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8chan goes dark after hardware provider discontinues service

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Re: 8chan goes dark after hardware provider discontinues service

#931

Post by jacquesm »

azernik wrote: post #888
busymom0 wrote: post #782

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But rights are inherently social No, the founding fathers specifically said that freedom of speech is a God given right and not something which the government gives to a person, instead the government simply recognizes that right. They specifically said freedom of speech is a "Natural" right. Right to clean water is not a right, right to education is not a natural right in their terms. Right to speech, right to sel…

That's a very US-centric view. Most democratic countries with constitutions less than 230 years old have broad exceptions for certain kinds of impermissible speech. (Germany takes it to an extreme, but even that seems to be compatible with a liberal democratic basic order.)

Germany has learned some pretty hard lessons with regards to what too much free speech can lead to.

Re: 8chan goes dark after hardware provider discontinues service

#932

Post by JulianMorrison »

mikedilger wrote: post #891

According to Andrew Torba of Gab (I cannot speak to the veracity of this myself): "As predicted in our statement to Buzzfeed: 8chan is indeed online. It's on ZeroNet, a decentralized and open source peer-to-peer version of the internet. It literally can not be censored now. By anyone. At all. Not admins. Not governments. No one. This isn't as good as it sounds. It means no illegal content can be permanently removed,…

The way to remove those things is to arrest the operators and demand they hand over access to the hosting, and shut it down and prosecute them.

Re: 8chan goes dark after hardware provider discontinues service

#933

Post by ohithereyou »

stelonix wrote: post #580
devmunchies wrote: post #549

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> some minimum level of education What a bunch of horse crap. Being told what to think, what to buy, who to vote for, how to feel. If you claim to believe in a liberal democracy but want "education" or limited-speech then you don't have must faith in the system. Democracy has been broken since the rise of technology and mass media. If you control the narrative, you control the people, and the power. The outrage over…

I respectfully and vehemently disagree. Hate speech has been proven to be able to convince people by virtue of appealing to their emotions rather than their intellect . It does not make sense to have a society based around human rights, with a point of view where stealing, murdering or otherwise deceiving people is wrong, while at the same time allowing speech which can subvert that same democracy. It's simply not sm…

>Hate speech has been proven to be able to convince people by virtue of appealing to their emotions rather than their intellect.

Replace hate speech with advertising and it reads the same.

Re: 8chan goes dark after hardware provider discontinues service

#934

Post by ohithereyou »

JohnBooty wrote: post #900
devmunchies wrote: post #549

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> some minimum level of education What a bunch of horse crap. Being told what to think, what to buy, who to vote for, how to feel. If you claim to believe in a liberal democracy but want "education" or limited-speech then you don't have must faith in the system. Democracy has been broken since the rise of technology and mass media. If you control the narrative, you control the people, and the power. The outrage over…

What a bunch of horse crap. Being told what to think, what to buy, who to vote for, how to feel. We don't do anything else this way. When an airplane has a problem in midair, we don't let the passengers each have one equal vote on what ought to be done, regardless of how much they know about flying. A doctor doesn't crowdsource ideas in the middle of surgery. She certainly could , and it might work, but only if the c…

This is why the US is a constitutional republic designed with a lower house that was elected by and represented the interests of the people of the several states and a senate that was appointed by the legislatures of the several states and represented their interests.

The drafters of the constitution did not want the citizens of the country to have up and down votes about specific policy. Add to that the limited spread of information due to lacking infrastructure (and, well, a man on a horse on a several day's ride being the fastest way to carry news), and the populace would be too ill informed to be able to make a decision based on current facts. This is also why the US does not elect presidents based on popular vote and uses electors are representatives for the local voters.

Re: 8chan goes dark after hardware provider discontinues service

#935

Post by d0100 »

solohan wrote: post #920
saintPirelli wrote: post #910

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> For example, I don't think my freedom of speech should trump Cloudflare's or Voxility's right to freedom of association. Right, but those only produce a conflict in a very specific case and your right to free speech should be defended by your government/peers regardless of where you do the caching for your blog (or whatever). I have a huge issue with this modern relativist approach, because it leads to the situatio…

I sympathize with this argument, but it has several problems: Rights and wrongs are inherently social constructs. The is no (currently) discovered moral potential in the laws of the universe, nor is there a well defined, clearly bounded, definition of life. I would argue that relativism is in fact the fundamental construct, and that societies only arise in the unstable balances between extremes. That's not to say tha…

> I would argue that relativism is in fact the fundamental construct

Then you pretty much agree with any practice that is currently-bad-but-wasn't-in-the-past? After all, it was relatively ok at the time, and can be again.

Minorities, women and children beware!

Re: 8chan goes dark after hardware provider discontinues service

#936

Post by jokoon »

tepidandroid wrote: post #139

My opinion is that freedom of speech is a fine ideal to strive for, but it relies on having a stable society with some minimum level of education (moral and philosophical too, not just the technical kind). It requires people who are able to fully parse the implications of what they are hearing to make sound and rational judgements on the rejection of an idea or the embrace of it. It creates a moral duty for the peopl…

If you can make your message visible to thousands of people or (tens of, hundreds of), instantly, for free, I don't think it's playing with the same rules anymore. It's a huge societal breakthrough. Freedom of speech was not an interesting idea before the printing press happened. The internet is another step beyond the printing press. It will require a lot of human thinking and debating before the internet is able to adapt and improve society like the printing press did.

China and Russia are often saying that western societies are vulnerable because freedom of speech, but it becomes true only if the internet exists.

I personally think that online hate will force society to work on the cause of hate, so in the end society will be more cautious about hateful ideologies, but we might also work on poverty, lack of education and mental illness which are often the cause of hate speech. The population will naturally become more aware of the implication of their extreme opinions, and learn to moderate their speech to let other answers happen.

In the end I think we're already benefiting a lot from the internet, it's just that the problems it create are more visible.

The problem is malignant anonymity and online trust. Once the internet is more focused on local problems, people will stop behaving like invisible ghosts and will be polite again.

Re: 8chan goes dark after hardware provider discontinues service

#937

Post by d0100 »

csa wrote: post #666
devmunchies wrote: post #549

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> some minimum level of education What a bunch of horse crap. Being told what to think, what to buy, who to vote for, how to feel. If you claim to believe in a liberal democracy but want "education" or limited-speech then you don't have must faith in the system. Democracy has been broken since the rise of technology and mass media. If you control the narrative, you control the people, and the power. The outrage over…

> What a bunch of horse crap. Being told what to think, what to buy, who to vote for, how to feel. While much education in the US may have been reduced to this, your quote does not represent a proper education in theory or practice. A proper education teaches you how to think rather than what to think. Note that critical thinking is typically a key component in such education programs. And yes, I think critical think…

> A proper education teaches you how to think rather than what to think

No true education...

Re: 8chan goes dark after hardware provider discontinues service

#939

Post by dangerface »

tepidandroid wrote: post #139

My opinion is that freedom of speech is a fine ideal to strive for, but it relies on having a stable society with some minimum level of education (moral and philosophical too, not just the technical kind). It requires people who are able to fully parse the implications of what they are hearing to make sound and rational judgements on the rejection of an idea or the embrace of it. It creates a moral duty for the peopl…

> Moderate people are repulsed by such forums and the quantity of hate-speech they generate, which further compounds the negative feedback loop.

As a moderate I am not repulsed by the repulsive, I'm interested in understanding it, and I think all moderates are.

People have a fascination with what repulses us look at documentaries about murders, ww2 etc.

Todays problem is that moderates can not openly debate the extremists without themselves being labled as an extremist so their arguments can be dismissed, deplatformed and then used as justification for a personal attack.

Re: 8chan goes dark after hardware provider discontinues service

#940

Post by naasking »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #922
saintPirelli wrote: post #910

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> For example, I don't think my freedom of speech should trump Cloudflare's or Voxility's right to freedom of association. Right, but those only produce a conflict in a very specific case and your right to free speech should be defended by your government/peers regardless of where you do the caching for your blog (or whatever). I have a huge issue with this modern relativist approach, because it leads to the situatio…

Disagree. "Absolutely positively absolute rights" are taking decent heuristics and turning them into thought-terminating clichés. Let's go with the "right to live". Consider questions such as: - Who has that right? You, or your body? If you don't want to live, should you be forced to? What if you're suffering so badly it's debilitating, and this state won't improve until you eventually die? Is living in a state of en…

> "Absolutely positively absolute rights" are taking decent heuristics

You're assuming that moral propositions are heuristics or a utilitarian optimization problem, and not moral facts that are simply true or not true. This is still a contentious debate, and not the only possibilities either.

In this case, the answers to your questions depends entirely on what the moral facts are. For example, it may be morally impermissible to take a life under any circumstances, which answers many of your questions quite clearly.

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