This takes us to questions such as “how bad is the Freedom Party of Austria”. It’s hard to compare nazi-ness on an international scale (example: having all schoolchildren stand and recite a pledge of allegiance to a flag every day feels so obviously fascist that not even the Freedom Party would dream of it). They are solidly to the left of Front National (fr), UKIP, (uk) and AfD (de). On many issues, I’d still prefer them to Republicans. On others, it gets confusing, as the politicians and the voters are not the same. I do get the feeling that some of the domestic political debate is spilling over into international reporting in a distorted way, leading to scare-mongering reporting about our “nazis”. They’ve been at 25% before, and they were back down at 10% after that. Which is not to say that they are harmless and don’t do any damage.
Any more detail wouldn’t fit in this thread, though.
That’s damning them with faint praise. They’re nationalist right-wing populists with ties to Identitarians, and Austrians should know better than to give them even one seat in parliament after all your lovely country went through in the 20th century.
Hey, you’re stealing my lines!
Seriously though, as I mentioned earlier I think it’s really critical for people to choose sides around critical “party lines”. For example, I think that it’s pretty obvious and non-debatable at this point that capitalism has to go, systemic white supremacy and patriarchy has to go, and ecocide has to go. If you don’t share (and act on) those broad values, then I would say to you what @Melizmatic said about being an obstacle.
But as this discussion thread has shown, it’s possible for someone to align with these general ideas and still end up on “the wrong side” (a.k.a. the other side) of an argument with others who support the same “party line”. When that happens, I don’t think it’s spineless to decide that you’re unsure who has the most compelling argument so far - or even to decide that multiple contradictory views are correct. What’s spineless is to avoid conflict or work by picking sides based on what’s easiest for oneself or sounds coolest. That kind of side-taking is actually really easy, and not particularly principled or honorable.
OK let me step in a minute with some technical reality checks.
We run a hosting business at discourse.org and I can assure you that Gab could migrate their entire site to any colocation of their choice, anywhere in the world, for the cost of ~$30k in server hardware (and that is me being extremely generous here on their load & scale) and ~$500/month in recurring rack rental + electricity + bandwidth fees.
That’s not “radical deplatforming” – that is “we’re too goddamned lazy to move after being kicked off three other cloud hosting services, latest being Joyent.”
Also, Gab raised a bunch of money, around a million dollars as I recall. That’s not even accounting for their monthly “pro account” subscription services. So this one time colocation cost of $30k plus $500 x12 = $6k per year in recurring costs would be tiny for them.
Now if CloudFront kicks them off, then they’d be in a lot more danger because they give up IP masking and DDoS protection. And as a hate platform they need that protection badly.
(Reading between the lines, you can see where Gab would deem it too risky to colocate because they know it is a matter of time before their hate network is kicked off wherever they go. Even still, there’s a metric ton of places in the world to rent network attached hardware that aren’t Microsoft (Azure), Google, Amazon, etc.)
There’s no panacea, but the closest thing we could have to ameliorating what we are now seeing remains strong education, good social support services, affordable healthcare (including metal health), and stability.
Things Republicans used to believe in, but crucially, have not since Eisenhower (at least).
What the heck, I have a freshly formatted Pi with no use at the moment*. I’ll give Misskey a shot. (I’m more familiar with node.js than Ruby and sort-of compiled is a good thing on a small Pi without a hard drive.)
Heh, “room number”, that is so old. A modern OS would be trying to connect to my online identities by hook or by crook.
* fun uses later. Sshh!
Based on recent history, I’m not sure if Cloudflare will dump them. But here’s the latest company to pull a support beam from under this hate platform, so who knows?
Dayum son. When GoDaddy says you are too sleazy for them you dun fucked up big time.
It reminds me of that sequence in “The Rocketeer” when the gangster and the G-man suddenly find themselves fighting side-by-side against…you guessed it… Nazis.
Obligs:
When you find that Richard Spencer was being funded from a 1930s white supremacist eugenics trust fund, you start expecting the gorram Red Skull to make an appearance. (Punchable!)
I don’t think there is anything inherently obscure about the philosophical implications of Nazis which warrants this. While Nazis march in the streets and murder people is not what that position is for, nor when you would want to play it.
Playing it in the 1980s, forty yeas ago … was still nonsense, but at least it was safer for society in general.
It really isn’t.
Liberal is the portion of the political axis in between social democrats and conservatives. There are liberal parties in most modern democracies. They’re the party of the capitalist middle class.
a large part of the confusion with the usage of the term in the states is because of the demonization of the word “liberal” starting in the early 80s. by the mid-90s the term had come to be an epithet which implied an enormous level of opprobrium and so those who held positions to the left of center cast about for other ways of describing themselves. “progressive” seemed to be the most common one. it was also because of this process of demonization that the distinction between “left liberalism” and “classical liberalism” became confused.
I’d argue that it’s more to do with the century of demonisation of “socialist”.
Erasing the normal left (i.e. socialists) from the political landscape created a vacuum; the unnatural association of liberal with left-wing distorted the definitions.
The current crop of progressives aren’t moving away from the Fox News demonisation of liberalism; they don’t give a shit what the GOP thinks of them. They’re instead looking to differentiate themselves from the actual embodied reality of liberalism, AKA the establishment Democratic Party.
It isn’t just an argument over terminology, it’s a genuine ideological split. The establishment Dems are liberals, the Berniecrat Progressives are social democrats, the DSA are democratic socialists.
that has more to do with overall weirdness of u.s. politics. i was speaking more to why the term “liberal” is so confusing in the states. i could write a dissertation on how explicitly socialist parties and labor parties were driven from the field over the period from the late 1800s to mid 1900s has distorted our politics.
And that’s Jenga.
Gab is gone from Philadelphia.
I don’t know anything about gab – I’m not sure I’d even heard of it before this – but I’m curious how much the platform itself is the same thing as its far-right user base. Is it just for nazis, or are there also vibrant macrame and 4H communities?
I’m not asking this as a defense of gab. I am more than happy to see nazi-style people burned out of their third- or fourth-favorite rathole. What I am getting at is, how is gab any different to Twitter? If gab deserves to die, is quitting and ad-blocking Twitter too much to ask?
