No need; I’m all too familiar, unfortunately:
There has to be a baseline for what is not acceptable within a civilized society.
EDIT:
Dammit, @LurkingGrue;
I owe you a coke.
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I agree with the EFF when they make free speech arguments, even for loathsome speech. Same way I agree with the ACLU when they defend Nazi’s right to speak.
I’m a civil libertarian, and I don’t really feel a need to be apologetic about it, because civil liberties are important… and they apply to all.
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So what do you do with a web site that isn’t being served? Park it?
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LOL!
Am I suppose to say jinx now?
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Did you make that?
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I’m good, but not that good.
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It’s really good.
Also ‘86 45 !’ is really good.
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I wouldn’t include an ideology, I would say you can’t advocate genocide, and use a common sense argument that marching under a nazi flag is advocating genocide. I think it would be reasonable to argue that since incitement of violence is not protected speech, saying advocating genocide is not speech is more consistent than the current incitement-not-okay, advocating-genocide-okay approach. And to be clear here, as much as I hate white supremacists, I’m not even proposing an idea that would stop someone from marching with “White people should be paid more than black people” signs. I’m really after the literal nazis.
I also don’t really buy the “if the give the government power they will abuse it” argument. Despots and dictators usually don’t care what the law is. They don’t oppress people by convincing the courts it is legal to do so under existing law, they oppress people by showing disregard for the law and by killing or imprisoning people who stand between them and power. The idea that the Bill of Rights or the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms would stop a dictator seems a lot like arguing that a law against theft would stop a thief.
I think that when the Bill of Rights was written it was a bold document that explained important characteristics of how we can tell a government of the people from the monarchies that it the US was trying to define itself against. But ultimately I think that while the presence of free speech rights is an important indicator of a free country, it isn’t at all the cause of a country being free.
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for some measure of “us” and “them”.
we already exist in a world where we have the great firewall, region locked content, drm provisions, take down notices, gag orders, dns seizures, and more.
without any uniform system of laws and redress, we will always be at the whim of whatever the internet powers that be feel is in their best interest.
the internet powers that be will cultivate a libertarian paradise right up until the moment they succumb to facism and fall in line – just like many german based companies did during ww2.
that google memo that floated around a few weeks back was one small salvo in that war.
the ground is always unstable, and we can always slip in any direction.
the choice at any moment is to try to guide things in a good direction. and, good future outcomes do not correlate well with allowing white supremacy in our midst.
what might be best for the long term is to aim for some actual egalitarian internet system, with actual governing bodies, so that we can have some real rights. right now it is already too ripe for the picking. and it is already in the hands of folks who don’t have all people’s best interests in mind.
in the meantime pretending we have any footing is a bad idea. ceding space on the hill to white supremacists is even worse.
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How much blood do socialists and communists have on their hands if you take Marxism-Leninism derived ideologies out of the equation?
I have been critical of those doing this for nearly 20 years now. It makes it harder to point out when real fascists start appearing, as we are now finding out.
However, If the Overton window wasn’t looking over the authoritarian right for the last 30 years this wouldn’t be as big a problem. The fact that you think that social democrats bear responsibility for the murder by marxist-leninists is evidence of this. If you think that the likes of Keir Hardy, Clement Attlee and George Lansbury are equivalent to Stalin, Pol Pot and Mao then you are part of the same problem. You are just coming at it from a different direction.
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The EFF is ignoring the long history of how white supremacist speech was not only protected, but privileged at the expense of the rights of others. If anything, suppressing nazi speech is beneficial to free speech as a whole, because it recognizes that the “marketplace of ideas” is much like the actual marketplace - unequal, undemocratic, and entirely driven by profit. Public discourse is entirely constructed inside the marketplace, so assuming a stance of principled “neutrality” over who gets to speak is to ignore the very real power imbalances that already decide speech, power imbalances that generally favour nazi speech.
Considering the US had legally enforced white supremacy well within living memory, and has never adequately addressed that historical injustice, the idea that white supremacist speech needs protecting is ludicrous. A neo-nazi just murdered someone exercising her right to speech and the US President couldn’t even condemn it, so I don’t think we should be focused on defending some website that celebrated her death as protecting free speech.
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Which ones aren’t considered Marxist/Leninist? Is what is in Europe really socialism? Or rather, what kind is it then? Though I concede even I don’t consider either ideology inherently prone to violence. I still don’t think Communism works in any real sense, but if they had had less violent leaders, history would have been less bloody.
Though I remember watching a video not long ago which mentioned that no free capitalist society has ever become Communists. It rose of from people suffering under something else, often times a dictatorship or monarchy or the like. Can you think of an example that contradict this?
on the Paradox Interactive forums they have a selection of flags from their games to use as user icons, with a few obvious exceptions. The general rule there is to be wary of anyone using the flag of the German Empire, as it isn’t the preferred choice for many of them.
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Off the top of my head: Social democracy, democratic socialism, anarcho communism, anarcho syndicalism. All of them consider themselves to be socialist.
It started off as liberal capitalist, then elected a socialist, communist and anarchist coalition. Only after that did the Spanish civil war start.
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Chile under Allende is a counter to this. It was a democratically elected government which began transitioning a capitalist economy to socialism before being overthrown by an American backed military coup which established a decades long dictatorship.
Then we have the issue of where most of these “free capitalist societies” had colonial empires, and the anti colonial movement was primarily driven by communists. Upon independence, many former colonies were ruled by communist parties, despite all the efforts of their former masters to prevent this. While communism didn’t happen in the imperial core, this was in part because the really oppressive exploitation could be displaced onto others.
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The paradox of intolerance is being used as a thought-stopping cliche. Who ever thought tolerance was absolute but far-right cynics and the clueless moderates they eat for lunch?
You can be intolerant of Nazi speech, refuse them civil rights, even agree that physical violence is an acceptable preeemptive measure against them, and still think that it’s a mistake to let markets (or unaccountable regulators) lead the way on stamping it out.
When and where the wind blows the other way, they will bend with it.
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Another thing that I think might be interesting and related to this:
In the UK, there was a harsh class divide between the washing of aristocrats and servants:
In stately homes, items were tagged and colour coded to ensure that the two never mingled, and the popularity of the laundry services offered by department stores only took off when they started advertising that servants clothing would not be mixed with that of their employers.
Source:
https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=BY7ynqJmRKsC&lpg=PA76&ots=HJB062AeH0&pg=PA77#v=onepage&q&f=false
I think the reasons behind the two adverts might be the same- reassuring prejudiced people that their clothes will not be “contaminated” by contact with an object of their hate. It’s a powerfully irrational blind spot in the human mind, as modern experiments have shown:
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Eh, nomenclature. I don’t consider social democrats to be socialists. I actually generally consider myself a social democrat by persuasion. The rough dividing line is: Do you want to expropriate and nationalize most or all means of production?
If you are ok with businesses remaining private (if heavily taxed and regulated), you are not a socialist in my book.
By that definition I’m not a socialist. I prefer workers co-operatives to nationalisation.
and by that definition I am a socialist.
as for social democracy being socialist or not, look at Clement Attlee again. under his leadship the labour party nationalised
healthcare
the railways
coalmines
steelworks
road haulage
electricity and gas companies
yet he was still a social democrat leading a social democratic party.
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I don’t, and I fine this logic to be the problem rather than the solution.
First, freedom of speech is based on the government’s application of laws regarding expression only. Demanding private enterprises - which are reflecting the views of the people running them - have the same standard is ridiculous. Just making the statement “expression should be free to the point that corporate enterprise can’t impact speech” is already infringing on freedom of expression, and the whole reason citizen’s united went through is based on a very by-the-letter interpretation of the first amendment - not to mention other similar things that got struck down like McConnel’s case against a bipartisan law for campaign finance reform.
That leads me to a second point, demanding corporations to act on the basis of freedom of expression to save Daily Stormer’s url woes is already the opposite of reality. The simple fact is that corporations and wealthy individuals already prop up their personally approved sites and use them to eliminate the expression of others. I mean, the Daily Stormer is probably not funded by a single person but many private media corporations absolutely are. The only reason Brietbart exists is because the scales of freedom of speech already enable whoever has the most money to have the freest speech. To say that protecting repugnant sites will one day save the sites we care about isn’t true applied to the real world where the politics of a few extremely rich entities for the vast majority of speech. That is not, and cannot be construed as freedom.
EDIT
For clarity’s sake, I find the argument to be a nonsensical paradox. The government is the only way to limit the actions of private enterprise, private enterprise is also primarily formed of citizens of the country with a right to not have the government limit their expression, and on top of it all the government would have to interfere to provide a more level and free plane to exchange ideas on at all.
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