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YouTube bans Stefan Molyneux, David Duke, Richard Spencer for hate speech

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Re: YouTube bans Stefan Molyneux, David Duke, Richard Spencer for hate speech

#711

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Conservatism has a place in society. It does. I've also been confidently assured by my conservative friends that conservatism is a very different politics from racism, fascism, and neo-Nazism. I would not really consider the question of whether I myself am a human being or, as Richard Spencer has posited, a "soulless golem", to be a conservative vs liberal fight.

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The status quo hasn't actually put me in a death camp and gassed me, so it seems to me that if you are to assume all forms of the status quo, and all preservation of the status quo, is inevitably equivalent to Auschwitz, that you have some explaining to do.

Re: YouTube bans Stefan Molyneux, David Duke, Richard Spencer for hate speech

#712

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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Are you seriously comparing the struggle of Jews in Nazi Germany to white supremacists being deplatformed in America? If you are, you should really take a step back and evaluate the gravity of that statement. Edit: Saw your edit. You can usually click the timestamp to reply when there is no reply button. Thank you for the clarification. I'll repeat my previous statement because it still applies, I can tell that you s…

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Re: YouTube bans Stefan Molyneux, David Duke, Richard Spencer for hate speech

#713

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Obviously the First Amendment is directed to the government. I’m not making a legal argument here. But we don’t abide by the first amendment merely because we throw up our hands and say “this is a terrible idea but we’re stuck with it.” There is an underlying principle there, and that principle isn’t necessarily limited to the government. (As a matter of what is good policy, not what is the minimum legally required p…

It's up to the people who run Reddit. If they want to wipe out some subreddits, who is to say they can't? Any mechanism you can imagine to prevent them from doing so would have the effect of forcing speech upon them. A website declining to carry some content seems perfectly in line with American values and traditions of free speech, in much the same way that Fox News is free to choose not to carry Rachel Maddow's sho…

... Except for some people, though, right?

I have an idea how you feel about the guy refusing to sell (decorate) the gay marriage cake (not trying to be pithy here, just tried to do a bit of footwork before replying). Do you absolve that guy under those "American values and traditions of free speech" as you would a website in this case? For me, second-order consequences are as important as whether or not this particular guy must sell this particular cake, when it comes to issues as critical to a functioning free and democratic society (such as speech). So "fair" abstractions (those which don't hide or ignore contradiction) aren't just important, but obligatory. This is an issue that can be reasoned to completion without introducing "protected classes" of human being, because the reasoning and conclusion are the same regardless (and for the same reason more concise mathematical proofs are preferred over those predicated on "complications" such as Riemann).

The guy selling the cake argued that he was being compelled to express an opinion (decorate a cake in celebration of an idea his religious beliefs dictated were unethical), thus making it compelled speech. So, is Youtube being compelled to express a particular opinion, if they do not ban users from the platform, when those users say things people find abhorrent? I do not think so, because Youtube bills itself as a platform where users create content and then publish the content on the platform for other users. Youtube does not purport to be a merchant of the content itself (obligatory reference to criticality of Section 230 protections). But according to his legal defense, the cake guy is selling the decoration of the cake in addition to the cake itself; his artwork as an expression of himself. In other words, Youtube is selling the medium and not the message. But the cake guy is selling the message (in addition to the medium). He is billing his cake decoration as part of his services, whereas Youtube and every other "platform" specifically denies in legal long-form that the content on their platform(s) reflect the views and opinions of the companies creating them. That is the critical distinction, and why I feel strongly that any platform which displays in its ToS that users agree that the views expressed on its platform are not the views held by the company, is violating the right of free expression to the users they ban from their platforms for the speech those users express on their platforms.

Importantly, a big part of my reasoning here is that, subscribing to stoic thought, I place accountability for any perceived "damage" from words on the shoulders of the person interpreting them. I mention this here because I've found this is so divergent from the dominant worldview that it's rejected often with much of the same forcefulness as if I'd stated a value judgment predicated on the color of a person's skin. And this seems to me to be symptomatic, and I'm not sure how this fits into the broader discussion of how the internet fits into our culture. But it's a core proposition which I hope will be addressed directly instead of indirectly, because the implications are clear (you are ceding control of your mind to others, when you allow their words to dictate your thoughts).

Re: YouTube bans Stefan Molyneux, David Duke, Richard Spencer for hate speech

#714

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow that guy's an idiot. He actually claims the Iraq War was a failure because Iraqis have IQs in the 80s and are therefore incapable of accepting democracy. Racism aside, if you've done even a bit of reading on IQ you know it's been rising for decades if not longer. His Jeffersonian Democracy was built by people with an IQ that would be in the 80s today.

Can you point to some of that reading? Pedantically, that goes against the definition of IQ, where 100 is always average so it can't really increase over time, but your general point about people getting smarter doesn't intuitively make sense to me. Obviously we have more knowledge and resources to build on today, but I've never seen any reason to believe modern humans are smarter from birth than humans born 300 year…

Several responders have brought up the Flynn Effect. It's relevant.

As a sign of how far the Western ruling class has gone down the rabbit hole, though, note that Flynn's own take on the broader context is now beyond the pale: https://quillette.com/2019/09/24/my-book-defending-free-spee... .

Re: YouTube bans Stefan Molyneux, David Duke, Richard Spencer for hate speech

#715

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If one man produces 1000+ hours of content then there's always going to be dodgy stuff when stuff is taken out of context. ('If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him' -- Cardinal Richelieu) Black vs white IQ is an empirical rather than an ideological question, and a question best ignored, character and culture being more important than r…

are you actually so far gone you think calling the holocaust an 'overreaction to a Jewish threat' actually makes you an anti-Nazi? Jesus that may be the single dumbest thing I've ever read on this site, congratulations. And, no it's not normal to casually advocate white supremacy in 1000 hours of recorded conversation. Dude's a full on neo-nazi who calls himself a libertarian, which probably puts him in good company…

Exactly!

If you find yourself defending these words, in any context, you might be the problem! It is -not- normal to say any of this, 1000 hours or not.

Re: YouTube bans Stefan Molyneux, David Duke, Richard Spencer for hate speech

#716
post #339

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How many people have revolutionary Marxists murdered in the USA in the last 25-50 years? I'm sure if you dig you could find one, maybe two. If you dig into far right ideologues involved in murders and shootings you will find hundreds and hundreds. I am not a fan of revolutionary Marxism, but in terms of actual danger to people I don't see them as nearly as much of a risk. They also have far less funding than the extr…

Why limit this to the USA and 25-50 years? If we can look globally, even within 50 years, Marxists (e.g., Khmer Rouge, and Mao's Cultural Revolution) have killed many orders of magnitude more people than have racial separatists or supremacists. If we look back further, you at least pick up the Nazis on the racial supremacist side, but that still doesn't get you within an order of magnitude of Mao, Stalin, and friends…

The topic was specifically Marxists in Western democracies today.

Again, I am not a fan of hard core authoritarian Marxism and would be concerned if these people had real power or larger numbers and serious funding. I was simply pointing out that as of today they are few, lack funding or serious organization, and seem to advocate and enact violence much less often than the extreme right. They can be just as trollish though, I'll give them that.

BTW /r/ChapoTrapHouse was also banned for advocacy of violence and trolling/brigading.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chapo_Trap_House

Re: YouTube bans Stefan Molyneux, David Duke, Richard Spencer for hate speech

#717
post #705

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You're absolutely right. At least society will collapse after the far left finishes removing all of its "offensive" pillars, and we'll start building it again. Absolute freedoms of speech, defense, property, etc.

Oh good, HNers are now openly going full boogaloo.

Re: YouTube bans Stefan Molyneux, David Duke, Richard Spencer for hate speech

#718

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I have seen practically this same post on /Pol/ and I really appreciate NOT having it on HN.

Your post is a symptom of the problem. If you can't read a paragraph like that without experiencing an emotional reaction and a need to hide it from yourself and others, it is you who is immature and should stay out of discussion forums, not the other poster. No rude words were used; the hide comment button is right there if you'd like to close it and the tree stemming from it and move on.

Posts like your own really strike me as having essentially the emotional maturity of a small child - if you don't like something, you want to hit it, or cry to an authority to hit it for you. Actually engaging with the comment, or having the strength to accept that people post stuff you don't like and moving on, are obviously just a little bit too difficult for some folks.

Re: YouTube bans Stefan Molyneux, David Duke, Richard Spencer for hate speech

#719
post #647

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You may want to read https://www.popehat.com/2016/06/14/lawsplainer-its-not-rico-...

I know this. The KKK, or at least a great many chapters, is an organization that helped coordinate crime. By this, I mean that hierarchical members of the KKK organized criminal acts to be perpetrated by other members of the organization in their hierarchical control. The KKK was 100% a criminal organization that could have been prosectured using RICO. It would not even have been the only overtly political group wher…

There's a lot of reading you can do about why RICO isn't routinely deployed against ideological white supremacist organizations (including those that refer to themselves as "KKK"). RICO is deployed against organized white supremacist criminal gangs, where there's a centralized "enterprise" and a pattern, rather than a scattering, of racketeering-predicate crimes.

Re: YouTube bans Stefan Molyneux, David Duke, Richard Spencer for hate speech

#720

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I have seen practically this same post on /Pol/ and I really appreciate NOT having it on HN.

> “[There will be a promise of] all kinds of goodies and paradise on earth to destabilize your economy, to eliminate the principle of free-market competition, and to put a big brother government in Washington, D.C., with benevolent dictators who’ll promise lots of things. Never mind if the promises are fulfilled or not.”

Yuri Bezmenov is almost prophetic, given that he was speaking of our current era in the early 80s. He predicted the decline of the United States way before anyone else.

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