is a legal technicality where someone has to vote Democrat to start a domain registrar then there is a problem here. VeriSign doing this would be a concern. Unless I'm misreading this it isn't troubling; GoDaddy is not that important.
It'd be sad if the DNS system becomes political. But at this point we should be bracing for it, there aren't a lot of future paths where it stays neutral.
There's already precedent for this. Cloudflare de-listed a major neo-nazi website a few years ago if I recall correctly.
As much as I might loath one website or another, I think basic web infrastructure, from DNS to certs to even cloud services should be treated as common carriers, and it should only be by legal order that they're allowed deny services to a particular site.
There's so much consolidation going on that we're not so far from a situation where a hand-full of corporations are the defacto gatekeepers of online life.
I agree with you to some extent, but we have to agree on a line somewhere.
For instance, I don't think cloudflare is required to host a site. Millions of entities online are able to function without cloudflare or godaddy.
So where do we draw the line for basic web infrastructure? To me it seems like the ISP is a good place to start. If you have internet, you could host a site on hardware yourself, or with a minor hire
Yeah I don’t think it’s quite good enough. In the 19th century we could have let railroads play favorites, because after all it was still possible to transport goods by canal or by wagon, but it was much better for the growth of the US for everyone to have a fair shot at the best form of freight transit available.
Sure it’s possible to get your own fiber connection, manage your own hardware and host a web company, but you’re never going to be able to compete with another party who has access to AWS or GCP to run on top of.
The reason that they were removed from Godaddy is because they violated the EULA.
That said, a line? The line that should be drawn is anyone declaring that they have a right to financially coerce women to making adverse health decisions.
The only point where I disagree is that I believe the line should be drawn by democratic means. It's all fine and good when a company can unilaterally set the standard so long as it's something we agree with. But what will you think when it's your speech, or your business which gets classified as unacceptable by a room full of people at some web company with no oversight?
If the pandemic has taught us anything, the internet is the commons in the modern world, and currently we're ceding governance of it to private enterprise.
There's no such thing as a democracy in a gerrymandered representative state. One of the reasons we have a Constitution is because the Founding Fathers didn't believe that states were capable of fully independent democratic governance. It is there to protect the people FROM democracy at a local level.
Right, the discussion was around what bits of the internet should be a common carrier
This would essentially prevent godaddy from limiting service to a customer because they would be required to work with all peoples
My argument, was that yes, I agree that some things should be governed more like public utilities, like ISPs. Other things should not, like CDNs, or DDOS protection, etc.
IMO once you have internet, that is what is obligated to be made available to you, all these other services might help you but they are private companies that can refuse service for any reason
Anyway, I doubt this discussion continues as the topic is stale now, but I wanted to clarify my comment regarding where the line was. I wasn't talking about morality of issues, I was talking about where common carrier status should start / stop
>Businesses don't have to do business if they don't want to.
Except for all sorts of exceptions this isn't true. As a "principle" you could write everything you said above but substitute racial, gender, or sexual orientation discrimination and it wouldn't stand up, because businesses absolutely have to do business in these cases.
>has to vote Democrat
No, but has to not promote conservative political policies, thus supporting, just like voting does, Democrat political objectives. What's the practical difference? Democrat political power is mandated just the same.
> As a "principle" you could write everything you said above but substitute racial, gender, or sexual orientation discrimination...
Although the law disagrees with me, I'd say the same thing to them too. I do think it is unfair that GoDaddy might choose to boot me for my political beliefs but would get in to legal trouble for booting an LGBT group.
I see perfect parallels between GoDaddy expelling this site vs. GoDaddy expelling a site for LGBT advocacy. Both are stupid actions for GoDaddy to take, but both should be legal options.
> Other than my agreeing with the moral position in this case, how is this different than a baker not making a cake for some particular customer?
> We can’t reasonably be making “this type of refusal to do business is okay, but that one is not” based on moral agreements of individuals
We actually can. And the difference between this and the baker is in the details you omitted.
The actual baker situation was denying a customer based on their sexual orientation. That type of refusal is not okay and the reason why is pretty well-established in the law. Sexual orientation (like religion, race, sex, etc) is protected from such discrimination.
And the baker was allowed to not serve the gay wedding anyways! Despite that!
Being pro-life is not a protected attribute. You could argue these pro-life beliefs are due to religion..but this isn't about Jesus Christ Himself. This is a political opinion derived from the church that plenty of Christians don't have.
>The actual baker situation was denying a customer based on their sexual orientation. That type of refusal is not okay and the reason why is pretty well-established in the law. Sexual orientation (like religion, race, sex, etc) is protected from such discrimination.
This is not true. They were perfectly happy to bake a cake for gay people; they objected to baking the cake specifically for a gay wedding. The cake was to have wording which the bakers disagreed with for religious reasons.
Your clarification is important and I've seen all too often these past few days a critical misunderstanding of the case. The baker offered the couple any other cake in the shop and offered to bake any cake they wanted - other than one specifically for a gay wedding.
Right - my point was the baker case was closer to being protected than this GoDaddy stuff. And despite that, it was still within the law.
It's a little more nuanced because abortion is less linked to religion than gay marriage is to being gay. You can in theory link a variety of nonsense to your Christian faith (if you can prove false you can prove anything blah blah blah)
The difference is that political opinions are not a protected class, while race, gender is. What is the justification for having protected classes? You can pick your opinions, but you can't pick to be a different gender.
This is completely different. The baker bakes cakes for some people. GoDaddy presumably doesn’t support the non-consensual collection of private information for vigilante harassment for _anyone_.
Not that the weirdos behind this site are a protected group, but even if they were, they couldn’t demand that a bakery, say, sell them plastic explosives, only things that it sells to other people.
> how is this different than a baker not making a cake for some particular customer?
This is not refusing a customer, but more refusing an ingredient on customers request: "I know you request to have shit in your cake, but we're not going to do that."
It's a business, they can refuse who ever they want (same as the cake business). Sure a bunch of people might get angry, but if GoDaddy disagrees with the business, kick them off. It's always been this way, I am not sure why people are caring about it now. GoDaddy has kicked thousands of sites/customers off their platform for a variety of reasons.
> It's a business, they can refuse who ever they want (same as the cake business).
No they can't. There are plenty of restrictions on denying service. An obvious example: you can't refuse to serve people based on their race. And since the door is open on disallowing such, a lot of other arguments are made and will be made in regards to who it's ok to not serve. Which is what's going on here with regards to GoDaddy's actions. Since the US is rapidly shifting to a hyper tribal, protected classes system of rule of law (different laws for different people), you can expect the rules/laws pertaining to situations like this in business to get more complex over time.
> There are plenty of restrictions on denying service.
The restriction, is literally, "You cannot refuse service to people in a protected class." The burden of proof is on the person who was refused to show that, beyond a reasonable doubt, the reason that they were refused was due to them being within a protected class. It's not a low bar to clear. It has been this way since the civil rights movement.
> Since the US is rapidly shifting to a hyper tribal, protected classes system of rule of law (different laws for different people).
You don't have any understanding of the jurisprudence here, this is embarrassing.
You can and people do it all the time, what you are not allowed to do is say "sorry I can't serve you cause you have a different skin color", but you can certainly say "sadly due to our terms we cannot serve you because we cannot serve people who are born in North Colorado because we get to much fraud from North Colorado".
There is tons of ways to "not serve" people. Just try not to be an outright racist and you're fine.
A business with a terms of service that you signed always says "Random Business has the right to refuse service for blah blah".
The new law lets anyone sue someone (other than a medical staff) who “abet” an abortion.
So the “reporting” would be on someone other than the person having an abortion. Let’s say, a boyfriend who pays for an abortion.
The person doing the reporting is someone other than the “abettor” or the person getting an abortion. Let’s say the boyfriends ex-wife.
Once a certain number of people know about something, it’s not private.
Even current medical privacy laws, and including abortion laws, don’t create any privacy obligations for non-commercial third partied, much less fourth parties.
If my ex-boyfriend tells me he helped his girlfriend get an abortion, I have no obligations to keep this secret. As it should be.
This website allowed fourth parties to communicate with fifth parties (Texas Right to Life).
Think about this: someone is informing an anti-abortion organization about an abortion.
At this point the cat is out of the bag. It’s not a secret. It’s in the open. It’s public.
Imagine if social media organizations decided to treat abortions the same way they treat CSAM, revenge porn, the identity of intelligence officers, nuclear secrets, copyright violations, and misinformation about COVID.
Is that what we want? Some people do. I’m sure there’s a constituency for that.
But notice how the we are descending down a slope.
Maybe we should be doing that. But let’s do it with our eyes open and with rigorous debate that results in action.
>We can’t reasonably be making “this type of refusal to do business is okay, but that one is not” based on moral agreements of individuals
I totally disagree, that seems completely reasonable to me. Are we not allowed to say that doing something moral is okay but doing something immoral is not ok?
Is it not immoral to break the law even if the law is immoral? What if said policy makers believe what you consider "not immoral" to be just that, immoral? Wouldn't they be on the side of correct morality?
This is why the logic of "who is more moral" fails because someone believes they're safeguarding "true" morality. Hence why we are a nation of laws and institutions that upholds or challenges them. Which is why I disagree with you, it is unreasonable (even though it's not why GoDaddy dropped them). If the law is immoral/unjust, take it to court. Otherwise shut up and deal with it. That's what civil rights leaders did back in the 60's. They didn't just whine on twitter.
I'm not sure it's accurate to say that civil rights leaders "shut up" and didn't "whine". Most of their work was public issue advocacy in the form of marches, boycotts, speeches, news communication, media advocacy, op-eds, etc. I tend to think of the Birmingham Bus Boycott, the March on Washington, and the Selma March (Bloody Sunday) as probably the single most crucial acts of civil rights leaders.
I'm also not sure it's accurate to say people aren't taking this law to court. In fact, they did that before the law became law. Then the Supreme Court declined to enjoin the law. Then they managed to enjoin literally this group from enforcing the law, as part of the legal process that's currently unfolding.
The problem is that there's no grand coalition of people who agree with you in all major aspects of what it means to be moral. (The war in Afghanistan helpfully illustrated this over the past month, with people who normally consider themselves to be "on the same team" adopting wildly different views of the withdrawal.) If we don't want to live in an infinitely factionalized society, there has to be some kind of limiting principle where we agree to do business with others who we find to be immoral.
I am not sure if you realize what you're arguing. I don't want to put words in your mouth, but I want to probe you to consider the implications.
My take on your post is that it's a very (classical) conservative view: in many cases, liberty undermines order, and that a sort of benevolent guiding force can keep order, which benefits us all. This is, like, Edmund Burke 101. It's anti-(classical) liberal. And in fact one of the major issues political conservatives were concerned with was the restriction of speech that agitated or disrupted harmony, so they agree with you on this.
Without trying to reductio ad absurdum you, let me suggest what I think this would look like. One possibility is that you are calling not for any solution, but for just a sort of feel-good agreement, a sort of principle among people, that we should go along to get along. I think that's tempting. We can all recognize this status quo of cultural cleavages leading to rag-tag boycotts is not working very well. But I am going to conclude that would fail.
The reason I conclude it would fail is more or less because that's what lead us here to begin with. So if you think that factionalism is a problem, and judging from this thread I would assume you do, then clearly people aren't going to voluntarily agree to do this.
On the other side of the spectrum, you could imagine a very heavy-handed intervention wherein wide swaths of issues are declared off-limits in the name of comity. Now, many people would say "hey, agreeing not to argue about something is a status quo politics that favours some majority opinion" but I'm actually going to sidestep that argument and just imagine that we could do this. In this theoretical world, you'd likely still have factions -- some of the original factions were tribal! Doing business with the people you know, the people who are closer to you, the people who are like you, who speak your language, preferentially... that's the original factionalism. My father-in-law was an engineer, and he worked with a few mechanics, and when my wife and I bought a used car, he referred us to the mechanics he worked with. They owed my father-in-law a favour or two, so we got discounted mechanic work. In return, we recommended him to some friends. And on and on.
Moreover, in all but the smallest towns, you typically have a choice of multiple merchants for a given good; so, like, I can choose to go to Sal's Cupcakes or Sweet Treats Cupcakes. Probably I don't have enough business to always go to both. And it might even be the case that the quality of their products and their prices are going to be around the same, so more or less my preference is going to be some kind of aesthetic -- meaning broadly more about the store's location, the friendliness of the service, things that basically don't matter -- preference. How do I force myself as a customer to affirmatively do business with everyone?
I think probably we're not going to be able to build a society where I am affirmatively obligated to do business with someone I find immoral, unless you're talking about a degree of central planning that more or less de-duplicates or centrally owns market sectors. It's true that every cupcake company was OmniCake by government fiat, and if I was only zoned to purchase from the one on Oak Street, then I wouldn't have a choice. But otherwise, I do. We do have this option, but I think here we'd be talking about a degree of totalizing central planning that more or less eclipses the USSR, DPRK, etc.
But of course there aren't just both ends of the spectrum, there's an in between. What would a "first step" of depoliticizing basic commerce look like? To my eye, any restriction on a consumer's speech is going to be more liberty-infringing than a restriction on a firm's speech. To me, it's less important that Chevy be able to express opinions without fear of reprisal than that I do.
> Other than my agreeing with the moral position in this case, how is this different than a baker not making a cake for some particular customer?
You can refuse service to someone because you don't like the color of their shirt, but it's illegal to refuse service to someone belonging to a protected class because they belong to a protected class.
"Abortion reporting form operators" are not a protected class, and they aren't being denied service because they belong to a protected class.
[edit:] The depiction was never discussed, it was about the wedding not the cake.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masterpiece_Cakeshop_v._Colora...informing the couple that he did not create wedding cakes for marriages of gay couples owing to his Christian religious beliefs, although the couple could purchase other baked goods in the store. Craig and Mullins promptly left Masterpiece without discussing with Phillips any of the details of their wedding cake. In other words he was unwilling to provide any cake for this purpose regardless of what was shown on it.
The law isn’t that literal for good reason. Put another way saying it’s ok to reject a mortgage because it’s a black mortgage rather than a black applicant is silly. It’s clear in the case the rejection was based on sexual orientation.
A bakery can’t reject an order because it’s for a religious ceremony due to the religion associated with that ceremony. However, it’s likely a bakery could reject being part of any wedding independent of religion or sexual orientation.
Anyway, the same baker is in court over refusing to make birthday cake for transgender woman.
A mortgage to a black person. The point is you can’t reject something that’s a proxy for a protected class. For example only staffing your call center with blonds.
It's probably obvious, but you can do this when you have a legitimate business reason for it. Hooter's is within its rights to hire only women with a DD+. More germanely, a casting director can put out a call for actors only of a specific race.
If the bakery would sell a non designed cake to a gay couple, or if they refused a straight couple to make a gay cake, that is different than your example.
To be clear, I'm not sticking up for the bakery, it just doesn't seem like a clear proxy like you are saying
Only the context was discussed not the details. In other words they could have been trying to order a cake saying “Happy Birthday“ to be used in a wedding for some in joke and the baker wouldn’t have known.
And in context a strait couple can’t have a gay wedding, the difference is inherently gender dependent thus making it a proxy. [edited for clarity]
No it was the wedding cake specifically that was rejected without discussing details, they could order other baked goods as long as they where not used as a wedding cake.
“Masterpiece's owner Jack Phillips, who is a Christian, declined their cake request, informing the couple that he did not create wedding cakes for marriages of gay couples owing to his Christian religious beliefs, although the couple could purchase other baked goods in the store. Craig and Mullins promptly left Masterpiece without discussing with Phillips any of the details of their wedding cake.“
Right. They might have wanted a cake with gay symbols on it. But Phillips made his mind when the couple said they wanted a wedding cake for their wedding. It wouldn’t have mattered if it’s a pride flag or an asteroid on the wedding cake.
“Masterpiece's owner Jack Phillips, who is a Christian, declined their cake request, informing the couple that he did not create wedding cakes for marriages of gay couples owing to his Christian religious beliefs, although the couple could purchase other baked goods in the store. Craig and Mullins promptly left Masterpiece without discussing with Phillips any of the details of their wedding cake.”
Clearly religion isn’t a blanket free pass to do anything, otherwise the baker would have won the case. This is needed as religions do actually prescribe stoning people to death for example.
So a symbolic ritual sacrifice is protected, but an actual human sacrifice isn’t.
Does depicting mean that there was some sort of marzipan decoration depicting two men?
If so, would it be possible to refuse to make that particular decoration (but make a cake)? Wouldn‘t this kind of be like telling an artist what exactly they have to paint?
I‘m wondering purely from a legal viewpoint, not based on what would be the right thing.
No, the details of the cake where never discussed.
“Masterpiece's owner Jack Phillips, who is a Christian, declined their cake request, informing the couple that he did not create wedding cakes for marriages of gay couples owing to his Christian religious beliefs, although the couple could purchase other baked goods in the store. Craig and Mullins promptly left Masterpiece without discussing with Phillips any of the details of their wedding cake.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masterpiece_Cakeshop_v._Colora...
It might actually be 100% legal to reject providing gay themed decorations while providing a cake
That's true, but not even half the story. The couple in question had gone around like a dozen other cake makers who were all fine with making the cake they said they wanted. So why sue that guy?
It's pretty clear, this was never a ordinary couple looking to have a nice wedding. The point of the whole operation was to find somebody who was not sufficiently supportive of them and use the power of the state to crush them.
Rosa Parks was never an ordinary individual who didn't want to sit in the back of the bus. She was an activist who was a chapter secretary of the NAACP ten years before kicking off the Montgomery bus boycott with her actions. The day of her arrest, her NAACP chapter president E.D. Nixon encouraged her to be a plaintiff in the fight against segregation laws that went all the way to the Supreme Court.
I’m not sure that refutes the point. The couple may be activists but at the time of the event they needed to interview many places before they found what they were looking for. Maybe it’s oppressive but I believe there is a difference between forcing a sole proprietor to make a particular type of cake because they can’t say no for protected class reasons. While the fay community has been similarly oppressed I just don’t see the comparison here as clarifying so much as muddying.
This is true, as far as I know. I don't think it really means much though. Rosa Parks may have been a professional activist, but there was real and widespread oppression. Nobody had to go looking to find it. It was mandated by the state.
If you have to go looking for a particular individual to "oppress" you when you've already found plenty of alternatives that work fine, maybe what you're facing isn't in the same ballpark.
This is like saying forced labor isn't oppression because chattel slavery was worse.
Segregation on the basis of individuals belonging to protected classes is illegal, the law makes it very clear.
How would you feel about a "white couples only" restaurant or bakery? What about a "whites only" grocery store? Or a "whites only" mechanic? Do you feel the same way about those as you do with the "straights only" bakery?
People have used their religions to give a pass to discrimination for a long time[1]. Today's scapegoat is gay and trans people, but a few decades ago it was miscegenation. People discriminated against mixed-race couples and said it was a core tenet of their religion[1]:
> Almighty God created the races white, black, yellow, malay and red, and he placed them on separate continents. And but for the interference with his arrangement there would be no cause for such marriages. The fact that he separated the races shows that he did not intend for the races to mix.
The ACLU has this to say about such cases of discrimination:
> Instances of institutions and individuals claiming a right to discriminate in the name of religion are not new. In the 1960s, we saw objections to laws requiring integration in restaurants because of sincerely held beliefs that God wanted the races to be separate. We saw religiously affiliated universities refuse to admit students who engaged in interracial dating. In those cases, we recognized that requiring integration was not about violating religious liberty; it was about ensuring fairness. It is no different today.
There were plenty of places these people could have chosen to do business with, as well, but that doesn't really matter.
In my opinion, it's not about the act of discrimination itself, but the method used to combat it.
As an extreme example, I think everyone agrees that littering is bad. But how would you feel about summary execution for littering? Feels crazy extreme, right? The actual effective punishment for littering is more like people maybe frown at you a little, and maybe if you're super obnoxious about it or do it right in front of a cop, you might get a modest fine. That seems about right to me. I feel like I'm complaining that maybe we shouldn't summarily execute people for littering and everyone's coming back at me with how dare you support the evils of littering.
I don't like any kind of discrimination. If everyone in town is discriminating against some group so hard that they can't go about the ordinary activities of life, that feels like something that needs to be addressed by government action. On the other hand, if one business in a medium-size city doesn't want to serve some group for some reason, and there's a dozen competitors that are fine with that group, maybe it's best to just let it slide from a legal standpoint. Maybe a local soft boycott or something like that.
If you want to ratchet up the severity of the punishment for an act that is vanishingly rare and hasn't really caused anyone that much trouble, consider the possibility that you aren't the good guys anymore.
I think the distinction is that the 'cake maker' could not be compelled to use is 'artistical craft' for purposes he didn't want to.
i.e. if it was an off-the-shelf cake, there would have been legal problems.
But a 'song writer' I think can't be compelled to write a song in such circumstances.
It's a little bit of a digression though:
For networking - most people agree in total neutrality i.e. AT&T cannot inspect our packets for 'bad words'.
On the other end, for Social Networks, we mostly agree they should probably have the right to moderate on some level according to their own rules. Perhaps we could require some consistency and objectivity or something, but generally speaking, I think we can live with Section 230 there.
The 'big issue' in IT I think has to do with hosting, which is a service one might deem should be 'neutral' - at the same time, companies may not want to host certain content and may be able to demonstrate 'harm' by doing so.
Like Amazon dumping Parler as the threshold / test case, along with this GoDaddy example - which is complicated because on one hand it's 'expression' on the other, there were some very serious and probably illegal things going on there.
In tech, we tend to focus on these social issues, but imagine if 'Brick and Mortar' business started doing this? i.e. UPS refusing to deliver packages? Or the 'Paper Company' refusing to sell inkject cartridges?
For commonly available things, like groceries, probably we can allow discrimination, because after all, someone can just go down the street to the next one, but for products and services which are unique, it really poses a problem.
However much we might not like some groups, we have to be really careful about banning things.
I was under impression that they actually can inspect, but should not be able to deny/degrade or prioritize service based on whatever they might find in one’s packets.
Inspection part is going to be moot if everyone is using encryption though.
Net Neutrality was tossed by the Trump admin, and Section 230 was written for the protection of business.
What remains is this [1] 1934 Comms. Act.
In the US it's the Wild West and basically money rules on this issue, like the vague laws about land holding and mineral rights on the frontier in the 20th century, power is winning, not so much civility.
I'm not sure that the EU has the right laws, but at least there are clearly measures enacted to protect individuals and to try to create some kind of more rational 'playing field' even at the risk over over regulation.
Maybe we are in an era where only a few things here and there are going to get banned, and we will arrive at a new 'consensus' without intervention, that Parler was taken down isn't the end of the world for free expression ... or it's possible things will only escalate, it's hard to say.
But it's worth considering if hosting platforms might better fall more under the notion of 'carrier' than they would 'internet service' i.e. Section 230.
One issue that people brought up is that “curation” (or moderation even) is not really possible with a “carrier”-type hosting platform, but I think that specialized or niche forums are a good thing.
On the other hand, it is clear that heavy handed suppression is not good either, especially when all major platforms do that.
Is it possible to have both alternatives available somehow?
Neither VISA nor Amazon 'curate' either which is why I lean towards some kind of light regulation towards 'open access' as opposed to them kicking people out arbitrarily.
But I like your 'have the cake and eat it too' thinking! ...
I wonder if companies on the margins could be given either the option of Section 230 protections, but then also have an obligation to curate for some things, and to have some kind of 'consistently objective rules' ... or ... take the more 'neutral' approach and wash their hands of everything and be obligated to provide services for 'pretty much anything legal' ... which in this case would be interesting because GoDaddy is looking mostly to avoid populist outrage. If they are legally bound to allow the 'legal site' ... well ... there's little they can do ant the outrage would have be oriented towards the legislators.
My feeling is that both our current Net Neutrality and Section 230 just don't provide very well in the middle ground cases.
Maybe it’s naive to think that that we can legislate those two options into existence where a company can pick an option (and maybe even switch between them under some circumstances), but it would be nice to see a “free market” finding one that most efficient without everyone being forced to just use one.
For Visa, wasn’t the latest OnlyFan thing that payment networks almost forced them to self-destruct due to some morality rules? That would be a bit too restrictive for “carrier” case I think…
Incorrect. The gay couple did not even detail the cake’s design. They said they wanted a cake for “our wedding,” and since Jack Phillips believed homosexuality was a sin, he thought providing any kind of wedding cake would violate his freedom of religion. He did tell them they could get other kinds of cakes, just not a wedding cake, and that includes plain wedding cakes.
Phillips even said, “I’ll make your birthday cakes, shower cakes, sell you cookies and brownies, I just don’t make cakes for same sex weddings.” (Notice the lack of nuance: he wouldn’t make any cake, whether it’s plain or designed.)
You can read more in the opinion of the Supreme Court [1], page 4 (7 on your document viewer).
P.S. A good argument can be made that the Colorado Commission didn’t violate religious neutrality. As Ginsburg outlined in her dissent, Phillips wouldn’t make a wedding cake for any gay couple. So there is a subset of people he discriminates against just because of who they are (gay couples), and another he doesn’t discriminate against. The other bakeries involved that rejected William Jack’s request to make cakes depicting homosexuality as a sin wouldn’t make such a cake for anybody.
To make it easier to understand: Jack Phillips makes plain cakes he gives to one group of people but not another. On the other hand, the other bakeries wouldn’t even make a cake depicting homosexuality as a sin for anyone. So it wouldn’t matter if it’s an atheist or Christian or Muslim. Plus, the very same bakeries made cakes for other Christians and decorated beautiful Bibles, so it’s clear they didn’t find someone’s religion a reason to deny them a cake.
Phillip’s argument might be more convincing if he was asked to, say, design a wedding cake with a rainbow flag. But the gay couple were refused a plain, let alone designed, wedding cake.
Phillips is by definition discriminating, since he makes something (a plain wedding cake) he gives to some people but not others, all because they’re gay. He himself admitted he wouldn’t make wedding cakes of any kind for same-sex weddings. Having intermediaries in the middle is a moot point. If anything, it makes for a stronger case that Phillips also excludes heterosexual people from buying cakes if their purpose is to give it to a homosexual couple for their wedding. (Also, a better comparison would be between the gay couple who visited Phillips’ bakery vs William Jack who visited the other bakeries, since there were no intermediaries here.) As Alfredo said, this isn’t a cake with a rainbow flag; only a plain wedding cake you might find at your local cakery. The other bakeries wouldn’t make a cake containing hateful messages for anybody, so they can’t be discriminating (unless you argue not offering something to all people is discrimination). The difference is that Phillips finds a certain class of people who do weddings sinful and so wouldn’t make the same cake (he sells to others) to them, while the other bakeries find the message of “homosexuality bad” abhorrent and wouldn’t sell a cake with such messages to anybody; they wouldn’t even think of making it.
Great point, thanks. Also worth adding that individuals in a protected class are not there by opinion / decision (not to imply that they wouldn't be if they had any other choice!), e.g. one does not choose to be gay, black, etc. Pro-life ideals are an optional belief.
That’s true from one perspective. From another perspective pro-life views have religion heavily mixed into it and religious indoctrination happens early without a lot of consent and can be viewed as a form of brain washing. So the optionality can be argued.
Of course, Republicans/conservatives are of the exact same opinion when it comes to CRT/woke ideology, which is why they attempt to legislatively remove it from curricula of public schools, to protect children from brainwashing in that direction.
You can describe any pedagogy as indoctrination. Conservatives are very selective about where the deploy that rhetoric. Grade school kids still get taught that capitalism is “better” than communism, but you don’t see conservatives flipping out about that.
Edit: also plenty of people on HN who think their Kool-Aid is just water, I see.
All you’re doing here is kicking the can down the road by offloading a moral principle to a law that happens to exist in the US. The fact that this law exists doesn’t actually resolve any moral dillema - it just provides a thin excuse to be philosophically lazy.
You can refuse service to someone because you don't like the color of their shirt
Interesting. Isn't this a loophole? If I am the baker in question, can I refuse to bake the cake citing the shirt color instead of the real reason, which is that I am homophobic? (I am not, just asking a hypothetical question)
I believe the burden of proof would be the other way around. It's not hard though to establish a pattern if all gay people are refused service. Even in a singular instance, if you are willing to help a customer after seeing their shirt, but wait until discovering their orientation to refuse helping them, that makes a pretty strong argument it's about the latter and not the former.
No. Objective or broad rules or prerequisites for service/employment/etc that apply to everyone, but have a disparate impact on protected classes, are also illegal.
If you kick everyone out of your store that wears dreadlocks, no matter what their race or protected class, and that has a disparate impact on people who belong to protected classes, that's also illegal.
Similarly, if you refuse service to, say, immigrants because of the color of their shirts, but you serve everyone else no matter what color their shirts are, that's also illegal.
Why would they? Youtube already routinely kill channels based on bogus copyright claims, so it's not like they are desperately scrambling for excuses to pull things offline.
So If I don't like the shoes of the person in the protected class, I can refuse service? I think there are better, more organic ways to solve this problem than forced association and labor.
Yes. You just need to be able to prove that’s the reason if needed.
How many others have you refused service due to their shoes? And if none, what’s the policy?
GoDaddy has their policy.
> GoDaddy's policies say that its registered websites cannot "collect or harvest" information about people without their consent. Its policies also forbid registered sites from doing anything that "violates the privacy or publicity rights of another User or any other person or entity, or breaches any duty of confidentiality that you owe to another User or any other person or entity."
> So If I don't like the shoes of the person in the protected class, I can refuse service?
Yes. However, if there's a disparate impact on protected classes based on your shoe discrimination, that can be illegal. You can't just deny service to, say, immigrants and say it's because of their shoes, while letting other people and their shoes slide.
This wasn't about being pro/anti abortion, this is about them violating GoDaddy's ToS. Although I'm sure they weren't heartbroken over enforcing it.
"You will not collect or harvest (or permit anyone else to collect or harvest) any User Content (as defined below) or any non-public or personally identifiable information about another User or any other person or entity without their express prior written consent"
This is a refusal to participate in a process explicitly designed to make it harder for people to assert their Constitutionally-protected rights, by arranging such that there's nobody to take to court to protect those rights.
That's how it's different. The cake-purchaser is not a government trying to use the cake as a shield against civil rights litigation.
Illegal abortions and snitching on your neighbors remind me about communist Romania (my country), though I was young at that time I heard enough stories about weird abortion attempts(like putting furniture on your belly) and there are amny stories about people reading their security files and finding out that someone they trusted was snitching on them.
I can't understand what exactly this crime stoppers do, do they call police on you if you make a crime?
There were 2 things in the Texas abortion thing that reminds me of my country past
1 make abortion illegal and force people in doing risky procedures
2 a system where you can't trust anyone , you could get snitched on, even false accusations that could destroy your life.
So the 2 things combined did the job, individually would not have worked, and Texas has a reputation that I will not be surprised of weird things happening there.
As someone that lives in Texas, this is one of the few issues that's dire enough for me to post once more on HN. So I'll say my piece and return back to lurking:
This issue (specifically the issue of the law that Texas passed) has zero place in our society. None, whatsoever. No matter if you're for or against abortion. It is a flagrant violation of our constitutional rights (including our rights to freedom of speech) because it criminalizes anything relating to 'aiding and abetting' abortions. Section 171.208 of the bill HB1515 implies that you could be drawn into a civil lawsuit for simply suggesting or posting about abortions. This site was created explicitly for that purpose: to gather information about people whom violated that section of the law so that they can be sued in court.
I shouldn't need to mention the extreme chilling effect this has not only on abortions but on speech relating to abortions as well. This site (and by extension this law) I repeat can not and should not be tolerated in any way, shape or form.
Not to mention that its legality is based off a novel mechanism of crowd sourcing enforcement.
In other words roe v wade is the law of the land, so they make a law that’s clearly in violation of it, but with a novel enforcement mechanism. Now the issue is challenging this in court, which is strange and weird because of the enforcement mechanism.
Put another way, let’s say California passes a law banning the purchasing of guns, but enforces that law by allowing neighbors to bring suit and shielding defendants from collecting legal fees if they prevail.
You can pretty much use this technique for anything if it’s allowed. Basically it’s opening a legal Pandora’s box.
The piece I've yet to fully understand is how the state manages to absolve itself of enforcement. That is, they created the law which criminalizes it (or at least makes it some odd criminal-civil hybrid statute). They then set up a reporting system, which itself places them squarely in the process. And, following a report, they would presumably do something.
I don't see how they can reasonably claim they are not involved with enforcement.
It will probably not stand up to serious legal scrutiny, simply due to the implications.
Part of me wonders if they were inspired by the Obama care rulings. Basically the enforcement mechanism was taken away, so removing the law was seen as moot, however the plaintiffs wanted to see Obamacare dismantled. The truth is even without enforcement people use it voluntarily.
It’s sort of like a twisted revenge to use the same concept, but in such a new and nefarious way.
The tendentious legal argument is the dispute is between two private parties, and the state's only involvement is providing the dispute-resolution mechanism (a bit hard to swallow when they've stacked the deck in favour of the claimant and not exactly hidden why). The Supreme Court's decision rests on the even thinner ground that there are no grounds for ruling on the constitutionality of the law until a case has been brought and enforcement attempted. (It's feasible they might even rule the other way if and when cases are actually brought, but we shall see. A head on challenge to Roe vs Wade would have fewer side effects)
In the mean time, a very obvious route to create chaos has been opened up for any state government of any political inclination that wants to deter any constitutionally-protected behaviour whatsoever ...
>a bit hard to swallow when they've stacked the deck
Yeah, it's the reasonableness standard that doesn't seem to fly. I mean I get that they're making a claim about who's enforcing, but all of these people declaring that the claim creates some grand legal crisis is what I'm not getting. It just seems so patently clear what's going on here that the claim is absurd on its face.
I assume part of the reason for blowing it up though, is that it is such an egregious violation that even the attempt should be characterized as serious and dangerous.
>on the constitutionality of the law until a case has been brought and enforcement attempted.
Yeah this is head exploding. I don't know what the precedent is here, but it seems there's some standard or mechanism for SCOTUS getting involved pre-harm. I mean, if the law legalized murder...
And, at a minimum that's what injunctions are for--avoiding potentially irreparable harms before matters can be fully adjudicated. Denying an abortion is certainly irreparable.
That's why their refusal to grant a stay feels as ominous as it does.
We crowd source law enforcement all the time. See my other comment about tip lines.
The places your typical American considers exemplars of Social Democracy such as the Scandinavian countries are literally entire nations of Karens. That’s the only way a liberal society can actually function.
We're not talking about theory here or even about people turning each other in to the police, California could literally pass a law banning guns, and as long as they copied Texas's framework for enforcement, the Supreme Court's ruling means that nobody would have the ability to proactively sue the state.
People really haven't grasped what this law enables.
You're arguing about Karens, we're arguing about the ability of a State to ban pretty much any constitutionally protected activity they want in a way that prevents citizens from having the ability to sue to block those laws.
No actually I’m arguing that “crowd sourcing law enforcement” isn’t a novel government tactic at all. Argue for or against this law on its merits but it hasn’t enabled anything that wasn’t already a problem.
> No actually I’m arguing that “crowd sourcing law enforcement” isn’t a novel government tactic at all
Yeah, which is a completely separate conversation.
The biggest problem with this bill isn't that it crowdsources law enforcement, it's that in crowdsourcing law enforcement it provides a novel mechanism for passing laws that can't be preemptively challenged by citizens in front of the Supreme Court.
That is a novel issue. Citizens reporting people to the police, or even citizens collectively attacking, shunning, or boycotting socially unacceptable behaviors is not new. Citizens having standing under the law to sue each other over unconstitutional laws is a new thing.
Cancel culture doesn't give random people standing to claim damages against anyone they want in a courtroom. This law does.
> but it hasn’t enabled anything that wasn’t already a problem.
So California already gave citizens standing to sue each other over owning any gun? It already allowed citizens to sue each other going out in public without a mask? People can be sued by anyone in the state if they go to church and they're not vaccinated? And it removed limits on the number of lawsuits so that citizens could sue the same companies/people multiple times?
Remind me, after Apple refused to decrypt the San Bernadino phone, were they flooded with multiple lawsuits from ordinary citizens that couldn't be dismissed under anti-SLAPP laws, where citizens didn't need to prove standing for the lawsuit, and where Apple was barred from collecting attorney fees even if they won?
People cancelling each other on Twitter, or submitting tips to law enforcement, or even getting people fired over their political beliefs is not the same thing as the Supreme Court signing off on a legal framework for passing unconstitutional laws.
> It already allowed citizens to sue each other going out in public without a mask? People can be sued by anyone in the state if they go to church and they're not vaccinated?
And I'd be surprised if some legislature hasn't already started the process on this. It's more reasonable than the abortion law, because it's about behavior that puts the person bringing the suit into some amount of danger. Any argument that would support the abortion law would support the mask/vaccination law.
Serious question: I hate this law, but is it even managing to do anything? The law seems so broad that it’s being abused to sue Texas lawmakers themselves. And it seems like it clearly violates some laws e.g. the First Amendment, has it been challenged in court?
I'm in a weird position because I do understand why (particularly on HN) we're discussing infrastructure concerns, but all of the "do you really want companies to have this much power" conversations are happening in a complete vacuum from the bigger conversation of "do you really want governments to be able to sidestep constitutional protections this easily?"
We're allowed to care about multiple issues at the same time; you're allowed to be both concerned about Texas and the increased privatization of public infrastructure.
However, it's not really that we're caring about two things at the same time, there hasn't been much discussion about the tech implications of this law -- this law creates a template that can be used to attack tech companies and to sue platform providers. It can be used to bypass constitutional protections about freedom of speech. It can be used to attack constitutionally protected activities like encryption. It's heckin dangerous.
GoDaddy's move may or may not be prudent, but even if we think it's not prudent and that it's not the right thing for them to do -- it's still pretty objectively a much smaller story than the type of censorship that this law enables and the future implications of having the Supreme Court sanction a novel way for States to avoid constitutional scrutiny.
I understand that the abortion angle changes how people are thinking about it, but it's still disappointing to see this happen and GoDaddy being the main thing that people are focusing on. It feels like bikeshedding. What would prevent another state from using this same legal template to ban encryption? If people can't answer that question, maybe the ratio of conversation between GoDaddy and the law itself shouldn't be so skewed.
Again, you're allowed to care about multiple things at the same time, and nobody has to agree with what GoDaddy is doing. But it's kind of silly to say that corporatism is a bigger threat to freedom of speech than actual laws targeting speech.
Yeah, this is the reason I'm hoping the supreme court strikes it (and the general method) down hard when the full court case gets there (they couldn't at the time because of the way injunction works).
I think the most egregious thing about the law is that people who sue don't have to pay the defender's fees when they lose. It make it possible to DDOS defendents.
Deputizing the citizenry is also bad, and I'd like to see that struck down as well... but it's not the first time we've seen it either. Technically, this is somewhat similar to how the ADA works too (it does work a little differently though in that not everybody can be deputized). And I'm sure most have heard of good things happening because of the ADA, as well as bad things when people abuse the system. We are going to have to consider pretty carefully what we want instead here.
I'm still worried about companies making political decisions that affect so many people... but yeah, the government scares me even more.
Not really, its just that it won't be recognized as evidence nor attenuating circumstances if the man become violent and kill or disfigure his partner. It is illegal to provide the test mind you, not to ask for it.
So the reason why it is illegal to provide the test is medical data protection. France is really high on this, the restrictions on processing medical data like diabetes, asthma are probably the strictest in europe - probably for historical/cultural reasons, but i'm not sure and only have circumstential evidence of this (and btw, with the americanisation/globalisation of french society, those cultural reasons will disapear).
The genitical data are even more protected.
And by the way, for us (or at least for people from brittany, i don't know that much people elsewhere), being a father or a grandfather is'nt a genetical thing. The man who share 1/4 of my genes with i call Warren, the one who raised my father and me i used to call grandfather (well, more endearingly than that)
This is the flipside of the argument people make against Facebook or Twitter censoring people on their platforms. Without the ability to decide what speech is and isn't allowed on their own systems, GoDaddy wouldn't be able to do this.
If I understand what you're saying, whenever anyone allows others to use something they own, storage space, web servers, their car, etc. You want the government to be the sole arbiter of what it can and cannot be used for?
So like, if you sell web hosting on servers in your basement and one of them ends up being the most popular page on the white supremacist webring, you're totally ok with the government saying you have no right to cancel that account?
No certainly not. I would say that common carrier regulation should be reserved for things which behave like utilities, especially if there are very few comparable players in the market. The precedent would be something like the railroads: if you want to move freight, your options are quite limited, and your business might live or die depending on access to the rail system, so rail providers are not allowed to pick favorites as this would give them undue influence on the economy as a whole.
I think it should be fairly simple to draw a common-sense distinction between small business and the tech-giants which gate keep the internet. If you are not allowed to host your site on the server in my basement, nobody is going out of business because of that. If you cannot use AWS, GCP and Azure, there's a significant possibility your business will not be able to survive in today's market.
To counter your analogy, if I am the CEO of one of the largest mobile carriers in the country, and I believe you hold unacceptable opinions, should I be able to deny you access to my network and prevent you from making phone calls?
No, and I think this is the difference: I don't consider social media and web hosting as utilities the way phone companies and ISPs are. There are a lot of competitors in those spaces and it's relatively easy to spin up new ones, which is not true of things like the phones and internet service.
> If you cannot use AWS, GCP and Azure, there's a significant possibility your business will not be able to survive in today's market.
...I contend that this is ridiculous. I work for a company that doesn't use any of these services, I know of many companies not using these services, and in fact I'd say most of the companies using these services really don't need them because they'll never scale large enough to make them worthwhile, it's just that it's currently the fad of our industry.
They are sketchy. I had to use them in 2011 because a club I was in decided to use them for their website. Their web portal was designed to make using your products as difficult as possible, and buying new products as easy as possible. The interface changed frequently, always in favor of making it easy to buy new products from them.
They have been well marketed for years. If someone wants a website, they think goDaddy. Most people cannot deal with the concept of domain name registrars and http servers. They want a one stop shop, pay several dollars to a year, have a web site, and then forget about the whole thing.
Tried looking at it, but they must have the "wordfence" WAF turned up to super-paranoid settings. I did get a normal page once, but mostly I get a page telling me I'm suspicious.
That's because it was spammed to hell in the past couple of days. I wouldn't even call it a coordinated since I've seen people asking to spam that site on Twitter, TikTok, reddit, you name it.
So we're making it clearer and clearer that US is ruled by corporations rather than elected officials. I just hope they keep the same momentum the next time someone rallies for intervention in Middle East
Maybe Texas ought to just host the site themselves if it means so much to them. GoDaddy, AWS and DigitalOcean have no obligation to host your site if they object to the contents of your site, that's been inside the EULA of every VPS distributor since 2005.
I haven’t read any detailed piece on the SCOTUS decision, but I think a big part in why the law is allowed to go ahead for now is that it is:
- a civil statute, not criminal
- reported/enforced by private individuals/entities, not the state government
I suspect the law was crafted specifically to deny the possibility for the government to operate such a site, and that this was the “one weird trick” used to get around the Roe precedent, at least for 5 of the justices. I’m not totally confident in that, so I’d appreciate learning if I’m wrong.
Well, it sure is too bad that this law meant to bypass constitutional precedent by relying on private individuals to act as DAs might be slightly hampered by other private individuals denying them the use of their platform for this purpose.
To be clear, I’m massively against the new law. I was just explaining that my understanding is that for its proponents, a workaround such as hosting with the state government wouldn’t work because the legislators are hoist with their own petard.
All web services need to basically be classified as either a utility or a publisher, and be regulated accordingly. They've been in this gray area, picking and choosing to appropriately navigate the law / PR crises as they arise and clear regulations are simply required.
You may not like them, but the regulations are very clear. None of them are utilities. There was some effort to make ISPs common carriers, but the last administration nixed it.
Congress could always, you know, do their jobs and actually fix the law.
As to one bureaucratic choice or another, we've had enough turnover in the White House in the internet era that "the last guy broke this" doesn't really cut it. New executives can always issue new executive orders. It's just whether they want to bother or not.
Maybe. I think the common carrier thing was done with administrative rule making, which is a whole different process. I don’t think executive orders can overrule that, but I’m not a lawyer.
And people back in the day were allowed to own slaves, yet we don’t look back on that an argue that we’ve regressed. Perhaps some day society will look back on abortions with the same disgust as we see slavery today.
It has human DNA unique from the mother and, in this case, an independent heartbeat. To the minds of the people supporting this law, that makes it alive, with its own rights independent of the mother's.
Their argument, as such, is that it isnt a matter of reproductive healthcare at all, but murder. I know of a few states that would file multiple murder charges in the case of killing a pregnant woman, for example.
All the comparisons to a handmaidens tale, yelling about womens rights and reporductive health will never change their mind... No different than the accusations of Larry Elder being a white supremacist.
> It has human DNA unique from the mother and, in this case, an independent heartbeat.
I don't know why people use DNA uniqueness as a qualifier of anything. Are identical twins and clones not alive? Heartbeats aren't a measure of life either and, at 6 weeks, there is still no functioning heart. So despite the colloquial usage of the term, there is no heartbeat.
I strongly support abortion but this is the dumbest argument there is. You're just perscribing new meanings to the words alive and life that almost nobody shares with the subset of people who do this, which by the way excludes biologists. Abortions kill living human animals and there are many good reasons why abortions are justified, but not being alive isn't one of them. Everything that applies to a fetus also applies to a coma patient dependent on life support. If you want arguments that don't suck then look at bodily autonomy, health (including mental), self-defense, etc. instead of attempting to water down concepts to support your position. Seriously fallacious, sad to see it's so popular.
Other than the potential to be independent which the two share, yes, I think that does support my point. We have no need to reclassify limbs as "not alive" in order to have good reason to amputate them. Doing so would be seen as quite neurotic.
> Everything that applies to a fetus also applies to a coma patient dependent on life support
Except that coma patients are not dependent on another specific individual to stay alive. If one needed your kidney to live, but you refused and they died, you would not be responsible for their death.
Requiring another person to be alive does not make one not alive. Your argument doesn't suport that it does and I more or less agree with your argument, which is one reason that I supoort abortion. Perhaps you read too much into what I wrote.
He is trying to force the other person to bring evidence for their value judgments, but they, by definition, can not do that, since value judgments are not objective, so they just downvote without responding. Just trying to gather evidence would lead a thinking individual to reflect more about the nature of values, ethics and morals, but most people, doesn't matter if left or right, are almost equally dogmatic and most don't even understand anything about morality or ethics, they just blindly follow what society tells them. [0]"Study: Leftists just as likely to be dogmatic authoritarians as those on the right"
Instead of responding with a vapid statement, you should have just went right ahead and provided the evidence, but baselessly claiming that "people do it all the time" is infinitely easier I guess.
Richard: Time travel is impossible, it violates fundamental laws of physics, the arrow of time just goes one way.
Greg: * blindly downvotes * NONSENSE. You can time travel with a time machine easily. People do it all the time .
I can see the "why is this different than a wedding cake for gay couples" argument. It's a reasonable point. But I can see why it's not the same.
Making a cake is a one-time interaction. Sexual orientation is similar to race in the respect of expected protections from discrimination. Apply the same wedding cake refusal for racial reasons and it's obvious this is discrimination.
On the other hand, being a domain registrar means a continued involvement in the act being discussed- running this website. GoDaddy are not just selling a one time transaction, they're an active, paid participant. They're service must continue to exist for the website to work, so long as they are the registrar.
And what the website is doing is not protected by law.
What really decides these things though is that GoDaddy needs to answer to their shareholders. How many customers will leave if they choose not to do business with this website? How many customers will leave if they do continue to do business with this website?
Remember that in the cake baking case, the owners didn't refuse to do business with the couple. They offered to sell them any cake in the shop, or even make a custom cake that wasn't for their gay wedding.
It was specifically using their creative arts to contribute to the wedding that the owner refused to do.
The Bakery doesn’t refuse to allow LGTBQ to enter their business & purchase their products, that would be impossible to defend. They will also custom make a cake for LGTBQ customers, they only refuse to make “wedding” cakes for LGTBQ. Why? If anyone has ever been married & hired a wedding cake vendor, u realize you are not simply walking into a bakery & leaving with a cake. You are hiring a vendor. Like all vendors, they participate in your wedding. There’s private, personal meetings about design & flavors. The cake vendor delivers the cake to the location & sets it up. Why would an LGTBQ couple want a vendor to participate in such a personal event who does not want to fully support their event, who isn’t excited to be involved? I don’t think there are laws that would force the bakery to participate like that. GoDaddy is certainly not providing personal services on that level, so it’s not a great analogy.
Yeah, if you’re going to be soliciting personal information for vigilante harassment, I’m not sure why you’d imagine that a standard mainstream host would want to touch you. This is going to violate most hosts’ ToS.
>Yeah, if you’re going to be soliciting personal information for vigilante harassment, I’m not sure why you’d imagine that a standard mainstream host would want to touch you.
They are a state government attempting to enforce a law. By definition, it is not vigilante. Whether the law is agreeable or just is another question entirely; a political question.
For that matter, it's still entirely plausible that when someone actually sues under the law it's going to get appealed up and revoked because of Roe. I say plausible, because I'm sure the conservative majority would like to overturn Roe, but I'm not sure if this particular law is the vehicle they'd want for that.
All the Supreme Court said so far was that they didn't think there was a cause of action at the moment because of how the law was structured.
(Now, was that decision perhaps slightly motivated by the conservative majority and the exact topic of the law? Seems likely. I bet they'd have stayed a law that was exactly the same other than the reportable-act being handgun ownership, for instance.)
> They are a state government attempting to enforce a law. By definition, it is not vigilante. Whether the law is agreeable or just is another question entirely; a political question.
Have you been asleep? The OP sees the Texas law as vigilantism because he doesn't believe that the people of Texas have a right to self-determination --- he believes, essentially, that angry-Twitter ought to get a veto over Texan law, and that Texan law that angry-Twitter doesn't like isn't really law at all.
The people of Texas, of course, have limited right to self-determination; whether the absurd law their government had just passed falls under that or not will be determined later.
However, in this case, it’s nothing to do with the people of Texas. This is a private vigilante group, not the government.
Not, really, that it matters in this case. Even the full majesty of the Texas state government presumably can’t force a webhost to ignore its ToS if it doesn’t want to. But in this case it’s not the government, it’s a weird private organisation.
No one is forced to do anything, iirc that couple never got that cake. Businesses are free to refuse service to people within protected groups, they're just risking legal action when they do. That's the trade up.
True, but it's also disingenuous to imply you're forced to do something because the alternative to that action puts you in legal peril.
In the same way a factory owner is "forced" to comply with OSHA lest they be in legal peril, you cannot discriminate against a protected group without putting yourself in legal peril. Your freedom comes in the form of opting out of activities that put you in that position, if you cannot help but discriminate against those in protected groups due to your religious beliefs then you should take up a profession where that's no longer an issue for you.
If aforementioned factory owner was unwilling to follow OSHA guidences due to a deeply held personal belief then I think it's a much better outcome they see punishment for that until they opt out of that profession than for us to change the law to allow it.
Obviously women have the right to decide whether they want to continue to be pregnant or not. Everyone has an absolute right to bodily self-determination.
Obviously a fetus, like any other human at any age, has an absolute right to life. This right is not subject to the approval of the mother. It is arguably less strong than the right to life of a postnatal child due to the presumably more limited nature of the fetus's subjective experience, but if you think there is a moral difference between killing a newborn baby and killing a fetus a day before it is due, the forces that hold you in that position probably have more to do with cultural commitments than reason.
Nature puts two individuals' most fundamental, absolute rights into conflict with one another. It's a tragedy. At the moment, the least worst resolution available to us is to try to find the line before which the mother's right to bodily self-determination outweighs the fetus's right to life. This is an impossible task, because it's impossible to know the subjective experience of another sentient being.
Virtually everyone in the modern US responds to this situation by favoring either the mother or the fetus and discounting or outright denying the rights of the other party. I think it's time for us to move past that and seek to remove the rights conflict by developing technology that allows women to choose to end their pregnancies, without also ending the lives of their fetuses.
I mostly talk to liberals, and most of them push back on this idea at first. I point out to them that replacing abortion with access to technology and services that make it possible for women to end their pregnancies without killing the fetuses inside them would take much of the wind out of the sails of the American right. I also point out that, politics aside, it would actually be morally preferable to universal access to abortion, because it would not require killing fetuses, which actually do have a right to life.
Finally, I point out that liberals are unlikely to win the abortion issue in any other way. Their opponents aren't just going to get old and die. Young people choose to be pro-life all the time. This is because fetuses actually do have a right to life.
What this argument is like without virtue signaling or the brainwashing from civil rights:
Free the rapist. Kill the baby. What a sick society.
All this because you can't control your crotch. I wish you were the one aborted. No one wants to follow you around fixing your mistakes and cleaning up after you.
Send the father to war to die. Raise the child against his parents. All three of them failed at what even amoeba can do.
Everyone else who had the now luxury of birth gets through the day without a problem. The world would really be nice if we did not have these discussions, as in, you weren't in it.
California just passed a law that makes the phrases "virtue signaling" and "cancel culture" illegal, so anybody who reads your comment can sue you for $100K.
Genuinely curious how the Supreme Court would choose to differentiate that if it had the same enforcement mechanism and was similarly civil not criminal. I guess it wouldn't get to them because it'd have to go through a State Supreme Court first and none would pretend it was constitutional, but it's a fun hypothetical.
So the website still exists and now they found a different domain provider within 24 hours after being de-platformed by GoDaddy?
What have these 'script-kiddies' and 'hacktivists' achieved other than making these websites more resilient and censorship resistant?
What's next? complain to Google Inc, that they are using ReCAPTCHA because they don't like the website?
Perhaps this means anyone can do these sort of methods to anyone else who they don't like until they become censorship resistant. Unfortunately, the website owners have not changed their minds and the site is still up and the law (which I also disagree with) is still in effect. If they were expecting a backlash, it didn't happen.
This is a complete and total failure.
Downvoters: So you are telling me that the website is still down then? So they didn't find a domain provider to move to? Are you telling me that they are still on GoDaddy?
Is there any evidence that substantiates this? Are you really sure?
The website in question is still up isn't it? Despite everything that has happened, that dreadful law is still in effect and no-one's minds had been changed.
It is as if nothing had happened.
> BTW you're misusing the terms "script-kiddies" and "hacktivists".
How exactly? Elaborate. Your claim needs to be substantiated.
If you cannot elaborate further with any evidence, I can rapidly dismiss your claim as baseless.
I also invite anyone else to support the parent's comment against mine. Discuss.
Aside from the obvious problem that this is the company itself pulling it down and so no hacking is going on, Go Daddy is like the most mundane hosting company there is and you can't be anything as transgressive as a hacktivist there. Maybe you could get away with calling the responsible corporate drones in the legal department at Linode "hacktivists", but definitely not those at Go Daddy.
The insistence that "script kiddie" is applicable is obviously some sort of 4d chess type of sarcasm trap and I won't engage in it further.
> Aside from the obvious problem that this is the company itself pulling it down and so no hacking is going on,
Where did I directly accuse GoDaddy Inc. of taking down the website as 'hacking' or describing them generally as 'hacktivists'? Given they are a private platform, they have the right to terminate service to anyone for violating their Terms of Service.
As for the hacktivism and script-kiddie claims, the context is from [1]
> The developer, whose social media identifies him as Sean Black, also made an iOS shortcut making it easier for non-technical activists to participate as well.
> In the first video, Black says the script sends one request to the Texas website around every 10 to 15 seconds. In the second, Black adds that the script sent around 300 requests in all at the time of upload before the site blocked his IP address.
Does that also mean its fine for me to do it to someones website because I don't like their website?
So it's also fine to distribute malicious scripts and to encourage non-technical users to just hit the run button with the intention to DDoS and attempt to flood and bring down someones website because they don't like the website? If that is not script-kiddie behaviour, I don't know what is.
> The insistence that "script kiddie" is applicable is obviously some sort of 4d chess type of sarcasm trap and I won't engage in it further.
4d chess type of what?
Read the whole context [0] [1] [2] first before assuming such nonsense.
Are you are aware it's not actually context if you quote some completely different website you've never mentioned in the thread before?
If you'd had actually quoted from those links initially when making your comments about script kiddies and hactivists your statements would have made sense. But you didn't and instead of realising this you seems to prefer being outraged that nobody could read your mind to find the context you intended but never provided.
> Are you are aware it's not actually context if you quote some completely different website you've never mentioned in the thread before?
The whole context of this story is covered by multiple articles and all of them are completely relevant and happened BEFORE GoDaddy ultimately took action to de-platform the website.
I assume you also read the Gizmodo article. If you did, you'll find that the article mentions and linked various methods used to directly attack the website which can be described as 'script-kiddie' and 'hacktivism' behaviour, before they themselves suggested their own effective method in getting GoDaddy to de-platform the website.
To go further, I substantiated all of my claims with other relevant and reputable sources that gives more detail and covers the context of the whole story. Not just Gizmodo's ones. The whole story cannot be covered with only one source from one news site.
So, had you 'actually' read the article rather than only just the title in the first place like many others in this thread, you wouldn't be embarrassing yourself with laughable nonsense like '4d chess type of sarcasm trap' and resorting to baseless suggestions that I directly accused GoDaddy Inc. of taking down the website as 'hacking' or them being 'hacktivists' themselves.
On second thought, apparently you do understand what the term "script-kiddies" means. The real problem in your original sentence "What have these 'script-kiddies' and 'hacktivists' achieved" is that you misused the word "these".
Looking forward to your 1500 word rebuttal with citations about the validity of strawman arguments.
> The real problem in your original sentence "What have these 'script-kiddies' and 'hacktivists' achieved" is that you misused the word "these".
If you had read the Gizmodo article, you would find that they mentioned that '...trolls flooded the digital tip line with everything from Shrek porn to phony tips' and linked another previously reported article which again covers the methods used to attack and flood the website, before then detailing to others about another effective way to get GoDaddy to shut down the website for ToS violations.
These sort of flooding and attacks are what can be described as script-kiddie and hacktivist behaviour as I already said before. I assumed you have at least 'read' the Gizmodo article and its links. You clearly have not.
When asked to elaborate further on your original claim of '...misusing the terms "script-kiddies" and "hacktivists"' you couldn't substantiate anything. Now you retreat to attacking another 'argument' and thinking I misused the word 'these'.
So even after bringing up more relevant links and citations to support my own claims on top of what Gizmodo already mentioned, another person who also didn't read the article now says it makes sense and then you suggest I'm defending a strawman argument?
Have I just proved that both of you just read only the title of the Gizmodo article?
Seems to me like the same problem Voat ran into. Generally, subreddits are banned for a reason, so any site that allows essentially any legal content is filled with those not allowed elsewhere. So when people want an alternative to reddit, the biggest one is filled with people that the majority don't want to deal with. And so those people tend to just stay on reddit.
Epik hosting is simply acting as a dumb pipe. But because you really only look for alternatives if the big players kick you out, they're linked to those services now.
I think this paints Epik as more unbiased and neutral than it actually is. Rob Monster, Epik's founder, appears personally sympathetic to the views of those his company is now known for serving.
I see a lot of people who are mad that they got picked up by Epik, and even as someone who thinks these sites are reprehensible, this is frankly the right course of action. If Epik wants to cater to that crowd, then they can continue to accumulate 'rejected actors' from other services until they fail to effectively moderate their community. It's only a matter of time until that ticking time bomb explodes, and it's a total "not my problem" moment for everyone involved.
You want to really hurt their site? Just furnish their database with randomly generated names and addresses. Data poisoning is one of the easiest, cleanest, and effective ways to ruin someone's crowdsourcing campaign if you pull it off properly. Getting angry at people on the internet for having a voice though, that's just a tad petty.
My thought has been that an AI trained to submit plausible submissions, coontinuously trained against accepted and rejected submissions, would be more effective.
How hard would it be to filter out those items though? Shouldn't there be a way to "delete all data from this IP". It sounds like a lot of work to have a set of rotating IPs and act as multiple different people to get this done.
The hope is that you don't transmit any kind of personal information in any identifiable pattern. If you get that much right, it can be exceptionally effective.
Disclosure: me and my friends used to DOS self-hosted inboxes like this
Good. This isn’t a question of “but what about next time when it’s something you disagree with?”.
This issue (and especially this particular implementation of law) even be elevated to a political issue. We should keep this on the same page as GoDaddy throwing out a terrorist organization. It’s an issue that doesn’t even have two sides to it.
(Asking as someone who thinks these laws are among the worst passed in the US in recent memory)
What would you say to the charge that recruiting for terrorist organizations is actually illegal, and that the Texas laws were created legally by democratically elected officials?
Luckily I’m looking at it from the outside so I can say without flinching “if this was a functioning democracy and a functioning legal system this wouldn’t have happened”.
There are certainly shades of gray all over but I also don’t think anything can be excused as morally acceptable because it’s decided democratically.
> actually illegal
The thing though is that abortions are now in that category too!
Democratically elected officials creating laws without public support is sometimes necessary (e.g for budgetary reasons, environmental reasons or similar). Doing it in this situation isn’t that.
Glad you've acknowledged there is a difference between this and recruiting for terrorist orgs.
>I also don’t think anything can be excused as morally acceptable because it’s decided democratically.
Wasn't asserted.
>The thing though is that abortions are now in that category too!
The website is not providing illegal abortions. Or else sadly goDaddy would probably be required by law to take it down.
Anyways, I've learned from other comments that these laws are so broad that even activism supporting the right to abortion can be deemed illegal. So inadvertently you might've made a point if that proves true.
This is an interesting issue. Lets say all major hosting companies refuse to host this shitty website. Personally I will be okay with it, in this particular case. But what happens if/when the same companies refuse to host something that I support? That will make me unhappy and a hypocrite, I suppose.
Not saying Godaddy is right or wrong here. Just that this is a slippery slope.
Why would it make you a hypocrite if you think "bad things shouldn't happen" and "(unrelated) good things should happen" at the same time?
Maybe you meant the case where the company uses the exact same legal argument to later ban something you support? But this does not mean you must be a hypocrite, because the company might well employ it in error. Or you might have objected to already the first time it was stated because it was overly broad. Clearly hypocrisy does not follow automatically in the general case.
And this is no more a slippery slope than that which you stand on whenever you do any moral judgment. The real problem that godaddy's action calls attention to is rather the arbitrary selectivness by which companies enforce their terms of service.
The problem is that there is very little historical evidence that governing in terms of "morality" has any kind of success at creating favorable outcomes.
When you rely on subjective standards, you risk very bad outcomes if you have a bad actor making those subjective judgements.
It's perfectly reasonable to have concerns over handing over the governance of online life to companies which are not democratically accountable, especially in an era of increasing consolidation in the technology space.
But what about AWS? Or data centers? What if banks and farms and electric companies start doing this? That's where this is going. Companies taking political or ideological approaches is becoming normalized, and if infrastructure follows suit, we are in serious trouble. Godaddy is uncomfortably close to this.
Did they already just forget about OnlyFans and the payment providers?
The private platform argument applies here as well. The payment providers can refuse to do business with anyone or any individual. Even for political or ideological reasons. Just look at the outrage [0].
The whole point is that, this can happen to anyone.
Long story. See the linked article. There's a minor industry in Israel, and in Brooklyn, NY selling "kosher" stuff that has nothing to do with food, but is rabbi-approved. There's strong group social pressure and coercion to use only approved items.
This spills over into the larger community in strange ways. In Brooklyn, there is strong opposition to bike lanes through ultra-orthodox neighborhoods. Bike lanes encourage people to ride through in scandalous form-fitting outfits.
How is it relevant in this industry though? There are several hosting providers and name registrars that wouldn't care or are incorporated out-of-country, even some specifically owned and operated by conservatives. They violated the Godaddy TOS (which prohibits users from providing data about another person without their explicit, written consent) and are now being punished for it. Free-market capitalism is functioning as-intended.
Counterpoint: this is the reality we on HN have been warming everyone about for years.
This is no different from Cloudflare shutting down 8ch or AWS deciding not to host you anymore. We’ve been saying for years that we’re over-centralizing our internet infrastructure and that just a few bad actors have outsized influence on what can remain hosted and what they want to pull the plug on. If anything, this is good because companies might finally wake up and realize self-hosting is in their own best interests.
Well this is the sort of thing I have tried to warn them on and obviously when it affects them you can just see the same outrage right in front of you.
Just look at what happened to youtube-dl. [0] The private platform argument applies here too, also defeating the decentralised purpose of Git. Had they self-hosted with their own GitLab instance, this wouldn't have happened.
Self-hosting was done years ago is the way to over-come this. Now anyone can get their website, business terminated by any of these companies by anyone who seems to not like your website. (Even if they try to bring it down themselves.)
So one vocal minority with outsized power ("Texas right to life") is upset that an even smaller minority (a single hosting company!) is giving them the boot? Talk about the pot calling the kettle black.
And how is this a bad thing? This is the free market! Doesn't GoDaddy have the right to decide who they host?
Nice, we can no longer run from politics. We need two services for every single political affiliation. Are you on Communist Twitter or the Capitalist one ?
394 comments
[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 295 ms ] threadThis whole episode is inexcusable, and it's about time "big tech" made a stand and stopped participating in activities that are morally vile.
I will continue to be a paying customer of GoDaddy as a result.
How would you explain to a Nihilist that your morals are superior to the morals of those you consider reprehensible?
This made me think; thanks. :)
I'm not arguing that a discussion with an entrenched Nihilist has much chance to have value, but since I'm not a Nihilist I see value in that discussion, even when it was a lost cause.
Reality here is that godaddy gave an unreasonably small time window for a site shutdown, simply because of their fear of the backslash from the public causing PR damage hence revenue loss.
The problem is certain groups want to have their cake and eat it too. There is no consistency.
Should a business be "moral less" and allow all behavior?
The idea that we should embrace cold, profit-only business entities is much more reprehensible to me.
It seems to me that nobody on either side wants to tolerate freedom of speech. When you see something you don't like, the answer is tolerance, not "This person/thing/company" should go away and never come back. I'm just starting to see it far too often where something gets "cancelled" because it makes some subset of people uncomfortable. Inevitably the pendulum will swing the other way, and those who engage in this kind of activity aren't going to like the precedent they've set.
this isn’t really slippery slope, there are so many red flags here
https://twitter.com/dril/status/473265809079693312?lang=en
For those that don't want to go to twitter:
`the wise man bowed his head solemnly and spoke: "theres actually zero difference between good & bad things. you imbecile. you fucking moron"`
I don't want to add a ton of exposition to this, but I also don't want this to be a reddit-level comment where I just link to something and bounce so I will add that clearly someone doing something because it is moral and just like hampering the collection of abortion bounties is better than someone doing something immoral and unjust like hampering access to abortions.
It isn't about what I agree and disagree with, it's about what's actually right and wrong.
The Aztecs had no problem sacrificing people, and many sought it out (it's theorized) given that it guaranteed you a place next to the sun and thus in paradise, eternally drunk.
Extremists even today believe in a paradise-after-death if they sacrifice themselves for god. To a lesser extent, self-flagellation (whipping oneself for religious purposes) is still prevalent in many cultures and sects of e.g. Christianity/Catholocism today.
"Right" and "wrong" change over time, and with culture. Thus they are subjective - there is no objective "right" and "wrong". In this sense, your last sentence relates two identical things - what you might agree with and disagree with are your own perception of "right" and "wrong".
It's a somewhat flawed and (in my opinion) dangerous way of thinking about social interaction and morality.
---
E: Because I know this will be mis-interpreted, let me be clear: the website in question is, in my opinion, abhorrent - but I think it's dangerous to celebrate a large company taking it down on the grounds of morality. I understand it was taken down as it specifically violated a pre-existing clause in their ToS which makes it make sense in this case. But to say that this is a great thing and we should do this for people that are "wrong" is beginning down a path that nobody really wants.
You're incorrect about right and wrong changing over time. Even with that information though, it doesn't matter for what I said to still be correct both CURRENTLY (which fits your incorrect ideas of morality) and more broadly.
Care to elaborate?
This wouldn’t necessarily have been something they’d know about up front. The group presumably didn’t write them an email on signing up saying “yeah, we’ll be violating your ToS”.
What this shows is that harm reduction (the principal moral foundation for “leftists”, “progressives” etc. according to Jonathan Haidt) is inadequate as the sole foundation for an ethic.
What this shows is that conservatives do not give a single shit about harm, but this is about their own little morals and ethic allows them to justify a miserable existence for a woman and a child because you, as a man who is never going to be in a situation where your only choices are either getting an abortion in secret or being sued for doing do, thought that you could control their bodies.
A fetus is not a life? WTF? "Science" says it's a forming human. Are you anti-science?
When one turns on an enemy, the first thing is to dehumanize them. Doing horrible things (dismembering, killing) to a non-human is much easier. The tactics of the Left regarding abortion are very similar as what one does when ginning up a society for war: you convince them through repeated messaging that "they" they aren't human beings -- they're something less, and they're a problem for us.
I used to be a Democrat, and it was the callous tone the the Left took on re: abortion that was a factor in me deciding that the hypocrisy was too much. I support unrestricted first trimester abortions, and am of the now-rejected Bill Clinton philosophy that they should be safe, legal, ... and rare. It's very telling that it's the "rare" part that the Left takes exception with. Now, it's only conservatives who quote Clinton on that.
Add to that, 80% of abortions are black and brown babies[2], yet the organization known as "Black Lives Matter" is silent on the topic -- more hypocrisy.
[1] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/fetus
[2] https://aapsonline.org/planned-parenthood-abortions-over-80-...
This is complete nonsense. It's not "the left" that opposes teaching proper sex ed, easy and affordable access to contraception, or providing economic assistance for the mothers who cannot care for a child. Or, for that matter, reducing the economic inequality that leads to that problem in the first place.
[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/12/the-brilli...
> "Young feminists living in the age of dwindling access to abortion aren’t interested in a mantra that implies there is something shameful about the procedure"
The Left doesn’t. The “rare” was a reference to government providing sex education, contraception availability, and social support to attack the demand side so that even with abortion being ssfe, legal, and readily available at need, it would be rare that it would be sought.
> Now, it's only conservatives who quote Clinton on that.
While the right may quote it, they also oppose each and everything it stood for. In fact, that was the left-wing part of the formulation (and the part Clinton, as a center-right Democrat, was least sincere about, hence his cheerful collaboration with Republicans in destroying the social safety net.).
> There is no unborn child. It's not even a thinking mass of cells. A fetus is not a life.
The fetus would grow into a life if it were not for the violent intervention of an abortion. Is the future relevant to a system of ethics? Take for example the debate over universal pre-k. What harm is there right now if a toddler in the ghetto doesn't learn their ABCs until a few years later. Or is it the proponents think it will lead to problems later on in life.
> What this shows is that conservatives do not give a single shit about harm
Maybe a single shit but harm/care is only one of several moral foundations. Read your Haidt. Or atleast this excerpt from the wikipedia page on moral foundations theory:
"Researchers have found that people's sensitivities to the five/six moral foundations correlate with their political ideologies. Using the Moral Foundations Questionnaire, Haidt and Graham found that libertarians are most sensitive to the proposed Liberty foundation, liberals are most sensitive to the Care and Fairness foundations, while conservatives are equally sensitive to all five/six foundations."
Incidently, another of Haidts' findings is that conservatives are much better at understanding why liberals are liberal than liberals are at understanding why conservatives are conservative.
> this is about their own little morals and ethic
Well duh! morals and ethics are by definition the principles that drive a person to act.
> allows them to justify a miserable existence for a woman and a child
From the childs point of view (what child is that btw? I thought a fetus wasn't one.) not existing at all seems to be as miserable as possible. But a better question might be is there no reason to oppose abortion except a desire to cause misery.
> because you, as a man who is never going to be in a situation where your only choices are either getting an abortion in secret or being sued for doing do
I'm never going to be a loser drug addict who got his neck stepped on by the police. Can I say nothing in support of George Floyd? In general, can one only express a moral opinion on subjects one has direct experience of?
> thought that you could control their bodies.
This is about a law. Law is an instrument by which human societies control the bodies of women and men. Law is also how those societies can discuss when to control and how much but control is what is going on. As I write this, there is this group of strangers called "doctors" who are attempting to control my body by covering my face and sticking me with needles. Can you think of a non-nefarious reason why they might be doing this?
But while I accept that this argument may be contested and there may be a debate on "generic abortion" in "benign circumstances", a key issue here is a non-exceptions law (it's six weeks even in case of rape or incest), which to me seems absolutely indefensible.
Let's look at a hypothetic but realistic example of a thirteen year old girl who is eight weeks pregnant after being raped by her mother's boyfriend. Would it be morally acceptable to prevent her from getting an abortion and force the victimized kid to carry it to term? If someone's answer is yes or maybe, then IMHO that does pass into the territory of just "a desire to cause misery" and their moral compass is so outrageously immoral that any of their arguments with respect to morality should be ignored without listening/reading. If the answer is no, then a law that implements a blanket ban without allowing for such circumstances (the example may seem outrageous but such cases, sadly, are not that rare) is not morally justifiable if it does not enable abortions at least in such cases.
What I'm trying to say is that this particular law is so outrageous that I would expect that both sides of the ordinary "pro-choice" vs "pro-life" argument should be against this particular law, because it does go to essentially misogynic extremes that do not have a sufficient justification in all the reasonable "pro-life" arguments.
How can not existing be [as] miserable [as possible]? Is existing not being? Is misery not possible? Or am I missing another option?
> what child is that btw? I thought a fetus wasn't one.
As far as I know nobody disputes that (unless there are complications with the pregnancy) a fetus usually evolves into a child when an abortion is made impossible.
Don’t companies have the freedom to choose who they do business with?
What exactly is “leftist takeover” about not hosting a website that’s used to spy on and report citizens for “crimes”? This is something I expect to see in an authoritarian country. Not the United States. It’s something I expect from Big Government invading people’s lives. What’s next? Maybe a “leftist” state will create a site like this for reporting gun owners? Maybe you can start reporting people who drive from California to another state to purchase 30 rd mags instead of what’s legally allowed in California? Or better yet maybe you just don’t like the 2nd Amendment neighbors you have so you anonymously report them. What’s the worst that could happen? Maybe the police show up and make that person’s life a living hell. Nothing like passive aggressive SWATing. You can quickly see how this spirals out of control.
This website is like the exact opposite of what we need in the United States. It’s the kind of thing communist countries do.
Don't forget that even in the US that we dance on the knifes edge of authoritarianism where neighbors narc on neighbors all the time.
My conservative friends (truly friends) would you rather confront someone in an honorable way to their face, or report someone anonymously on the Internet to the government. Which of these approaches really align with your own beliefs about resolving problems?
If someone backed into your truck or something are you going to work it out like gentleman/woman or would you not talk to them and sit on your phone and report them to the police anonymously? Seriously. Face your accuser and all that.
The danger is that the anonymity will be used by disgruntled people to make false accusations or get revenge instead of only by civic minded citizens trying to improve society but this is a danger in all the examples above not just the abortion one.
I think the unsanitary conditions is more similar to violence or misrepresentation so I don't see it as too different.
The mask thing I think is a little more controversial and could be argued probably. But in all of these cases it seems that there is a dispute between an injured party and the injuring party. You'd have to argue that a fetus is an injured party and that a physician and the mother are injuring the fetus against its will. Some probably will. I won't.
Given the precedent set by the Supreme Court, probably every gun owner and even people whose politics are deemed as "aiding and abetting" gun ownership being sued into bankruptcy by unrelated third parties, because the Supreme Court position has made it clear that a state setting civil penalties for something it wishes it could ban and permitting private bounty hunters to collect couldn't possibly be infringing on anyones' constitutional rights
Edit: anyone want to tell me how a law constructed to circumvent constitutional restrictions on the state banning something by allowing them to make it a civil offence unrelated third parties can sue for doesn't set a precedent that it would be OK for a state with different political priorities to try this by setting civil penalties for gun ownership or unacceptable speech?
That's the problem with conflating everything to freedom of speech, then forgetting its exceptions while prioritizing it over every other right. You end up with these perversions wherein the right to violate someone else's Constitutional rights is just "speech".
Other than my agreeing with the moral position in this case, how is this different than a baker not making a cake for some particular customer?
We can’t reasonably be making “this type of refusal to do business is okay, but that one is not” based on moral agreements of individuals, especially when it comes to utility and infrastructure providers (which arguably bakers of cakes are not).
Sure but at what point is it inconvenient enough that the bakers are infrastructure? Like if there is a single baker in a town and the next one is idk 20 miles away?
“Bake a cake at home”
“Buy a computer and host the website yourself”
The TOS is a contract which the Texan group had signed with GoDaddy. They can sue if they believe they’re not actually in violation.
This is nothing like the case of not selling a wedding cake to someone in a protected category.
They’re selling the service to everyone with the same terms, and the Texan group’s religious beliefs are irrelevant to their violation of the TOS.
Some may claim abortion is against some vague "christian values" but those people either didn't read their own holy book or use it as a thinly veiled excuse to oppress other people.
The idea that GoDaddy should need to make an exception to their ToS when a case is politically charged is scarier, IMHO.
Anyone working with the abortion ban of Texas should be publicly humiliated and BDSed.
This is to an extent what dual power in the US looks like.
https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/detroit-emergency-room-doctor...
And no, the Supreme Court didn't decide that, the people bringing the suit failed on procedural grounds and will get a chance to argue the merits when they re-file properly. My guess is that this whole thing will be a tempest in a teacup that will get sorted out in short order.
You wouldn't be "violating" anything, but if we sidestep that issue, you appear to be arguing that all behavior that someone has standing to sue over should be called "illegal". That seems like a semantic game most everyone should have a serious problem with.
Careful: you wouldn't want to be unfairly misrepresenting somebody else's views! That would be libellous. (You don't want to say something illegal, now, do you?)
But yeah: not all torts are crimes, and there's good reason for that. Lumping them together under the same “illegal” banner is how IP-as-control got started.
Yes, your two examples are of a person commiting a crime.
The issue at hand is about the privacy of healthcare/medical status. You cannot say somebody aided in abortion if you cannot prove whomever they were around was pregnant. You cannot ask in a legal sense if somebody is pregnant, was pregnant, or is now not pregnant, and force them to give a truthful answer/disclosure, that's against pre-existing medical privacy laws. Does that make more sense to you?
And in an attempt to make slight sense of that to one of your answers - yes, the act of commiting FGM on a child, or perhaps an adult who was somewhat forcibly taken somewhere to have the procedure done against their will, is a crime committed by whoever did it. However - to convict this person of the crime, the person mutilated would have to testify. As it deals with medical privacy - they do have to and can choose not to testify. Especially with a child, it gets more tricky - the parent to a certain age can choose not to testify per their rights to their child's medical privacy. If somebody was hellbent on trying to make a child testify against the perpetrator, they could attempt a massive legal battle to get state custody of the child, who can then somewhat legally force the child to testify or face some sort of legal recourse. Otherwise, you're basically going to need video evidence of the crime being committed, or an eyewitness account from a law enforcement agent/FBI/etc for any chance of legal prosecution.
This is a situation of Optics, Communications and PR.
The lawyers would be tasked with finding the grounds necessary.
GoDaddy is not at risk of public outrage over CrimeStoppers, but with the very raw politics of Abortions in Texas hitting the front page ... I can see the Marketing team just sweating bullets over this, wanting to just 'get out' of the path of a fast moving vehicle.
May GoDaddy be BDSed. May it hemorrhage customers until it reconsiders.
Important thing to know is that via emergency relief, judges cannot strike down a law, they can just stop people or groups from enforcing said laws. The case that went to the supreme Court was asking for a group of eight different people that have them blocked from enforcing the law. 7 of them were state employees of various positions, one was a private citizen. For the private citizen the plaintiff asked the court to consider the that person as a group, but they did not have time to get that through the courts (I think). The private person ended up signing an affidavit saying they would not try to enforce the law.
If you go search the news, you will find a pro life group has already had a temporary restraining order placed against them from applying this law or assisting other people and applying this law.
You can also bet as soon as anybody brings a lawsuit about this, it'll be immediately dismissed as being in violation of Casey (Roe).
I would exercise caution with this perspective. They stand to gain a bit of mind share from this action as it's a popular position to take. I am not saying virtuous companies don't exist. In general they act in the best interest of their bottom line (in this case public image).
What does this acronym mean?
Your argument definitely stands though: there's not much difference in private information that's requested on a crime stoppers form[1] vs the right to life form[2].
[1] https://www.p3tips.com/tipform.aspx?ID=458
[2] https://archive.is/zspjG
Also, a person’s health-care information is quite private.
GoDaddy had a ToS that includes statements about inquiry of medical conditions
Crimestoppers or whatever isn't asking you to submit things regarding people's medical status, it's asking for crime reporting.
There's been a large amount of privacy with regards to healthcare in the US in general for the longest time. The fact anybody is surprised by this is somewhat unsettling.
“violates the privacy or publicity rights of another User or any other person or entity, or breaches any duty of confidentiality that *you owe* to another User or any other person or entity.”
Most people don’t owe any privacy rights in regards to others medical care.
GoDaddy can say “we don’t want to be involved in this sort of thing.”
But they should not pretend their clients are breaking the law.
There is lots of caselaw involving whether anti-abortion groups can gather this sort of information.
They can.
GoDaddy doesn’t have to be involved in it. But they shouldn’t pretend there is an obligation or duty being violated by the site owner.
"You will not collect or harvest (or permit anyone else to collect or harvest) any User Content (as defined below) or any non-public or personally identifiable information about another User or any other person or entity without their express prior written consent."
That seems way stronger in forbidding the exact purpose of this site. (With the privacy/publicity/confidentiality rights sometimes applying, but only to specific reports.)
“You will not collect any PII about any entity without their consent.”
There’s probably an implied “You will not use this service to collect …” at the start.
So basically, you can’t host a portal to gather PII on non-consenting parties.
It would be pretty easy for the website to get around that.
The website asked for the contact info of the user and then had a textarea field with the caption “If applicable: Do you have information about potential violations of the Texas Heartbeat Act?”
All they would have to do is change that textarea into a Yes/No radio button.
Edit: confusingly, it said, “we will not follow up or contact you” but also asked the best time to contact you.
GoDaddy could maybe argue that the fundamental purpose of the website was still to facilitate gathering that data, but that seems more of a stretch. "You are using our servers to gather this forbidden data" vs "you are using our servers to gather this allowed data, which will later be used to gather forbidden data elsewhere"...
I'd guess that the reason the website doesn't want to make this change would be that it'd greatly increase their own costs in terms of followup they'd have to perform. Makes it a more high-touch operation.
As I mentioned, it promises not to contact you, and then asks the best time to contact you.
Not exactly high caliber user research going on there.
I also get the impression it’s more about get names they can hit up for donations.
Notice how it asks if the “reporter” is already involved in anti-abortion movement.
That’s probably to avoid duplicates when they add the name to their mailing list asking for money.
The last thing it wants is a security breach, followed by an obligation to inform all of the affect parties who reside in California and the EU.
It's really easy if you don't try and make perfect abstract rules, and remember that context is important.
Yes, the argument can be made in these cases that there are two sides, so someone's rights are being violated either way.
But, there does seem to be a consistent quality here that the particular "infringed" right of one side is the "right" to deny others' rights.
Might that be the difference?
very interesting question! what sort of "term of services" are we implicitly agreeing on when ordering a cake or any other food?
What this illustrates is that liberalism only "works" incidentally when people share the same ethos and moral standards or who submit to the ruling ethos and moral standards in relevant conduct, as it were. As those diverge, mutual coexistence becomes increasingly impossible. That's why libertarianism is such a joke.
Furthermore I believe GoDaddy has already assessed the potential loss, made customer comparison between both parties and concluded this is better financially.
EDIT: additionally, they may also compared the hosting plan with the spam attacks and PR attacks they get.
Personally and morally I don't know whether this is the right thing or not, but financially I believe this is.
Title VII protections tend to be applied to housing and employment discrimination, not restricting the general right of business owners to freedom of association with respect to who they'll take on as customers.
Most shops come with a sign posted saying they can refuse to serve you for any reason whatsoever, including total personal whim, and that doesn't get challenged.
Businesses don't have to do business if they don't want to. Tough for this website, sucks to be discriminated against for a political belief. It isn't like there is a shortage of domain registrars in the world.
If there is a legal technicality where someone has to vote Democrat to start a domain registrar then there is a problem here. VeriSign doing this would be a concern. Unless I'm misreading this it isn't troubling; GoDaddy is not that important.
It'd be sad if the DNS system becomes political. But at this point we should be bracing for it, there aren't a lot of future paths where it stays neutral.
There's already precedent for this. Cloudflare de-listed a major neo-nazi website a few years ago if I recall correctly.
As much as I might loath one website or another, I think basic web infrastructure, from DNS to certs to even cloud services should be treated as common carriers, and it should only be by legal order that they're allowed deny services to a particular site.
There's so much consolidation going on that we're not so far from a situation where a hand-full of corporations are the defacto gatekeepers of online life.
For instance, I don't think cloudflare is required to host a site. Millions of entities online are able to function without cloudflare or godaddy.
So where do we draw the line for basic web infrastructure? To me it seems like the ISP is a good place to start. If you have internet, you could host a site on hardware yourself, or with a minor hire
Sure it’s possible to get your own fiber connection, manage your own hardware and host a web company, but you’re never going to be able to compete with another party who has access to AWS or GCP to run on top of.
That said, a line? The line that should be drawn is anyone declaring that they have a right to financially coerce women to making adverse health decisions.
If the pandemic has taught us anything, the internet is the commons in the modern world, and currently we're ceding governance of it to private enterprise.
I have to say, since I moved to Europe I have become much less convinced of the inherent futility of democracy.
This would essentially prevent godaddy from limiting service to a customer because they would be required to work with all peoples
My argument, was that yes, I agree that some things should be governed more like public utilities, like ISPs. Other things should not, like CDNs, or DDOS protection, etc.
IMO once you have internet, that is what is obligated to be made available to you, all these other services might help you but they are private companies that can refuse service for any reason
Anyway, I doubt this discussion continues as the topic is stale now, but I wanted to clarify my comment regarding where the line was. I wasn't talking about morality of issues, I was talking about where common carrier status should start / stop
this is one of the reasons for it's existance [1] and thanks to the federated nature, it still exists.
[1] probably also worthwile to lookup rir/lir in that regard https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regional_Internet_registry
Except for all sorts of exceptions this isn't true. As a "principle" you could write everything you said above but substitute racial, gender, or sexual orientation discrimination and it wouldn't stand up, because businesses absolutely have to do business in these cases.
>has to vote Democrat
No, but has to not promote conservative political policies, thus supporting, just like voting does, Democrat political objectives. What's the practical difference? Democrat political power is mandated just the same.
Although the law disagrees with me, I'd say the same thing to them too. I do think it is unfair that GoDaddy might choose to boot me for my political beliefs but would get in to legal trouble for booting an LGBT group.
I see perfect parallels between GoDaddy expelling this site vs. GoDaddy expelling a site for LGBT advocacy. Both are stupid actions for GoDaddy to take, but both should be legal options.
> We can’t reasonably be making “this type of refusal to do business is okay, but that one is not” based on moral agreements of individuals
We actually can. And the difference between this and the baker is in the details you omitted.
The actual baker situation was denying a customer based on their sexual orientation. That type of refusal is not okay and the reason why is pretty well-established in the law. Sexual orientation (like religion, race, sex, etc) is protected from such discrimination.
And the baker was allowed to not serve the gay wedding anyways! Despite that!
Being pro-life is not a protected attribute. You could argue these pro-life beliefs are due to religion..but this isn't about Jesus Christ Himself. This is a political opinion derived from the church that plenty of Christians don't have.
This is not true. They were perfectly happy to bake a cake for gay people; they objected to baking the cake specifically for a gay wedding. The cake was to have wording which the bakers disagreed with for religious reasons.
Being gay is protected, as is being Christian, both.
Demanding a cake that expresses certain beliefs such as celebrating gay marriage or trangenderism or any other thing may not be protected by law.
Just as demanding to be sold hosting services for your anti-abortion hotline based on your Christian beliefs probably isn’t protected by law.
It's a little more nuanced because abortion is less linked to religion than gay marriage is to being gay. You can in theory link a variety of nonsense to your Christian faith (if you can prove false you can prove anything blah blah blah)
I don't think private businesses should be obligated to work with any government for any reason.
There's probably a good argument that the government should have to invoke eminent domain and proceed with manufacturing themselves.
I can't say that I've put an excess of thought into the matter, though.
Not that the weirdos behind this site are a protected group, but even if they were, they couldn’t demand that a bakery, say, sell them plastic explosives, only things that it sells to other people.
This is not refusing a customer, but more refusing an ingredient on customers request: "I know you request to have shit in your cake, but we're not going to do that."
It's not like GoDaddy is the only option.
No they can't. There are plenty of restrictions on denying service. An obvious example: you can't refuse to serve people based on their race. And since the door is open on disallowing such, a lot of other arguments are made and will be made in regards to who it's ok to not serve. Which is what's going on here with regards to GoDaddy's actions. Since the US is rapidly shifting to a hyper tribal, protected classes system of rule of law (different laws for different people), you can expect the rules/laws pertaining to situations like this in business to get more complex over time.
The restriction, is literally, "You cannot refuse service to people in a protected class." The burden of proof is on the person who was refused to show that, beyond a reasonable doubt, the reason that they were refused was due to them being within a protected class. It's not a low bar to clear. It has been this way since the civil rights movement.
> Since the US is rapidly shifting to a hyper tribal, protected classes system of rule of law (different laws for different people).
You don't have any understanding of the jurisprudence here, this is embarrassing.
There is tons of ways to "not serve" people. Just try not to be an outright racist and you're fine.
A business with a terms of service that you signed always says "Random Business has the right to refuse service for blah blah".
So the “reporting” would be on someone other than the person having an abortion. Let’s say, a boyfriend who pays for an abortion.
The person doing the reporting is someone other than the “abettor” or the person getting an abortion. Let’s say the boyfriends ex-wife.
Once a certain number of people know about something, it’s not private.
Even current medical privacy laws, and including abortion laws, don’t create any privacy obligations for non-commercial third partied, much less fourth parties.
If my ex-boyfriend tells me he helped his girlfriend get an abortion, I have no obligations to keep this secret. As it should be.
This website allowed fourth parties to communicate with fifth parties (Texas Right to Life).
Think about this: someone is informing an anti-abortion organization about an abortion.
At this point the cat is out of the bag. It’s not a secret. It’s in the open. It’s public.
Imagine if social media organizations decided to treat abortions the same way they treat CSAM, revenge porn, the identity of intelligence officers, nuclear secrets, copyright violations, and misinformation about COVID.
Is that what we want? Some people do. I’m sure there’s a constituency for that.
But notice how the we are descending down a slope.
Maybe we should be doing that. But let’s do it with our eyes open and with rigorous debate that results in action.
That’s not how GoDaddy approached this.
I totally disagree, that seems completely reasonable to me. Are we not allowed to say that doing something moral is okay but doing something immoral is not ok?
This is why the logic of "who is more moral" fails because someone believes they're safeguarding "true" morality. Hence why we are a nation of laws and institutions that upholds or challenges them. Which is why I disagree with you, it is unreasonable (even though it's not why GoDaddy dropped them). If the law is immoral/unjust, take it to court. Otherwise shut up and deal with it. That's what civil rights leaders did back in the 60's. They didn't just whine on twitter.
It is not.
> If the law is immoral/unjust, take it to court. Otherwise shut up and deal with it. That's what civil rights leaders did back in the 60's.
Have you really not heard of civil disobedience?
See how your logic can be turned against you?
I'm also not sure it's accurate to say people aren't taking this law to court. In fact, they did that before the law became law. Then the Supreme Court declined to enjoin the law. Then they managed to enjoin literally this group from enforcing the law, as part of the legal process that's currently unfolding.
My take on your post is that it's a very (classical) conservative view: in many cases, liberty undermines order, and that a sort of benevolent guiding force can keep order, which benefits us all. This is, like, Edmund Burke 101. It's anti-(classical) liberal. And in fact one of the major issues political conservatives were concerned with was the restriction of speech that agitated or disrupted harmony, so they agree with you on this.
Without trying to reductio ad absurdum you, let me suggest what I think this would look like. One possibility is that you are calling not for any solution, but for just a sort of feel-good agreement, a sort of principle among people, that we should go along to get along. I think that's tempting. We can all recognize this status quo of cultural cleavages leading to rag-tag boycotts is not working very well. But I am going to conclude that would fail.
The reason I conclude it would fail is more or less because that's what lead us here to begin with. So if you think that factionalism is a problem, and judging from this thread I would assume you do, then clearly people aren't going to voluntarily agree to do this.
On the other side of the spectrum, you could imagine a very heavy-handed intervention wherein wide swaths of issues are declared off-limits in the name of comity. Now, many people would say "hey, agreeing not to argue about something is a status quo politics that favours some majority opinion" but I'm actually going to sidestep that argument and just imagine that we could do this. In this theoretical world, you'd likely still have factions -- some of the original factions were tribal! Doing business with the people you know, the people who are closer to you, the people who are like you, who speak your language, preferentially... that's the original factionalism. My father-in-law was an engineer, and he worked with a few mechanics, and when my wife and I bought a used car, he referred us to the mechanics he worked with. They owed my father-in-law a favour or two, so we got discounted mechanic work. In return, we recommended him to some friends. And on and on.
Moreover, in all but the smallest towns, you typically have a choice of multiple merchants for a given good; so, like, I can choose to go to Sal's Cupcakes or Sweet Treats Cupcakes. Probably I don't have enough business to always go to both. And it might even be the case that the quality of their products and their prices are going to be around the same, so more or less my preference is going to be some kind of aesthetic -- meaning broadly more about the store's location, the friendliness of the service, things that basically don't matter -- preference. How do I force myself as a customer to affirmatively do business with everyone?
I think probably we're not going to be able to build a society where I am affirmatively obligated to do business with someone I find immoral, unless you're talking about a degree of central planning that more or less de-duplicates or centrally owns market sectors. It's true that every cupcake company was OmniCake by government fiat, and if I was only zoned to purchase from the one on Oak Street, then I wouldn't have a choice. But otherwise, I do. We do have this option, but I think here we'd be talking about a degree of totalizing central planning that more or less eclipses the USSR, DPRK, etc.
But of course there aren't just both ends of the spectrum, there's an in between. What would a "first step" of depoliticizing basic commerce look like? To my eye, any restriction on a consumer's speech is going to be more liberty-infringing than a restriction on a firm's speech. To me, it's less important that Chevy be able to express opinions without fear of reprisal than that I do.
So you might start by saying tha...
You can refuse service to someone because you don't like the color of their shirt, but it's illegal to refuse service to someone belonging to a protected class because they belong to a protected class.
"Abortion reporting form operators" are not a protected class, and they aren't being denied service because they belong to a protected class.
The cake maker refused to bake a cake depicting a gay wedding.
Regardless of the protected class status of whoever was ordering it.
People get this wrong all the time about this story.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masterpiece_Cakeshop_v._Colora... informing the couple that he did not create wedding cakes for marriages of gay couples owing to his Christian religious beliefs, although the couple could purchase other baked goods in the store. Craig and Mullins promptly left Masterpiece without discussing with Phillips any of the details of their wedding cake. In other words he was unwilling to provide any cake for this purpose regardless of what was shown on it.
The law isn’t that literal for good reason. Put another way saying it’s ok to reject a mortgage because it’s a black mortgage rather than a black applicant is silly. It’s clear in the case the rejection was based on sexual orientation.
A bakery can’t reject an order because it’s for a religious ceremony due to the religion associated with that ceremony. However, it’s likely a bakery could reject being part of any wedding independent of religion or sexual orientation.
Anyway, the same baker is in court over refusing to make birthday cake for transgender woman.
If the bakery would sell a non designed cake to a gay couple, or if they refused a straight couple to make a gay cake, that is different than your example.
To be clear, I'm not sticking up for the bakery, it just doesn't seem like a clear proxy like you are saying
And in context a strait couple can’t have a gay wedding, the difference is inherently gender dependent thus making it a proxy. [edited for clarity]
And the baker wouldn’t have sold it to them.
Therefore the baker is not discriminating against gay people.
The baker won’t sell cakes for gay weddings to anyone, regardless of race, religion, or sexual orientation.
A mortgage is impersonal, this is more like requiring an LGBTQIA+ artist to paint a picture of Trump against their will.
“Masterpiece's owner Jack Phillips, who is a Christian, declined their cake request, informing the couple that he did not create wedding cakes for marriages of gay couples owing to his Christian religious beliefs, although the couple could purchase other baked goods in the store. Craig and Mullins promptly left Masterpiece without discussing with Phillips any of the details of their wedding cake.“
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masterpiece_Cakeshop_v._Colora...
Are you sure about that? Like, a cake depicting human sacrifice to Satan, and your random baker couldn't say "uhm, no, I don't do those"?
“Masterpiece's owner Jack Phillips, who is a Christian, declined their cake request, informing the couple that he did not create wedding cakes for marriages of gay couples owing to his Christian religious beliefs, although the couple could purchase other baked goods in the store. Craig and Mullins promptly left Masterpiece without discussing with Phillips any of the details of their wedding cake.”
So a symbolic ritual sacrifice is protected, but an actual human sacrifice isn’t.
If so, would it be possible to refuse to make that particular decoration (but make a cake)? Wouldn‘t this kind of be like telling an artist what exactly they have to paint?
I‘m wondering purely from a legal viewpoint, not based on what would be the right thing.
“Masterpiece's owner Jack Phillips, who is a Christian, declined their cake request, informing the couple that he did not create wedding cakes for marriages of gay couples owing to his Christian religious beliefs, although the couple could purchase other baked goods in the store. Craig and Mullins promptly left Masterpiece without discussing with Phillips any of the details of their wedding cake.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masterpiece_Cakeshop_v._Colora...
It might actually be 100% legal to reject providing gay themed decorations while providing a cake
It's pretty clear, this was never a ordinary couple looking to have a nice wedding. The point of the whole operation was to find somebody who was not sufficiently supportive of them and use the power of the state to crush them.
If you have to go looking for a particular individual to "oppress" you when you've already found plenty of alternatives that work fine, maybe what you're facing isn't in the same ballpark.
Segregation on the basis of individuals belonging to protected classes is illegal, the law makes it very clear.
How would you feel about a "white couples only" restaurant or bakery? What about a "whites only" grocery store? Or a "whites only" mechanic? Do you feel the same way about those as you do with the "straights only" bakery?
People have used their religions to give a pass to discrimination for a long time[1]. Today's scapegoat is gay and trans people, but a few decades ago it was miscegenation. People discriminated against mixed-race couples and said it was a core tenet of their religion[1]:
> Almighty God created the races white, black, yellow, malay and red, and he placed them on separate continents. And but for the interference with his arrangement there would be no cause for such marriages. The fact that he separated the races shows that he did not intend for the races to mix.
The ACLU has this to say about such cases of discrimination:
> Instances of institutions and individuals claiming a right to discriminate in the name of religion are not new. In the 1960s, we saw objections to laws requiring integration in restaurants because of sincerely held beliefs that God wanted the races to be separate. We saw religiously affiliated universities refuse to admit students who engaged in interracial dating. In those cases, we recognized that requiring integration was not about violating religious liberty; it was about ensuring fairness. It is no different today.
There were plenty of places these people could have chosen to do business with, as well, but that doesn't really matter.
[1] https://ir.lawnet.fordham.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=55...
[2] https://www.aclu.org/issues/religious-liberty/using-religion...
It was the cake, not the customer.
As an extreme example, I think everyone agrees that littering is bad. But how would you feel about summary execution for littering? Feels crazy extreme, right? The actual effective punishment for littering is more like people maybe frown at you a little, and maybe if you're super obnoxious about it or do it right in front of a cop, you might get a modest fine. That seems about right to me. I feel like I'm complaining that maybe we shouldn't summarily execute people for littering and everyone's coming back at me with how dare you support the evils of littering.
I don't like any kind of discrimination. If everyone in town is discriminating against some group so hard that they can't go about the ordinary activities of life, that feels like something that needs to be addressed by government action. On the other hand, if one business in a medium-size city doesn't want to serve some group for some reason, and there's a dozen competitors that are fine with that group, maybe it's best to just let it slide from a legal standpoint. Maybe a local soft boycott or something like that.
If you want to ratchet up the severity of the punishment for an act that is vanishingly rare and hasn't really caused anyone that much trouble, consider the possibility that you aren't the good guys anymore.
I guess I am still not cynical enough to have thought of that. So thank you for bringing in new perspective.
i.e. if it was an off-the-shelf cake, there would have been legal problems.
But a 'song writer' I think can't be compelled to write a song in such circumstances.
It's a little bit of a digression though:
For networking - most people agree in total neutrality i.e. AT&T cannot inspect our packets for 'bad words'.
On the other end, for Social Networks, we mostly agree they should probably have the right to moderate on some level according to their own rules. Perhaps we could require some consistency and objectivity or something, but generally speaking, I think we can live with Section 230 there.
The 'big issue' in IT I think has to do with hosting, which is a service one might deem should be 'neutral' - at the same time, companies may not want to host certain content and may be able to demonstrate 'harm' by doing so.
Like Amazon dumping Parler as the threshold / test case, along with this GoDaddy example - which is complicated because on one hand it's 'expression' on the other, there were some very serious and probably illegal things going on there.
In tech, we tend to focus on these social issues, but imagine if 'Brick and Mortar' business started doing this? i.e. UPS refusing to deliver packages? Or the 'Paper Company' refusing to sell inkject cartridges?
For commonly available things, like groceries, probably we can allow discrimination, because after all, someone can just go down the street to the next one, but for products and services which are unique, it really poses a problem.
However much we might not like some groups, we have to be really careful about banning things.
I was under impression that they actually can inspect, but should not be able to deny/degrade or prioritize service based on whatever they might find in one’s packets.
Inspection part is going to be moot if everyone is using encryption though.
What remains is this [1] 1934 Comms. Act.
In the US it's the Wild West and basically money rules on this issue, like the vague laws about land holding and mineral rights on the frontier in the 20th century, power is winning, not so much civility.
I'm not sure that the EU has the right laws, but at least there are clearly measures enacted to protect individuals and to try to create some kind of more rational 'playing field' even at the risk over over regulation.
Maybe we are in an era where only a few things here and there are going to get banned, and we will arrive at a new 'consensus' without intervention, that Parler was taken down isn't the end of the world for free expression ... or it's possible things will only escalate, it's hard to say.
But it's worth considering if hosting platforms might better fall more under the notion of 'carrier' than they would 'internet service' i.e. Section 230.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communications_Act_of_1934
On the other hand, it is clear that heavy handed suppression is not good either, especially when all major platforms do that.
Is it possible to have both alternatives available somehow?
But I like your 'have the cake and eat it too' thinking! ...
I wonder if companies on the margins could be given either the option of Section 230 protections, but then also have an obligation to curate for some things, and to have some kind of 'consistently objective rules' ... or ... take the more 'neutral' approach and wash their hands of everything and be obligated to provide services for 'pretty much anything legal' ... which in this case would be interesting because GoDaddy is looking mostly to avoid populist outrage. If they are legally bound to allow the 'legal site' ... well ... there's little they can do ant the outrage would have be oriented towards the legislators.
My feeling is that both our current Net Neutrality and Section 230 just don't provide very well in the middle ground cases.
For Visa, wasn’t the latest OnlyFan thing that payment networks almost forced them to self-destruct due to some morality rules? That would be a bit too restrictive for “carrier” case I think…
See Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission, 584 U.S. ___ (2018), section I (1)(a).
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masterpiece_Cakeshop_v._Colo...
Phillips even said, “I’ll make your birthday cakes, shower cakes, sell you cookies and brownies, I just don’t make cakes for same sex weddings.” (Notice the lack of nuance: he wouldn’t make any cake, whether it’s plain or designed.)
You can read more in the opinion of the Supreme Court [1], page 4 (7 on your document viewer).
[1] https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/17pdf/16-111_j4el.pdf
P.S. A good argument can be made that the Colorado Commission didn’t violate religious neutrality. As Ginsburg outlined in her dissent, Phillips wouldn’t make a wedding cake for any gay couple. So there is a subset of people he discriminates against just because of who they are (gay couples), and another he doesn’t discriminate against. The other bakeries involved that rejected William Jack’s request to make cakes depicting homosexuality as a sin wouldn’t make such a cake for anybody.
To make it easier to understand: Jack Phillips makes plain cakes he gives to one group of people but not another. On the other hand, the other bakeries wouldn’t even make a cake depicting homosexuality as a sin for anyone. So it wouldn’t matter if it’s an atheist or Christian or Muslim. Plus, the very same bakeries made cakes for other Christians and decorated beautiful Bibles, so it’s clear they didn’t find someone’s religion a reason to deny them a cake.
Phillip’s argument might be more convincing if he was asked to, say, design a wedding cake with a rainbow flag. But the gay couple were refused a plain, let alone designed, wedding cake.
So therefore he is not discriminating against the customer, but rather the stated purpose of using the cake.
Edit: also plenty of people on HN who think their Kool-Aid is just water, I see.
I'm not a lawyer, but this doesn't sound right. As an example, I've never met someone who didn't CHOOSE to get married.
Also, pro-life ideals are a proxy for religion- which IS a protected class. And I (as an example) DID CHOOSE my religion.
You guys need to keep the following question in mind when presenting an argument that is legalese nitpicking:
What if Trump (or whatever your political monster du jour is) redefined $statue_my_argument_is_based_on, would I still be arguing this way?
By the way, being against abortion might actually count as a protected class, since it‘s based on the person being of the Christian faith.
Interesting. Isn't this a loophole? If I am the baker in question, can I refuse to bake the cake citing the shirt color instead of the real reason, which is that I am homophobic? (I am not, just asking a hypothetical question)
That might be difficult, especially if you were lying.
If you kick everyone out of your store that wears dreadlocks, no matter what their race or protected class, and that has a disparate impact on people who belong to protected classes, that's also illegal.
Similarly, if you refuse service to, say, immigrants because of the color of their shirts, but you serve everyone else no matter what color their shirts are, that's also illegal.
Is this how it should work though?
YouTube could claim the same whenever they kill another channel.
How many others have you refused service due to their shoes? And if none, what’s the policy?
GoDaddy has their policy.
> GoDaddy's policies say that its registered websites cannot "collect or harvest" information about people without their consent. Its policies also forbid registered sites from doing anything that "violates the privacy or publicity rights of another User or any other person or entity, or breaches any duty of confidentiality that you owe to another User or any other person or entity."
Quote from, https://www.newsweek.com/texas-website-abortion-law-violate-...
It's completely subjective... unless you can read my mind
You can make a decision to not serve people wearing Nazi symbols or to kick them out if they’re loud even if they’re from a protected class.
Put a camera. If they take you to court, show them everyone else in the past you’ve kicked out due to not liking their shoes.
Pick your battles. If the first person after you install the camera is from a protected class, skip them. Don’t be stupid either.
Yes. However, if there's a disparate impact on protected classes based on your shoe discrimination, that can be illegal. You can't just deny service to, say, immigrants and say it's because of their shoes, while letting other people and their shoes slide.
"You will not collect or harvest (or permit anyone else to collect or harvest) any User Content (as defined below) or any non-public or personally identifiable information about another User or any other person or entity without their express prior written consent"
That's how it's different. The cake-purchaser is not a government trying to use the cake as a shield against civil rights litigation.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/4_Months,_3_Weeks_and_2_Days
https://www.crimestoppersusa.org/
There were 2 things in the Texas abortion thing that reminds me of my country past
1 make abortion illegal and force people in doing risky procedures
2 a system where you can't trust anyone , you could get snitched on, even false accusations that could destroy your life.
So the 2 things combined did the job, individually would not have worked, and Texas has a reputation that I will not be surprised of weird things happening there.
This issue (specifically the issue of the law that Texas passed) has zero place in our society. None, whatsoever. No matter if you're for or against abortion. It is a flagrant violation of our constitutional rights (including our rights to freedom of speech) because it criminalizes anything relating to 'aiding and abetting' abortions. Section 171.208 of the bill HB1515 implies that you could be drawn into a civil lawsuit for simply suggesting or posting about abortions. This site was created explicitly for that purpose: to gather information about people whom violated that section of the law so that they can be sued in court.
I shouldn't need to mention the extreme chilling effect this has not only on abortions but on speech relating to abortions as well. This site (and by extension this law) I repeat can not and should not be tolerated in any way, shape or form.
In other words roe v wade is the law of the land, so they make a law that’s clearly in violation of it, but with a novel enforcement mechanism. Now the issue is challenging this in court, which is strange and weird because of the enforcement mechanism.
Put another way, let’s say California passes a law banning the purchasing of guns, but enforces that law by allowing neighbors to bring suit and shielding defendants from collecting legal fees if they prevail.
You can pretty much use this technique for anything if it’s allowed. Basically it’s opening a legal Pandora’s box.
I don't see how they can reasonably claim they are not involved with enforcement.
Part of me wonders if they were inspired by the Obama care rulings. Basically the enforcement mechanism was taken away, so removing the law was seen as moot, however the plaintiffs wanted to see Obamacare dismantled. The truth is even without enforcement people use it voluntarily.
It’s sort of like a twisted revenge to use the same concept, but in such a new and nefarious way.
In the mean time, a very obvious route to create chaos has been opened up for any state government of any political inclination that wants to deter any constitutionally-protected behaviour whatsoever ...
Yeah, it's the reasonableness standard that doesn't seem to fly. I mean I get that they're making a claim about who's enforcing, but all of these people declaring that the claim creates some grand legal crisis is what I'm not getting. It just seems so patently clear what's going on here that the claim is absurd on its face.
I assume part of the reason for blowing it up though, is that it is such an egregious violation that even the attempt should be characterized as serious and dangerous.
>on the constitutionality of the law until a case has been brought and enforcement attempted.
Yeah this is head exploding. I don't know what the precedent is here, but it seems there's some standard or mechanism for SCOTUS getting involved pre-harm. I mean, if the law legalized murder...
And, at a minimum that's what injunctions are for--avoiding potentially irreparable harms before matters can be fully adjudicated. Denying an abortion is certainly irreparable.
That's why their refusal to grant a stay feels as ominous as it does.
The places your typical American considers exemplars of Social Democracy such as the Scandinavian countries are literally entire nations of Karens. That’s the only way a liberal society can actually function.
People really haven't grasped what this law enables.
You're arguing about Karens, we're arguing about the ability of a State to ban pretty much any constitutionally protected activity they want in a way that prevents citizens from having the ability to sue to block those laws.
Yeah, which is a completely separate conversation.
The biggest problem with this bill isn't that it crowdsources law enforcement, it's that in crowdsourcing law enforcement it provides a novel mechanism for passing laws that can't be preemptively challenged by citizens in front of the Supreme Court.
That is a novel issue. Citizens reporting people to the police, or even citizens collectively attacking, shunning, or boycotting socially unacceptable behaviors is not new. Citizens having standing under the law to sue each other over unconstitutional laws is a new thing.
Cancel culture doesn't give random people standing to claim damages against anyone they want in a courtroom. This law does.
> but it hasn’t enabled anything that wasn’t already a problem.
So California already gave citizens standing to sue each other over owning any gun? It already allowed citizens to sue each other going out in public without a mask? People can be sued by anyone in the state if they go to church and they're not vaccinated? And it removed limits on the number of lawsuits so that citizens could sue the same companies/people multiple times?
Remind me, after Apple refused to decrypt the San Bernadino phone, were they flooded with multiple lawsuits from ordinary citizens that couldn't be dismissed under anti-SLAPP laws, where citizens didn't need to prove standing for the lawsuit, and where Apple was barred from collecting attorney fees even if they won?
People cancelling each other on Twitter, or submitting tips to law enforcement, or even getting people fired over their political beliefs is not the same thing as the Supreme Court signing off on a legal framework for passing unconstitutional laws.
And I'd be surprised if some legislature hasn't already started the process on this. It's more reasonable than the abortion law, because it's about behavior that puts the person bringing the suit into some amount of danger. Any argument that would support the abortion law would support the mask/vaccination law.
We're allowed to care about multiple issues at the same time; you're allowed to be both concerned about Texas and the increased privatization of public infrastructure.
However, it's not really that we're caring about two things at the same time, there hasn't been much discussion about the tech implications of this law -- this law creates a template that can be used to attack tech companies and to sue platform providers. It can be used to bypass constitutional protections about freedom of speech. It can be used to attack constitutionally protected activities like encryption. It's heckin dangerous.
GoDaddy's move may or may not be prudent, but even if we think it's not prudent and that it's not the right thing for them to do -- it's still pretty objectively a much smaller story than the type of censorship that this law enables and the future implications of having the Supreme Court sanction a novel way for States to avoid constitutional scrutiny.
I understand that the abortion angle changes how people are thinking about it, but it's still disappointing to see this happen and GoDaddy being the main thing that people are focusing on. It feels like bikeshedding. What would prevent another state from using this same legal template to ban encryption? If people can't answer that question, maybe the ratio of conversation between GoDaddy and the law itself shouldn't be so skewed.
Again, you're allowed to care about multiple things at the same time, and nobody has to agree with what GoDaddy is doing. But it's kind of silly to say that corporatism is a bigger threat to freedom of speech than actual laws targeting speech.
I think the most egregious thing about the law is that people who sue don't have to pay the defender's fees when they lose. It make it possible to DDOS defendents.
Deputizing the citizenry is also bad, and I'd like to see that struck down as well... but it's not the first time we've seen it either. Technically, this is somewhat similar to how the ADA works too (it does work a little differently though in that not everybody can be deputized). And I'm sure most have heard of good things happening because of the ADA, as well as bad things when people abuse the system. We are going to have to consider pretty carefully what we want instead here.
I'm still worried about companies making political decisions that affect so many people... but yeah, the government scares me even more.
Hope you have an awesome day.
It is not.
https://www.francepaternite.com/est-il-legal-de-realiser-un-...
So the reason why it is illegal to provide the test is medical data protection. France is really high on this, the restrictions on processing medical data like diabetes, asthma are probably the strictest in europe - probably for historical/cultural reasons, but i'm not sure and only have circumstential evidence of this (and btw, with the americanisation/globalisation of french society, those cultural reasons will disapear).
The genitical data are even more protected.
And by the way, for us (or at least for people from brittany, i don't know that much people elsewhere), being a father or a grandfather is'nt a genetical thing. The man who share 1/4 of my genes with i call Warren, the one who raised my father and me i used to call grandfather (well, more endearingly than that)
So like, if you sell web hosting on servers in your basement and one of them ends up being the most popular page on the white supremacist webring, you're totally ok with the government saying you have no right to cancel that account?
I think it should be fairly simple to draw a common-sense distinction between small business and the tech-giants which gate keep the internet. If you are not allowed to host your site on the server in my basement, nobody is going out of business because of that. If you cannot use AWS, GCP and Azure, there's a significant possibility your business will not be able to survive in today's market.
To counter your analogy, if I am the CEO of one of the largest mobile carriers in the country, and I believe you hold unacceptable opinions, should I be able to deny you access to my network and prevent you from making phone calls?
> If you cannot use AWS, GCP and Azure, there's a significant possibility your business will not be able to survive in today's market.
...I contend that this is ridiculous. I work for a company that doesn't use any of these services, I know of many companies not using these services, and in fact I'd say most of the companies using these services really don't need them because they'll never scale large enough to make them worthwhile, it's just that it's currently the fad of our industry.
They have been well marketed for years. If someone wants a website, they think goDaddy. Most people cannot deal with the concept of domain name registrars and http servers. They want a one stop shop, pay several dollars to a year, have a web site, and then forget about the whole thing.
https://prolifewhistleblower.com/
- a civil statute, not criminal
- reported/enforced by private individuals/entities, not the state government
I suspect the law was crafted specifically to deny the possibility for the government to operate such a site, and that this was the “one weird trick” used to get around the Roe precedent, at least for 5 of the justices. I’m not totally confident in that, so I’d appreciate learning if I’m wrong.
Consumer have the right to use or not use said service.
Been this way for centuries.
I agree we are ruled by corporations, but this isn't an example of that problem.
As to one bureaucratic choice or another, we've had enough turnover in the White House in the internet era that "the last guy broke this" doesn't really cut it. New executives can always issue new executive orders. It's just whether they want to bother or not.
https://archive.org/details/whenabortionwasc00reag_0
We are more regressive in this way that people from the 19th century. Great.
Their argument, as such, is that it isnt a matter of reproductive healthcare at all, but murder. I know of a few states that would file multiple murder charges in the case of killing a pregnant woman, for example.
All the comparisons to a handmaidens tale, yelling about womens rights and reporductive health will never change their mind... No different than the accusations of Larry Elder being a white supremacist.
I don't know why people use DNA uniqueness as a qualifier of anything. Are identical twins and clones not alive? Heartbeats aren't a measure of life either and, at 6 weeks, there is still no functioning heart. So despite the colloquial usage of the term, there is no heartbeat.
Except that coma patients are not dependent on another specific individual to stay alive. If one needed your kidney to live, but you refused and they died, you would not be responsible for their death.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
He is trying to force the other person to bring evidence for their value judgments, but they, by definition, can not do that, since value judgments are not objective, so they just downvote without responding. Just trying to gather evidence would lead a thinking individual to reflect more about the nature of values, ethics and morals, but most people, doesn't matter if left or right, are almost equally dogmatic and most don't even understand anything about morality or ethics, they just blindly follow what society tells them. [0]"Study: Leftists just as likely to be dogmatic authoritarians as those on the right"
[0]: https://www.psypost.org/2018/01/study-leftists-just-likely-d...
Richard: Time travel is impossible, it violates fundamental laws of physics, the arrow of time just goes one way.
Greg: * blindly downvotes * NONSENSE. You can time travel with a time machine easily. People do it all the time .
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Making a cake is a one-time interaction. Sexual orientation is similar to race in the respect of expected protections from discrimination. Apply the same wedding cake refusal for racial reasons and it's obvious this is discrimination.
On the other hand, being a domain registrar means a continued involvement in the act being discussed- running this website. GoDaddy are not just selling a one time transaction, they're an active, paid participant. They're service must continue to exist for the website to work, so long as they are the registrar.
And what the website is doing is not protected by law.
What really decides these things though is that GoDaddy needs to answer to their shareholders. How many customers will leave if they choose not to do business with this website? How many customers will leave if they do continue to do business with this website?
In the end, it always comes down to money.
It was specifically using their creative arts to contribute to the wedding that the owner refused to do.
They are a state government attempting to enforce a law. By definition, it is not vigilante. Whether the law is agreeable or just is another question entirely; a political question.
All the Supreme Court said so far was that they didn't think there was a cause of action at the moment because of how the law was structured.
(Now, was that decision perhaps slightly motivated by the conservative majority and the exact topic of the law? Seems likely. I bet they'd have stayed a law that was exactly the same other than the reportable-act being handgun ownership, for instance.)
Have you been asleep? The OP sees the Texas law as vigilantism because he doesn't believe that the people of Texas have a right to self-determination --- he believes, essentially, that angry-Twitter ought to get a veto over Texan law, and that Texan law that angry-Twitter doesn't like isn't really law at all.
The people of Texas, of course, have limited right to self-determination; whether the absurd law their government had just passed falls under that or not will be determined later.
However, in this case, it’s nothing to do with the people of Texas. This is a private vigilante group, not the government.
Not, really, that it matters in this case. Even the full majesty of the Texas state government presumably can’t force a webhost to ignore its ToS if it doesn’t want to. But in this case it’s not the government, it’s a weird private organisation.
Given that there's a growing movement to use state power against tech censorship, I expect this claim to be empirically tested in the near future.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28408467
The SJW Technofascists & Qui say:
- We can force you to make a wedding cake for gay people even though you religiously disagree with it
- We can also take your website offline because we disagree with.
In the same way a factory owner is "forced" to comply with OSHA lest they be in legal peril, you cannot discriminate against a protected group without putting yourself in legal peril. Your freedom comes in the form of opting out of activities that put you in that position, if you cannot help but discriminate against those in protected groups due to your religious beliefs then you should take up a profession where that's no longer an issue for you.
If aforementioned factory owner was unwilling to follow OSHA guidences due to a deeply held personal belief then I think it's a much better outcome they see punishment for that until they opt out of that profession than for us to change the law to allow it.
Obviously a fetus, like any other human at any age, has an absolute right to life. This right is not subject to the approval of the mother. It is arguably less strong than the right to life of a postnatal child due to the presumably more limited nature of the fetus's subjective experience, but if you think there is a moral difference between killing a newborn baby and killing a fetus a day before it is due, the forces that hold you in that position probably have more to do with cultural commitments than reason.
Nature puts two individuals' most fundamental, absolute rights into conflict with one another. It's a tragedy. At the moment, the least worst resolution available to us is to try to find the line before which the mother's right to bodily self-determination outweighs the fetus's right to life. This is an impossible task, because it's impossible to know the subjective experience of another sentient being.
Virtually everyone in the modern US responds to this situation by favoring either the mother or the fetus and discounting or outright denying the rights of the other party. I think it's time for us to move past that and seek to remove the rights conflict by developing technology that allows women to choose to end their pregnancies, without also ending the lives of their fetuses.
I mostly talk to liberals, and most of them push back on this idea at first. I point out to them that replacing abortion with access to technology and services that make it possible for women to end their pregnancies without killing the fetuses inside them would take much of the wind out of the sails of the American right. I also point out that, politics aside, it would actually be morally preferable to universal access to abortion, because it would not require killing fetuses, which actually do have a right to life.
Finally, I point out that liberals are unlikely to win the abortion issue in any other way. Their opponents aren't just going to get old and die. Young people choose to be pro-life all the time. This is because fetuses actually do have a right to life.
This isn't an issue in most countries
Free the rapist. Kill the baby. What a sick society.
All this because you can't control your crotch. I wish you were the one aborted. No one wants to follow you around fixing your mistakes and cleaning up after you.
Send the father to war to die. Raise the child against his parents. All three of them failed at what even amoeba can do.
Everyone else who had the now luxury of birth gets through the day without a problem. The world would really be nice if we did not have these discussions, as in, you weren't in it.
What have these 'script-kiddies' and 'hacktivists' achieved other than making these websites more resilient and censorship resistant?
What's next? complain to Google Inc, that they are using ReCAPTCHA because they don't like the website?
Perhaps this means anyone can do these sort of methods to anyone else who they don't like until they become censorship resistant. Unfortunately, the website owners have not changed their minds and the site is still up and the law (which I also disagree with) is still in effect. If they were expecting a backlash, it didn't happen.
This is a complete and total failure.
Downvoters: So you are telling me that the website is still down then? So they didn't find a domain provider to move to? Are you telling me that they are still on GoDaddy?
Is there any evidence that substantiates this? Are you really sure?
BTW you're misusing the terms "script-kiddies" and "hacktivists".
> BTW you're misusing the terms "script-kiddies" and "hacktivists".
How exactly? Elaborate. Your claim needs to be substantiated.
If you cannot elaborate further with any evidence, I can rapidly dismiss your claim as baseless.
I also invite anyone else to support the parent's comment against mine. Discuss.
The insistence that "script kiddie" is applicable is obviously some sort of 4d chess type of sarcasm trap and I won't engage in it further.
Where did I directly accuse GoDaddy Inc. of taking down the website as 'hacking' or describing them generally as 'hacktivists'? Given they are a private platform, they have the right to terminate service to anyone for violating their Terms of Service.
As for the hacktivism and script-kiddie claims, the context is from [1]
> The developer, whose social media identifies him as Sean Black, also made an iOS shortcut making it easier for non-technical activists to participate as well.
> In the first video, Black says the script sends one request to the Texas website around every 10 to 15 seconds. In the second, Black adds that the script sent around 300 requests in all at the time of upload before the site blocked his IP address.
Does that also mean its fine for me to do it to someones website because I don't like their website?
So it's also fine to distribute malicious scripts and to encourage non-technical users to just hit the run button with the intention to DDoS and attempt to flood and bring down someones website because they don't like the website? If that is not script-kiddie behaviour, I don't know what is.
> The insistence that "script kiddie" is applicable is obviously some sort of 4d chess type of sarcasm trap and I won't engage in it further.
Read the whole context [0] [1] [2] first before assuming such nonsense.[0] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/sep/02/texas-aborti...
[1] https://www.vice.com/en/article/z3x9ba/tiktok-texas-abortion...
[2] https://www.theverge.com/2021/9/3/22656196/godaddy-texas-rig...
If you'd had actually quoted from those links initially when making your comments about script kiddies and hactivists your statements would have made sense. But you didn't and instead of realising this you seems to prefer being outraged that nobody could read your mind to find the context you intended but never provided.
The whole context of this story is covered by multiple articles and all of them are completely relevant and happened BEFORE GoDaddy ultimately took action to de-platform the website.
I assume you also read the Gizmodo article. If you did, you'll find that the article mentions and linked various methods used to directly attack the website which can be described as 'script-kiddie' and 'hacktivism' behaviour, before they themselves suggested their own effective method in getting GoDaddy to de-platform the website.
To go further, I substantiated all of my claims with other relevant and reputable sources that gives more detail and covers the context of the whole story. Not just Gizmodo's ones. The whole story cannot be covered with only one source from one news site.
So, had you 'actually' read the article rather than only just the title in the first place like many others in this thread, you wouldn't be embarrassing yourself with laughable nonsense like '4d chess type of sarcasm trap' and resorting to baseless suggestions that I directly accused GoDaddy Inc. of taking down the website as 'hacking' or them being 'hacktivists' themselves.
Looking forward to your 1500 word rebuttal with citations about the validity of strawman arguments.
If you had read the Gizmodo article, you would find that they mentioned that '...trolls flooded the digital tip line with everything from Shrek porn to phony tips' and linked another previously reported article which again covers the methods used to attack and flood the website, before then detailing to others about another effective way to get GoDaddy to shut down the website for ToS violations.
These sort of flooding and attacks are what can be described as script-kiddie and hacktivist behaviour as I already said before. I assumed you have at least 'read' the Gizmodo article and its links. You clearly have not.
When asked to elaborate further on your original claim of '...misusing the terms "script-kiddies" and "hacktivists"' you couldn't substantiate anything. Now you retreat to attacking another 'argument' and thinking I misused the word 'these'.
So even after bringing up more relevant links and citations to support my own claims on top of what Gizmodo already mentioned, another person who also didn't read the article now says it makes sense and then you suggest I'm defending a strawman argument?
Have I just proved that both of you just read only the title of the Gizmodo article?
Well, my resolve not to use GoDaddy for anything ever has been strengthened a bit.
Epik hosting is simply acting as a dumb pipe. But because you really only look for alternatives if the big players kick you out, they're linked to those services now.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rob_Monster#Politics
You want to really hurt their site? Just furnish their database with randomly generated names and addresses. Data poisoning is one of the easiest, cleanest, and effective ways to ruin someone's crowdsourcing campaign if you pull it off properly. Getting angry at people on the internet for having a voice though, that's just a tad petty.
Or a simple DDoS flood.
The hope is that you don't transmit any kind of personal information in any identifiable pattern. If you get that much right, it can be exceptionally effective.
Disclosure: me and my friends used to DOS self-hosted inboxes like this
This issue (and especially this particular implementation of law) even be elevated to a political issue. We should keep this on the same page as GoDaddy throwing out a terrorist organization. It’s an issue that doesn’t even have two sides to it.
What would you say to the charge that recruiting for terrorist organizations is actually illegal, and that the Texas laws were created legally by democratically elected officials?
Surely there is some daylight between the 2.
There are certainly shades of gray all over but I also don’t think anything can be excused as morally acceptable because it’s decided democratically.
> actually illegal
The thing though is that abortions are now in that category too!
Democratically elected officials creating laws without public support is sometimes necessary (e.g for budgetary reasons, environmental reasons or similar). Doing it in this situation isn’t that.
>I also don’t think anything can be excused as morally acceptable because it’s decided democratically.
Wasn't asserted.
>The thing though is that abortions are now in that category too!
The website is not providing illegal abortions. Or else sadly goDaddy would probably be required by law to take it down.
Anyways, I've learned from other comments that these laws are so broad that even activism supporting the right to abortion can be deemed illegal. So inadvertently you might've made a point if that proves true.
Israel has something like this with "kosher" phones.[1] One man determines who the ultra-orthodox are allowed to call.
[1] https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/.premium-how-one-ultra-o...
Godaddy isn't by any means a monopoly. The barrier of entry into hosting DNS is trivial. I don't see the problem.
Not saying Godaddy is right or wrong here. Just that this is a slippery slope.
Maybe you meant the case where the company uses the exact same legal argument to later ban something you support? But this does not mean you must be a hypocrite, because the company might well employ it in error. Or you might have objected to already the first time it was stated because it was overly broad. Clearly hypocrisy does not follow automatically in the general case.
And this is no more a slippery slope than that which you stand on whenever you do any moral judgment. The real problem that godaddy's action calls attention to is rather the arbitrary selectivness by which companies enforce their terms of service.
When you rely on subjective standards, you risk very bad outcomes if you have a bad actor making those subjective judgements.
It's perfectly reasonable to have concerns over handing over the governance of online life to companies which are not democratically accountable, especially in an era of increasing consolidation in the technology space.
But what about AWS? Or data centers? What if banks and farms and electric companies start doing this? That's where this is going. Companies taking political or ideological approaches is becoming normalized, and if infrastructure follows suit, we are in serious trouble. Godaddy is uncomfortably close to this.
The private platform argument applies here as well. The payment providers can refuse to do business with anyone or any individual. Even for political or ideological reasons. Just look at the outrage [0].
The whole point is that, this can happen to anyone.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28337426
This spills over into the larger community in strange ways. In Brooklyn, there is strong opposition to bike lanes through ultra-orthodox neighborhoods. Bike lanes encourage people to ride through in scandalous form-fitting outfits.
This is no different from Cloudflare shutting down 8ch or AWS deciding not to host you anymore. We’ve been saying for years that we’re over-centralizing our internet infrastructure and that just a few bad actors have outsized influence on what can remain hosted and what they want to pull the plug on. If anything, this is good because companies might finally wake up and realize self-hosting is in their own best interests.
Just look at what happened to youtube-dl. [0] The private platform argument applies here too, also defeating the decentralised purpose of Git. Had they self-hosted with their own GitLab instance, this wouldn't have happened.
Self-hosting was done years ago is the way to over-come this. Now anyone can get their website, business terminated by any of these companies by anyone who seems to not like your website. (Even if they try to bring it down themselves.)
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24872911
So one vocal minority with outsized power ("Texas right to life") is upset that an even smaller minority (a single hosting company!) is giving them the boot? Talk about the pot calling the kettle black.
And how is this a bad thing? This is the free market! Doesn't GoDaddy have the right to decide who they host?