“In theory there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice there is.”
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Let’s practice!
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Choice phrasing.
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“It’s tough to make predictions, especially about the future.”
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Knocked down by Adam Smith’s invisible pimp hand.
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And it’s problems like this that keep me awake (or dreaming) thinking about how to do an open source distributed BBS with no central control or domains, no way to globally delete posts or ban-hammer the shitposters, edgelords and fuckjobs like this, or even shut the thing down, and still carefully rig the game so that they’ll be shoved into their own little bubble of nodes, distributed by no one else.
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I like how the old trope about how “the internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it” has been completely falsified, with the support of the people who even 10 years ago would have been utterly appalled at the notion that we should trust corporations to be the speech police.
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We live in the world of disinformation wants to be free now.
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Doesn’t Mastodon do some of that? (he asked, having no Mastodon account and having very little understanding of how it works) (or interest, frankly, until it gets some more users)
Also, I feel like Twitter could be doing a lot of that right now, if Jack’s primary interest wasn’t on making money by letting Nazis tweet death threats to anyone they wanted.
So give them their own private sand boxes to shit in?
That never works… evil and hatred are a contagion; it only exists to spread and infect everything it touches.
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When you propose a solution to a short term problem, and someone else points out that this will contribute to longer term problems without knowing a better short term solution, does that mean that they are advocating for inaction? A viable course of action would be to stick with the short term solution, be aware of the long term problems and side effects, and don’t treat people who care about solving them as enemies.
I must admit that I am indeed short on better ideas on how to deal with this particular hate group in the short term. And it’s quite far away from where I am, so I won’t be of much help anyway, so keep doing whatever you’re doing.
In the long term, If the short-term solution involves radically no-platforming the nazis using plutocratic means, then the long-term solution should include adding checks and balances to that process. Try getting as much as possible of the political spectrum aboard. It’s no good if a slightly-right-of-center person is left with the impression that “first they came for the Nazis” and suddenly think they have to oppose you in the name of freedom.
So yes, I think that how we talk to each other, and to our not-quite-enemies-but-definitely-not-allies is important. A single conversation means nothing, but the sum of all conversations means the general mood in society. I’m a big fan of initiatives like https://www.mycountrytalks.org/.
I often found that the theory that the difference between theory and practice is greater in practice than in theory is just a theory held by people who are surrounded by incompetent theoreticians. 
I’ve heard many people say “filter bubble” effect of modern internet communication is a major cause of the problem, as it tends to radicalize people. Not sure if that’s a local consensus only, but in Austrian media I haven’t really seen anyone dispute it. But there are many people kept awake thinking about how to do a social network like thing that has a natural tendency to expose people to opposing views. Without being to in-your-face about it, of course.
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The term “liberal” and “liberalism” can get confusing, especially when one looks at it from outside the U.S. but also inside.
Without getting into the international scene, in the U.S. there’s political liberalism, which is a left-centre ideology in terms of social issues and economics (further to the left are progressives, socialists, etc. Somewhat to the right of them are Third-Way Democrats).
But then there’s also economic liberalism, the name implying that the market and corporations should have the freedom/liberty to operate without the interference of the state. This is an economic philosophy most associated with conservatives and Libertarians. Thus, you’ll often hear the latter calling themselves “classical liberals” or “neoliberals.”
To further confuse things, I make a personal distinction between different types of American libertarians. The small-l libertarians take an ideologically leftist view toward some social freedoms (at least those that affect them personally) in addition to subscribing to classical or neoliberal economic philosophies.
Then there are the capital-L Libertarians, who are completely focused on the economic philosophy but are more authoritarian/right-leaning on social freedoms. Which gives rise to such odd phenomenon as the self-declared anti-Choice Libertarian (as regards abortion).
Those Libertarians are the ones who tend not to understand how the First Amendment works and who only come out and champion free speech if they feel someone in a position of power and privilege (usually a white male, often a corporation) saying something “politically incorrect” (i.e. being a bigoted or sexist arsehole) is being censored (in reality, per the cartoon posted above, being shown the door).
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Right. There are dangers inherent in any approach, whether the state forbids unacceptable speech or whether it leaves private corporations and the market to do so.
In regard to Austrian politics (and German politics), I just find it disturbing that far-right parties are being allowed to get anywhere close to the levers of power. They’re not a majority yet, but a quarter of the electorate of a country that suffered under Nazi rule is saying “yeah, let’s give these guys a fair chance. How bad could it be?”
It only confirms my theory that historically ignorant people start repeating the errors of the past at almost the exact moment the horrors that resulted from those errors die out of living memory.
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“…if people can not express themselves through words, they will do so through violence. No one wants that. No one.”
That actually sounds like a threat to me - you have to listen to us or bad things will happen.
No. We don’t have to listen to you. Companies can kick you off their services, and keep shoe horning you until you are talking into you own ear if we are lucky. The debate is over. Millions dead in WW2 gives us license to say Shut The Fuck Up now and forever.
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I can’t speak for how Mastodon handles these problems. (It’s awkward for me to set it up and give it a try with my configuration. I’ll get around to it one of these days.) There was that incident with Wil Wheaton, so there seem to be issues with top-down control, even if the top is distributed.
I’m certainly not saying that the bottom-up way I want to do it will be better or without problems, just different problems. What I want to avoid is a half-success where it works, but is immediately taken over by the alt-right and out-right Nazis. 
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Yeah, it still needs some tightening up judging by that messy incident. The Mastadon admins need better mechanisms and training to identify bad actors who target and brigade a user in their instance and to hear out the user in question before banning him.
Still, a lot of the other mechanisms are in place that let an admin ban known toxic instances and known individual trollies. Combined with decentralisation that makes it better than Twitter by a longshot.
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I don’t think it’s self-absorbed for me to think and talk about how I can best contribute to struggles for social justice, and whether and how my efforts fit in to the whole. I spend very much of my time working on liberatory projects to address the concerns that you express (and which I share), so it would be kind of weird not to engage in criticism and debate around those topics.
I appreciate your suspicion that people on the internet (like me) are just fucking around and don’t have “skin in the game” the same way that you do. There’s no easy way for either of us to know the extent to which each other actually do have skin in the game, so in my opinion it’s a topic best reserved for other venues. But if you feel differently, I can tell you that I definitely do have skin in the game for a variety of reasons, I just will not be explaining them on the public internet.
Not to belabor the point but I wasn’t actually implying that I was personally important, just offering myself as an example of someone who offers good faith criticism. I could have offered someone else, because I think very many people can and do give constructive criticism. I thought it would be less complicated to speak for myself. Maybe I was wrong!
I disagree that doing “thought exercises” is a symptom of privilege. While it’s true that thinking interesting thoughts is not enough to fix real problems, casting intellectualism itself as privileged is rhetorically powerful but ultimately reactionary (and at worst actually racist/sexist/classist/etc). Discussion as a replacement for action, sure fuck that. But they aren’t mutually exclusive.
I appreciate your arguments against being self-absorbed and blind to privilege, that shit sucks and can be easy to get complacent about. And I agree that we have to be thinking about everyone, cause ultimately we depend on each other.
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