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Gab will become a Mastodon fork

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Re: Gab will become a Mastodon fork

#231

Post by zzzcpan »

UncleMeat wrote: post #228
ryanmarsh wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In spite of the fact that Gab is a known cess pool (cis pool?), I funded it because we need more alternatives to the big social networks. I would have funded Tor and 4chan had I the opportunity many years ago. Not too long ago this was a classical liberal position. Today free speech is passé. Guess I'm just old fashioned. I'm happy to see that Gab is switching to Mastodon. I think it will increase the survivability o…

Why are free speech absolutists only supporting fascists? Where are the people advocating for the destruction of intellectual property rights, for widespread declassification of state communications, for suffrage rights for felons, and for unionization and striking rights? I don't exactly see the gab users advocating for laws permitting sympathetic striking.

HN crowd is not that open to opinions.

Re: Gab will become a Mastodon fork

#232

Post by qball »

wpietri wrote: post #69
vorpalhex wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The darkness is only ever undone by shining a light. By all means, people of reasonable sense should take a moment to look at Gab and realize what counter-factual nonsense it is, because banning it or censoring it will only make it more powerful.

That's a common claim, but I've seen precious little evidence for it. For decades US Nazis and other loons were justifiably obscure. But the rise of the Internet, which enabled all sorts of connection, also enabled our country's worst to more easily connect, network, and recruit. A good book on the topic is Neiwart's "Alt-America", written by a journalist who studied American white supremacists starting in the 1980s.…

>Why did fail? He himself says social media bans were the reason.

Politician blames everything but his own politics for his failure to get elected. News at 11.

>For decades US Nazis and other loons were justifiably obscure. But the rise of the Internet, which enabled all sorts of connection, also enabled our country's worst to more easily connect, network, and recruit.

And yet the number of race riots and violent crime has fallen drastically since the 1980s, even with the rise of the Internet. LA hasn't had a repeat of 1992 yet. There is no Unabomber trying to spread their manifesto and the number of terror attacks in the Western world has subsided dramatically (there are no Troubles in Ireland, terrorists aren't taking over the Olympics, etc.), even though the knowledge to make explosives and sorts of manuals to commit those crimes are more available than ever before. OWS never got off the ground, even with Internet support; it's no surprise that more unpopular groups with far smaller membership aren't getting a huge benefit from it either.

Even if hate crimes are on the rise because the Internet exists, the correlation is small enough to be trivial because the factors contributing to the massive decline in crime utterly dominate them. Maybe we should be focused on keeping those going rather than jumping to conclusions.

Besides, if the Nazis come, they'll be voted in overwhelmingly due to an utter failure of economic conditions. Limits on what such a government can do that can't be easily sold by a society, like freedom of speech, are the best protection against such a thing should it ever actually happen.

Re: Gab will become a Mastodon fork

#233

Post by justin66 »

ryanmarsh wrote: post #76
gargron wrote: post #8

Gab solicited $5M [1] in investments just to use open source software that anyone can use for free. Wonder how those investors feel about it. [1]: https://thinkprogress.org/social-network-that-caters-to-whit...

In spite of the fact that Gab is a known cess pool (cis pool?), I funded it because we need more alternatives to the big social networks. I would have funded Tor and 4chan had I the opportunity many years ago. Not too long ago this was a classical liberal position. Today free speech is passé. Guess I'm just old fashioned. I'm happy to see that Gab is switching to Mastodon. I think it will increase the survivability o…

> I would have funded Tor and 4chan had I the opportunity many years ago.

> Not too long ago this was a classical liberal position.

I'm not sure who or what you're thinking of, but the classical liberal position would be to support something like the Cambridge Union, Cleveland City Club, or some other free speech and debate forum where social norms exist.

Re: Gab will become a Mastodon fork

#234

Post by amiga-workbench »

rmtech wrote: post #205
amiga-workbench wrote: post #154

I tried to find some remotely interesting content on that site, all I found was boomer political rambling and bile. If they do this, I'll be making sure I blacklist their instances. While there are plenty of free-speech oriented or even right wing mastodon instances, the signal to noise ratio on these is pretty good and there is actually content worth engaging with.

> there are plenty of free-speech oriented or even right wing mastodon instances, the signal to noise ratio on these is pretty good and there is actually content worth engaging with. any recommendations?

I see a lot of people in my feed from bsd.moe and liberdon.com, I'm on layer8.space at the moment but am considering hosting an instance just for myself.

I feel like a burden being on someone else's server, using their bandwidth.

Re: Gab will become a Mastodon fork

#235

Post by village-idiot »

gubbrora wrote: post #226
village-idiot wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What you’re proposing sure sounds like a logical fallacy to me. It sounds like you’re accusing others of having the following thoughts: 1. Trump supporters are fascists 2. I don’t like fascists 3. Trumps supports are overwhelmingly white 4. Therefore I don’t like white people because they’re fascists. This is the fallacy of the undistributed middle.

You understated 2. Its more correctly described as hatred. You inverted 3. I said majority of white people support Trump, not majority of Trump supporters are white. Finally you are overstating my conclusion. Here I refer to to the majority rather then all.

> You understated 2. Its more correctly described as hatred.

So? Political opinion is not a protected characteristic, because it's a choice and it affects others. I hate literal Nazis too, and pretty much nobody sane thinks that this is an inappropriate thing to do.

You might argue about the "Trump supporters are fascists" bit, but that's a very different discussion.

> You inverted 3. I said majority of white people support Trump, not majority of Trump supporters are white.

Still a fallacy of the excluded middle.

> Finally you are overstating my conclusion. Here I refer to to the majority rather then all.

I didn't say all either. If your point is that some people hate white Trump supporters, then ... duh? But anyone who thinks Trump supporters are fascists will hate white Trump supporters because they think they're fascists. At which point, I have to ask what point were you trying to make?

Re: Gab will become a Mastodon fork

#236

Post by manfredo »

UncleMeat wrote: post #228
ryanmarsh wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In spite of the fact that Gab is a known cess pool (cis pool?), I funded it because we need more alternatives to the big social networks. I would have funded Tor and 4chan had I the opportunity many years ago. Not too long ago this was a classical liberal position. Today free speech is passé. Guess I'm just old fashioned. I'm happy to see that Gab is switching to Mastodon. I think it will increase the survivability o…

Why are free speech absolutists only supporting fascists? Where are the people advocating for the destruction of intellectual property rights, for widespread declassification of state communications, for suffrage rights for felons, and for unionization and striking rights? I don't exactly see the gab users advocating for laws permitting sympathetic striking.

> Why are free speech absolutists only supporting fascists?

They aren't. You're totally free to advocate instituting a Marxists state, the execution of the bourgeoisen masse, and forming a communist society on Gab. Gab has the blanket policy that any legal speech is okay on their platform (and yes, calling for the execution of the bourgeois is legal in the US. Non-specific threats of violence are legal as per Brandenburg v. Ohio). There's nothing fascist about that in and of itself. The fact that Gab is filled with fascists is because of displacement. Fascists got banned from all the major platforms, so the only ones that don't ban them like Gab and 4chan are full of them.

Free speech absolutists are disproportionately made of up right wingers these days, likely because the right wing is being subject to harsher censorship. I think it's unambiguously true that most big tech platforms are overtly biased in their policing. People are getting banned for tweeting "learn to code" to journalists (in mockery of how some suggested that laid off coal miners should learn to code). And by comparison, verified leftist Twitter users outright advocated for the doxxing and violence of the Covington high school students with no apparent repercussion. This podcast with Jack Dorsey, Twitter's global lead for trust and safety, and Tim Pool gives some good insight into the situation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DZCBRHOg3PQ

> Where are the people advocating for the destruction of intellectual property rights, for widespread declassification of state communications, for suffrage rights for felons, and for unionization and striking rights? I don't exactly see the gab users advocating for laws permitting sympathetic striking.

This is pure whataboutism. What do any of those things have to do with free speech? Why do you assume that support for freedom of speech should needs to be coupled with destruction of intellectual property rights? Is it not possible to staunchly believe in free speech but also believe that patents are an effective way of incentivizing innovation by allowing innovators to monetize their work? Why does freedom of speech have anything to do with unionization or letting felons vote?

Re: Gab will become a Mastodon fork

#237

Post by jtr1 »

anon12345690 wrote: post #158
jtr1 wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Certainly. And here I am, pointing at some speech and saying "that's bad."

you called it evil because they support free speech. why?

I did not call it evil _because_ they support free speech. I call the specific content of that speech evil, and I call the act of promoting that specific speech evil.

I would call ISIS recruitment videos evil. If someone created a social network for ISIS under the banner of "free speech", I would call their project evil.

I don't in any way apologize for flatly condemning the kind of speech Gab is designed to harbor. And yet I happen to be a pretty big fan of free speech, somehow! If you'd read closely, you might notice I haven't called for the government to shut them down, and suggested that a Mastadon instance might be a good move. There's a case to be made that the Streisand effect means unilaterally banning neo-nazis helps spread their ideas.

In my mind, perhaps it's better to pre-empt their persecution complex by allowing them a space that the rest of us can mute. On the other hand, there is plenty of evidence that these spaces serve as recruiting grounds for a rising international terrorist movement. That complicates things, and I don't have an easy answer for what should be done.

Re: Gab will become a Mastodon fork

#238

Post by Bakary »

antepodius wrote: post #225
rchaud wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suspect it does too, but probably for different reasons. Criticism of "thought leaders" like these guys only strengthens the hold they have among the legions of young people who follow their words like gospel. Any criticism of these figures for their platitude-heavy content and huckster-style marketing must also be a criticism of their followers as individuals, because they have bought into that mindset wholesale.

JBP, at least, generally seems to come off better than the people criticising him. And young people have rebellious tendencies, they form countercultures. The current world culture tilts to left-progressivism, so there's a right-ish counterculture.

The problem is that many look at JBP interacting with clickbait and unethical journalists and conclude that he must be a great and honest thinker in comparison. Actual academics rarely engage with him, and not because they are afraid to or malicious but because he hasn't published much that can even be engaged with outside of psychology. The exception is Žižek, and we all saw how that went for Peterson.

Re: Gab will become a Mastodon fork

#239

Post by rmtech »

amiga-workbench wrote: post #234
rmtech wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> there are plenty of free-speech oriented or even right wing mastodon instances, the signal to noise ratio on these is pretty good and there is actually content worth engaging with. any recommendations?

I see a lot of people in my feed from bsd.moe and liberdon.com, I'm on layer8.space at the moment but am considering hosting an instance just for myself. I feel like a burden being on someone else's server, using their bandwidth.

What's the best way to use that kind of thing? Is there an app that's recommended?

Re: Gab will become a Mastodon fork

#240

Post by busterarm »

manfredo wrote: post #236
UncleMeat wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why are free speech absolutists only supporting fascists? Where are the people advocating for the destruction of intellectual property rights, for widespread declassification of state communications, for suffrage rights for felons, and for unionization and striking rights? I don't exactly see the gab users advocating for laws permitting sympathetic striking.

> Why are free speech absolutists only supporting fascists? They aren't. You're totally free to advocate instituting a Marxists state, the execution of the bourgeoisen masse, and forming a communist society on Gab. Gab has the blanket policy that any legal speech is okay on their platform (and yes, calling for the execution of the bourgeois is legal in the US. Non-specific threats of violence are legal as per Branden…

> so the only ones that don't ban them like Gab and 4chan are full of them.

To be fair, you see just as many if not more socialist and black bloc anarchist content on /pol/ as you do nazi content. It's a meme and most of it is posted by the same people.

Heck, I know one of the more prolific white supremacist troll /pol/lacks and he's Pakistani.

While I don't think it should be considered lightly, a lot of the reporting about that board comes from journalists that know better and deliberately deceive the public because it gets hits.

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