Comment by Akujin
9 years ago
We take down Al Qaeda terrorist websites all the time because they can be used to radicalize people. Nazis are no different. They are calling for the systematic violent overthrow of the US government and for the extermination of many millions of so called undesirables. This is a terrorist threat. I take this threat very seriously as do many people in the Jewish, Hispanic, and African American community.
There are literally thousands of hosts out there in and outside the United States. The idea that Cloudflare is a public space requiring the protection of the first amendment from a company's policies is laughable. The idea that I'm seeing any of these comments arguing to the contrary means HN is already infiltrated by /pol/ and other Nazi sympathizing groups.
^^^ The parent comment hits the ball out of the park.
The commentary on past posts on HN and elsewhere floors me. It seems one or two things are prevalent:
1. Folks will gladly loan the hangman the rope that he will use to hang you, your family, and your neighbors — all because of "purity of belief" in free speech. Sorry, hate to break it to you, but these illiberal forces are a clear and present danger to this comfortable society you call home.
2. Support for Cryptofascism (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crypto-fascism) is rampant. Either folks don't know that they already support it, or they wittingly do and are too afraid to say it out in the open.
Immensely disturbing. As someone who cherishes the rule of law over the rule of man, not aiding and these illiberal parties is the minimum. They are not pluralists; they don't care about the rules of the game. They won't politely tolerate you. Deviants will be chastised, expelled/expatriated, jailed, or killed. Ignoring prudence (preservation of self and the society at-large) is perilous.
I don't have any sympathy for the Daily Stormer.
I just don't see where this is stopping. What else needs to be taken down? /pol/? Who about Breitbart? Or maybe some 2nd WW Nazi propaganda? Or something from the US civil war?
You guys seem to be ok with this very slippery slope being assessed by random private companies accountable to who knows. And then you have the nerve to call us who believes that limits of free speech should be set by courts and open process "nazis"?!
>You guys seem to be ok with this very slippery slope being assessed by random private companies accountable to who knows.
To me its strange someone would consider closing down /pol/ a "slippery slope". I am amazed that someone would consider 4chan a moral compass for the type of things their admins should put up with. moot has closed down /pol/ for this very reason in the past with even less "political" awareness than the CEO of cloudflare.
4Chan is "free-speech" not through effort but through negligence & apathy. moot shut down /pol/ (aka /n/) before, twice, on a whim because he didn't like the content. It's not the first time it has devolved into nazi-fetishism. While 4chan has the reputation for being a seedy place, moot has taken stands and banned people and conversions from 4chan (for example most recently gamergate on /v/) for reasons that can be boiled down to that he didn't like it (mods of 4chan have done this as well, such as no Naruto on /a/). The current iteration of /pol/ has likely been allowed to live through negligence - moot is no longer involved with 4chan, and the new owner hiroyuki has been as absent as moot during his VC startup days. Simply put 4chan never had any moderator accountability (see Rule 9 of the internet).
In conclusion, the notion that this is a "slippery slope" is nonsense. "Free speech" on the internet never really existed, the current view points that exist only exist because their operators have never bothered to flex their muscles - and the reason they haven't has rarely been because of some moral high ground. At the end of the day there is plenty of "reasonable" content YouTube won't host for you, and that Facebook will kick you for. If you are concerned about being silenced by a corporate vendor, then choose your partners wisely. If none will support you - then self fund. Free Speech doesn't mean the NYT is obligated to print your content, only that the government wont stop circulation of your newspaper. If you can't acquire the resources to start your own print, then tough luck.
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CloudFare served DailyStormer for years.
Then DailyStormer says CloudFare are secretly nazis.
Then CloudFare say "no we don't, goodbye".
If DailyStormer hadn't been so stupid, and had never claimed CloudFare was anything other than neutral, then they would still be served?
Stupid own goal DailyStormer.
The censorship and 'line' seems to be not what you say or incite against others, but what you say about CloudFare.
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Many European countries (like Germany etc.) have operated with free speech restrictions since the end of WW2 and the slippery slope that is always brought up never materialized.
Slippery slope arguments are only valid if you believe that your jurisdiction doesn't have proper rule of law. Otherwise experience, at least in European countries, showed that courts are very well capable of recognizing the importance of free speech even for tasteless and hateful speech.
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Daily stormer, pol, and breitbart are all free to find another web host/CDN or start their own. There is no slippery slope with one business refusing to do business with another one. The business does not need to be accountable to anyone, because they have no requirement to host the daily stormer in the first place.
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I'm curious, if you imagine a possible historical situation, let's say a German business owner in the 1930s that took a stance of not offering services to Nazi organizations, does that appear commendable, or bad in the same "slippery slope" way that you apply in the present situation?
It seems to me that such a business owner would seem in hindsight to have been acting virtuously, and it seems that businesses that did in fact offer services to e.g. the Nazi party are now tarnished morally because of that.
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People sitting on the fences talking about slippery slopes are only ceding space to people pushing the conversation down.
I'm sorry but The space to sit idly and think about it is gone. All of society is on the slope because America didn't realize that some points are raised not to discuss, but to tie down discourse and keep logic at bay.
Leaving the field open for emotion and lazy logic to defeat whoever remains.
There's rules to how this is done, and they have little to do with facts but everything to do with owning the communication channel.
Congratulations, you've just employed the Sex With Ducks argument. Remember before employing slippery slope arguments to explain why we haven't already fallen down the slope when we banned terrorist websites.
And taking down The Daily Stormer was speech. If you want to regulate that kind of speech, it's your right to say so. But don't pretend you're supporting the First Amendment when you do so.
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That is indeed a tough question. And to Cloudflare's credit, they discuss it at some length. I'm quite impressed.
But in any case, it's Cloudflare's business, and so it's Cloudflare's decision to make. What concerns me more are censorship mechanisms involving DNS and BGP games. Which the US has been quite fond of using, to take down what it considers to be illegal content. That's a vulnerability of the Internet itself, reflecting continuing US dominance.
So hey, we have Tor and other overlay networks.
Edit: And just to be clear, I'm a communitarian anarchist. I'm not at all sympathetic to fascists. But I do oppose all censorship.
Maybe you should be the one who chooses what a private company can and can't do?
As for the slippery slope arguments, come on.
Feel free to feel outraged when someone you do have sympathy for gets taken down then.
Until that time comes, good riddance to Daily Stormer, you lot of motherfucking nazis.
>What else needs to be taken down?
It would be interesting to see how much of this applies to sub sects of Islam, namely the sub sects that promote violence or which promote child marriage.
My big issue here isn't the logic itself, but the selective application of it. For a similar related topic, whose statues should we have up? What is the objective criteria by which we should decide if a statue is allowed (on public property/at a memorial) and will it be applied to all statues?
If Breitbart or /pol/ are hosting discussions in the open between known Nazis or people who are advocating to take terrorist actions and they do not moderate and delete these things then yea they actually should be shut down. We would not tolerate this from Al Qaeda or with child porn so I really don't understand the problem. Nazism has caused orders of magnitude more suffering in the history of man than either of the previous things I mentioned.
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> They won't politely tolerate you. Deviants will be chastised, expelled/expatriated, jailed, or killed.
If they have the power to? Yeah, in a heartbeat. But they're not the only ones, or the most powerful ones, just the most ostentatiously intolerant.
> 1. Folks will gladly loan the hangman the rope that he will use to hang you, your family, and your neighbors — all because of "purity of belief" in free speech.
If both Nazis and (as an example) Communists have free speech, then I can be supremely confident that I have free speech, and that I can use it without being expelled, jailed, or killed. (Chastisement, well, as long as you mean the verbal kind, I'll just have to cope.) I sure as Hell don't defend their rights because I like them.
Have you never actually felt your ability to speak out meaningfully threatened by the society around you?
A white supremacist killed someone at the weekend for protesting. If their free speech gives you supreme confidence, then you are simply wrong.
The evidence is fresh. You will have free speech - as long as you only go to the right places, say the right things, wear the right clothes, have the right colour skin.
Over time, supremacist movements reduce that free space in greater and greater amounts. This is what the evidence of history tells us, very clearly. We can see it happening now.
If despite the hard evidence that these groups are opposed to free speech and willing to kill those exercising it, you still defend their right to try and subjugate or kill people merely because of their DNA, you are not defending free speech. What you're really doing is celebrating your own virtue - you're defending their rights because you like yourself. You are taking a calculated risk with other people's lives to do so. Even if they're not even trying to speak at all, but just walking down the street while being the wrong race/gender/religion/etc.
Fundamentalist free speech advocates make an implicit assumption: that a race of billions of social animals can completely avoid situations where one group makes another even feeling uncomfortable. It's purist nonsense. Occasionally feeling you aren't entirely free to speak is part of being a social animal.
Part of living is learning when keeping your trap shut means you're being oppressed or censored, and when you are just being respectful to someone else's house, or a workplace, or suffering beyond your experience.
You can't use a civilised person's inevitable experience of "well, I didn't want to cause offense" to justify Nazis.
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I'm sorry, was the government preventing Daily Stormer from starting a hosting company or CDN? I'm pretty sure it wasn't so they have the same free speech that everyone else does.
CloudFare has free speech rights too. They are excersizing those rights by saying they don't want Daily Stormer on their network.
All it takes is a few key fascists in government positions to tear all of this down. All it takes is one false flag terrorist attack to justify the systematic persecution of a group of people. This is what happened in Germany. Recently in Turkey. And it can happen here just as easily.
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>If both Nazis and (as an example) Communists have free speech
That's where the argument become null, communists ideas have been banned from the US political landscape for a long time and even mild socialists propositions are a call for arms for many USians.
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>Folks will gladly loan the hangman the rope that he will use to hang you, your family, and your neighbors — all because of "purity of belief" in free speech. Sorry, hate to break it to you, but these illiberal forces are a clear and present danger to this comfortable society you call home.
Replace like 3 words in your comment, and I could make it into a rant advocating persecution of Communists. Which has happened before in the US. But it's ok now because it's against your political enemies?
Second, no they are not. They are a tiny tiny percentage of the population. They have been losing power and numbers for decades. They get little representation in the mainstream and in the media. When they speak up with their beliefs or attend a protest unmasked, they often lose their jobs. They are not even remotely a serious threat. Just like communists during the Red Scare.
>Replace like 3 words in your comment, and I could make it into a rant advocating persecution of Communists. Which has happened before in the US. But it's ok now because it's against your political enemies?
If by "it's against your political enemies" means "it's against people who want to overthrow your society and replace it with a repressive one" then the two cases are exactly the same in principle and only differ in details.
So yeah, I'd say that they're both OK, under the exact same logic.
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I recommending watching 'The People vs. Larry Flynt' for a (much-needed) lesson in what Freedom of Speech means in the United States. I am certain Larry Flynt had a hard time finding print houses willing to publish Hustler but the fact he was being arrested and prosecuted – by the government – for distributing Hustler is when/where the line was crossed.
I have doubts that SCOTUS will ever consider 'The Nazis vs. Cloudflare'.
I always wondered why we didn't see the term crypto-fascism come up more in the last few years. Perhaps because it is too honest and gives room for manoeuvre (although equally it is going to be hard to disprove). Hence people shouting 'Nazi' - which reminds me of kids calling the cops in the UK 'The Feds' - both of which sound idiotic. We had the terms we needed (Neo-Nazi and Crypto-Fascist) and they both meant something.
I would say we also need to introduce a counterpart. e.g. crypto-stalinist or crypto-communist. As it is an equally plausible accusation to make that some people with hidden beliefs on that side of the spectrum could take them to those dark places.
This has already has a name, and the eminent Karl Popper describes its precepts better than I: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance.
I've got to agree. I was quite shocked by some of the comments on earlier threads about this topic.
For example, someone suggested that the German Nazi party was advocating mild socialist reforms very similar to modern social democrats, entirely ignoring "minor details" like that the SA actively beat up people on the streets and spread terror wherever they showed up, that the nazis attempted a Coup d'Etat, and that socialists and communists later went to prison and concentration camps for their political views. Not to speak of killing 5-6 million Jews and being responsible for the death of about 25 million soldiers and 55 million civilians in WW2...
The largest cognitive dissonance is with those people who suggest that jihadist propaganda should be interrupted but Nazi propaganda should be allowed to thrive unconditionally. That sounds very crazy to anyone who knows a little bit about history and can compare orders of magnitudes.
> As someone who cherishes the rule of law over the rule of man, not aiding and these illiberal parties is the minimum.
That's good. But the rule of law should apply over "not aiding" those people.
In the private sector, there have been a number of cases where companies (a) don't apply their ToS to people they agree with, and (b) over-apply their ToS to people they disagree with.
See Vidcon && Sargon for the most recent example.
i.e. When given the choice, the groups that value "inclusiveness" and "tolerance" and "due process" violate all of that...
Safe spaces and diversity are diametrical to due process and tolerance. You're assumed guilty and treated as lesser if "privileged", which means white, male or both.
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An atmosphere of free speech that allows for satire and conversation are the best weapons against extremist ideology.
> They won't politely tolerate you. Deviants will be chastised, expelled/expatriated, jailed, or killed. Ignoring prudence (preservation of self and the society at-large) is perilous.
Except I never really seen a 'neonazi' saying "punch a communist" I never seen mass media encourage such behavior either.
Do you not realize that this is cyclic reinforcement of behavior? (Antifa says punch nazis, nazis punch back, antifa ups their game with HIV needles and guns, nazis up their game etc)
Both sides are disgusting, but the fact that the media covers up for the leftist violence makes me stand on the side of the so called "right wing extremists".
Just calling yourself a Nazi or doing the chants or whatever carries with it an implicit provocation and threat of violence toward minority groups.
Responding with actual violence in turn is not the right approach, but when we see large armed mobs forming and declaring themselves pro-genocide, it's absurd to call the people protesting them the 'real problem'.
why do you need to "take sides"? life is not binary. If you don't like antifa that's fine, but you don't then need to support nazis for that ...
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Get out of here with the crying wolf.
Sorry, hate to break it to you, but these illiberal forces are a clear and present danger to this comfortable society you call home.
No, it's the last gasps of a dying breed of racists, empowered by the Internet and that look a lot more popular than they are due to media focus. Nazis are lame, but you leave them alone and there's nothing to fuel the fire. You send out counterprotesters, get in fights with them, act like these people are on the verge of starting a civil war and in their minds you've proved them right (delusional though they may be), and they get energized and then you have a real problem.
Kicking nazis off the Internet is one thing, but yours (and the grandparent) is the language that causes the slippery slope arguments. That people can't even discuss the issue of free speech without being assumed to be nazi sympathizers or "cryptofascists" or whatever we want to label people we don't agree with isn't ok.
Someone having a debate about the right of nazis to use modern services is not by extension a nazi.
"No, it's the last gasps of a dying breed of racists, empowered by the Internet and that look a lot more popular than they are due to media focus."
Really? Because yesterday the PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES defended white nationalists and neo-nazis on national TV.
This discussion also shouldn't have much to do with free speech. If private companies do not want to allow pro-nazi websites to use their servers, they should be allowed to refuse them.
The only slippery slope here is the idea that Nazis are dying and there is no need to take them seriously. People in Germany did not take them seriously when Hitler started his rise to power, then the country fell into disarray and Hitler had simple answers to hard questions. After everything that has happened over the past year, it is time to stop thinking that something like Hitler's rise to power could never happen again. We are in uncharted waters.
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The last sentence is the main reason why the world is so fucked up today. "Unless you agree with my radical leftist agenda you are a nazi/racist/<some_imaginary_word>"-mentality and the complete unreasonability of the left is the reason why normal people are fed up with all this crap and are voting for Trump, Brexit etc.
No matter how evil some group is (may they be pedophiles, satan worshippers, nazis, whatever...) silencing them and assaulting them is a crime and is against freedom of expession. The problem with making these exceptions like "Let's have freedom of speech but not for these and these people...yadayadayada" is we can never be sure where to draw the line.
(Neo-)Nazis are sure dumb as hell but as long as they have peaceful protest and they don't harm anybody physically (unlike their counter-protesters) it doesn't matter. And don't even start with the car-thing. An individual psycho does not compare to organized widely accepted violence.
If we were to ban nazis and far-right organizations because they are racist and apparently a "threat" then what about anarchists? They also are extremely violent and want to overthrow the government. (and in the US officially categorized as terrorist threat) What about BLM which is openly racist and violent (July 2016 anti-white/police sniper attack, riots, assaults, highway blockings etc.) If we start going down this slippery slope will have shitloads of organizations and ideas to ban.
Anarchists and communists have long been banned from entering the US. And I've noticed a strong push back against most of the more mild socialists ideas. The US have not been "the land of the free" for a long time.
And I will argue that communism is fundamentally a good ideology. While fascism has never leaned on the good side of human nature.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communist_Control_Act_of_1954
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ideological_restrictions_on_na...
PS: statues of Lenin and Stalin were removed without much second thought, only USians would keep statues of their (war criminals)|(rebels) for 150 years. And political bronzes are not art, they are at best political camping and grandiloquence.
The US dropped its blanket ban on anarchists and communists well over 20 years ago. I personally know people in both camps who have visited the UK and one who has permanent US residency.
I'd argue that while the US has many problems when it comes to its treatment of the left, things have moved in the opposite direction of what you indicate. E.g. the far rights attack on Obama coupled with generations now growing up who never experienced the cold war combined to make words like "socialism" far less scary.
> Anarchists and communists have long been banned from entering the US. And I've noticed a strong push back against most of the more mild socialists ideas. The US have not been "the land of the free" for a long time.
American citizens are perfectly free to hold those beliefs. They are also free to determine what kind of people they want to allow in their country, just like every other country on Earth can. That they choose not to allow people who openly advocate destroying all existing social institutions (which is the end goal of communism as stated by Marx in The Communist Manifesto) to enter the country does not mean that the country is not free.
> And I will argue that communism is fundamentally a good ideology. While fascism has never leaned on the good side of human nature.
There are 100 million people who died in the 20th century who would disagree with you.
But, even if we ignore that, the US does not allow Nazis to enter the country either, for very similar reasons. As a matter of fact, if you apply for permanent residency today, you still have to sign a statement that says you're not a member of the National Socialist German Workers Party or adhere to any of its beliefs, even though that party is defunct and most of its members are dead.
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>And I will argue that communism is fundamentally a good ideology.
This is a dangerous thing to say publicly! As you mention yourself, the United States has had red scares just a generation ago. Who is to say it won't happen again? And that is exactly why you should support freedom of speech and tolerance of differing ideologies. Or the next red scare will be even worse.
>statues of Lenin and Stalin were removed without much second thought, only USians would keep statues of their (war criminals)|(rebels) for 150 years.
As far as I know most of the USSR world war 2 monuments are still standinding. The US is removing even monuments to soldiers that don't feature any specific general or leader. By your logic we should tear down the famous Vietnam war memorial because the US lost the war.
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To be fair, anarchists didn't exactly make anyone their friends from the late 1800s forward. There was an incredible amount of political violence at the time.
Russia saw tens of millions murdered because the anarchists and communists (of that day) got exactly what they wanted in the overthrow of the old regime. It's weird how communism and fascism seem to appear out of the ether together and fight with each other.
How many states were destabilized by that combo in the last 100 years? Russia, Germany, Spain, at least, South American countries, etc. Fascists and communists are like pb & j.
There must have been a lot of normal people who just wanted to live normal lives but saw them destroyed by extremists who knew the right way to live.
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> "Unless you agree with my radical leftist agenda you are a nazi/racist/<some_imaginary_word>"
Calling for persecution of literal inciting of violence is hardly a "extremist left" idea. In fact it's not even left-or-right issue.
The problem is for the most part very few (no?) people are calling for explicit violence, even really abstract violence. Calling for muslim bans, border walls, deportation of illegal or even legal immigrants, restricting immigration to "white" countries and honouring racist war "heroes" are all abhorrent and racist views, but they are all clearly not inciting violence in any way.
How do you restrict the speech of people who advocate for white supremacy in non-violent ways? You could specifically ban white supremacy, but such a narrowly targeted law would probably lead to more radicalization.
Inciting violence is already illegal and no one is defending it.
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The right to your own ideas is not an absolute. It's a pact you have to respect and it involves respecting other people rights first. Neonazi and white supremacist are betraying this social pact by furthering the idea of a superior race and the extermination of the different, that's why they're walking a really thin line when it comes to their right to First Amendment protection.
You just resorted to what I call "the bad child argument". The bad rich child who already has everything wants an icecream. Mom, for once, says no. The child throws a fit and blames mom for it: if you gave me the ice cream I wouldn't have thrown a fit.
All political ideologues think their opposition wants to take away their freedoms. If you make the rule that people who want to remove freedoms don't get them, you create a tool for any party in power to silence their opponents.
There is no prerequisite like that in the first amendment. Go read the thing. Monarchism was a serious threat to the founders. Monarchists don't believe in many freedoms including freedom of speech. But the founders didn't specify it only applied to non-monarchs. Because they knew such a feature could be abused.
>You just resorted to what I call "the bad child argument". The bad rich child who already has everything wants an icecream. Mom, for once, says no. The child throws a fit and blames mom for it: if you gave me the ice cream I wouldn't have thrown a fit.
What on Earth are you talking about? Neonazis are spoiled rich kids that get everything they want? Freedom of speech is a luxury like icecream?
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The First Amendment was instituted by literal slave holders. When did this requirement to (intellectually) respect the rights of others appear?
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> The right to your own ideas is not an absolute. It's a pact you have to respect and it involves respecting other people rights first.
You just defined a thoughtcrime.
Did you never read 1984?
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Problem is - we need the line. If someone is openly calling for someone else's death, is it ok?
And neo nazis - just by embracing the historical association - seem to be ok with crossing any line.
Of course it brings other problems, as any regulation ever (e.g. calling nazi anyone you disagree with), but society needs to set at least some limits. Enforcing them will be always subject to debate, as is natural and (imo) good in democracy.
> radical leftist agenda
Being anti-nazi is "radical leftist" now?
You must have seen my grandparents - the ones that have witnessed the real horror of nazisme/ww2 - radical to the bone. Doing all dangerous violent stuff with their walker and wheelchair. A whole life of attacking "good people" from the extreme right or whatever orange buffoons choose to describe them these days.
The notion that anybody that is anti-facisme - which for me should be natural for anybody with some minimum of values - is a radical of extreme-whatever is plain ridiculous.
I'm beginning to think that as soon as someone says the word 'agenda', you can safely ignore what they have to say. That word is never used constructively in political discussions.
Yea. Holy shit what the fuck is wrong with people.
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Isn't perjury a crime? What about death threats? It's all speech, and it's the type of speech hate groups use - the type that is already a crime and we want to protect under some strange interpretation of the first amendment to your constitution.
If a group is threatening the security of non-white people, some even going to the extent of carrying guns (as is their right) whilst they make said threats and spread lies, I don't know what else you need to shut them down.
There is always a line. Nearly everyone, every company, has a line.
Heck, this website itself asks that you don't be mean in comments.
> The problem with making these exceptions like "Let's have freedom of speech but not for these and these people...yadayadayada" is we can never be sure where to draw the line.
There's no problem here. You have freedom as long as you don't hurt other people. Different nuances of what "hurt" means which are not covered directly by law are decided in courts of law by judges.
As a "radical leftist", it's certainly not on my agenda, and in fact I hold views that they'd likely denounce.
Would you say the same about a takedown of an ISIS website?
Most ISIS content is already illegal for things like inciting violence. If the Daily Stormer is breaking the law by inciting violence, then it should be dealt with the same way. There is an existing legal process and it doesn't require the discretion of Cloudflare's CEO.
Would you argue the same for the takedown of a marihuana promoting enthusiast website?
The first sentence is the main reason we are so fucked. There's literally nothing radical or leftist in what I said. Nazism is literally responsible for hundreds of millions of deaths world wide. Fact.
You know how I know you're actually a shill?
> And don't even start with the car-thing. An individual psycho does not compare to organized widely accepted violence.
Whataboutism in literally the next paragraph:
> What about BLM which is openly racist and violent (July 2016 anti-white/police sniper attack, riots, assaults, highway blockings etc.)
99.99% of all people who have ever been to a BLM protest are peaceful. Blocking cars is called Civil Disobedience. It is literally what the Nazis are doing when they demonstrate in a liberal town in which they don't even live. It's just as annoying when they close down the center of a town for Nazis as it is when BLM blocks a street in Baltimore.
You are literally equating Nazis to people who want universal healthcare, equal pay for equal work, and to not get shot at by police for the color of their skin.
We're only talking about Nazis. Not the right wing. The Nazis claim they are "alt-right" or whatever but someone who is advocating for lower taxes and a decrease in government spending and for abortion to be illegal isn't the enemy. Nazis are the enemy. Stop conflating Nazis with the legitimate right wing of the nation.
I am not qualified to analyze the rest of the comments, but the last/first sentences strikes dear to me. In succession they were:
> > > The idea that Cloudflare is a public space requiring the protection of the first amendment from a company's policies is laughable. The idea that I'm seeing any of these comments arguing to the contrary means HN is already infiltrated by /pol/ and other Nazi sympathizing groups.
> > The last sentence is the main reason why the world is so fucked up today. "Unless you agree with my radical leftist agenda you are a nazi/racist/<some_imaginary_word>"-mentality and the complete unreasonability of the left is the reason why normal people are fed up with all this crap and are voting for Trump, Brexit etc.
> The [previous citation] is the main reason we are so fucked. There's literally nothing radical or leftist in what I said. Nazism is literally responsible for hundreds of millions of deaths world wide. Fact.
The radical part of your first assertion, Akujin, is that it is hard to interpret your statement as anything else than "person A saying that Cloudflare is a public space requiring the protection of the first amendment from a company's policies implies that A is a Nazi sympathizer". These kind of statements are highly polarizing, hurtful and anger-inducing, because they deny A to have any rationally positive reason for their statement and instead generalize A to belong to an undesirable group. Notice how arguments structured in this way will never convince anyone that is not already of your opinion and will increase the outrage of those readers that are already of your opinion. I would call this radicalizing.
Mildly relevant video from CGP Grey "This Video Will Make You Angry": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rE3j_RHkqJc
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We have come to the point where comments in here is accusing an other HN commenter of being a shill and doing Whataboutism. Maybe we should take a step back and focus on what, if anything, the disagreement is about?
How would you formulate a general law which forbids only neo-nazi organizations and neo-nazi demonstrations? The first thing that comes to my mind is a law against organizations that write that they intend to use violence, but then you just end up with organizations that don't explicitly write that down anywhere but still practice it. If you applied it more flexible, like for example that any organization which members ever express an intention of violence, you would very fast find that doing a test run on history would catch a much large number of organizations than intended.
You could define it as "anything classified as a terrorist group by the state", but again many groups has been classified as such in the past, the state has occasionally change their mind, and animal right activists is an famous example that the FBI classified as "serious domestic terrorist threat". That leaves the system that Germany currently have, and leaves the details to the legal system to figure out what is nazi and what isn't.
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>Whataboutism
This is not what the parent is employing. The parent commenter is saying that if you enable arbitrary lines in the sand that those in power WILL ENGAGE in Whataboutism, taking the corner case of "we're just going to ban Nazi speech" and stuffing the precedent down the throats of the courts until it sticks close enough.
As the parent commenter said, there is enough evidence to show that there are violent sects of BLM and other groups that promote equality, and that might just be enough to get the corner case precedent to hammer and crush the same freedom of assembly we just happened to carve out for white supremacists.
> Nazism is literally responsible for hundreds of millions of deaths world wide. Fact.
Not true. "hundreds of millions" implies >= 200 million. According to wikipedia, total deaths during WW2 were 70-85 million. Not all of these were to do with the actions on Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy, so the total bodycount for fascism would be c. 50-60 million.
This is a lot, but considerably less than your overblown claim.
>There's literally nothing radical or leftist in what I said.
"The idea that I'm seeing any of these comments arguing to the contrary means HN is already infiltrated by /pol/ and other Nazi sympathizing groups"
Can be expanded to:
"There are people in the world who disagree with me. It cannot possibly be that there is a rainbow of opinion and some people draw different lines in different places. Nay! My opinion is clearly infallible and indeed no less than the very standard of all educated men, so all who disagree must be members of organized hate groups infiltrating our pristine website."
This clearly implies the follow on sentence:
"And therefore we should gag them all to prevent their hateful agenda".
Expanding it that way makes you sound like a prat, that's my bias shining through. Take a guess on whether I agree with you on whether we're the victim of a sustained nazi infiltration conspiracy or not. That must make me an evil internet-nazi spearheading the covert assault on the hacker news psyche. Stand clear people, I'm dangerous and infectious.
Please don't accuse other users on HN of being shills.
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> Nazism is literally responsible for hundreds of millions of deaths world wide. Fact.
Not to defend Nazism but the death toll of WWII was between 50 and 80 million.
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And communists just want equality. The rsult is tens of millions of people dead.
Actions speak louder than words and BLM's are very telling.
communism is literally responsible for 100s of millions of deaths and almost all of the worst dictators in history were socialist / communist
It seems people have no idea that Nazis are actually extremely violent people. I'm not talking about your average racist, but people that identify with the Nazi party. Violence is central to their philosophy. If you actually met any modern-day Nazis, you would know this. It took me about two days of hanging out with Nazis before they literally tried to blow me up.
This isn't some free-speech issue where you debate politely and sip iced water and other frippery.. this is actual people killing other people. This is how the the real world actually operates, instead of libertarian-nerd theory world.
And you know Nazis would be extremely violent people because no rational person would self identify with that group, so already they're batshit insane, which means they're likely to be extremely violent. And sure enough, when hundreds of Nazis gathered this weekend in Charlottesville, you actually ended up with an event measured in terms of "death toll".
We have to treat these people like armed and dangerous criminals, like you would ISIS or any active shooter.
And we all need to understand that government limits speech in many, many ways, not just the "fire in the theatre" example, but with things like sedition and other criminal conspiracies to more mundane things like copyrights and libel.
People forget that we went to war against these people and used to kill Nazis wholesale less than 80 years ago, because the Nazi party went to war against America. Identifying with them means you've actually declared war against the US. Not sure how much clearer you could be in declaring yourself to be a violent and dangerous criminal than that.
Just ban them. Arrest their members. Don't be the socially inept libertarian nerd that thinks only in terms of theory without any real-world experience. It's perfectly fine to limit rights and freedoms in the real world. You can do it!
A couple of things:
1. I was watching the news and in a picture I noticed one of the counter protesters using some sort of spray can as a flamethrower. I also saw the counter protesters beating up a spokesman for the protesters before the police saved him. So violence goes all around.
2. Arresting people just because someone like the parent here calls them violent is a really bad idea. As in, it's horrendous. If all someone has to do is call you violent to have you arrested, then boy can it be used to silence people that say things inconvenient to whoever wants to silence them. Saying "arrest their member" about a political group is extreme, ignores any legal precepts of innocent until proven guilty, and can be used by the most authoritarian groups to silence anyone they choose.
That said I do find protesters very unlikable. The counter protesters I have found a little bit more likeable but still unlikable, because they seem somewhat hypocritical and dishonest, given they have been somewhat violent as well, and have said that it doesn't matter that they were violent as well.
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Amen! Wow I'd like to hug you for these words (libertarian-nerd theory world: right on the money!).
In the end it doesn't matter if it is a leftist or a rightist organization that calls for murder or other criminal or sedituous behaviour: if we can be sure that you use your means of communication to murder people and destroy society, then this has consequences. In Germany I know as well of leftist as rightist groups/activists who were prosecuted on these grounds, so this is by no means something that is just used against nazis.
However: almost all nazi-groups are concerned by this, as violence and hate are constitutive for their movement, while almost all of the leftist groups go uninvolved, since their fundamental interests are compatible with our basic humanitarian values etc.
So, to all you libertarian-nerds: stop whining (and seeming stupid thereby) that it would be sooooo hard to detect speech that is used to murder people, poison the civil society and destroy the democratic form of government. There is nothing valuable about hateful agitation, we can do fine without it. And please stop acting as if it didn't matter: the whole point of the Charlottesville-demonstration was to show that people can be motivated by hateful agitation and propaganda on the internet to go out and intimidate the rest of the world. That people can be motivated to let go of all inhibitions if they see day after day that it is okay to talk about killing jews, homosexuals and afroamericans, that other people kudo them when they deride minorities themselves.
Oh and by the way: go and check your priviledges. It is easy to act as if hateful speech wouldn't matter if you aren't affected by it (or are intelligent and eloquent enough to turn the tables). But: hateful speech harms the people that are affected by it and can make life a living hell for them. I mean: it is obviously the aim of it, isn't it? I deride and intimidate minorities, so that ... they feel derided and intimidated. It's just that simple.
What about anti-nazis that constantly cry out how every nazi is an armed, dangerous criminal that should be killed or arrested wholesale.
My opinion about those?
Just ban them. Arrest their members. Don't be the socially inept libertarian nerd that thinks only in terms of theory without any real-world experience. It's perfectly fine to limit rights and freedoms in the real world. You can do it!
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> The idea that I'm seeing any of these comments arguing to the contrary means HN is already infiltrated by /pol/ and other Nazi sympathizing groups.
This is an extremely frightening statement to me. I'm terrified by the fact that you'd paint me as a Nazi sympathizer because my meta-level beliefs that text and speech should be protected are stronger than my object-level beliefs that Nazi philosophy is evil.
The Nazis are not reviled today because they had disgusting beliefs. They're reviled because they actually murdered millions of innocent citizens.
I'm okay with neonazis saying disgusting things, as long as they play by the rules and don't commit any violence. (Hell, people brought AK-47's and AR-15's to Charlottesville but didn't use them, despite the violent clashes.) Whatever happened to "sticks and stones"? Do kids not learn that mantra anymore?
To be clear, this is a separate question from whether major internet infrastructure providers should be considered de facto public systems and fall under the 1st amendment. I don't think they should, so I think this falls within Cloudflare's rights (although I wish they had done otherwise). I'm just objecting to the characterization that the only people who could possibly object to Cloudflare here are neonazis or their sympathizers.
For what it's worth, I tried to find the Daily Stormer site to see what it is they actually advocate for, but I was unable to. I'm not sure if it's because of the domain name issues, Cloudflare, Google search or what, but it's a little disconcerting to me that ideas can be so easily expunged from the internet. So much for the "right to forget" controversy - I guess it is possible after all, if the companies were motivated to do so.
I'm okay with neonazis saying disgusting things, as long as they play by the rules and don't commit any violence. (Hell, people brought AK-47's and AR-15's to Charlottesville but didn't use them, despite the violent clashes.)
So intimidation and threats of violence are ok? Are you really commending these people for their restraint in not using AK-47s at a demonstration?
One of the lessons from the first round of Nazis is that, by the time the threatening talk turns to actual large-scale violence, it's too late. When Hitler got out of prison in 1924, he made sure that he would be seen as an "all talk" kind of guy by those who could have shut him down.
Think forward a little bit. The "all talk" guy with vile opinions backed by a violent mob is already in the White House. He won. Now is exactly NOT the time to try to curtail free speech in any way, lest that same precedent be used by the administration to stifle dissent by his opposition - you - in the future.
Freedom of speech (and in fact a lot of the Constitution) is constructed to curtail governmental powers so that dangerous groups in charge aren't able to fundamentally re-shape the country. Why would you want to undermine that when the country is arguably very close to being in that position?
(Personally I think CloudFlare is within its rights to fire a client it doesn't like; non-governmental entities don't have first amendment obligations, just a requirement not to break certain class-based discrimination laws. I don't know if neo-Nazis are a protected class in that respect but it's difficult to see how they would be, since they are not a political party or recognized minority group.)
edit: parentheses
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> This is an extremely frightening statement to me. I'm terrified by the fact that you'd paint me as a Nazi sympathizer because my meta-level beliefs that text and speech should be protected are stronger than my object-level beliefs that Nazi philosophy is evil.
Well, your theoretical beliefs are now put to a much more practical test, sympathizing with the Nazis in any way shape or form, even if it comes down to just sympathizing with their 'right to a platform' is an excellent way to see how strong ones beliefs really are.
If this is the first time you are in a situation where your strongly held principles are put to the test then I sympathize with you, the longer you live the more this will happen and the more likely you will end up in a situation where there is a conflict between a strongly held belief and a negative consequence for yourself.
Note that bringing weapons (loaded or not) to a march sends a message: we're an army, and we're armed. Not using those weapons should not get them points. One of them brought his car and did use it, the damage was as bad or even worse as if he had fired a rifle.
> The Nazis are not reviled today because they had disgusting beliefs. They're reviled because they actually murdered millions of innocent citizens.
And they would do so again in a heartbeat if they knew they could get away with it.
> I'm okay with neonazis saying disgusting things, as long as they play by the rules and don't commit any violence. (Hell, people brought AK-47's and AR-15's to Charlottesville but didn't use them, despite the violent clashes.) Whatever happened to "sticks and stones"? Do kids not learn that mantra anymore?
Neo Nazis only say disgusting things because they know they are still living in a society where they can not get away with doing more but make no mistake, the overthrowing of that very society is their goal and I'd love to see you arguing for 'free speech' in the society that they wish to create.
You'd be up against the wall faster than you can say 'jack shit'.
The internet archive? https://web.archive.org/web/*/daily%20stormer
And they'll gag be back up by tomorrow no doubt. "Hell, people brought AK-47's and AR-15's to Charlottesville but didn't use them, despite the violent clashes." What restraint.
> I'm okay with neonazis saying disgusting things, as long as they play by the rules and don't commit any violence.
So people should be allowed to say anything? So you can organize any imaginable crime, threaten people and promote false information as long as you don't do any physical harm?
I agree that just objecting Cloudflare's decision doesn't make you anything. One being a potential Nazi sympathizer just because they don't see any limits to where free speech ends can just be a very crazy conspiracy theory - nothing else.
Speech intended to incite violence and threatening isn't protected by the 1st.
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If you are referring to "sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never break me", clearly you have other problems with sympathy and empathy.
Free speech does not protect dangerous speech.
Yes, it does. Explicitly and confirmed by several Supreme Court cases.
Here's a quick and current take on the issue from Eugene Volokh: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/201...
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See, and now you're attacking the character of a person: "clearly you have other problems".
This type of psychological attack is precisely the issue at hand with counter-nazi progress online at this precise moment in time.
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The problem is who defines "dangerous speech"?
Dr. King himself was labeled as "the most dangerous Negro of the future in this Nation from the standpoint of communism, the Negro and national security"
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Perfect example of the snowflake generation.
"Free speech does not protect dangerous speech."
One of the neo-nazi's ran over a bunch of people with their car in attempt to kill and injure them. Did you miss that video? These nazi's are trying to kill people, they deserve life long prison sentences, not an internet platform to spew hate and calls to violence.
> This is an extremely frightening statement to me.
It truly is to me as well. It's something you expect nazis to say.
Imagine if the comment was
"The idea that I'm seeing any of these comments arguing to the contrary means HN is already infiltrated by israel and other jewish sympathizing groups."
It's a form of intimidation to silence groups one disagrees with. I can't believe his comment is the most upvoted on HN of all places.
All the pro-censorship people here are behaving no differently than the neo-nazis they claim to hate. Not only that, both groups share the hatred of free speech and the principles which kept the US from being a nazi germany.
Everyone here is forgetting that Nazi Germany happened because germans supported censorship. Censorship allowed a minority group like the nazis to take over the government and silence everyone else. If the germans had an appreciation for free speech back then nazi germany would have been impossible since most germans opposed hitler and the nazi party. Nazi germany happened because of censorship laws which allowed hitler to ban all political parties and all speech he disagreed with.
But nobody learns history or philosophy anymore it seems.
> Whatever happened to "sticks and stones"? Do kids not learn that mantra anymore?
It seems like kids are taking gender studies instead of philosophy and that is frightening. All the arguments are based on emotion rather than reason.
We've banned this account for using HN primarily for ideological battle and ignoring our request to stop. That's not what this site is for, it destroys what it is for, and we ban accounts that abuse the site this way.
Would you please stop creating accounts to break the site guidelines like this?
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This is fundamentally untrue, but the nice knife twist against gender studies was a nice bit of rhetoric.
I guess the idea coming out of this is that if you want to be forgotten on the Internet, commit wrongspeak. If you want your arrest record and record of your divorce to disappear from the Internet, add some wrongspeak in there - Google, Cloudflare, and others will pull it down in an instant.
"If a society is tolerant without limit, their ability to be tolerant will eventually be seized or destroyed by the intolerant. Popper came to the seemingly paradoxical conclusion that in order to maintain a tolerant society, the society must be intolerant of intolerance."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance
IMO this is the ideal rebuttal to the 'be tolerant' argument.
> IMO this is the ideal rebuttal to the 'be tolerant' argument.
It's an interesting point, but at what point does the intolerance of intolerance become intolerance in it's own right?
If the compromise on things we stand for (Freedom of speech, due process, equality for all) where is the line where we cease to be the things we claim to stand for?
FWIW I'm all for charging Nazis with crimes and putting them in jail whenever they commit them. I would be happier if they weren't covered in the media at all. I'd be over the moon if they didn't exist. But if we allow mob rule (which negates the rule of law) to take over, then we risk claiming to stand for things that we do not.
Popper's Paradox illustrates the theoretical. I would argue as a counterpoint that we're successfully as a society not tolerant without limit because of the rule of law.
It's a circular argument that leads nowhere. Just recurse one more time to see it: the people shutting down StormFront, Milo Whatshisname, James Damore, Brendan Eich etc are paragons of intolerance. They scream, they shout, they blockade, they demand firings and other forms of retribution, they DDoS and sometimes they get violent. Meanwhile many in the media and at places like Google stand by and do nothing to stop them.
So by your own argument, should we start tossing Google executives in prison, for tolerating intolerance?
This makes me think of the game theory site linked in an HN comment the other day. I suppose 100% tolerant people would be the naive "always cooperate" players, and 100% intolerant people would be the "always cheat" players.
Interesting to think about how we should behave in this context... If I recall correctly, the ideal behavior would be the copy-cat?
This seems to validate the 'intolerant of intolerance' objective.
Nassim Taleb talks a bit about this in his draft book on Medium. There's a concept of group renormalization which is quite interesting in relation to hardliner absolutists and how the majority must inevitably accommodate their positions.
https://medium.com/incerto/the-most-intolerant-wins-the-dict...
But I want to know exactly what and how the people who "hate" me think. The idea that censorship solves the problem is pretty flawed; I assume Trump got elected in part by people who felt they couldn't speak their own thoughts out loud anymore. Just like with the Google memo, you create silent resentment instead of keeping a debate open (in as far as some of these people are capable of debate – that's another discussion). You can stick a Nazi label on pretty much anything you don't like, it doesn't mean it's a good idea to censor the other side to death and pretend their concerns don't exist, even if some of those concerns are inapprehensible or appalling.
In some European countries, you were (and well, still are) not allowed to say certain politically incorrect things out loud, which in some countries gave the far right a lot of votes and almost a majority. So people didn't grieve their concerns out loud, but the resentment came out amplified in votes and by other means... While an open debate would likely have created a better atmosphere and perhaps have presented some solutions.
In the long run, you are doing yourself a disservice not pulling everybody into the debate, including terrorists and people sliding into that direction.
I think censorship should be avoided, unless there is a direct and unambiguous call to violent action or a clear violation of other peoples' personal privacy (e.g. "doc'ing", releasing personal information that harms a person).
Cloudflare here admits that large companies are increasingly gatekeeps to the internet, especially in the case of controversial content. They have made a trade-off, and this is probably more about philosophical considerations or personal ideology, but I'd have put freedom of speech and neutrality before censorship of questionable content.
>> But I want to know exactly what and how the people who "hate" me think.
Then go ask them. If there are people that you think probably hate you nearby, I am almost sure there are places in a city where you could go to talk to them.
I know, personally, there has never been a time where I couldn't call the right evangelical church and find out exactly why I am hated.
I've experienced my share of drunk homophobic comments in my direction that do occasionally get violent. I certainly now where to go to find out 'exactly what and how the people who "hate" me think,' I don't for a minute believe they need the internet, let alone cloudflare, to achieve this goal.
That's not why they took them down. You can argue for censoring threatening dangerous terrorist speech all you want but it is incorrect to suggest that is the stance cloudflare took. They censored because stormfront falsely claimed cloudflare sympathized with their cause and pissed of the CEO. Not because the speech itself presented a clear and present danger.
Foreign hosts are not really the right solution to freedom of speech on the internet. First of all it depends on the agreeability with the opinion rather than the right to express it. But moreover they can be DDoS'd just the same without a service like cloudflare. Cloudflare is a proxy not a host.
The core problem is that the Internet is a modern public space while its management has been handled by private entities. Cloudflare is essentially performing the function of the police permitting the KKK to march, which the US constitution permits. They don't have to do it as a private entity, but if DDoS becomes the norm for unpopular speech then the internet is no longer a public space, just a space for views that don't get DDoS'd.
> Cloudflare is essentially performing the function of the police permitting the KKK to march, which the US constitution permits
The better analogy is that Cloudflare is performing the function of private security instead of a police force.
The United State government doesn't require any private entities to provide armed security for political groups they dislike (in fact, the US government couldn't make such a mandate as the mandate itself would fall afoul of the first amendment).
If we believe that there must be a steward of this resource that should provide this kind of service in a first amendment protected manner, then we should advocate that the government offer DDoS protection services.
I agree. As our society moves more to Internet-based communication we must consider how to preserve and apply the principles of free speech when so much of it is governed by private entities. Is free speech not a desirable trait? Is it merely something that racists exploit, and thus the move to autocratic private management is a blessing, a relief from the constitutional shackles that would compel, say, a law enforcement officer to beat back a mob intent on torching a KKK newspaper? Is that a better world?
Remember that these same principles apply to progressive views as well... which have not historically been as popular, and greatly benefited from free speech protections. I would say we would not be where we are now as a society without them.
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What is this "public space" statement based on? Only because I can go there? Like in a shop or restaurant? So if I set up a server as a private person, it's a "public space" too?
Looks like some heavy reality bending for a questionable cause to me.
No, your server, shops and restaurants are private spaces. The Internet, the park and the street are public spaces. The questionable cause you speak of is the right to express views in public spaces.
DDoS is the internet equivalent of a mob censoring public speech. Proxies like cloudflare are the equivalent of the police protecting the right to speak, no matter the view.
Remember that these principles, which date to the Enlightenment, work for all views and have benefited the civil rights, antiwar, suffragist, environment and other movements immeasurably.
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Except it is different. The CEO has clearly stated that they won't take terrorist sites down, or any other kind of site, because it's not their job as a utility provider. [1] Its concerning because of its a violation of clearly established policy with an arbitrary decision by the CEO. If it were policy, it wouldn't be a big deal, my own company has anti-terrorism/hatred etc policies. We take this stuff down. It sets a bad precedent for them, they can't have it both ways.
https://blog.cloudflare.com/cloudflare-and-free-speech/
Everyone who disagrees with you may not be a Nazi sympathizer
Not everyone who makes rational statements about this discussion is saying that other's disagreement is a sign of them being a Nazi sympathizer. Look through the comments and it's pretty clear what is being said by akujin.
Well, should we be taking down Alqueda websites? There seems to be an implicit assumption in this whole philosophy that if you prevent people from speaking their socially-backward beliefs (online, in person, in websites, in writing) then you'll somehow prevent negative behaviors.
I'm not convinced that's the case. I think progress requires a more nuanced approach than "punish the baddy," but an examination into the psychology and a discourse that shows you understand the frustrations that are being channeled into blind-rage.
The problem with this is that your definition applies to literal Nazis, and it's effectively become a fad to call people Nazis who aren't even remotely. The media being partly to blame with the Trump/Bannon/Brietbart 'fascist'/'white supremacist' hysteria.
An atmosphere of free speech that allows for satire and conversation are the best weapons against extremist ideology.
Your post is incredible; you are stating that advocates for free speech are Nazis and shit posters. You are stating that there are no good faith defenders of free speech.
Not all of us will argue to the contrary. On the other hand, expect no sympathy when the powers-that-be decide to knock your favorite site(s) off the grid because they haven't passed the (next fashionable) purity test. You've no leg to stand on.
We don't actually take down Al Qaeda websites in the US.
You make a good point, though I feel you undermine yourself somewhat by adding the "and anyone who disagrees is a Nazi" onto the end there.
> The idea that I'm seeing any of these comments arguing to the contrary means HN is already infiltrated by /pol/ and other Nazi sympathizing groups.
Are you serious? "And anyone who disagrees with me must be a Nazi or Nazi sympathiser."
Combined with the fact that the rest of your comment seems to be calling for Nazis to be silenced... I don't think I'm comfortable with where this is going.
"The idea that I'm seeing any of these comments arguing to the contrary means HN is already infiltrated by /pol/ and other Nazi sympathizing groups."
What it comes down to is that the people arguing for "free speech" here feel safe in this world, with a growing neo-nazi presence.
They don't feel threatened--they're not a target, the system will protect them, maybe they even have guns or plans to live off the grid, whatever.
They can argue that neo-nazi speech is OK because it isn't an existential threat to them. They may even look at the terrorist car attack in Charlottesville and think "lone wolf, random unplanned attack," but what it comes down to is: they're going to be OK. Cops will protect them, their stuff, the system is on their side.
Those of us who are OK with Cloudflare shutting down the Nazis, we don't trust the system to keep us safe. Cops won't protect us, the system is not on our side. We see the actual threat of nazi violence and death coming our way, and the "free speech" people are doing nothing to stop it.
>The idea that I'm seeing any of these comments arguing to the contrary means HN is already infiltrated by /pol/ and other Nazi sympathizing groups.
If you're not with me, then you're my enemy. Spoken like a true Sith Lord.
Al Qaeda websites are not taken down in the US because they can be used to radicalize people; they're taken down when they are used to radicalize people.
Do /pol/ actually sympathise with the Nazis or are they just trying and getting a rise out of people ?
It's a mixture of teenagers trying out shock humor, people trying to be ironic, people who don't identify as Nazis but certainly identify with many of their ideals and straight up Nazis. There's a lot of abyss-gazing that pushes people over the edge into extremism.
Exactly. People who are subjected to that imagery and messaging, even if "ironically" risk internalizing it over time.
/pol/ is not one person and it is in no way an organized movement. Some obviously sympathizes, other are edgelords. /pol/ seems like one of the last places where you can actually have a conversation with political adversaries without risking getting banned / shadowbanned or downvoted to obvlivion for having violated some snowflake safespace.
This comment perfectly illustrates the need for free spreech absolutism.
First, it's just about denying speech to Nazis. Then, everyone who "argues to the contrary" is also a Nazi, and presumably doesn't deserve free speech either. And voila, when you want to deny speech to anyone in the future, you can shut down anyone defending them as well.
> The idea that I'm seeing any of these comments arguing to the contrary means HN is already infiltrated by /pol/ and other Nazi sympathizing groups.
Infiltrated? You talk like having a different opinion than you justifies social stigma and exclusion, do you really think that helps anyone?
I didn't realize that HN was full of 16 year old communists.
> I didn't realize that HN was full of 16 year old communists.
Was the irony on purpose?
Why would you even reply? This is so out of context, and its a petty attempt at being snarky. I think its funny that /pol/ is better at engaging soberly in a political debate than a forum such as Y-combinator. At least add something more, an argument or you know just an actual REPLY.
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Yup, I've been saying for a while that HN has a vocal majority of racists and sexists. They're now being exposed. Great. There should be a legal fund to sue the entire white supremacist and sexist assholes for damages, every time they speak.
> Nazis are no different.
Be careful of this. There are very few actual national socialists in the United States, and they certainly aren't all part of a single organisation like Al Qaeda.
Even among them the majority are probably against genocide since they all deny the holocaust.
What you say does however apply to The Daily Stormer. So I agree that they're a threat and should have been taken down years ago.
Holocaust denial is a pro-genocide ideology. To deny the holocaust of the past is part of denying violence in the present day. It also implies that Jews are liars - it's a very strong piece of anti-semitism.
> Holocaust denial is a pro-genocide ideology
Can you make this case more clearly? I get that it's anti-semitic (the lying point) but not how it's pro-genocide.
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> Holocaust denial is a pro-genocide ideology.
No that simply isn't true. Contemporary Nazis deny the holocaust because they can't morally justify following mass-murderers to themselves.
"The idea that I'm seeing any of these comments arguing to the contrary means HN is already infiltrated by /pol/ and other Nazi sympathizing groups."
Exactly. Thank you for this beautiful statement.
Dear writer of faul thoughts; have you considered that maybe one day this HN forum that you love so much will be closed due your writings here? Let's keep our forum clean from your Nazi sympathizing so that HN can continue as a part of the beautiful open web.