Comment by KirinDave
9 years ago
> He is also effectively saying that since he can and will remove sites he personally doesn't like, that he personally approves of every other site using Cloudflare.
Well... Yeah. I'm not sure why people think this is not how the internet works. It's a knit of private industry in most of the west and with the exception of a few (eroding) laws, private industries do all kinds of things.
The problem for DS is: there aren't many sites that WILL CDN them now that are as good as the alternatives that will surely not.
We can talk about strengthening guarantees of access to internet services and hosting, but that'd almost certainly be government mandated. Very few governments in a position to dictate this kind of policy to a global entity like the internet are terribly friendly to outright fascist, nazi policy.
So you can pick your poison: inconsistent rules from private entities or more consistent but more likely unfavorable and less mutable rules from government mandate (probably with the weight of government survey and law enforcement).
> Don't wanna sell cakes to gay people or host pro-Nazi sites? Don't start a business serving the public then.
The difference here is that neo-nazis make a decision to be bigots. They could stop. Most LGBT people consider their status to be a matter of birth.
Even for deeply held religious beliefs, we've long recognized a difference in fairness between discriminating on the circumstances and nature of birth vs. the circumstances and nature of choices made.
I think CDNs are a problem in general (their existence speaks to the self-inflicted wounds of an ultimately lawless internet, bad actors contained within gradually destroying it from abuse). It's a bad thing if they start consistently policing content.
But I think it's much worse to vigorously justify murder of people exercising their rights to free speech. Ultimately, people opting out of the tit-for-tat game of free speech and engaging in spontaneous acts of violence are opting out of society as a whole, and will start finding themselves exiled and imprisoned formally. And it's difficult to see any other way to proceed.
> The difference here is that neo-nazis make a decision to be bigots. They could stop. Most LGBT people consider their status to be a matter of birth.
I don't understand why this argument gets thrown about so often. Obviously not so much about neo-nazis in particular, but whenever a comparison is made to LGBT people. And before anybody jumps to conclusions, I am not about to argue that sexual orientation is a choice.
Even in the face of overwhelming evidence of all kinds, from all sorts of sources, there are people that seem to honestly believe the earth is flat. There is no way to make a reasoned decision to believe that. It must be something they are not in control of. It could be something they were born with, something in their experiences, or both, but it's clearly something they are not rationally deciding.
I'm not certain it can be said that the neo-nazis are definitely making a choice. It seems to be a pretty vehement emotional response, which would indicate it's not.
I don't mean to say we should tolerate neo-nazis in the sense that we just let them do their thing. But I do think we might be better off treating them as people that have some predisposition to being neo-nazis than as people that just decided to be one.
Muslims make a decision to follow Islam. They could stop.
But then they would be considered an apostate by most of the people they have ever known, and some of those people may consider apostasy to be a capital crime.
Do you really think it that easy for someone who is immersed in a niche culture to walk away from it, particularly if it is an insular and unpopular culture? It happens, but not everyone is strong enough to overcome the cognitive dissonance and leave behind everything they have ever been taught.
It isn't a matter of expecting a neo-Nazi to suddenly decide to stop being one, but in getting one to a cult deprogrammer counselor and providing sufficient social support afterwards, as they will likely have to discard all previous friends and family in the process. It would be similar to a homosexual kid coming out to fundamentalist parents. "Mom, Dad... I have decided that all people are created equal, and I want to judge people not by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character." "I knowed we never shoulda sent you to no public school. Get out."
For most humans, leaving an accidental community requires subsequent joining of an intentional community. And the stronger the stigma and adversity against that original community, the harder it is for someone to believe they could be accepted by anyone else upon leaving it.
But that really only applies to the passive followers, who go along to get along. There are always true die-hard believers, for whom facts and contrary evidence simply dissolve under the light of their religious or pseudo-religious faith. They have intentionally excised their own capacity to question their beliefs. How much effort are you willing to expend to crack open that nut and "save" them? They are certainly never going to pull themselves out under their own power.