261–270 of 789 posts
I'm torn about this. On the one hand, Patreon shouldn't have to do business with people they don't like. On the other hand, at what point do we accept that we have different viewpoints and live and let live? The biggest one for me in recent history was Cloudflare arbitrarily deciding to stop hosting the Daily Stormer. Sure, DS is vile, but at the point we start enforcing censorship on a whim instead of hardened polic…
> On the other hand, at what point do we accept that we have different viewpoints and live and let live? The government, soapboxes, homes and places of business that are happy to have them. Freedom of Speech is not the right to be heard. If people don't like what you have to say, or how you are saying it, they are free to walk away. If you don't like what someone is doing in your place of business, you can also throw…
The reality is no, there is enough privatized centralization in payment and networks that certain companies can choose not to do business with someone, based on otherwise legal speech, and effectively stifle that speech.
Maybe that’s better than the alternative, which is that companies are forced to carry speech they don’t agree with or even find “repulsive”.
However there is a concept of “public forum” and at some point it is incumbent on private enterprises controlling key internet infrastructure like DNS, IP allocation, peering, DDoS, and even payments at some point, to become neutral carriers which cannot and should not interfere with providing services based on content.
This to me is an even more fundamental neutrality than what is referred to as “network neutrality” because we’re talking about blocking service entirely not just prioritizing packets for higher paying customers.
This is a critical stance to take now, not 10 years from now after the frog is boiled. I think the average entitled American has absolutely no clue how quickly a regime can become repressive, and how much repression is going on out there. We tip toe around talking about Daily Stormer when countries today are inspecting packets to cart people off to new age gulags.
Nazis are a pathetic boogeyman to justify this kind of censorship. Laying this kind of groundwork to kick out a “radical anti-feminist” I personally hope that Patreon users rebel against that.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I can't speak to what's really in the guy's head, but he seemed to be arguing with and insulting nazis.
> Likewise, Benjamin has been called right wing and an alt-right sympathizer by multiple news outlets. He rejects those characterizations, calling himself a “classical liberal.” However, a recent Southern Poverty Law Center report revealed he has been a stepping stone for some white supremacists on the path to radicalization. The Right Stuff, an unapologetically racist, antisemitic blog founded by white supremacist M…
> Mike Peinovich, hosted a poll asking users who their biggest influence was in coming to the alt-right. Multiple respondents named Sargon of Akkad.
I can't find the actual poll in question, but from the SPLC's own analysis, Sargon was mentioned a grand total of 3 times in a thread about what brought people to "the movement" on The Right Stuff forum. I guess that counts as "multiple". Regardless it was a very small sample size collected from an explicitly white nationalist (I assume, I'm just taking SPLC's word for that one) message board. Likely most of the people who still follow Sargon have not gone down the racist rabbit hole and just consider themselves skeptics, but hey they found 3 so...
But this part is downright slanderous, or liable (not sure which, need to watch the Spiderman movie again...)
> And for someone who says he’s not a part of the alt-right, he’s been spending a lot of time with them lately. He’s appeared in videos with alt-right figures like Millennial Woes and Richard Spencer, giving those men a platform to reach his nearly 800,000 subscribers in the process.
While factually true the implication is clearly that he appeared with these figures to promote their ideas, not debate them, which is what actually happened. When paired with Spencer Sargon so vehemently disagreed with him that he kinda made a fool of himself, as at least Spencer remained calm throughout.
I don't really care to defend Sargon and don't watch/listen to most of any of the content he produces. I do follow the tea leaves though, and from what I've gathered, while certainly anti-PC/feminist/social justice/progressive etc., he's no racist.
I mean I could be wrong because as I said I've not listened to much of him, but I'm certainly not going to take the SPLC's word for it.
I'm torn about this. On the one hand, Patreon shouldn't have to do business with people they don't like. On the other hand, at what point do we accept that we have different viewpoints and live and let live? The biggest one for me in recent history was Cloudflare arbitrarily deciding to stop hosting the Daily Stormer. Sure, DS is vile, but at the point we start enforcing censorship on a whim instead of hardened polic…
> The societal norms are shifting to a place where there are certain topics that are not allowed to be discussed at all even if looking at them from a critical lens. Patreon want to prevent the expression of certain thoughts. For example, they are against "negative generalizations, of people based on their race". However, negative generalisations are sometimes true. For example the homicide rate in Japan is much lowe…
That is not true. The fact you presented might be true, but the statement that "Jamaicans are on average more homicidal than Japanese" is not identical to the fact about homicide rates.
Your statement implies that those two groups of people are somehow differing in temperament such that one has more violent tendencies than the other.
The reality is that there are many complicating factors, and your statement removes enough of those that it no longer is true.
For example, a similar but more obviously false statement from the same vein: "It is a fact that americans have more total car accidents than the ancient greeks. Therefore, the americans are worse drivers than the ancient greeks" (or similarly "more americans own cars and have no accidents than ancient greeks, so it follows americans are better drivers). The obvious confounding factor there is the fact that ancient greece had no cars, but it follows an identical pattern to your statement. It starts with a simple fact, and then creates a phrase which neatly avoids all confounding factors and has a negative implication that relates to the fact, but ignores how complex reality is.
I think that if you, in seriousness, made a statement like your example, you can and should be banned from platforms. You're mis-using facts to represent one culture as more violent than another, and implying that it's a trait of the people, not a much more complicated result of economic and legal differences. It's an incredibly racist and insidious thing to say.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Would you ban her from Instagram? Honestly I don't find free speech to be an interesting topic, so I'm not interested in continuing this. I just wanted to point out that it's possible to be so charitable that you say something naive.
I don’t think he was naive in saying what he said and neither do I think he was being charitable to blacks or to whites for that matter. Maybe the simplest thing is to let profit motivated corporations do whatever it takes to increase their revenues, and leave the moralities out of the door. If they want to deny service to people because of their speech in the pursuit of growing their business, why not?
No, you're being too naive when you're so charitable to assume that a Brit, of his background and who does what he does for a living, isn't aware of the stigma of the n-word.
I'm torn about this. On the one hand, Patreon shouldn't have to do business with people they don't like. On the other hand, at what point do we accept that we have different viewpoints and live and let live? The biggest one for me in recent history was Cloudflare arbitrarily deciding to stop hosting the Daily Stormer. Sure, DS is vile, but at the point we start enforcing censorship on a whim instead of hardened polic…
Well, that's all well and good; but I do notice that on Hacker News there is a very strong tendency to only report and discuss this kind of thing when it affects "conservative windbags" or people with terrible long-discredited ideas or campaigns against individual women.
It's also well worth discussion "stochastic terrorism", the phenomenon by which injecting hate material into public discussion will eventually cause someone to take it seriously. If you say "carthago delenda est" often enough someone will carry out a mass shooting in Carthage.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm aware of what he said. He also said: ‘I was being anti-Nazi,’ I can't get into his brain and determine if he actually opposes genocide or secretly supports it, but from what I've seen thus far it seems he carelessly uses offensive racially charged language but takes exception with those who advocate for genocide. Just so we're clear, I don't like this guy. I dislike a lot of people who fall well short of being na…
I'm aware of what he said. He also said: ‘I was being anti-Nazi,’ If someone constantly spouts Nazi talking points while insisting they're not a Nazi, you need to consider the possibility that they're lying to you. And it's awfully dangerous to claim that you can't compare someone to the Nazis until and unless they publicly call for large-scale genocide. Modern racists know they can't get away with openly flying the…
Or maybe this is intentional, and the NYT knows how to make me click. You can never be too paranoid about this stuff.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> On the other hand, at what point do we accept that we have different viewpoints and live and let live? The government, soapboxes, homes and places of business that are happy to have them. Freedom of Speech is not the right to be heard. If people don't like what you have to say, or how you are saying it, they are free to walk away. If you don't like what someone is doing in your place of business, you can also throw…
> If people don't like what you have to say, or how you are saying it, they are free to walk away. Yes, but it's funny that we're now deliberating conflating 'people' with 'private corporations', a conflation that folks on the left vociferously condemned when it came to Citizens United. I think we should look at ourselves a bit more carefully in the mirror - are private corporations supposed to be held to a higher st…
Not only should we not get rid of net neutrality, we should enshrine it as a principle further up the protocol stack.
I'm torn about this. On the one hand, Patreon shouldn't have to do business with people they don't like. On the other hand, at what point do we accept that we have different viewpoints and live and let live? The biggest one for me in recent history was Cloudflare arbitrarily deciding to stop hosting the Daily Stormer. Sure, DS is vile, but at the point we start enforcing censorship on a whim instead of hardened polic…
> On the other hand, at what point do we accept that we have different viewpoints and live and let live? The government, soapboxes, homes and places of business that are happy to have them. Freedom of Speech is not the right to be heard. If people don't like what you have to say, or how you are saying it, they are free to walk away. If you don't like what someone is doing in your place of business, you can also throw…