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Patreon Bars Anti-Feminist for Racist Speech, Inciting Revolt

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Re: Patreon Bars Anti-Feminist for Racist Speech, Inciting Revolt

#331

Post by [deleted] »

krick wrote: post #225
vowelless wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or let private corporations do whatever they want. Let there be new ones that come in and fill the gaps. Make competition easier by busting monopolies.

I kinda support your point, but at the same time I'm not sure it's entirely realistic. Here we assume that everything will have competition given the free market. But this is hardly true, some markets are biased towards having a monopoly. Because of the economies of scale, because in practice some services have only so much demand and, the most importantly for our discussion, some services are the more valuable for t…

[deleted]

Re: Patreon Bars Anti-Feminist for Racist Speech, Inciting Revolt

#332

Post by XorNot »

joshuamorton wrote: post #237
wildmusings wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you for mentioning the post office. The post office is a great example of a service that could just as well be private and should, in that case, still not be allowed to discriminate.

And indeed a privatized USPS could potentially be considered a common carrier and regulated as such, although note that currently neither UPS or FedEx is. But that has no bearing on financial services (like square or visa, which are all contract carriers) or hosting companies (also contract carriers), or other things like that. ISPs are the one exception which might fit the bill of a common carrier.

The important difference is that an attempt to speak at unwilling subjects via the mail would constitute harassment with common carriers. They're not broadcast mediums since they are point to point.

Re: Patreon Bars Anti-Feminist for Racist Speech, Inciting Revolt

#333

Post by [deleted] »

agentdrtran wrote: post #206
augustl wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

According to Carl Benjamin himself, the comments were meant ironically. He was reacting to a chat stream, which is missing context in that video, and the chat used slurs like this. So Benjamin used the slurs back at them. Having said that, we have to assume Benjamin’s inner thoughts to know what he really meant, so I’m not arguing we should disregard it completely because of his alledged good intentions.

You see officer, I did all that hate speech _ironically_

[deleted]

Re: Patreon Bars Anti-Feminist for Racist Speech, Inciting Revolt

#334

Post by manfredo »

nharada wrote: post #200
augustl wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

According to Carl Benjamin himself, the comments were meant ironically. He was reacting to a chat stream, which is missing context in that video, and the chat used slurs like this. So Benjamin used the slurs back at them. Having said that, we have to assume Benjamin’s inner thoughts to know what he really meant, so I’m not arguing we should disregard it completely because of his alledged good intentions.

I don't think you should get to walk back your shitty comments by claiming you were just joking the whole time. Based on this guy's past behavior, I don't think anyone is giving him the benefit of the doubt here either.

It is obvious that much of this speech was sarcastic. To the point that I would say that it requires willful ignorance to say otherwise. Take for instance:

> And I see, like, 'kikes are ruining everything'. [laughs] Good—good—good job... You're making your movement look like you're not full of Nazis! Great! Bravo!"

Is it your genuine belief that the statement "You're making your movement look like you're not full of Nazis" was meant non-sarcastically? Do you genuinely believe that Benjamin stated that statements like "kikes are ruining everything" among the Alt-Right makes the group not look like Nazis?

Again, to say "yes" to these questions requires willful ignorance in my opinion.

Re: Patreon Bars Anti-Feminist for Racist Speech, Inciting Revolt

#335

Post by jakelazaroff »

ggreer wrote: post #312
zamalek wrote: post #120

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…

> 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. That's technically correct, but it doesn't get at the core of the concept. If you read the original arguments in favor of freedom of speech, you'll see they don't focus on the rights of the speaker as much as the rights of the listener. John Milton, Thomas Paine, and John…

Listeners are perfectly free to go elsewhere to hear racist speech — Gab exists, 4chan exists, and there are plenty of smaller sites dedicated to this as well. Insofar as they want to support someone monetarily, no one can prevent them from using Bitcoin.

Re: Patreon Bars Anti-Feminist for Racist Speech, Inciting Revolt

#336

Post by specialist »

asdffdsa wrote: post #282
zamalek wrote: post #120

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…

The problem is, "intolerance" is an arbitrary distinction, especially over time and especially now. In sites like Patreon, Youtube, or Reddit which apparently presume to operate as a free marketplace to identify, discuss, and promote ideas, censoring those which merely hate (rather than actively condone actual/specific acts of violence) sets the precedent toward greater and more arbitrary censorship (whether people t…

Freedom Markets™ (laissez faire) means we all define intolerance however we want.

Unless you believe corporations have any sort of obligation to the society they function within.

Re: Patreon Bars Anti-Feminist for Racist Speech, Inciting Revolt

#337

Post by [deleted] »

adventured wrote: post #174
zamalek wrote: post #120

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…

> These individuals are free to create their own businesses and websites which facilitate whatever kind of discourse they please, nobody can take that away from them That's very clearly not true at all. Just a dozen or so major companies or orgs can work together to shut you out of having nearly any reach at all. For practical purposes, you'll have zero reach. Any combined small group of them can easily be enough to…

[deleted]

Re: Patreon Bars Anti-Feminist for Racist Speech, Inciting Revolt

#338

Post by coffeemug »

zamalek wrote: post #120
orthecreedence wrote: post #33

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…

> Freedom of Speech is not the right to be heard.

People keep saying this and repeating it, but as far as I can tell this meme is destructive and wrong. Freedom of speech isn't just a legal assurance that congress shall make no law abridging it. It is also a set of cultural norms rooted deeply in a long lineage of hard won ideas. It is Evelyn Hall's principle "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it". It is Friedrich Nietzsche's dictum that only insecure societies are threatened by quirky characters with weird ideas. It is our own Daniel Gackle's observation that tolerance is the experience of suffering through unpleasant ideas. We endure that suffering because the world is dramatically better on balance when we do.

Popper and the paradox of tolerance have nothing to do with it because we aren't talking about fascists angling to march on Washington DC to burn down the Library of Congress. We're talking about people who may have made a careless remark, or have quirky ideas, or disagree with the overall bent of the arc of history.

By banning these people platforms like Twitter and Patreon are eroding free speech not in the legal sense, but in the cultural norms sense. If these norms continue getting eroded, god help us all -- it may set humanity and the western civilization back by hundreds of years.

Re: Patreon Bars Anti-Feminist for Racist Speech, Inciting Revolt

#339

Post by imron »

beat wrote: post #289
zaroth wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everything about your response I agree with except the tongue-in-cheek “these individuals are free to create their own businesses and websites which facilitate whatever kind of discourse they please, nobody can take that away from them...” 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 spe…

Business itself is inherently amoral (not evil, just lacking any sense of morality one way or another). Businesses don't refuse particular customers out of a sense of social justice - they do it because continuing to service their customers harms their reputation, and thus their business. I know I don't want to do business with businesses that tell me fascism is just "speech", and I'll go to their competitors instead…

> Businesses don't refuse particular customers out of a sense of social justice - they do it because continuing to service their customers harms their reputation, and thus their business

And yet this case shows the exact opposite, and they are hemorrhaging users and money for it.

> I'm saying that it's not good to require business to provide a platform for their hate.

The Overton window really has shifted too far if you consider the things Sargon of Akkad says as hate speech.

Re: Patreon Bars Anti-Feminist for Racist Speech, Inciting Revolt

#340

Post by joshuamorton »

XorNot wrote: post #332
joshuamorton wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And indeed a privatized USPS could potentially be considered a common carrier and regulated as such, although note that currently neither UPS or FedEx is. But that has no bearing on financial services (like square or visa, which are all contract carriers) or hosting companies (also contract carriers), or other things like that. ISPs are the one exception which might fit the bill of a common carrier.

The important difference is that an attempt to speak at unwilling subjects via the mail would constitute harassment with common carriers. They're not broadcast mediums since they are point to point.

Yep, I'm not actually sure if there are any examples of common carriers that aren't point to point. Radio isn't a common carrier, you have to be federally licensed and its highly regulated (and for example all of these youtube videos that we're talking about would result in the makers being banned and fined).
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