Parler is basically a direct clone of twitter's basic features. They use different names but have features similar to that of Twitter's tweet/like/retweet.
Gab's current iteration is a mastodon fork (although iirc they don't participate in the fediverse via activitypub). Gab is similar to Twitter like Parler but is less of a direct clone, offering other features Twitter doesn't have.
Gab has been along for longer and seems to be more popular. Both market to the (mostly American) far right, with their shtick being basically "you can say anything that is not directly illegal in the US without fear of being banned or other moderation". Gab seems to have been more competent in coming back up after bans from their hosting provider and other partners.
> you can say anything that is not directly illegal in the US [or frowned upon by what we* believe God would frown upon] without fear of being banned or other moderation
probably correct that they censor based on conservative opinions. not correct that right leaning americans are conservative. all conservatives are right leaning tho. not the other way around.
Conservative means what it has always meant. The political belief that the law should bind outsiders but not protect them and that it should protect insiders but not bind them.
That's not what conservative means in my country, and frankly without a prefix it's indecipherable. If someone at the pub here says "I'm a conservative", you can actually infer nothing from that statement.
In most cases, you'd probably be correct in thinking that the person would be more inclined to preserve the status quo than changing it too quickly, for fear of unforeseen consequences.
Also, a simple Google search and 30-second skim of Wikipedia throws a wrench in your assertion.
> In most cases, you'd probably be correct in thinking that the person would be more inclined to preserve the status quo than changing it too quickly, for fear of unforeseen consequences.
This does not encompass reactionary conservatives that have become incredibly prominent as a political group in the United States, to the point of completely taking over one of the two political parties.
The main reason they banned "adult content" was simply that porn posters will fill any available online free forum. Reasonably enough, as a forum aimed at free speech, Gab wasn't eager to pay the hideous storage and networking costs of becoming another site like Tumblr, where that content had simply taken over...
Not if handled in the current social media "standard" way: Twitter, Reddit (and ex-Tumblr) keep nsfw content from sight of non-nsfw interested users by special handling - semi-hiding the category, won't show up on searches etc but can be linked to if you have nfsw opt-in.
I have not seen Gab ban blasphemy. Andrew Torba has been pretty clear that any speech that is legal under the US Constitution (with a few exceptions for directly/personally violent threats, doxxing, etc.) is permitted on Gab. A small number of people who have abused the rules have been banned, but in every one of those cases that I'm aware of, it was for generally antisocial and abusive behavior, not the content of their speech.
Banning adult and drug content is understandable though. Most social media sites do that because it's a liability.
Blasphemy is different but I haven't seen corroborating evidence of that.
Even if they did ban blasphemy, it would still be less strict on banning speech than Twitter where entire heads of state have been banned for saying words people don't like (or for being from Iran)
Adverse selection. If your differenciating feature is "you can say what you want without getting banned", your userbase is going to tend towards people who get banned on other platforms. In todays climate, that is mostly the far right.
Compounding this is PR and network effects. Once they become known as the place for the far right, then more far righters go there, and more distant people avoid it.
You're putting words in their mouth and then arguing with those words. Seeing as you're responding to a single sentence, this is an impressive amount of extrapolation.
You're suggesting that right-wing white males are an oppressed minority in the USA. It takes a serious amount of ignorance and mental gymnastics to sincerely believe this. I suspect you are trolling, but if you're not then I don't know what would convince you otherwise because the amount of information you'd have to discard or ignore to reach this conclusion is alarming.
If you're just going to lie, you could at least pick something everyone isn't versed in. As opposed to implying the US has no oppressed minorities, which is by now so well and extensively documented to be the case nobody sane will take you seriously after reading you say it isn't.
It happens on very few of my comments, usually when I'm a bit too forceful while pointing out something that can be construed as politically left-leaning. Thank you :)
White vs Black was something that was ripping the United States apart since the arrival of the first slave on the continent, so I'd have a hard time crediting the KGB for it.
What could you possibly mean by 'no chance for consensus'?
Let me get this straight. One group of people has all the political power in an area. That group of people repressed another group. The second group wants to be treated like human beings.
To me, it seems that if you want to avoid conflict and strife, the first group should immediately give in to those demands. Those demands are just, and the status quo is indefensible, and the first group has the political power to solve the problem, and anyone obstructing the immediate implementation of those demands is the one causing strife.
Since they have a monopoly on power, the onus is on them to make the society they built just, not on the people they are repressing.
>The second group wants to be treated like human beings.
Who is that? The Citizens or the establishment? You have much deeper problems in your society, and it's not skin-color, that's just the game to distort you (yes and the police) from the real problems...trans vs woman, democrats vs republican, man vs woman, white vs black, vegans vs meat-eater those are some of the other ones. You always hit your nearest made up "enemy" not the one thirteen steps away. Keep the dump's entertained with problems so they don't see the bigger picture, and at one point they start to entertain themself with made up problems.
Segregationists, and their various flavors of racist allies of the 50s, 60s, 70s, and 80s. I don't really care which party they belong to. They had a monopoly on power, they built an unjust system, and I will firmly put all arising strife on their unwillingness to treat people of other races as human beings.
> Who is that? The Citizens or the establishment?
African Americans during the broad civil rights era. You are talking about the KGB, right? The KGB operated between 1954 to 1991, so I have to assume that whatever black versus white 'conflict' you are talking about is somewhere in that time period.
> You have much deeper problems in your society, and it's not skin-color, that's just the game to distort you (yes and the police) from the real problems
I assure you, when your society has no-n_____ water fountains, train cars, classrooms, and suburbs, your society's problems include skin color. They include it incredibly prominently.
Are you arguing about real issues that real people faced? Or are we going down some weird, theoretical rabbit hole? I have no patience for the latter.
>They had a monopoly on power, they built an unjust system, and I will firmly put all arising strife on their unwillingness to treat people of other races as human beings.
Had? Have, is the right word or did that changed i the last 2 month? But yeah absolutely, human are humans and everyone has the same right and has to be treated the same way.
>African Americans during the broad civil rights era. You are talking about the KGB, right?
I was talking about that one of the KGB strategies was to heat already existing conflicts up to the point where no consensus is possible, that just works in democratic systems where consent is the ~only way to achieve something.
>I assure you, when your society has no-n_____ water fountains
Look that's the problem, i NEVER said that skin color or religion (especially muslims...remember the hate after 2001, but also jews) is not a problem in your country, again for me there is no race just humans. But ATM it's white vs black etc, that's the opposite what Martin Luther King said like "Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that", atm your countrymen create borders between community's which creates a downward spiral, and the profiteer is for sure not "we the people" but we the media and the party (the two same ones) which can profit out of it and in the meantime easily maintain the status quo (both the democrats and the republicans...they have the exact same goal, they just play different so you have the illusion of choice).
> the first black slaves were brought over by the ethnic group we now call Latinx.
No, they weren't. Latinx (or the equivalent combination of Latino/Latina) is not synonymous with Hispanic, and more to the point, even if it was, the slavers were (by modern American terms) racially White ethnic Hispanics, so it wouldn't change the White/Black racial dynamic.
That’s some pretty impressive mental gymnastics. It’s likely that the crews of those first Portuguese and Spanish slave ships included plenty of mixed Hispanic/North Africans too.
By the way North Africans raided as far as the south coast of England in order to capture slaves of their own.
This is simultaneously a fair point (the Portugeuse were the first slavers) and a miscategorization (puritans/white european invaders were quite racist and violent from the moment they landed on Plymouth rock and began stealing from / killing Natives).
This pro-slavery attitude was huge from you people.
Black people enslaved other blacks in Africa, Latinx shipped them to America where the natives were also enslaving each other. White people put an end to all 3 of these activities, everywhere. This is historical fact.
Welsh, british, scottish, all the same. All three groups were slavers, both of Africans and of the Irish, not to mention countless other Asian cultures.
You rewrite history, white wsshing it to make yourselves out to be the great white saviors despite having participated for many centuries.
“Hey the Africans sold their enemies to us so it must be Ok.”
I know people are going to mad about this because tech boys loooove him but google it he's a eugenics supporter and endorses far-right race philosophers.
On Gab daily. Never seen a single Nazi. Seen some unorthodox/thought-provoking views for sure, but that's part of why I visit and one of the same reasons I visit HN.
Andrew Anglin, operator of The Daily Stormer is famously one of the biggest 'influencers' to move to the original Gab platform, and he remains fairly active there. Gab's front page has been tuned over time to be less egregious, but I have been poking around the site for a long time and remember when even in logged out view the home page would be a lot of altright / TDS type of posts filled with general /pol/ tier takes.
And though the main feed / explore page is not quite as openly tilted toward that audience today, the 'groups' features not one but three QAnon groups, which appear to be some of the largest on the site.
In short - if you've been looking at Gab's content since their inception, it be hard not to see activity from some prominent altright/stormer users, and there remains a large quantity of both weird political extremism and general cultism promoted at the top level of the site.
So what? If you happen to see an obnoxious Nazi posting, simply mute them and move on with your life.
Personally, I usually don't even do that, because it's useful to occasionally comment on their posts (which are a tiny, tiny fraction of Gab's content) to point out to them that Nazi totalitarian tyranny is in no way preferable to socialist/Communist totalitarian tyranny.
I wonder if anyone here has ever even seen either site, because the vast majority of the comments here are simply regurgitating national media talking points about the sites - and those talking points bear zero relationship to reality.
America used to be about the free exchange of ideas.
There are a handful of Nazis on Gab, as I'm sure there are a handful of Nazis on HN. One of the nicest things about Gab is its Mute feature, which allows you to easily to never see the really obnoxious idiots again.
As for myself, I hate all totalitarians - Nazis are no worse than Communists, but they are no better, either. (Arguably, as horrible and inexcusable as the Nazis were, by the numbers they are in the flyweight class for genocide in the 20th century compared to their Communist counterparts...)
Ok, give this some thought for minute: you’re a normal person going about your business everyday and sure, you have your personal views. Let’s say you strongly believe in having your own network infrastructure vs going to the cloud. It’s better for your business than cloud XYZ, which will eat into your profits too quickly. Now, imagine having a rational discussion about this topic on HN and it makes you feel good that you’re able to project your thoughts in a positive manner. However, the next day you find out that you’re banned. All of the sudden, your views are being titled “extremist” as if you’re against the society if you’re not hosting your app in the cloud.
Would you say that this kind of a pushback on your views, which to me don’t seem extreme, have any significance in actually making you an extremist?
> The point is there’s nothing inherently “far right”...
The point being made is that the application of censorship on some platforms results in a uneven distribution of users with such views in platforms that don’t due to self selection.
If the entire population has an X% rate of folk with extreme views, and 0% are allowed on platforms A, B, C... but platform D allows it.
The regardless of the overall distribution of users you cannot deny that the rate of folk with extreme views on D will be more than the 0% on A, B, and C.
Like, it’s not a matter of opinion; that’s just a fact.
So it’s fair to say Gab has higher proportion of users with extreme views simply by allowing them; that is, it is inherently controversial to even allow controversial discourse on your platform.
I don’t care if you don’t like that; that’s irrelevant. It’s simply not correct to assert that the platform is not to blame; when different platforms enforce different rules you get different content on different platforms.
It’s the same for porn, under age users, pictures of dogs ffs.
If you allow it, you’ll get it... and if you do when no one else does, you’ll get attention for being the “only
Platform with [whatever]”.
The argument to here is about if the content is good or not; whether Gab is “far right” or “far left” is just arbitrary bs labels that distracts from the actual discussion of the content itself.
> Protection of offensive speech is a bedrock classical liberal view.
So is the protection of personal freedom, and yet no one claims we shouldn't put people in jail. Protection of speech is not an absolute principle of liberalism; just one principle that is weighed against others. Plus, in this case, most of the speech banned by Twitter is protected and can't land you in jail. It is also not at all a principle of liberalism that any publisher must publish any speech. Quite the opposite, the reputation of institutions like newspapers and universities are entirely predicated on their freedom to filter out and not disseminate certain things. The liberal view is that institutions should be able to build their reputation by choosing which speech they want to disseminate and amplify.
> Tech's obsession with hating on Gab/Parler is based upon on the identity of the people in them, not on whether offensive or not-sanctioned speech should be allowed in general.
Because it’s often one and the same: the “identity” of the people on them are the ones spreading hate speech and disinformation. You don’t need to sugar coat it as “not-sanctioned speech”, nobody is banning anyone for saying “hey I support Donald trump!’ They are banning people for saying “trans people will burn in hell” and “the Jewish cabal that run the world are eating babies and that’s why Biden stole the election and the democrats will be executed on TV by trump”.
Unfortunately this kind of speech comes from mostly one side of the political spectrum. Yes, I’m sure you can cherry pick random left-leaning Twitter users saying dumb things, but it’s not quite on the same level as you can find on ParlerWatch[1] for example.
Two irrelevant niche forums banning you does not make an argument.
Go to /r/conservative and say “I support Biden” and you will be banned within a minute. Does that mean liberals are being brutally silenced by oppressive moderators and therefore we have no choice but to helplessly become radicalised by racists?
That is exactly the point. People that define their identity by feeling superior because of their race, religion or their sexuality are not the kind of people that are known for their differentiated, non problematic comments.
People have suggested re-education camps or other "deprogramming" for Trump voters, including elected Democratic representatives.
And yeah, it is often one and the same. Don't remember who it was, but someone said that the problem with free speech is that you'll spend most of your time defending scoundrels.
As far as hate speech goes, people literally lecture that people who happen to be born like me are "born into not being human", say the lives of people like me don't matter. We are told we should not speak and yet that our silence is violence. Trainings for "diversity" across a wide range of institutions have started segregating along racial lines, and the list goes on. During the Grievance Studies hoax, for example, one of their papers was sent back because it was too sympathetic and not sociopathic enough. Said paper advocated making white students sit on the floor and putting them in chains as a learning experience.
Yet open racism is fine, because the target ethnic group and sexual orientation are acceptable to the activist class.
Likewise, people who get kicked out for "transphobia" will often not be people who hate transpeople in any proper sense, but have policy disagreements where there are no win-win solutions. Yet anything but being completely on board with the activist class's 100% no limits pro-trans policy agenda is "phobia". The claim holds up as well as wet paper.
How about gender affirming treatment for kids who cannot physically know what sexuality properly is because they haven't been through puberty? Someone's a bit off their gender role? Tomboy, nah, they're a boy, time to stuff them full of hormones. Concerns that this just might be insane are again, labeled hate.
Said cultists insist on mantras of trans(wo-)men are (wo-)men in an explicit denial of biology that the best of our medicine can't alter: We just craft a facade that eases dysphoria to care for our fellow human beings. As Buck Angel put it: "I use testosterone to masculinize myself so I feel more like me." He's routinely called a transphobe.
This is basically the biology equivalent of flat eartherism or young earth creationism, but not subscribing to the creed is stamped hate speech. The mantra wouldn't even be necessary if its claim was actually true. It's even worse than flat eartherism, since a human can't at a glance confirm that the Earth is indeed round, but TWAW/TMAM asks us to baldly deny the input of our eyes in everyday life.
Hate and disinformation do not at all come "mostly from one side of the political spectrum" - science denial in the "party of science" is alive and well.
So one is from a leftist journal condemning their own (thanks for the context! I’m glad the leftists are policing themselves from violence it seems!) and the other is a clip? What about the multiple paragraphs about trans people?
> nobody is banning anyone for saying “hey I support Donald trump!’
If that person says they don't believe the results of the election they are. If that person says that they don't believe the vaccines or lockdowns don't work, they are.
Twitter, Facebook, and tech in general have lost this card to play. They've been banning people for things that have nothing to do with racism and everything to do with them being not-Democrat.
In a world where 95+% of tech companies are Democrats in the U.S., it's easy to believe all the head-nodding and congratulations that your views are the only morally correct ones. It's also easy to deliberately avoid any sense of nuance or context because that would require overcoming cognitive dissonance that half the country isn't a bunch of racists.
> If that person says they don't believe the results of the election they are. If that person says that they don't believe the vaccines or lockdowns don't work, they are.
The political spectrum of tech is pretty centrist. Leaning fiscal-conservative, even.
It's the right wing of American politics that has swung so far to the right of where it used to be that it's made tech look Democratic in contrast. If tech employees are supporting Democrats, it's because the alternative has come to look insane.
Because he routinely harasses other trans people and has a coterie of cis people chomping at the bit to bully trans kids he retweets and mocks. He's not called that for the quote you chose. I think similarly the rest of your points are warped and exaggerated to fit your view that you are under siege by "open lunatics" because you're tired of certain people you find undesirable having a collective voice all of a sudden.
It’s mostly normal people freely associating with other normal people, without fascist establishment elite government control, like Twitter, Facebook, elite media, and most other social media.
Did you ever wonder why you are calling others far right or far left? Why are you referring to other American citizens with those terms? Who is pushing those terms that divide the vast majority of normal Americans? Who stands to gain?
The fascist establishment elite are getting richer by the second, while the lower classes are calling each other insulting names and fighting amongst themselves.
There’s an old movie called They Live. When you watch it now, you can call it time shifted documentary.
Wait, you object to describing "american citizens" with political labels and then in the very next paragraph use a political label on a specific group of american citizens.
Alternative viewpoint: platforms without censorship tend to be right wing because that is what succeeds in a free marketplace of ideas. Left wing ideas require censorship to thrive.
Mainstream ideas require censorship to survive. In the 60-70s it was the left that was obsessed with free speech because their views were less mainstream, something many people on the side of censorship seem to ignore.
As glen greenwald says, censorship eventually is always about those in power staying in power. Unless you are in power it’s sad to see so much pro censorship these days.
Read up on Ira Glasser at the ACLU or watch the documentary. Why did he as a Jew defend neo nazis?
Normally, people use "socialism" synonymously (intentionally or unknowningly) with _international_ socialism. There are plenty of other kinds, and _national_ socialism is one of them.
Obviously, if you're going to name your faction with a preceding adjective like national/international then:
a) it's important to you
b) you're probably not going to get along with the other faction that is named in direct opposition to yours
Which pretty much explains how these two groups of socialists hate each other and why the Nazi's 25 point plan [0] reads 50% nationalist and 50% socialist.
Oh, I see. Names don't matter if they are inconvenient....
Nazis (a literal shortening of Nationalsozialismus) - no they weren't the left.. 'cos Hitler, and Hitler bad.
Freedom is speech, but not 'hate speech'. (Who defines 'hate speech'?) What is hate speech except for a reason to stop people speaking. These are ideological positions couched as morality. And everyone needs moral busybodies who know it all, to tell them what to do, right?
“Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.”
- CS Lewis
Besides, party names have never been a good indicator of political standing. Only policy is. You can look at the Liberals in Australia as an example of a conservative party.
That's got to be the lowest bar for "socialism" i've ever seen. So, is Eisenhower socialist as well? The US Interstate highway is much bigger than the Autobahn, so it surely counts?
This only works if you put cold war blinders on and equate the word communism to being left wing. Their policy and actions were decidedly not left wing.
The problem is left and right are not a single dimension. Liberal left wing policies can often overlap with libertarian right wing policies. This is because the align on the freedom dimension. There are other examples but I don't think you can argue that Mao and Stalin are not left wing. They both push the idea that the state can and should supply the needs of the people. This is a very left wing view on both the financial and social dimension.
However it also depends are you simply looking at the economic beliefs of left/right wing idealogies or also social rights? It also depends on which era of left vs right is being considered, since the traits of the spectrum have changed over the decades.
Perhaps the issue is many consider only the economic models as the indicator, whereas many others consider the entirety of policy with regards to equality and rights.
If we're only looking at economic policy, then sure, Mao and Stalin are left wing.
If you look at it socially, then I'd argue they were not because they violently impugned on the freedoms of people to install totalitarianism.
Maybe one could argue they're far left, or alt left in todays vernacular however. But even that would be eschewing much of the social aspects of leftism. Mostly because their aspects of "equality" only applied to the people they deemed equal. Which was unequal to start with.
Well that is what I was trying to illustrate. There is an authoritarian right ( e.g. Hitler ) and an authoritarian left ( e.g Stalin ).
It sucks if you're on the left or right and are more on the pro freedom end when someone drags up the authoritarian cohort of your respective side.
I'm right of centre ( pro private industry ) but anti fascism. I'm pro private industry because I don't like a concentration of power. So a mix of small government with the power to provide basic services and break up monopolies seems the best way to keep everything free. So slightly left wing social policies such as free medical care aren't my first choice but much better than giving the government more surveillance powers. So I think I'm further away from fascism than I am from socialism. Yet as I'm right of centre people throw Hitler is on your side at me.
It's a bit rich to claim you're neither right nor left, when you're constantly repeating right wing talking points. Maybe you don't prescribe to a label, but all your arguments thus far all hinge on labels and not policy.
He didn't state any of his own political views so you can't place him. You should consider whether those talking points actually have some legitimacy rather than using them to identify which group he's in. This is actually part of the problem he refers to.
So you're l saying he raised specific points but that they aren't reflective of his political beliefs but are somehow reflective of mine because I don't agree with them?
That's certainly a level of mental gymnastics to paint things favorably for your political beliefs.
Ok - here's my criticism of the 'right'. They talk about less government, but never do anything about it! Never. They will say whatever it is that sounds good to conservatives, but do the opposite.
Left and right are all on board with the same system. And this is increasing a fascist system, run by corporations.
But whatever the case - if people purport to have a constitution that allows for free speech - but that a lot of people do not have meaningful ability to exercise it, well its not surprising that places like Gab spring up. And that all those de-platformed views make their way there. People need to be able to have their say.
It used to be that it was a left position to say 'I don't like what you say, but I'll fight for your right to say it'. Those days are long gone - de-platform the hate speaker!
Not really if you read Kershaw's two vol bio early on the NAZI party did have some "socialist policies" but Hitler changed the policy and threw those out in the late 20's.
Its also one of the reasons that the SA was purged.
The Nazis were socialist only in name. I highly suggest reading at least the first book in Richard J. Evans’s trilogy on ‘The third Reich’ if you want your eyes opened to unbiased historical facts. Referring to names to determine the leaning of a political party or even community groups is never a good idea. Look at their policies and what their people are saying.
Absolutely, look into it. Mixed with their tyrannical racial nationalism, you will also find many socialist ideas; here are some examples from the 25 point plan, their early party platform:
> We demand that the State shall above all undertake to ensure that every citizen shall have the possibility of living decently and earning a livelihood.
> We demand... that all unearned income, and all income that does not arise from work, be abolished.
> We demand the nationalization of all trusts.
> We demand profit-sharing in large industries.
> We demand a generous increase in old-age pensions.
> We demand the creation and maintenance of a sound middle-class; the immediate communalization of large stores which will be rented cheaply to small tradespeople
> We demand...the abolition of ground rents, and the prohibition of all speculation in land.
> We demand that specially talented children of poor parents, whatever their station or occupation, be educated at the expense of the State.
> The State has the duty to help raise the standard of national health
Edit: I'm not surprised that these inconvenient facts are being downvoted. Why acknowledge facts when you can attempt to suppress them instead? Why read history in the very words of the people of the time, when you can rewrite it instead?
It's hard to argue against this, that really is the 25 point program of the Nazis. However, I think it is generally understood that Hitler's entrance into the National Socialists marked a deviation from Socialist ideas.
My understanding was that there were literally two factions, one which took the socialist aspects seriously and one which had no interest in socialist principles.
The socialist faction had people like Gregor Strasser as figureheads and they got routed out as part of the night of the long knives.
Much of the Big Business that invested in the Nazi party were tentative at first because of socialist name and were convinced by Hitler et al that it was in name only..
> I think it is generally understood that Hitler's entrance into the National Socialists marked a deviation from Socialist ideas.
No, the 25 point plan was announced by Hitler in 1920, including all of those socialist ideas.
And the night of the long knives was in 1934. For over 14 years, socialists like Strasser were an important part of the Nazi party, working side by side with Hitler.
Then Hitler consolidated power and eliminated all rivals - not only socialists like Strasser, but people with many ideologies. His primary target was not the socialists, but his most dangerous rival, Ernst Roehm, the leader of the brownshirts.
Even after that purge, the socialist programs continued, such as Volksgemeinschaft (people's community), Deutsche Arbeitsfront (the German Labor Front), and Nationalsozialistische Volkswohlfahrt (National Socialist People's Welfare).
> The NSV [National Socialist People's Welfare] was the second largest Nazi group organization by 1935, second only to the German Labour Front. It had 4.7 million members and 520,000 volunteer workers.
> The Nazi social welfare provisions included old age insurance, rent supplements, unemployment and disability benefits, old-age homes and interest-free loans for married couples, along with healthcare insurance, which was not decreed mandatory until 1941
> No, the 25 point plan was announced by Hitler in 1920, including all of those socialist ideas.
I'm not contesting that.
Here's what the book I'm reading has to say about the 25 points:
> A good many paragraphs of the party program were obviously merely a demagogic appeal to the mood of the lower classes at a time when they were in bad straits and were sympathetic to radical and even socialist slogans. Point 11, for example, demanded abolition of incomes unearned by work; Point 12, the nationalization of trusts; Point 13, the sharing with the state of profits from large industry; Point 14, the abolishing of land rents and speculation in land. Point 18 demanded the death penalty for traitors, usurers and profiteers, and Point 16, calling for the maintenance of “a sound middle class,” insisted on the communalization of department stores and their lease at cheap rates to small traders. These demands had been put in at the insistence of Drexler and Feder, who apparently really believed in the “socialism” of National Socialism. They were the ideas which Hitler was to find embarrassing when the big industrialists and landlords began to pour money into the party coffers, and of course nothing was ever done about them.
> They were the ideas which Hitler was to find embarrassing when the big industrialists and landlords began to pour money into the party coffers, and of course nothing was ever done about them.
I think that's fair, but I would characterize it this way:
The Nazis started out "socialist" in the traditional sense of collective ownership, and ended up "socialist" in the modern sense (popularized by Bernie Sanders) of a strong social safety net.
(That safety net being restricted, of course, to those the Nazis deemed worthy.)
Yeah and the really really bad part that we all remember the nazis for took place after hitler rose to power and all the socialists in the party were murdered.
When people say “the nazis were socialist” they are trying to draw a line from the modern left to genocide. But this is just not a functioning argument.
I'm not trying to draw a line from the modern left to genocide. But I don't agree with refusing to acknowledge historical facts for fear someone might draw that line.
> Mixed with their tyrannical racial nationalism, you will also find many socialist ideas
Yeah, that's true of their early platforms, but even on paper (and much more in practice) socialist elements were progressively deemphasized as Hitler consolidated power within the party.
> Why read history in the very words of the people of the time,
You should definitely read their words, but you should read all of them as they change over time, and track the objective external facts of who held more power as they changed, and also check words against actions. Because just because something was at one point the words tied to a faction doesn't mean:
(1) that it represented that factions immutable view for all time across changes in internal power dynamics, or even
(2) that it was ever anything more than cynical, opportunistic manipulating propaganda.
1. national-socialism seams to have equality as a target. But this equality accounts only for a small group of superior people. In case of Hitler that was the aryan, german race.
2. Those points and the reality are two completetly different things
In fact Nazi-Germany was not socialist but capitalist. Rich people and companies became richer. The only people that were expropriated were jews, political enemies and minoritys. The jews were working as slaves until death to provide wealth for a capitalist upper class. Siemens for example increased their turnover by a factor of 5. Single persons became incredible rich. At the same time, the normal citizens of germany had to live under the worst circumstances because of the war. (You would not believe what my grandma experienced...)
The core idea of national-socialism is inhumane.
Who ever was not productive like disabled people, or people with mental illnesses(which includes homosexuals etc.) got killed.
The Nazis propagated the rule of the strongest and racism. They propagated social darwinism.
That stands completly against everything the left parties in Germany , even socialism, stands for. The main target is equality and equal oppurtunities for everyone. The main target is a humane society. One of the main points of our left wing, is to fight any form of facism to prevent anything similiar to Hitler from happening ever again.
The right wing partys are the Heirs of the Nazis. They want to exclude minorities and restrict their rights.
They propagate racism.
I'm certainly not defending the Nazis here. I'm cherry picking because someone claimed there were no cherries (socialists) in that bowl of grapes (nationalists) and cherries. So I'm pointing out the socialists.
The role of the left in the rise of the worst governments of the twentieth century should be remembered, so that nothing like Hitler ever happens again.
Many horrible governments start with promises of equality and a humane society (not the Nazis, who promised revenge, but certainly the communists), because that much concentrated power is a catastrophe waiting to happen. A government big enough to give equality is also powerful enough to impose tyranny, as we saw far too many times in the 20th century.
Even the Nazis only rose to power because of the horrible mistreatment imposed on Germany by the Treaty of Versailles. Germans saw themselves as the oppressed people.
I am not sure If you got my point.
I never said that your are defending the Nazis. But you were and still are refering to Hitler as a part of the political left. Something he definetly wasn't.
I'm not referring to Hitler personally as part of the left, I'm talking about the support he received from so many socialists on the left.
Hitler himself was, I think, a megalomaniac who wanted nothing but his own power, and a delusional madman intent on killing almost everyone. He doesn't belong on the left-right spectrum, because he was motivated by nothing other than his own madness.
I can’t downvote. I’m also being downvoted and definitely don’t think people’s goals are to ‘rewrite history’ here. But also the list you mentioned is just that. A list. Behind every bullet point there’s a grimmer meaning, if a meaning at all outside of gaining more support from the socialist groups who had more political sway at the time. No sane person would place Nazi ‘state education’ in the same class as a modern day public school for example.
I personally think it’s just a bit odd that you’re using a propagandist list by the Nazis on its own as proof that they were socialists. The Nazi playbook is so much deeper than that. The books I recommended earlier quite literally only scratch the surface around the tricks the Nazi's played to consolidate power by all means necessary.
I would argue that there was a grimmer meaning behind similar promises from every socialist leader, except those where there was no meaning at all other than cynical pursuit of power (like Stalin).
Despite that, the Nazis did gain support from many socialists, and ultimately, like so many other governments that rose to power with socialist promises, failed to live up to those promises.
But I don't think Hitler himself was a socialist, and I agree that Hitler was using the socialists just as he used everyone else who supported him. I just think people should acknowledge the role that socialists played in helping him rise to power.
> I just think people should acknowledge the role that socialists played in helping him rise to power.
I think practically everyone, including myself agrees with that. And I pointed that out in my original posts. Power doesn't occur in a vacuum and the Nazi's capitalized on peoples (mostly unfounded) fears and anger to grow their base. My original point was that the Nazi's themselves were not socialists. Referencing a name they came up with and their published propaganda was not a convincing argument to say otherwise.
Hitler wasn't the only Nazi. Some socialists, like Gregor Strasser, weren't merely supporters, they were full members and even leaders of the Nazi party.
Do you not see the irony in the fact that you had to grab a tiny snippet of a response several posts prior to 'prove' your counterpoint to a criticism made towards you in regards to practically every response you've had in this thread thus far?
I'm going to give this thread a break since it seems as though you're simply looking for arguments where none exist.
Again, this only applies if we blindly use the cold war association that communism is a left wing ideal, without actually looking at the policy of the people.
The reality is that communism as a movement spans a wide political range, and both Stalin and Pol Pot had diverged significantly from any form of leftist Marxism in their hunt for power.
This is a very interesting world view you have where Hitler is left wing. I think that alone scuppers any substance to your argument.
Stalin and Mao would only be left wing if you prescribe to the thought that communism by nature must only be left wing. I assume your train of thought on Hitler is similar because you're likely equating the socialist word in the Nazi party to left wing socialism.
At best this is dishonest and ignoring actual policy.
Isn't the flipside of that coin that leftism is more or less just plain good and ceases to be leftism the moment it deviates from what we think of as good, ie. basically a No True Scotsman?
One reason the Marxist kind of thought pattern is dangerous is because of something like that. The ideas in and of themselves can sound good and appealing - who wants poor people to live in squalor and so on? But if we look at what natural and sexual selection ingrains in biological life - it is by necessity kin-preferring, competitive and in non-eusocial social creatures, status seeking, for example. Things that prefer non-kin and don't compete just die out.
In that light, a sound philosophy would understand that those things can't be eradicated by human will, take the impulses and hone something constructive out of them. But Marxist thought is rationalist in the sense that it thinks doctrine and reason can mold human nature to whatever shape, and then achieve their utopistic ends. That, of course, cannot happen because we're built from competitive, kin-preferring, status-seeking genes, not utopistic ones. Marxism is incompatible with biological life, and to get biological life to comply for any length of time, it must be forced constantly, or the utopian society degrade into tyranny, which has thus far happened every single time these things have been tried. But it's never done properly, so we should try again.
I'm hardly invoking any sort of no true Scotsman fallacy.
I'm asking for people to delve into the so called left wing policy of the people they're claiming are left wing dictators.
So far people have only been listing people by their party names. Which would mean that North Korea is a bastion of democracy. I'm asking for substance to back up their assertions.
As a german, I can definitly tell you that Hitler was not left wing. There is no overlap in the political views at all. (Something I can not say about germany's far right.)
I have to add that "no overlap at all", may not be correct, as those points were shared by different political spectrums in the history.
The point is: The core idea, is completly different.
Wow. This comment section is a mess. Did y'all miss the other countries in the world that seem to be left wing without censorship. Or just history in general. Typically it tends to be a bit cyclic cycling between "left" ideas being popular at certain times and places, and right wing ideas being popular at certain times and places.
Conservativism largely fails over time in the free marketplace of ideas as evidence by human progress and societal change. Conservativism is fundamentally about suppressing change in favour of familiarity and established norms, which could certainly be seen as censorship. An obvious example of this is the conservative/Puritan influence in American culture, which has lead to excessive censorship of sexual content and cursing in American media.
Censorship is a product of political extremism though, it has no basis in one political ideology, only in how aggressively it is applied to society.
Counterexample - Islamic culture is conservative and thriving in the world (20% of all humans are Muslim), with roughly the same beliefs and culture as it's had for the past 1000 years.
I'm not sure thriving is the correct term. When it comes to HDI, human rights record, freedom of press/expression/etc. i can't think of a single Muslim-majority country ( which isn't the same as Islamic, and i chose the former because they fare better by definition on various freedoms)
On the HDI, the first majority Muslim country is the UAE, at 31, and that's probably highly skewed by its limited population, extreme natural wealth, and slavery. And considering it's involved in a human rights catastrophe in Yemen, it fails any human rights record-based index directly.
On the contrary, I'd say that Islam is stuck in the past, which doesn't help Muslim nations thrive and develop, and those that do, do it based on "luck" ( natural resources).
Who cares? Gradual changes in a philosophy of a culture that has become the great game-board of all adjunct powers, over and over again, is not relevant. At some point all that remains, is the fact, that getting pushed around on the school-yard of the world, is a bad idea.
Nobody cares for the history of getting pushed around.
Just for the now full of mud, blood and laughter.
It'd be hard to make a monolith out of the beliefs, practices and behaviour of over a billion people even if you could boil some of it down into one book (and you can't even do that as even the Sunni majority uses at least 7).
> Conservativism largely fails over time in the free marketplace of ideas as evidence by human progress and societal change.
This is obviously just selection bias. Everything that changes is a loss for "conservatism"; ignore everything that stays the same, which is the majority of everything.
Here are some "conservative" (i.e. longstanding existing) policies: Due process, separation of powers, warrant requirements, freedom of speech. They are currently under attack. But the attackers are the ones on the wrong side of history -- even if they succeed, they lose, because then the monsters these policies were established to vanquish return and the polices get reinstated once the current generation has had a taste of what happens without them. But that route is a lot harder and bloodier than learning from history.
This depends on is being cancelled. It's not the left that cancelled Kapaernick or the artists formerly known as the Dixie Chicks or howled with rage that the Supreme Court - with the exception of three conservative justices - ruled their longstanding practice of cancelling gay people unconstitutional.
No, but the juxtaposition of "footballers' antiracist gestures must be silenced" with "We must intervene to prevent Big Tech from declining to broadcast racism" in the rhetoric of prominent mainstream US conservatives is a pretty good indication that the longstanding tradition they are actually defending isn't "free speech"...
That only works if your frame for literally everything is racism.
Kaepernick kneeling during the pledge of allegiance can only parse as an antiracist gesture if the thing being disrespected (flag/country) is presumed to be intrinsically racist, i.e. it's accusing the whole country of racism. There are a lot of non-racist patriots who would take offense to that. The answer still shouldn't be censorship, but calling any opposition racism is accepting the very premise that the people opposed to the gesture are opposing it over.
Moreover, the implication that everyone who has been canceled was a racist is contrary to evidence unless you're making some heavy tribalist assumptions about anything vaguely conservative automatically implying racism.
And you're still not addressing the original point, which was that the left going around canceling people over speech is inconsistent with freedom of speech. Nothing anyone on the right does can make that untrue.
Show me a case of "cancel culture" and I will show you a case where the "cancelled" person benefitted in popularity on the right wing side. The people that really do get cancelled, you don't hear from them. The examples you know of are all people who benefitted hugely from the "cancelling". Unless you count the #metoo people. But you probably believe all these men are innocent. I don't really get how due process and opposition to trial by media is usually not important with right wing people when someone is suspected of robbery, but when someone is suspected of sexual misconduct it is suddenly a problem. This feels like the protection of elites (because elites will never be part of a robbery, but can be hurt by a metoo-scandal). And I am seriously curious who is calling for a new war in terror. Tell me, who is doing this?
Ok, I'll bite. First three examples of cancel culture I can think of: dongle gate, rosetta mission guy, and more recent J. K. Rowling. How exactly they benefited?
Because the people there are far right. When you go to a website and the first thing you see is calls to murder jewish people and the n-word repeated ad nauseam, all but the far right decide to just leave. The end result is that gab/parler/etc don't become places where all speech exists but instead places where extreme racism, homophobia, and sexism suck the oxygen away from everything else.
Neither of the things you claim are tolerated on either platform. I suspect you've never looked for yourself.
Gab looks like a version of Facebook that's mostly populated by Christian conservatives. Parler looks like a version of twitter that's mostly populated (or was, before) by Christian conservatives with a small side of some conspiracy theories.
Christian conservatives don't subscribe to the beliefs you think they do.
And ironically enough, Parler, the bastion of "free speech" was happily banning people who were critical of right wingers or did not participate in the right-wing group think on their network.
After rallying against liberals being "snowflakes" and needing "safe-spaces", Parler ironically enough ended up being just that for the extreme right.
Lol, yup, I was just thinking that after I posted. /r/conservative is hilarious in that they rail against censorship and free speech issues and yet basically self censor so strongly that only "flaired" (someone vetted to be part of the group-think) users are allowed to post in pretty much all discussions. And even flaired users who dare to oppose the group-think are quickly banned. The cognitive dissonance on that subreddit is quite amazing.
I don’t think they have much of a choice. When I’ve gone there after large news events and they have unflaired people able to post it turns in to /r/politics 2.0.
I have seen discussions there from people on both sides of the political spectrum where neither side was downvoted to oblivion, which is more than you can say for most of Reddit.
This is irrelevant: you're just making the exact argument that they are ridiculing and claiming to not need about "safe spaces".
That's the point: they complain about everyone else except when it happens to them, and then suddenly it's totally just and necessary. As though the reason women, gays, lesbians, transgender, black, mexican etc. communities don't have their own spaces for the exact reason that otherwise they would be brigaded by no end of people who felt just overly necessary to drop in and talk about how they think none of their problems are valid.
/r/conservative isn't ridiculed because it's moderated aggressively, it's ridiculed because it's moderated aggressively by people who continuously argue that moderation anywhere else is an assault on free speech and wholly unnecessary.
It doesn't help that seemingly half the content posted there is made up. Whenever they open the floodgates their narratives get torn to pieces by people that actually know what they're talking about.
Truth isn't welcomed there. For instance, you will be banned for simply stating that Trump lost the election
Except /r/conservative never claimed to be unbiased. After people started brigading and posting threats (examples are occasionally shown by moderators) they had to tighten up their moderation.
In contrast, /r/politics claims to be about general politics but most content to the right of AOC/Bernie gets downvoted or deleted.
> most content to the right of AOC/Bernie gets downvoted or deleted
As Reddit has a user base that comes from the US less than 50%, this might have to do with the fact that the Overton window shifted so far to the right there that the opinions of AOC or Bernie would count as center-right pretty much everywhere else in the western world, with the Republicans being off the charts lunatic extremist right.
AOC/Bernie economic policy may count as centrist by European standards simply because the US is as a baseline much more right-leaning/libertarian and the big econ-left project is to establish a welfare state, which already exists in Europe. (There are rightwing arguments for a welfare state type of solution, but those are contignent on other things being true first, ie. something more ethnostate-y)
But that's not the only relevant dimension of policy:
Culture matters, and they are not remotely rightwing on culture.
The direction they want to move the country in matters, and they definitely don't want to move the country rightward either.
Right leaning content is downvoted because the US population leans left.
The centrist view, the average American, would be considered a leftist by conservatives. This is why they think they're getting brigaded everywhere. They are. Their beliefs are unpopular.
The only reason the US Republican party is viable while being so far right is structural voting advantages. That's why they've lost the popular vote almost every time for 30+ years. That's why 50% of senators are Republican when only ~43% of the populations votes R.
On the internet where these artificial advantages aren't present it's much more obvious that Republican policy is broadly unpopular, and conservative opinion is the minority. Or more accurately, the moderate left is actually the center, and the average Republican is substantially far right.
Your comment would make sense if Reddit and r/politics is an accurate description of the US population.
But I'll have to disagree, since the comment above me suggests that there are a significant number of non-American Reddit users who lean more left than the average American, skewing the upvoting patterns. I'd argue that there are a different set of "artificial advantages" on the internet, such as that.
And when I browsed r/politics during the 2016 and 2020 election seasons, it was clear that Bernie Sanders was the favored candidate by Redditors. However, more moderate politicians like Clinton and Biden actually won the nominations.
And the popular vote count is a reflection of the Electoral College process...if elections were actually decided on the popular vote, campaign strategies would be focused more on cities than rural areas shifting the results.
Redditors lean farther left than the average american. The average internet user is also left of the average american because they trend younger.
But it's also undeniable that the average American leans left. That's why Republicans lose the popular vote in both chambers of congress and the presidency nearly every election. Their positions are unpopular, that's why they get down voted on "mainstream" sites where the user base is large enough to revert to the mean.
And campaign focus outside of urban cores would mean that the average American is even farther left than they appear to be.
Biden is farther right than the average Democrat because he needed to be to win. The structural advantages to Conservatives means the Democratic party needs to run centrist candidates.
In comparison, the same advantages mean the Republican party can still win with extreme right wing candidates. For example, Trump was the first president that never hit 50% approval rating but it was still high enough for him to win and do okay during his second campaign.
This explanation ignores the cabal of moderators which controls all political subreddits, as well as the fact that /r/politics and /r/worldnews are regularly ridiculed in the rest of reddit for being Bernie-Central, to the poinnt that posting about other candidates on the left gets you called a traitor.
Anyway that's why I get my politics on /r/anime_titties.
I'm saying internet wide. There's almost 20% more democrats than republicans nationwide. And since young people use internet more, it could be much higher ratio on the net.
If 2/3 of US internet users are left of conservatives, that's why they get downvoted to hell anywhere outside their safe spaces. IMO the crazy moderators on reddit are a result of the left lean, not the cause.
No, websites have different cultures, so each one isn't a proportionate sample of all internet users.
Reddit leaned a lot more right/libertarian before nearly all coservative subreddits were systematically banned under spez and Pao. Spez also enacted more subtle censorship like algorithmic tweaks to keep t_d out off the front page and eventually the creation of /r/popular to keep similarly "undesirable" subreddits from the front page.
Show me a single mainstream website where conservatives don't REEEE about censorship. You won't find one. Because any website large enough to capture a few percent of worldwide web traffic leans left. Because the English speaking world leans left and the republican party is a hard right structure.
The truth means nothing to those that wont listen. The Republican party is a far right monstrosity. The democrats in US are a right leaning party for all practical purposes. Hell, Biden said he would be fine running with a Republican VP.
By curiosity I've looked on Gab and I don't see any content you mention. Yes, there is something about protests against banning guns, some celebrities teaming up to support Trump, etc., which is considered to be "far right" but I haven't seen anything you mention.
I might have missed that obviously during my five minutes of browsing there, as a result, if they really call for murdering Jews, could you provide a link to such resource - calling to murder someone is a crime in the US, so such link would be a good evidence for prosecution.
https://www.reddit.com/r/ParlerWatch/ is a community that tries to collect and highlight the fringes of communities like Parler, that's a good place to start.
This is a false depiction. I haven’t used Parler much but checked it out a few times and did not encounter a single piece of content advocating violence, talking about Jewish people, using the n word, or partaking in any kind of racism. Your claim that these are repeated ad nauseum suggests you never actually visited any of these sites and are just criticizing them without basis.
"Hate Speech" as you call it, no matter how distasteful you may find it, is protected speech under the US Constitution, and thus (if also not a threat of violence, doxxing, or similar) is permitted on Gab.
I have no problem with platforms allowing any and all speech, since it actually just allows stupid speakers to beclown themselves.
Free speech is the most liberal idea there is - as Voltaire famously said, "I may disagree with everything you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it."
I would agree that this was not really the case on Parler though one could find a couple accounts like that. Gab has been a little more extreme but the worst by far was Voat.
Because the only defense they constantly employ for saying atrocious things is that it's not literally illegal to say them. It's not literally illegal to be racist, it's not literally illegal to be xenophobic, it's not literally illegal to be transphobic. So they think they should be all those things, although they don't call themselves those names.
Things should be said based on the inherent merit of what they say, not be said just because it's not literally illegal to say them. If the only reason you can find for justifying what you say is that nobody has made a law yet to stop you (and we do have laws to stop some things from being said), then perhaps you need to find a better thing to say.
I agree with you, but Twitter is rife with leftists being almost as horrible as Gab's extremists and not getting banned because Twitter execs lean left. So let's not act like Gab users are the only ones being awful.
Good luck with that position. Too many people fail to recognise the Ying and Yang that is Twitter and Gab. Both of them are dominated by extreme ideologies, but only one has all celebrities, politicians, governments and business leaders.
Complete nonsense false equivalence. Gab is _dominated_ by far-right racist content and conspiracy theories. My mum uses Twitter and doesn't see a single far-left opinion, 99% of the content on Twitter is that way.
You're comparing an entire polluted pool that is unfit to swim in with a single floating turd in the ocean.
Really? It literally isn't possible to look at the "trending" panel in Twitter without seeing far-left talking points.
For example, today's trending topics include the "cancellation" of Dr Seuss (with many tweets giving examples of why he should be cancelled in the author's opinion) and the use of the words "latinx" and "womxn" to avoid offending people by using gendered language.
Stuff trends on Twitter without it appearing in my timeline all the time though, so it is quite true you can use Twitter and never deal with left wing politics even if the rest of Twitter is ranting about bean dad or whatever that was.
Hell kpop shows up on the trending as often as leftist stuff but I don’t claim kpop controls Twitter.
> It literally isn't possible to look at the "trending" panel in Twitter without seeing far-left talking points.
You've gone from complaining that twitter is consumed by the left to complaining that the left is allowed on twitter at all.
> For example, today's trending topics include the "cancellation" of Dr Seuss (with many tweets giving examples of why he should be cancelled in the author's opinion) and the use of the words "latinx" and "womxn" to avoid offending people by using gendered language.
Right-wingers post about that stuff 10:1 compared to anyone on the left. You're posting about it now.
> You've gone from complaining that twitter is consumed by the left to complaining that the left is allowed on twitter at all.
I'm not complaining about anything though - are you confusing posts from different HN users? I really don't care who uses Twitter or for what purpose. I'm pointing out that it's unlikely someone could use Twitter and be unaware of left-wing posts on the platform given that Twitter themselves amplify such content daily.
I just looked and nothing about seizing the means of production from our capitalist overlords, or that money is a construct that needs to be abolished is trending on Twitter today.
You are attempting humour of course, but leftists in the West have long since abandoned those goals - I wouldn't expect anything of that sort to trend on Twitter.
The far left is still advocating these things. That's what makes them the far left. If you just lop off the extreme wing of the spectrum so you can call the mainstream left "far left", where does that leave the people advocating for democratic control over the means of production?
Nah, Twitter just seems full of leftists to you because you use the "both sides" or "what about" argument, a common conservative talking point. You think arguments like hey, let's use a word like "latinx" to be a far left talking point. It's silly, but the position is nowhere nearly as radical as "let's get rid of all governments, by force if necessary". The extreme left views to you seem to be to get rid of Dr Seuss. You can't even think of even more extreme left views as viable discourse, such as getting rid of all world rulers.
There aren't nearly enough leftist talking points on Twitter as it appears to your rightist brain, and there's plenty of homophobia, "feminism has gone too far", "it's okay to be white", worldwide anti-immigration sentiments, and (still!) Trump supporters. Maybe they're bots or whatever, but the talking points are there.
> If the only reason you can find for justifying what you say is that nobody has made a law yet to stop you (and we do have laws to stop some things from being said), then perhaps you need to find a better thing to say.
If a person thinks that perhaps, maybe, there's 2 genders and not 700+, they should be prevented from civic discourse? That maybe we should not be providing chemical treatments to toddlers for gender reassignment, that's hate? If they believe that math isn't actually racist, but is an objective way of making sense of reality, are they racist? How about people who criticize Islam and argue that it is a fundamentally violent ideology? That lockdowns and "scientific" COVID-19 recommendations were harmful because Florida had fewer deaths per capita than NY or CA
Today, merely speaking any of these positions gets a person called a "transphobe" or a racist or a science denier. In addition to not convincing anyone and unfairly slandering the speakers, it destroys our ability to think as a society.
Socially "acceptable" speech has never needed legal protection (in any society, liberal or authoritarian). It's the offensive things that need protection from the book burners.
It's also possible that their defenses sound like that to the people making the "not literally illegal to say them" crowd. As a stereotypical example, grab a random Christian, they say they believe gay marriage is wrong on Biblical grounds, this gets interpreted as "I want to hate gay people".
If we look at racist hate speech, people literally lecture that people who happen to look like me are "born into not being human", say the lives of people like me don't matter. We are told we should not speak and yet that our silence is violence. Trainings for "diversity" across a wide range of institutions have started segregating along racial lines, and the list goes on. During the Grievance Studies hoax, for example, one of their papers was sent back because it was too sympathetic and not sociopathic enough. Said paper advocated making white students sit on the floor and putting them in chains as a learning experience.
Yet open racism is fine, because the target ethnic group and sexual orientation are acceptable to the activist class.
Likewise, people who get kicked out for "transphobia" will often not be people who hate transpeople in any proper sense, but have policy disagreements where there are no win-win solutions. Yet anything but being completely on board with the activist class's 100% no limits pro-trans policy agenda is "phobia". The claim holds up as well as wet paper.
How about gender affirming treatment for kids who cannot physically know what sexuality properly is because they haven't been through puberty? Someone's a bit off their gender role? Tomboy, nah, they're a boy, time to stuff them full of hormones. Concerns that this just might be insane are again, labeled hate.
Said cultists insist on mantras of trans(wo-)men are (wo-)men in an explicit denial of biology that the best of our medicine can't alter: We just craft a facade that eases dysphoria to care for our fellow human beings. As Buck Angel put it: "I use testosterone to masculinize myself so I feel more like me." He's routinely called a transphobe.
This is basically the biology equivalent of flat eartherism or young earth creationism, but not subscribing to the creed is stamped hate speech. The mantra wouldn't even be necessary if its claim was actually true. Hell, it's arguably even worse than flat eartherism, since a human can't at a glance confirm that the Earth is indeed round, but TWAW/TMAM asks us to baldly deny the input of our eyes in everyday life.
It's not one side that has gone insane: Good chunks of both are open lunatics. Q at least is thankfully fringe, but even they've managed to get representatives elected.
> How about gender affirming treatment for kids who cannot physically know what sexuality properly is because they haven't been through puberty? Someone's a bit off their gender role? Tomboy, nah, they're a boy, time to stuff them full of hormones. Concerns that this just might be insane are again, labeled hate.
Trans girls have horrible anxiety about going through puberty. It's not them being "a little off their gender role". It's a fundamental dread about being given an irreversible treatment of hormones that will change their voice and secondary sexual characteristics.
Puberty is far more irreversible than HRT. The percentage of people who detransition is tiny; far more people who transition are much happier for doing so. It is also incredibly difficult to actually get HRT. The therapy is beyond the reach of most children. It's a total boogieman that this is happening left and right and all of the children are getting stuffed full of synthetic hormones.
Please educate yourself more.
Anti-trans positions are up there with "gay people are going to sexually assault my children" or "being gay is disgusting 'cause I don't like thinking about anal sex". Complete and utter bullshit based on unfounded fears.
And a religious person would say that we should follow ten commandments. Should we make it illegal not to follow them? Should we move toward punishing the sinners by law? I am against immoral behavior but it does not mean I am for banning speach and art, quite the opposite. The Christian culture is crumbling and is being slowly replaced by a more repressive one. And it is worrisome to say the least.
The problem is that it isn't true, you can say things that they agree with without being banned, but say anything even slightly leftish and it's insta-ban.
It is liberal, in the sense that absolute liberty is anarchy is chaos is degeneracy is suffering.
Non-degenerates know that long lasting liberty comes with responsibility, and that responsibility is moderation and correction.
The far right operates in degeneracy. They may fly the banner of freedom but they fly it alongside nazi flags so what do symbols and ideals even mean for them.
Generally the argumentation presented is a dogwhistle for fringe elements (nazis, other unpleasant people, etc). Sadly they are currently dominated by far-right ideologies (and ofc the inevitable sexual predators).
I don't consider your example of hate speech to be anything close to actual hate speech. I consider your example to be an example of an ignorant and un-intelligent statement.
This is a perfect example of two major issues going on:
1) America is catering to the lowest common denominator of who is offended and therefore creating a race to the bottom for societal norms (i.e. you considering your example to be hate speech, but I don't...but society currently feels the need to make sure you feel comfortable in your safe place)
2) 95% of the platform discussion may be in the form of your "Free speech" example, but if there's any occurrence of your "Hate speech" example, the entire platform is labeled a "Hate speech" platform....and this feeds back into issue #1
I don't know how implying an entire country of people are rapists isn't hate speech but ok. At the very least it's racist and intolerant which has no place in public discourse.
I do agree with 1. America goes too far to cater for people having "safe spaces". This cuts both ways though though and I would say the American right go much further to create and enforce safe spaces where their views won't be challenged. (r/conservative and TD before that).
2. I don't think this is true at all. Reddit definitely has its share of hate speech and nonsense but it's not considered a hate speech platform. It's only when the overwhelming majority of content is hateful garbage that you get to that point. Gab/Parlor being the 2 main current examples.
To me your argument is like many others, trying to find a way to excuse hateful, racist, homophobic nonsense as "free speech" as if in some way this speech should be protected because it provides some value to society (it doesn't).
Many also argue it's a bias against conservatism but that isn't true either. Conservatism isn't meant to be any of those things and if they could drop all of that they might find people much more receptive to their ideas.
There are constructive ways to push conservative views, I myself would measure myself as a centrist. I see both sides of many arguments but I am definitely tired of the right wing rhetoric. Just because I think fiscal conservatism is a good idea and small-ish government can be a good thing in certain areas doesn't mean I should need to read/tolerate all the crap currently being pedled.
> Since free speech platforms don't censor any content, leftists naturally hate them...and they'll do anything in their power to slow them down. Rather than acknowledge this, they make themselves feel better by claiming any non-censoring platform is "hosting far right terrorists".
Parler and Gab certainly aren't free speech platforms, so curious what you're referring to here.
Usenet is a free speech platform to some extent, and nobody gives a shit. Parler and Gab censor lots (and lots and lots) of content, far more than legally required, they just leave racism, homophobia, transphobia and incitements to violence up specifically.
Indeed, liberals are now commonly being mis-labeled as "far-right" in America. The left has become intolerant of conservative views, and labels anything conservative as "far-right". Liberals tend to entertain views across the spectrum, and thus are labeled as "far-right" by many people in the left.
Are conservative views -- low taxes, low regulation, strong military, opposition to abortion, opposition to gay marriage -- banned on Twitter? Let's be honest, we're talking about racism and anti-democracy, and if that's not far-right, what is?
No, you missed the part where this isn't about conservative values — it's about even liberals being banned and called far-right and racist and anti-democracy when they are nothing of the sort.
Liberals are being called racists and anti-democracy as a way of attacking and deplatforming anyone who disagrees with the leftist tribe. This isn't about values, it's about tribal allegiance.
If you actually believe that these people are far-right racists then there is a strong chance that you are being fooled by tribal manipulation.
You're being far too abstract, so it's easy to think you're making this up. Who did Twitter ban for disagreeing with the leftist tribe about, say, higher taxes, unions, civil equality -- all these cornerstones of the left?
The big social media platforms tend to find themselves in hot water when something approaching "hate speech" trends on them. So they have a tendency to regulate that content away.
The center and left in the US are normally not in favor of hate speech, while the right is more supportive of it.
What happens then is people who want to discuss hateful topics and post hateful speech can't easily do it on the current popular social media platforms, so they need alternatives. That's the market for Gab and Parler mostly.
At this moment, it happens that the far-right in the US has a very "hateful adjacent" messaging. They generally support and promote populist, nativist, collectivist authoritarian, and conspiracy-minded ideas. Those often overlap with hate of immigrants and non-white Christians, as well as hate of liberals and social democrats due to believing in their participation in demonic conspiracies. They also tend to suggest violent and authoritarian methods to get what they want, like killing their opposition or storming the capitol, and other forms of violent insurection. Thus they fall in the market category of Parler and Gab pretty strongly.
It's mostly the far-right aka radical right, the regular right in the US does not all prescribe to these and don't all have "hateful adjacents" messaging.
Also some more extremist current left movements also have "hateful adjacent" messaging, though maybe less so, when they do it's often targeted specifically at the far-right, most likely as a reactionary measure.
Also, there are reports of such left-leaning accounts being banned and censored on Parler and Gab, hard to say how true this is, but even if a rumor, it keeps the less radical right from trusting them. And so they are often considered to falsy upheld free speech.
> The big social media platforms tend to find themselves in hot water when something approaching "hate speech" trends on them. So they have a tendency to regulate that content away.
> The center and left in the US are normally not in favor of hate speech, while the right is more supportive of it.
The left is very supportive of hate speech, it just has to have the right target. There's abject, open racism against whites all day. Black people attacking Asian people is white supremacy nowadays.
I think I mentioned that the extreme left side of things also had hateful adjacent messaging. But I personally haven't observed as much of it, and it also doesn't seem there is a big enough market on that side for a startup to capitalize on. Maybe I just never heard of them though?
I'm personally more centrist overall, but I've tried as much as I could to give an unbiased summary, though being unbiased in those cases is hard. I'm trying not to judge the behavior, just observe it.
One thing I have observed is that the current moderate left in the US does seem to align more with Canada/UK/France style of free speech, with a broader definition of what is considered hate speech and stronger enforcements against it. Where as the right seem more aligned with the traditional American view on it, where hate speech is limited only if it can be shown to have directly and immediately caused lawless action.
This seems to be the crux of the issue as well. With the big social media platforms available today, it has enabled hateful speech to have more reach at a wider scale than ever before. It also enabled not only Americans to reach others, but even non-Americans can promote and propagate hateful messaging in a targeted and strategic way. The question is what if anything should be done about this, could it lead to instability and divide and throw the country in turmoil, or maybe it's actually a good thing and will allow more voices to be heard and considered.
It's the age old trade off of free speech and restricted free speech. Where do you draw the line? What risks are there on either side of it?
And my observation has been the right leaning Americans seem to still consider that there should be no regulations on this, and everyone everywhere, even non Americans, should be allowed to freely share, promote, upvote, and target any message they want, even hateful, no matter the intent behind it, because upholding the right to speak up and against the government is more important and so we should stay as far as possible from threading water or any slippery slope.
And my observation is the left leaning Americans seem more cautious, and think some regulations might be needed, to make sure that no bad actor takes advantage of this, or that discourse doesn't rely purely on emotions and hate targeted reasonings. And that not doing so would actually bring more instability and chaos, and the risk of threading the line between restricted but still free speech and non free speech is worth it, or maybe an exagerated concern, where they don't think in practice it would be difficult to distinguish dissenting views from hateful ones or those with bad actors behind them.
TLDR: You can be super racist, describe how you're going to kill everyone you don't like, spread crazy fake stories without any consequence.
It's liberal in the same way it would be liberal to have a party where you walk around naked and smear feces on each other.
Definitely a liberal party, but not one that most people want to participate in. Most people would rather have moderation where you're not allow to scream the N word at blacks. Which concentrates N word screamers and similar onto these free speech forums
Gab and Parler basically just attracted extremist views which is why you see them being portrayed like that. Anything less than that is typically accepted or debated by more left leaning circles. Democrats cover a wide spectrum of society, from the far left to folks considered what republicans used to be 20 years ago in terms of the policies supported.
> "you can say anything that is not directly illegal in the US without fear of being banned or other moderation"
Parler was happily banning leftist viewpoints.
It's raison d'etre was not so much 'you can say anything that's not directly illegal', and more 'you can say anything that the far right approves of' (Some of which, most notably the death threats cited by AWS, also happens to be directly ilelgal.)
> Both market to the (mostly American) far right, with their shtick being basically "you can say anything that is not directly illegal in the US without fear of being banned or other moderation".
It’s incredible that supporting free speech is considered to be only important enough to the “far right” now to be worth marketing to.
Free speech used to be something all Americans supported and defended.
Just because Gab and Parler claim to support free speech absolutism--and use that for marketing purposes--doesn't make it true.
I signed up on Gab recently to see what people were talking about on there, and the discussion is far less diverse than Twitter (there's just no comparison). Twitter has X, Y, and Z Twitter, whereas Gab basically seems to be just Q Twitter these days.
And on Gab, you'll get shouted down within milliseconds if you post something that doesn't fit the general vibe, and you'll probably be called a f#g for your trouble. (I've seen the same thing on so-called "patriot" live streams that also claim free speech absolutism but then ban you for saying anything they don't want to hear, even good-faith efforts to explain the motivations of the "other side.")
Therefore, I can confidently claim that Twitter, just as an example, cares more about and does far more to promote free speech than Gab ever could or will, even though they don't use "free speech" as a marketing cudgel.
> I signed up on Gab recently to see what people were talking about on there, and the discussion is far less diverse than Twitter (there's just no comparison). Twitter has X, Y, and Z Twitter, whereas Gab basically seems to be just Q Twitter these days.
That said, mostly any platform that allows some kind of speech banned on mainstream platforms will initially turn into a hive of said banned content for completely obvious reasons.
> I've seen the same thing on so-called "patriot" live streams that also claim free speech absolutism but then ban you for saying anything they don't want to hear, even good-faith efforts to explain the motivations of the "other side."
This does sound sad. I've found a few places online where there are people of all manner of creeds and they're some of the best places. They usually don't contain wokelets or rabid Q people, which probably explains why they remain nice and interesting.
> It’s incredible that supporting free speech is considered to be only important enough to the “far right” now to be worth marketing to.
> Free speech used to be something all Americans supported and defended.
It's not that most Americans don't care about free speech. It's that most Americans understand that constitutional free speech means the government can't infringe on your speech, except in limited circumstances (like extortion, inciting violence, inciting panic, divulging classified material, etc).
The reason companies like Gab and Parler market 'free speech' to the far right, is because the far right often engages in trolling, harassment, incitement to violence, disinformation, and bigotry in social media. As such, they run into the moderation policies of those platforms and at some point start running into bans. Not to say other parts of the political spectrum don't run into moderation and bans too, but it's a bigger problem right now for the far right.
There's a debate to be had about the power social media giants have over public discourse and whether internet service providers should be able to blacklist companies like they did to Parler. But that still doesn't fall under the umbrella of constitutional free speech. Businesses usually have wide latitude to refuse service to customers, particularly for toxic behavior.
Before taking "constitutional" free speech for a concept, we have to understand that free speech is a prescriptive social norm.
It happens to have a constitutional instantiation. That instantiation happens to be expressed as a restriction on the government's chartered power; this is an artifact of the process by which it was drafted, i.e. as part of a collection of proposed restraints on the powers federal government.
No reasonable person should confuse the very limited constitutional guarantee given to free speech with the norm itself.
Is it really a social norm though? Before social media were people angry that publications chose to selectively print letters to the editor? Or that a business could kick you out for being verbally abusive? Or that if you wrote a nasty gram to your superiors that you could be fired?
It's only now that social media has come along and has democratized publication of text, images, and video that free speech as it relates to private businesses is becoming an issue. Maybe in the future a majority of people will decide that social media is the proverbial public square and change the law to reflect that. But the prevailing paradigm to this point has been that a company has a right (and some responsibilities) to make rules about what people post on their platform.
There are at least three fairly distinct ideas being conflated, I think:
- Was the "free speech" norm ever widely followed? This is the one I think you're objecting to, and indeed society as a whole has never exactly been accepting of all speech. On the other hand, there are plenty of social norms that people generally believe in but frequently don't quite live up to, like presumption of innocence, or "honour your father and your mother". I don't really think this criterion invalidates conduct prescriptions as social norms.
- Was the "free speech" ideal ever widely accepted? This one seems kind of tricky if you just look at the current state of affairs, but then if you look just a few years back at the way people danced around the "hate speech dilemma" even up through 2016, I think it's pretty clear that people generally did, or at least expected others to, accept free speech as an ideal.
- What kind of social obligation is the "free speech" rule conceived as? And this is one I wanted to make a point on, specifically that the constitutional instantiation of it is not primary.
It is not the understanding that, given that the constitutional guarantee exists, there is only a restriction on Congress and e.g. everything is all peachy with a president instructing the IRS to engage in punitive auditing against Vietnam War dissidents.
It is dangerously disingenuous to frame the constitutional protection on freedom of speech as the full extent of Americans' understanding of free speech.
Free speech as a "prescriptive social norm" has never been unlimited or free of consequences though.
Discourse within the "acceptable" range has been true free speech certainly, but step outside those boundaries and throughout US history there have been serious repercussions. Common law courts have long recognized that if you walk up to someone on the street and scream obscenities at them you have no recourse when you get punched in the face - the concept of "fighting words". Even today no one bats an eye when a restaurant doesn't allow a patron to dine there when they don't meet the restaurant's arbitrary dress code or if the patron has an "offensive" t-shirt slogan. Various forms of ostracism have been used against people speaking out against what is acceptable since human society has existed.
State Governments have punished speech they don't as well. For example in the South pre-Civil War many southern states made it illegal to publish anti-slavery books, newspaper articles, and speeches. You could literally be arrested for speaking against slavery in any form.
I think the actual social norm you're talking about is acceptance of conservative political discourse and opinion. Certain kinds of political discourse have been verboten in the US (eg people were fired and blacklisted for communism) so that's not new as a concept, but this is the first time in US history there is strong pushback against conservatism.
To some degree I see this social pressure as being weaponized because so much of the US is gerrymandered and tiled in the favor of conservatives*. Despite being a minority party Republicans control a majority of state legislatures. CA gets two senators. A group of 11 rural conservative states representing the same population gets 22 senators. When a rump party that represents a strict minority of the population gets to continuously impose its will, change voting rules, pack the Supreme Court, and so forth are you truly surprised when a lot of people get angry? When some people are no longer willing to be polite about politics?
When the normal relief valve - elections having consequences - gets subverted for decades that pressure must find relief somewhere.
The pressure is even more intense now that the major conservative party in the US is openly embracing nationalism and at least some are openly advocating for ending democracy: whether you agree with it or not the Republican party has declared war on the majority of the US population. Some people are going to see that as an existential threat and respond accordingly.
* I know the pedants will want to divert discussion to how the US is arranged into separate states deliberately, federalism, etc. I am well aware of those arguments, there is no need to re-hash them. Much like calling universal healthcare and worker protections "socialism", or trying to fine/punish people and take down their video clips due to "copyright claims" all you are doing is teaching the upcoming generations that socialism is better at solving problems, copyright should be abolished, and federalism sucks. Proceed at your own peril.
"Free speech" has never, ever meant "say whatever you want without any consequences whatsoever." That's what conservatives seem to be demanding these days. And when they don't get it, they whine about "cancel culture."
why do so many people confusedly assume free speech means forcing printers to print neo-nazi propaganda. Whatever happened to freedom of association? Some businesses and people don’t want to associate with neonazis and don’t want to be known as the company that helps neonazis.
Why do people who espouse free speech want to take away freedom to choose who one associates with?
freedom of association isn't really a thing anymore; if one were to promote that maxim, a large portion of the civil rights laws, anti-discrimination laws, etc. just become unenforceable.
The idea of public accommodation is ultimately based on the notion that commercial appeals (such as a store window and an open door) constitute an 'invitation to treat' (do business) and that these should not be withheld from anyone on the basis of their unalterable personal characteristics.
That depends who you ask. I don't think religion is unalterable, for example, but in the USA it holds a privileged legal position for historical reasons - although courts have concluded that merely claiming religious status is insufficient, eg https://www.ca10.uscourts.gov/opinions/18/18-1141.pdf
In general the Us recognizes race/ethnicity, sex, sexual orientation (to some degree) and religion as 'suspect classes' deserving of protection. But it's a thorny subject and understanding all the different perspectives is going to require a lot of reading.
Hmm... so in your opinion, back in the days of the Hollywood blacklist, when Louis B. Mayer decided that he wasn't going to buy any more screenplays from communists (or anyone who even had friends who were communists), that was perfectly okay? "Freedom of association", right?
The truly bizarre thing about the "woke" movement is that they seem to have absolutely no conception that the stuff they're doing to others can just as easily be done to them.
It's confusing how you criticize leftists for not realizing that they could theoretically be the target of these attacks while citing an extremely well-known example of leftists being the target of these attacks.
Leftists are generally aware of this risk, because today there is no shortage of similar social pressure against leftist ideas, and do not think it's a concern. The problem is not that it's never occurred to them.
One reason why it's not a concern is that there's no reason to believe that a principled stand against this tactic by the left will have any influence on the right. Conservatives in Hollywood in the middle of the last century did not blacklist communists in response to any similar activity by communists; they did so spontaneously. So there's no reason to fear an increased risk of use of this tactic. Nobody is getting ideas they didn't already have.
This makes absolutely no sense, and to me proves just how ignorant the left are of what could happen to them.
Censorship always becomes about those in power staying in power. Look no further than wall street bets. That had nothing to do with left right but about control and power.
Of course no one in the mainstream media is willing to consider this, because apparently wsb is financial trumpism.
Wake up. This is what the aclu warned about 50 years ago.
First, it's not "criticism" to ask a clarifying question. I understand that not having a good answer makes you uncomfortable, but that's not "criticism".
Second, you do understand that it's possible to believe that both are bad, right?
I'm not uncomfortable, and I don't know why you think I am. I merely think you're factually incorrect in your assertion that the point you mention has not occurred to leftists.
I do understand that it's possible to believe both are bad. I am informing you that leftists do not. (There's probably a more general phenomenon where centrists say that tools that can be used towards bad ends are bad, and people of a particular partisan tendency say that bad ends are bad and not to be blamed on the tool. For instance, liberals are generally not in favor of expanded gun rights, because they understand that guns can be used towards bad ends. Leftists are generally in favor of expanded gun rights, because they understand that, and also understand that guns can be used towards good ends.)
Weird how people keep trying to warn the left of some slippery slope argument that is if a company deplatforms literal neonazis today then lgbt, progressives or what have you can easily be tomorrow!
Like another comment mentioned, it’s mind boggling that those making these arguments think those on the left aren’t aware of censorship, legal and societal, given how recently one could be persecuted for being too left and labeled a communist or arrested, ostracized and more for being lgtb.
I don’t believe those making the arguments actually believe the surface facade of pointing out “unconsidered information”, so there must be some alternative purpose to the argument. It almost be like trying to constantly remind someone who was shot and also lost someone of how dangerous guns are and that’s why even violent felons needs gun.
It’s also arguing victims should be glad they are continuing to be victimized and that they should help and defend their attackers.
I’m not sure how you’re interpreting these, but if you are against businesses deplatforming those who express neonazi, and white nationalist propaganda I don’t think Paul Graham’s message supports you.
I doubt Paul graham equates neonazi propaganda with his examples of past situations where you could believe something that was later thought of as very wrong: “ how can you be sure you wouldn't also have believed everything you were supposed to if you had grown up among the plantation owners of the pre-Civil War South, or in Germany in the 1930s”
Are you saying that in 30 years that society will collectively think neonazi beliefs are correct and thus we were crazy to ostracize them? And you are saying that is why we should stop censoring them? Because in a future state we might live in a dystopia we should stop censoring the people trying to create the dystopia? And also that censoring neonazis is akin to those example like being anti slavery in the antebellum south? Is this your take away? Those arguments sound rather farcical and Paul himself actually explains why that is.
Paul says this: “Of course, we're not just looking for things we can't say. We're looking for things we can't say that are true, or at least have enough chance of being true that the question should remain open.“
There is no doubt about neonazi propaganda. Whether or not it is true is not an open question. White supremacist propaganda maybe being right is not an open question.
'Free speech' means nothing at all in the private sector - but 'supporting free speech' most definitely does. If a company opts to not support free speech (which is an ideal that I believe most Americans would say should be supported) by enacting censorship rules beyond what is illegal, they shouldn't be surprised when people that believe in that ideal look on them less favorably.
Any internet platform that didnt moderate would be overwhelmed with spam, porn, scams, hate, etc. Censorship and moderation are the same, a set of rules you must follow to participate. Gab is has huge problems with porn spam because of free speech policies.
Imagine if email providers were not allowed to filter. Your email would be totally unusable.
Enacting no filters beyond what's illegal would make most of the internet unusable. Like imagine if HN had no moderation? It would lose its original purpose.
So what do you mean support free speech exactly? Allow people to freely post porn, scams, lies, death threats?
By supporting free speech I support the right for us to say what we will without fear of retribution from the government. By supporting freedom of association I support that company’s can ban you for saying things they don’t agree with. Aren’t Gab and Parker right wing libertarian free market success stories? People found Twitter didn’t agree with their views so they founded a competitor.
> By supporting freedom of association I support that company’s can ban you for saying things they don’t agree with
The US already limit companies "Right of Association" by virtue of things like Providers of Last Resort (that's the extent of my knowledge on this topic in the context of America) so it's not an alien concept.
Do you feel that the electricity company should be able to cut off your power supply because you made a blog post they don't agree with? How about your mobile phone provider? And if not, why are online services treated any differently?
I presented an example along those lines, but more apt. I noticed you didn’t explain why you thought it was less applicable. And yes, the internet service provider should not be able to monitor your communication and selectively block it.
But why do should people be forced to associate with neonazis against their will? Expressing neonazi and white nationalist propaganda does not make one a a protected class so businesses are free to refuse to provide them service. Does McDonald’s have the right to refuse service to cater a klan rally?
> I noticed you didn’t explain why you thought it was less applicable.
I'm not actually sure where I stand on the issue in it's totality, I try to prevent myself from giving a knee-jerk response simply because the example being used is emotionally inflammatory. I do feel it's more a gradient than a binary issue though.
Edit: Upon re-reading, I misinterpreted this question sorry. The example you supplied might be as apt, but it's just one end of the spectrum. I also can't help but feel that it's like comparing my local Cafe (Switch Cafe in New Brighton, if you're interested) to McDonalds and calling it a free-market success story.
> But why do should people be forced to associate with neonazis against their will?
Why should a company - which is not a person, and something I think is being overlooked in this discussion - be forced to associate with anyone against their will? As I previously mentioned, there are several industries that can't refuse their service and there are several classes to which no industry may refuse their service. If we are looking for justification, I suggest we use the same logic applied in those cases.
> Does McDonald’s have the right to refuse service to cater a klan rally?
Obviously. I'm not sure where this is leading though, so I'll wait before commenting further.
Not an argument I want to have but I feel compelled to express.
While the ideology is terrible, hateful, close minded, harmful, etc, we tolerate their right to speech because no one knows when you might be the next “Neo Nazi”. A flick of the switch politically, and TPTB might find that LGBT speech is hateful. Perhaps people new to the tech industry don’t remember a time when being a computer nerd was anti-social, and clashed with the norms of society. Sure there are consequences to this ideology. People can get hurt and people’s lives can be impacted. But that is the price to live in a free society. Speaking to your last question, I think McDonalds should absolutely have the right to refuse service to a Klan member. But if I was in charge of McDonalds I would serve them. Because IMHO the outcome of a society where speech is no longer free, either by corporate cancel culture or government regulation, is not a society I want to live in.
Slippery slopes for everyone one. And a ceo that thinks catering klan rallies makes good business would soon find it their only business. Oh wait that’s what gab and Parler is doing!
And that “perhaps people new to...etc” is a nice backhanded appeal to authority and it falls flat.
Edit: hacker news has rigorously enforced comment guidelines, why is that okay? Why is it not bad per what you say:
> “ Because IMHO the outcome of a society where speech is no longer free, either by corporate cancel culture or government regulation, is not a society I want to live in.”
I don’t disagree with comment guidelines. Their platform, their rules. But my point is if it was my platform, I wouldn’t moderate it any more than the law requires: Imminent threats of violence, illegal pornography, libel, etc. I guess I would probably go beyond and ask people not to Dox others, and ask others not to bully or disparage one another. I find it no different from two people discussing communism in a private bar or restaurant, provided they are not harassing other customers
Ultimately, as a business owner, it’s not my (our?) job to direct culture. In fact it is kind of disturbing someone with enough money could change society to their whims. I’m here to create value for myself and the people around me. Political crusades are best left outside the professional/corporate environment.
Value isn't just a one dimensional thing where some business endeavours create less value or more value. There are different kinds of value that have different utility in different contexts.
Once you have that epiphany you can see that creating value for yourself and the people around you is a form of directing culture and vice-versa.
What if other people exploit your platform in order to direct culture, though? If you run a bar and after a year or two you realize that all of your patrons are nazis, presumably because their passionate discussions drove away anyone who overheard them, then any action you take to promote your bar is effectively promoting that ideology and directing culture in a rather unsavory direction. What do you do then?
You don't need to actually own a platform to leverage it for your side in a culture war, you only need to know how to exploit it. If you want your platform to be neutral, you need to monitor and moderate it carefully: if you don't choose what culture permeates your platform, others will be glad to choose for you, and I think it's foolish to think it'll be any better.
> If you run a bar and after a year or two you realize that all of your patrons are nazis
It could also mean that nazis like your bar.
I've seen this argument get politicized too much to the point of it being emotional. Like your nazi reference.
Social platforms should be moderated according to law. Whatever users legally & lawfully discuss in your platforms should not restricted. And this kind of applying pressure towards platforms worries me. They are merely tools. Let the law deal with this issue and leave free speech alone.
The problem is that big tech and social media companies don’t have competition. They are either monopolistic/oligopolistic or are shielded from new competition due to network effects protecting incumbents. They’re also immense in power and scope and influence.
They’re pseudo governments in that their actions (like censorship) are for all practical purposes, as impactful as an actual government. They’re necessary to our lives and are also utilities in that sense. And so they should be regulated and required to support everyone who doesn’t explicitly break the law, like a public agency.
If you're planning on a violent assault on others, all those protections disappear. Free speech has well established limitations that are pretty easy to understand.
You keep trying to associate Parler and Gab as supporters of free speech. Parler was shut down because it refused to moderate content that incited violence. Gab's browser extension Dissenter was removed from Google and Firefox for the same reason: unmoderated content that often featured calls to violence.
These platforms are being used by white nationalists and other extremists to normalize their hateful ideology and encourage violence against anyone with different gender orientations, nationality, ethnicity, or religious beliefs.
Gab and Parler have zero interest in free speech as a human right. They want unlimited free speech for acceptable groups (mostly white straight Christians) and no rights for anyone else.
Users on those platforms have posted their intent to hurt and kill others, that content was never moderated, and those users carried out acts of violence. Companies who don't want to be associated with that have disconnected their services ahead of the inevitable legal action to shut the services down.
Literally no one in the US has had their electricity or phone cut off because of a "disagreeable blog post." It's a ridiculous example to bring up in the sea of information about what's going on in those forums.
People have felt so unheard they've taken to the streets in violence. We've seen riots all through the last year up to and including the incident on Jan 6. When people feel unheard it reliably leads to violence. That is why, when it comes to my eyes and dollars, I support platforms that support free speech. In different times I might lean towards freedom of association.
The argument I've heard from friends on the left opposed to free speech is that barely-moderated forums inevitably turn into "white supremacist" sites.
It seems like there's plenty of "willful misunderstanding" from folk on both sides of the political spectrum. It seems like two sides of the same coin to me, and it doesn't really matter too much because ultimately the carnival game is rigged to eat the coin regardless. Whether you're a neo-nazi or a marxist-commie, we're all slightly awkward but reasonable nerds here right? I think most sane people can agree that data breaches are bad, and that black hat hackers are bad guys and white hat hackers are good guys?
Speaking of finding common ground, I thought the recent GME schenanigans were notable in that folk on both extremes of the political spectrum seemed to agree that it was fun "sticking it to the man". Was anyone here not cheering the "irrational" retail traders on?
You aren't coming across as genuine, though. Textual communication loses a lot of subtlety, but you figuratively started screaming mid-sentence. Is it fair to assume that people in the past have treated you like a dangerous person? Were you screaming at them? Were you trying to shame them into condemning something, thus forcing them to either submit themselves to you, or seemingly be implicated as the terrible thing you're calling them to condemn?
If you really intended to be genuine in your desire to find common ground with folk of differing political views from your own, I once again invite you to share your personal beliefs on the topic of societal damage caused by data breaches, or your thoughts on the recent GME stock market manipulation.
Hey, I'm willing to have that discussion, sure.
I am accepting the challenge to accept the rules of engagement you dictated.
Are you willing to accept the challenge of accepting the rules of engagement I put forth - Acknowledge that neo-nazis are a problem, briefly state why?
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I think the GME stuff is a bit nuts, personally. I found the whole thing entertaining, but I find it hard to believe that most participants won't be hurt in some way in the long run. I'm not sure how much small time investors understand that. Optimistically, maybe this is a collective learning experience that does minimal harm to a large number of people, and we all come away from the experience with a better idea of how the stock market works. Maybe then we can make better informed electoral decisions? Feels a bit too optimistic, but hey.
Better than meme stocks vs hedge funds, imo, would be to have a working system for accountability and enforcement at the SEC- been lacking for decades, from what I understand.
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Societal damage caused by data breaches. Idk, it's a bit large as a topic. Do I like that a bunch of personal data just got dumped? Not the biggest fan, no. I wouldn't want it to happen to me, certainly.
I do think it's useful to have the data there to show how much the platform is for hate and organizing around hate. It seems like there should be a better way to expose this kind of thing.
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I'd be surprised if you also engage in a genuine discussion on your own terms.
I love surprises, but I've been on the internet long enough not to expect them.
> I do think it's useful to have the data there to show how much the platform is for hate and organizing around hate.
I think for a proper useful evaluation, we equally need to see a similar full dump from other platforms like Facebook, Twitter etc. who are the standard when it comes to social media.
I am personally not too convinced the content is that different, but rather some platforms just have more diverse political allegiances.
I honestly think we do at the outset and especially before we evaluate.
The full history would also tell us if these ideas were more common when they're smaller network but when they grow they aren't etc.
The other thing we need to evaluate is if these platforms are just made of people banned from primary platforms and if that's the case, are these platforms really responsible for the surge of these types of people and perhaps what is a way to fix these societal issues as they continue to exist rather than disappear?
Gab and Parler have moderators too too, but the content they moderate is a lot more refined. I suspect proportionally, they're actually more to a per user ratio than FB or Twitter.
I invited you to share your opinions one way or another on two topics that I believe largely have common ground, and I appreciate your responses on both topics. I don't think it's comparable for you to challenge me with a "loaded question" that inherently puts me on the defensive, based on assumptions and false premises that I can't challenge without escalating the conversation into an argument. Do you see the difference there?
An equivalent prompt for discussion on the topic of neo-naziism would perhaps be, "I believe that neo-naziism is a problem. Do you agree with me? Why or why not?" I'll happily respond to that.
I think neo-naziism is one of the many appalling and terrible extremist ideologies that exist in the world, and people that willingly engage in it are bad people. In the general sense, it's certainly a problem; the world would be a better place if neo-nazis didn't exist. Within the context of politics in the United States, it's hard to say that it's a genuine problem. I'm an American, and I don't know of anyone within any degree of separation that would be fairly considered a neo-nazi, or is afflicted by neo-naziism. I live on the coast, though, and so may be in a bubble that's out of touch with other parts of the country. From my point of view, I think the problem is more that neo-naziism is a label that has been weaponized by the political left to rally their base against the political right. It seems comparable to the political right labeling their opponents as similarly nasty things to rally their base against the political left. I think it's about as likely that neo-naziism is a widespread concern within the political right as much as it is likely that the political left has a problem with child eating demon worshippers. It all seems like nonsense that doesn't match reality.
I agree with you on GME that it's unfortunate if anyone created a financial hardship for themselves by investing when they didn't understand the situation. I also agree that government oversight that actually functions effectively within its purpose would be way better than what we have now. I'm curious what your thoughts are on cryptocurrencies like bitcoin? I personally hate them, mainly for the environmental waste that proof-of-work algorithms create, but also for the blatant disregard for the majority of the world population's traditionally accumulated wealth.
I am thankful that you took the time to enumerate that you don't share neo-nazi ideology. I think that right now, it makes a bigger difference than it has in the past to state it out loud.
The FBI disagrees with you quite a bit on whether neo-nazis & co are a problem.
This is why I insist so much. This is why so many on the left insist so much on this particular test. Pretending the problem isn't a problem is a thing that is actively causing harm to the country.
These friends overtly say that free speech should be limited, in those exact terms. Not some speech, "free speech". Please let me know how you perceive me to be misunderstanding them willfully.
I think you might want to listen to them more closely, I can't answer on their behalf.
If, by chance, they're anything like me, then I agree that there's giant categories of prohibited speech that should remain so. Lying about medicine, slander, libel, incitement to violence to name a few.
They want the first amendment repealed as they say it protects racists, homophobes and transphobes. They say that liberal free speech laws led to Trump and free speech should be curtailed for that reason. They openly say that they are opposed to free speech. I am trying to present their views as neutrally as I can, but this is what they say and support.
Maybe it’s a bit “one true Scotsmanny” but there are many who identify left or right who fall in the bottom 10% of well thought out perspectives. Being on the left does not make your friends immune and they may fall into that tier if their argument is portrayed accurately. They get the general gist of things right, I.e. neonazi propaganda is harmful, but go about things in a hamfisted manner.
Yeah I can't say I agree with your friends if that's indeed what they meant. The first amendment is incredibly important. So is the jurisprudence around what it means.
I have a suspicion that there might be a communication barrier somewhere between you and your friends. I'm a bit out on a limb here, so forgive my presumptions if they're off base. I mean no offense.
It's possible that your friends have learned that, when talking to you, 'free speech' is only worth defending when it's offensive, neo-nazi style speech. Then, without making explicit the change in vocabulary usage, they run with it -- ending up in a bad spot where they're saying get rid of 1st Amendment. There's no winners in this story, just unfortunate misunderstandings.
Again, disregard if this is nonsense. I've been witness to similar disagreements in the past, so I'm offering my 2c since I think you're making the good faith effort to represent, even while exasperated, the views of your friends.
As a South African all of this is fascinating. Especially the shift of where the "center" is.
It seemed every American not on the left is called "far right" from where I am sitting.
Half a dozen of my friends have moved to the States and a few have scolded me for my understanding saying that plenty of centrists are labeled far right.
I'm beginning to glaze over the label now. It doesn't hold any sway for me because it is used so flippantly.
Because the American mainstream left became bananas. The Democratic and Republican parties would still be right-wing/conservative all across the world except in America, but the woke/sjw/faang crowd is socially hard-left also all across the world (not in economics or international politics, they are very conservative there,even hawkish). So, for example, me, a very leftist third world person has now more in common with your average mid-westerner republican than with a coastal google employee.
Your average Republican is going to be more authoritarian-leaning and hawkish than the not-actually-left FAANG caricature you're describing.
Republicans are pretty unlikely to support such leftist notions as democratizing the means of production, whereas your average FAANG employee just might.
Silent on their idol Biden bombing a middle east country.
Hawkish on having a confrontation with China. Even a military one.
Calling for any people with real or perceived criticism of them to be cancelled.
Organized the BLM protests which caused 100X more economic damages than the crazies in the Capitol.
They are in bed with the mainstream media, the technology oligopolies and the entertainment industry where their worldview is relentlessly pushed and any dissenting opinion is squashed. They still call themselves victims.(Victims who act like executioners)
They are silent on their hero Biden expanding jail facilities for latino children. Total silence and the few mentions are just euphemism= "expanding facilities"
Everyone I know (personally or otherwise) who is an actual leftist is very vocally unhappy with the bombing of Syria, the lack of stimulus checks, ICE's policies, and Biden generally. He's most certainly not a leftist hero/idol.
If by "actual leftist" you mean people like Rania Khalek, I would agree, but unfortunately people like her are a tiny minority and constantly belittled, ignored or called tankies or something along those lines.
The mainstream left is dominated by the tech companies, by the mainstream press, by the universities and by the entertainment industry, all coastal highly privileged, 2% of income elites. Those are the people dominating the discourse and as Chomsky said they are "Manufacturing Consent". That includes a big portion of the "commentariat" here too.
30 seconds of searching on the leftist's favorite communication platform. I think the problem might be more that you're not in the right echo chamber... or something.
This took 10 seconds to find. You can make an argument that they could be louder (and I'd definitely agree with you on that), but you can't in good faith make an argument that they're "silent". As for Krugman and Reich, I don't see how they're any relevant.
AOC is so vocal about abolishing ICE that I don't feel the need to even back that up.
That is not a trope, much less an old one. The "I am ideologically pure and anyone against me must be censured, silenced or even more" is an old trope. You a white guy, are calling a POC a neonazi because I dont buy your discourse of being an enlightened superior being. Get lost.
> It seemed every American not on the left is called "far right" from where I am sitting.
From my perspective as a German, you have the centrist democrats that swing quite a bit in both directions, and the republicans who swing from center right to "makes our local right wing extremist party drool"-right.
I can confirm that. The whole political landscape in the US is skewed to the right and has always been. So are their political positions, e.g. the word "social democracy" plays almost no role and "liberal" either means "extreme left" or, even worse and more incorrect, is used as a synonym to libertarianism by white supremacists and neo-Nazis who disguise themselves as "libertarians."
I guess it's the result of having a two-party system.
Not as much as you'd like to think of the "western world" is northern and western Europe. The "rest" of it includes, among other things, most of eastern Europe and pretty much all of South America.
The "western world" as a term is understood to mean Australia, Canada, Catholic and Protestant Europe, New Zealand, plus the United States [definition from wikipedia]. Not saying that isn't silly, but everyone understands that the western world does not include those other places.
It's a rhetorical bait-and-switch. It is "understood" to mean (essentially) Protestant Europe when making strong claims, but gesturing at the broader notion of West to imply a scale larger than that at which the claim is credible. In any case, even "Australia, Canada, Catholic and Protestant Europe, New Zealand, plus the United States" is too broad of a definition to make GP's claim true.
> As a South African all of this is fascinating. Especially the shift of where the "center" is.
> It seemed every American not on the left is called "far right" from where I am sitting.
What you are seeing is polarization. At the current moment, a lot of the Republican party has moved away from more moderate Republicanism and more towards Trumpism, which is a far right movement.
Fact is that more Republican Congress members voted to punish a moderate Republican like Liz Cheney for voting to impeach Trump, than voted to remove Marjorie Greene from committee assignments for claiming school shootings and 9/11,were a hoax and that California wildfires were caused by a Jewish space laser.
It's not that anyone who isn't left is now considered far right. It's that a lot of people who were more moderate Republicans in the past, have moved much farther to the right. There are more people on the left side of the political spectrum that moved father out too, but not enough to even nominate one of the far left candidates for president.
It's not. It happens to be an effective marketing vehicle for this particular audience, so you see it presented first and foremost, in an almost hyperbolic way. They conflate free speech infringements with basic service policies.
Doesn't mean that other Americans no longer consider free speech important.
"Break into Congress and kill the swamp creatures". This is a quote from Parler, and this is known as incitement, which is often illegal. The first amendment does not apply to child porn for obvious reasons, but it also doesn't apply to threats of violence, which isn't so obvious to everyone.
To make this obvious, this is not a free speech issue.
Americans always seem to conflate what is legal in usa with what is free speech.
All censorship of any speech is a free speech issue. My take is that it is sometimes justified to give consequences to speech that cause harm, but i don't think we should pretend its not a free speech issue.
I can cherry-pick several thousand twitter messages (probably more) that make this quote seem like a soft, fluffy teddy bear. But no one here accuses twitter of being a terrorist platform.
Your last line is absolutely correct: To make this obvious, this is not a free speech issue.
Trans-exclusionary radical feminist. So basically feminists that believe the femininity is endangered by the mere existence of male-to-female transgender people.
So basically transphobes that also larp as feminists.
How many of these posts are still up? The problem with "pictures of tweets" is that we can't check whether or not these were moderated. The controversy is not over whether garbage get posted, it's over what happens afterward.
Some people disagree with that attempt to redefine words. This whole thread is about the right to have that disagreement in a civil fashion, or whether to shut down the thought process with phrases like “period”.
This is highly debatable. In 100 years if an anthropologist was looking at the skeleton of a trans person they would beg to differ. If a doctor was looking at the DNA they would beg to differ.
You're constantly implying that they deserve it with sentences like "Maybe don't deny the existence of people and perhaps you won't get those responses?".
I'm telling you that's being a huge dick because nobody deserves to be told that they should be killed, even if they are massive assholes themselves. And now you're trying to weasel-word your way out of it without admitting that those tweets are wrong, which sure doesn't make it seem like you disagree with them.
Well tweets don't really kill you though do they? They are not directed at anyone, at most it is vented frustration from the oppressed that is trans people.
You can say that in response to any hateful tweet. Racism? "tweets don't kill you". Openly advocating for genocide? "tweets don't kill you". Claiming pineapple is a perfectly valid pizza topping? "tweets don't kill you".
Because I think that mainstream trans people are done a great disservice by trans extremists. Do you think trans people benefit from being associated with the kind of tweets on that website? Reasonable trans men and trans women are pushing back on extremist language and calls for violence that are perpetrated in their name.
Only by discussing this can peaceful coexistence be achieved.
You're right when it comes to calls to violence, but I would prefer #DieT*rfs or #T*rfsMustDie instead.
At least then freedom of speech is preserved and are is no calls for violence.
> Only by discussing this can peaceful coexistence be achieved.
Would love to see evidence of this and until then, please go tell that to the exclusionary T*rfs FIRST and NOT trans people fighting against them. Be a trans ally.
And now 'they' are saying #womxn is transphobic on Twitter. So now everyone using that in the past and present is a transphobe apparently.
The potential triggernometry in this complex inclusivity equation boggles my mind.
EDIT:
Downvoters: So this tweet is not accurate, No? [0]
From the reply thread, it shows how 'they' and Twitch are now re-hijacking the artificial term 'womxn' to lose its so-called meaning such that it can be used to cancel those who used it in the past, even when the same progressives coined it! [1]
This is how it starts. Redefine progressive terms, find famous person using it, call them out and demand them to apologise to the world right now for using that 'hateful' term they used in the past or be cancelled.
Just because twitter has illegal content doesn't make what parler was doing any less illegal. Just because someone else breaks the law doesn't give you a free pass.
This is not a free speech issue on any social media.
Amazon had every right to stop illegal activity on their platform.
I believe the "law" should be applied equally. "Illegal activity" ignored on one platform or given a wink and nod and scanned under a microscope on the other platform is strange.
The selective application of policy while pretending to be fair and unbiased tends to make folks cynical.
You could make the same argument for inane twitter posts calling out to "kill all white men" or defund the police.
In the end, the lines we draw are often in the sand, and the legitimacy of these threats have to be weighed with the consequence of real world actions.
People storming the Capitol Hill building shouting these things posed a legitimate threat, but so do feminists shouting these things in rallies in real life, or the people burning police departments during the George Floyd protests. What we choose to condemn however, seems to be completely arbitrary to passers by.
The number of messages on Parler that had content like that was probably very limited. You’re cherry picking one message on a platform with double digit millions of users to paint a certain picture. But let’s not forget about all the violence in BLM riots over the last year, much of which was organized and popularized on social media platforms like Twitter or Facebook, who all get a pass.
And yes it is a free speech issue when several companies that have left leaning cultures and leaders take concurrent actions to block a right leaning platform that mostly carries fully legal speech.
Feel free to share your hard evidence, with comparisons to total number of users and total message volume. Until then, you're making an unproven claim.
>not forget about all the violence in BLM riots over the last year, much of which was organized and popularized on social media platforms like Twitter or Facebook, who all get a pass.
Elaborating on that:
There was a mass shooting in New Zealand that was live streamed on Facebook. Now, imagine for a moment, what the public response would be if that had been on parler.
Just about all Americans support and defend doing moral things, but the "Moral Majority" was partisan. Just about all Americans have values that they care about, but the "Values Voter Summit" is partisan. Just about no Americans advocate for being irresponsible with government money, but "fiscal responsibility" is a specific partisan interpretation of what sorts of uses of government money are reasonable.
That only a subset of the population wants to be marketed to under the banner of "free speech" doesn't mean that people don't care about free speech itself.
(Neither Gab nor Parler have any objection to FOSTA/SESTA's unconstitutional limitations on free speech and neither of them have any interest in standing up for the free speech rights of sex workers, let alone their ability to participate in the free market.)
Yes, it can be called free speech, although there can be repercussions when that speech falls into slander / libel / defamation. Outside of that, why would you ever want the government deciding what you can and cannot say? Right now you may be aligned with the government, but that can change very easily in the future
Well, suppose there's a group of people saying that another group of people (which happens to include you) should be killed as soon as possible. In an ideal world, they probably wouldn't do that because they'd recognize that collective aggression against others could rebound on them, but in the imperfect world we actually occupy it happens all the time. Of course, you could just figure they'll limit their social opportunities and eventually grow out of it or develop some higher wisdom, but just how long should you have to put up with threats from random strangers and anxieties about your personal safety while you are waiting for your antagonists to become enlightened?
Some people think it is. In many legal jurisdictions, prosecutors and cops rely on the idea of a 'true threat' which has to be specific and imminent. So a generalized expression of hate like 'all _____ should die' wouldn't count. Here's a relevant example, about a woman in Michigan who eventually resorted to shaming her neighbor int he media because she had no confidence in reporting to police:
The problem with a very mechanistic/binary approach to legal questions is that it leaves a lot of room for antagonistic or outright threatening behavior that nevertheless remains within the bounds of legality. Experience suggests that's likely better than vague or arbitrary standards, but it's not a simple issue.
I was commenting on the hypocrisy of some, who love to bang the free speech drum, but expect the government to protect them from private individuals actions. Be it citizens or corporations.
If one wants the govt to ensure free speech, then it is implied it must also ensure a private individuals right to pursue legal actions, such as denial or service or lawsuits.
I will defend to the death someone’s right to hold and speak any beliefs, ideas, or opinions no matter how controversial or unorthodox.
What I will not defend is someone who knowingly speaks untruths or uses language as a weapon with the intent to hurt others. Just because it uses mouth sounds doesn’t make something speech.
If you think homosexuals are an abomination and an affront to god then you’re free to believe that and tell everyone you know. But that doesn’t mean you should be allowed to shout f*g at a gay person on the street. Only the former is speech, the latter is hate.
When private businesses support free speech everyone sues the hell out of them for "interfering in elections" when it really was netizens swaying voter opinions using free speech.
> It’s incredible that supporting free speech is considered to be only important enough to the “far right” now to be worth marketing to.
It's because private companies don't want to host their extreme views. Private companies free to regulate their own platforms is a very Republican position.
Hobby Lobby and Chic Fil A are perfect examples of right leaning companies imposing their own political views of what is acceptable on their employees and customers.
It would be liberal to regulate what private companies allow or block on their platforms, which is why Republicans complain about being cancelled but don't take action. Forcing companies to allow free speech using regulations is a liberal proposition.
Right leaning people are free to create their own platforms that cater to far right conspiracies, racism, homophobia, death threats, and white supremacists. And that's what they did
The reason they're seen as a separate demographic for marketing purposes is because the "far right" has a very specific view of free speech that is largely divorced from:
A) the actual full scope of the problem of censorship in the real world,
B) the actual rights that other people have to freely associate or filter content they find objectionable, and
C) the actual practical ways to increase free speech access.
Ignoring for a second the ideologies these people espouse, purely speaking as a free speech advocate far right people make my job harder, both because they only seem to show up to advocate for free speech in very selective situations, and because most of their ideas on how to preserve free speech are, frankly, really bad.
Most of the far right crowd isn't going to show up to bat for concepts like Net Neutrality, they're not going to be out campaigning against LGBTQ+ or sex censorship. These are the people I see in my timelines cheering on government intervention into public university curriculums. They push dangerous concepts like Section 230 repeals or nationalizing media companies, and some of their more experimental proposals are just blatantly unconstitutional. It's wild to hear proposals from people who claim that they're free speech advocates that would not hold up under almost any Supreme Court ruling. These people also don't have sophisticated ideas on how to handle spam, pornography, or copyright other than to shrug their shoulders and say that the 1st Amendment shouldn't apply to those things. And their big solution to Twitter censorship is to make new centralized platforms that (for now) cater to specifically them; there's nothing realistic or interesting or permanent about what they're proposing. It's a demographic that likes to say that they're pro-free-speech, but in my opinion a lot of that is just thoughtless rhetoric around the fact that they're mad that different people than them now have power to form their own communities and organize their own social campaigns.
So I would not call Gab or Parler bastions of free speech, and it irritates me that those sites steal headlines and place themselves at the center of these debates. Both sites are far right echo chambers filled with a lot of people who's primary experience with censorship begins and ends with the idea that nobody should be allowed to block them on Twitter. And neither site is afraid to engage in its own censorship -- the sites bill themselves as 1st Amendment advocates purely based around who they censor, not because they have compelling or innovative ideas about how to run a community in general.
I'm being a little uncharitable here, but I'm not being very uncharitable. I have almost completely given up trying to engage with far right ideas on free speech, because a significant portion of that demographic is only interested in free speech in ways that personally benefit them, and trying to assemble their views into an internally consistent philosophy has frankly been kind of a giant waste of my time. If you're worried about tech censorship, go donate to Mastodon or Matrix -- projects that are filled with people who are actually thinking about free speech in deep, thoughtful, and practical ways.
From experience I would recommend meeting and getting to know people politically from different ends of the spectrum. Not every conservative is anti-LGBTQ, nor do they agree with nationalizing the media, nor agree with intervention in public education, etc.. Net Neutrality is an issue I’m not a fan of but my opinion is not because the current system isn’t broken, but because I’m not sure government intervention would make it less broken.
The right has nuance to it the same way the progressive left has nuance that separates them from the establishment left. I think Gab and Parler give a voice to some questionable characters. Parler, in particular, has some investors I’m not exactly a fan of. However the ecology of diverse platforms does fit in with traditionally enlightenment ideas around speech that I subscribe to. So I support them. Perhaps we disagree what it means to be thoughtful. I think that’s a fair debate.
Speaking to your point about echo chambers, I agree this is probably the biggest societal and technological problem facing us today. How do we get people to see we aren’t all that different and want to debate complex issues? Far right” and “Radical Left” are not terms that inspire debate and critical thinking. It’s almost as if society wants to dumb us down and lower the human consciousness.
I do know Conservatives who I would consider to be pro-free-speech. They're just not the people on Gab. My criticism here is that in many cases, literally the same people that I see talking about how Net Neutrality might be problematic are advocating for concepts like reintroducing a Fairness Doctrine, for imposing massive regulations on what Facebook can and can't censor. At some point it's OK to acknowledge those contradictory positions aren't born out of some kind of nuance, they're born out of either thoughtlessness or bad faith.
I'm willing to engage with Conservatives who are genuinely grappling with free speech and aren't falling into those contradictions, but I'm also not going to pretend that Gab has ever been a good faith actor in that conversation. Being upfront about the obviously hypocritical sections of both the far right and many mainstream GOP senators is a necessary part of that engagement. It means acknowledging that Conservatives are diverse, but also being blunt about the overall direction (in the context of the legislation, surveys, platforms like CPAC, and general official party statements coming out) that the party is going is not in a pro-free-speech direction. Because if I'm not upfront about those things, then the conversation just devolves into reexplaining freedom of association for the 20th time. And that devolution of discussion also crowds out the Conservatives who actually do care about free speech who might have something interesting to say.
Part of this is that I actually do care about free speech, so I have a vested interest in making progress during conversations, in moving past basic ideas that the free speech community has already hashed out, and instead engaging with more complicated ideas that are more important right now. I don't want to waste time rehashing the same debates over and over again just because people like Ted Cruz, Andrew Torba, and Donald Trump don't understand the free market. Not only because I don't really want to engage with those people in general, but also because the actual free speech debate matters, and those people are holding it back.
My frustration here was a response to a comment arguing that criticism of Gab as a platform was a sign that Americans overall no longer care about free speech. I'm happy to engage with Conservatives that have more nuanced views, but again, in my experience those are usually not the people who are trying to sell Gab as a free speech utopia. And to the original comment's question of why "free speech" platforms like Gab often tend to market primarily to a very specific segment of the alt right, it's important to understand that it's not because everyone else hates the 1st Amendment, it's because the alt right uses the "free speech" debate disingenuously as a cloak to hide more nefarious goals.
> I'm also not going to pretend that Gab has ever been a good faith actor in that conversation.
It really hasn't, and in my opinion, neither has any other social media platform.
> My frustration here was a response to a comment arguing that criticism of Gab as a platform was a sign that Americans overall no longer care about free speech.
Polarising the issues and gaslighting is the norm today.
These are bottom feeders who want to cash in on social media without the overhead of moderation. To MBAs that's a cost center that has to go. The "free speech" spiel is just their cover story to fend off government intrusion while the user base festers.
It’s incredible that supporting free speech is considered to be only important enough to the “far right” now to be worth marketing to. Free speech used to be something all Americans supported and defended.
America once had a very finite number of publishers who were the primary gate keepers for what published. America suppressed the works of Wilhelm Reich and Henry Miller. America once arrested members of the IWW for engaging in street corner soapbox speak-outs [1]. America engaged in anti-socialist repression on a fairly large scale.[2] It's common to reference an imaginary free speech fundamentalist era somewhere in the US past but, sorry, it's not there.
And, of course, the extreme right only pretend to be true free speech fundamentalists - Note how the dropped Milo Yiannopoulos when his speech offended them.
Everyone supports free speech. Everyone also supports moderation. All liberty comes with moderation else we have chaos.
Imagine someone talking loudly outside your window all night. You’d have laws made about public disturbances. Would you then be a freedom hating communist? I don’t know about that.
Now if you also have a forum where you’d like to have more family friendly conversations. Would you welcome the Nazi hatemongerer? I would think you’d moderate them out.
Imagine you have a church, and an atheist disturbs your mass by shrieking god doesn’t exist. Would you escort them out?
This is so basic to me that I can’t believe people have a hard time grasping something so obvious. I can’t help but think they are being disingenuous.
Khamenei is that you? I thought you said something similar on Twitter a few months, years back but your main account didn't get banned for promoting terrorism.
If you were a photographer creating erotic gay art or a writer hosting a Communist poetry night, I would advise you not to bank on the right wing defending your freedom of expression.
Gab is older and in the old days, attracted alt right and downright nazis, however they banned the absolute worst by now.
So it has roots in the alt-right/nazi/4chan community and predates parler by a lot.
They used to have their own software, then switched to mastodon, but turned off the peering and added custom code apparently full of SQL injection.
Parler is very new and has roots in more conservative circles. It’s written from ground up and is apparently pretty bad, although it’s not working anymore.
Why is the second sentence of this article about how the CEO of Gab used a Transphobic slur? It kind of seems like the author threw that in there to make sure the reader agrees with their political views, but the article doesn't say what the slur was, and I don't think the author would defend the idea that being transphobic makes it okay to hack a person's website, but it kind of feels like that's the point implicitly being proposed.
It feels like yet another injection of politics into what was previously a tech-focused website.
> It feels like yet another injection of politics into what was previously a tech-focused website.
So, I've had an an account here since 2012, and was a reader before; this kind of comment is older than my presence here, and, if it ever existed, so is the time that HN was a politics-free tech-focussed website. [0]
Political issues, especially tech-adjacent ones or ones that aren't inherently so but which are raised directly in the context of tech issues, have been a major subject here for a very long time.
You are free, of course, to start your own tech discussion site with a firm no-politics (by whatever standard you want to delineate “politics”) rule, if you like.
[0] EDIT: except for a planned-as-brief-and-still-abandoned-early experiment.
The CEO literally used a trans-phobic slur when describing the hack. Plus, it speaks to the purpose of Gab, to allow the voicing of the types of bigoted views held by the far right. It's the reason for its creation. Communities that were removed from reddit, Twitter, etc for expressing such views.
> I’m not a liberal or anything, just a rational person.
As a rational person, it must have occurred to you that if what you say is true, abortion and gay rights would have stopped being election issues many moons ago.
The reason they haven't is because it works, it gets people to the polls. That's politics. People don't vote for 'rational', 'objective' technocrats who are 'policy wonks'. They will vote for whoever they think will deliver on the pie-in-the-sky promises they agree with.
It is a slur that carry the transphobic intent of the writer.
In the same way that ethnic slurs are not themselves ethnic and religious slurs are not themselves religious but convey pejorative, derogatory and insulting messages towards the targeted populations.
You're distracting from the fact that you, probably intentionally since the full comment is either not mentioned on most websites, or in full on others, removed part of a quote. Why you did this, I cannot say for certain, but I feel like, with your repitition of "Clearly he is a stable and happy person with no insecurities." that you have a have a particular viewpoint, and after seeing your other comments, transphobic, ugly and a troll.
There are people on this forum that will disagree with me on transgenderism, but comments like yours will not allow us to have a fruitful and meaningful conversation.
Why would I change my behavior for a stranger with a one year old account that has less than 15 karma? You clearly do not understand the tone that is used on HN.
If you don't think it's a transphobic slur I highly suggest you talk to some trans folks about what is or is not a transphobic slur, because I can almost guarantee that they'll tell you it's a transphobic slur
(yes the politics of the Rocky Horror Picture Show have gotten a bit weird in the last ten-fifteen years)
i agree! you are not. and the rest of us are not obligated to spend time and energy on you even though you're actively rude to people because of what you think is a mental illness.
You aren't a jerk if you refuse to call someone a made up pronoun. If a she wants to be called a he, fine. If you want to be a benegender xyzbbq xe/xir, no.
It seems people didn't really understand what I am saying. Calling human rights a political issue makes it seem as if there are two opposing yet equally valid sides... as that is what political means.
Human rights are not political. There is not opposing view to human rights, you just give them to people. Every has the right to respect, equality, etc. Thought that would be pretty obvious.
Making this stuff "political" just devalues the message and progress.
Isn’t DDoSecrets basically working with the hackers by hosting/evangelizing/distributing their illegally acquired data? It’s also amazing to me that all those involved with it and the prior Parler hack are allowed to remain on Twitter without even a label on hacked materials, let alone a ban for clear illegal activity. Double standards.
I think all censorship should be deplored. My position is that bits are not a bug. That we should create communications technologies that allow people to send whatever they like to each other. And when people put their thumbs on the scale and try to say what can and can't be sent, we should fight back - both politically through protest and technologically through software. - Aaron Swartz
Swartz never created a social media platform nor had to make decisions on how to moderate user generated content across millions of users. He made JSTOR articles freely available.
Swartz created a company called Infogami "that would help users build websites". That company merged with reddit, which had already raised $100K. Swartz didn't create a social media platform, and he never had to make decisions on how to moderate user generated content across millions of users.
It seems Gab banned anti-christian messages. So the 'freedom of speech' in this community is pretty much a dogwhistle for'freedom of alt-right speech'.
(Not sure dogwhistle is the right word here, but it's the often case of 'freedom of speech' actually meaning 'freedom of hate speech', like how often 'truth' is used to actually mean 'unscientific conspiracy theories'.)
I think you're wrong. Your maintaining your bubble by not going through your ex-girlfriends trash can everyday.
The community and moderation on this site are actually pretty good, don't demean people who have different ideas about what makes a good dialogue as being in a bubble.
If the whole community is in a bubble, downvoted people are even more in a bubble. They are the ones out of sync with the greater picture.
I spent a number of years living in America in the past, and made friends with people across the political spectrum there. And what has always stood out to me is how much hatred and animosity the American right and left have for each other. Talk with someone over beers long enough and they really open up about it, probably because I'm an outsider.
As far as political orientation goes, by worldwide standards America actually ranges from center-right (Democrats) to far-right (Republicans), but there are many confounding factors due to their society being forced into the mold of one-of-two parties. Indeed, the choice of ideologies and political tactics are downright bizarre, even contradictory to the outside norm of left and right when viewed by a foreigner.
What always surprises me is the rabidity of the comments left on sites such as these (both left and right oriented). Although you belong to different tribes, your words are remarkably similar: It seems that you really do see the other party as made up of terrible people, misguided at best, inhuman monsters at worst, unfeeling and callous, perhaps even extermination-worthy in some extreme cases. This is not how politics work in the rest of the world.
> This is not how politics work in the rest of the world.
Weighted by population, and including the places where that attitude has been taken to it's logical extreme by the dominant faction actually suppressing it's opposition, it absolutely is how politics works in the rest of the world.
It's not how politics works in healthy, multiparty democracies, but those are, globally, rather more the exception than the rule.
> by worldwide standards America actually ranges from center-right (Democrats) to far-right (Republicans)
OhBoyHereWeGo.jpg
It's stupid to try and condense the political ideology of the US (or almost any nation) down to one spectrum and then try and map that onto the rest of the world when we (and the rest of the world) have a lot of ideology based on "well party X took position Y because party V had position W back in year Z and they needed to be opposite and it stuck around". What's left and right is mostly a figment of historical coincidence, not any sort of ideological consistency across a party.
Shall we do a survey of immigration and gun control policies across Europe to drive the point home? If you don't like that option we can survey the social safety nets and freedom of expression in Asia.
> a lot of ideology based on "well party X took position Y because party V had position W back in year Z and they needed to be opposite and it stuck around".
That's not ideology: that's literally not at all what "ideology" means. What you're describing is dogma, and the fact that the two are often conflated in public perception speaks to the OP's point.
Correct, the Democrats are a weak willed party of centrists more concerned with maintaining the status quo as opposed to implementing progressive legislation that will help people. The GOP has become a cult of personality.
Neither party right now is a centrist party. They both realized that the median voter was disengaged, so they began to appeal to extremes as a way to motivate constituents to donate and vote.
From Merriam-Webster: "a situation in which a public figure (such as a political leader) is deliberately presented to the people of a country as a great person who should be admired and loved". Wikipedia mentions the use of mass media, propaganda, spectacle, etc. "to create an idealized, heroic, and worshipful image of a leader, often through unquestioning flattery and praise". I see nothing there about splitting the party and revenge. Remember these?
While I agree he's far from perfect (at the very least he sanctioned a couple extrajudicial executions and a coup in my home country) he seems to be a loving husband and father, can complete sentences and expose coherent reasoning. He clearly shows signs of a very superior intelligence, never declared bankruptcy (and never bankrupted a casino!) or defrauded investors, nor cheated on every single wife he had (he's still on his first one and she is a keeper).
Maybe. OTOH, a politician can be a huge influence for good. Kennedy's "We chose the Moon" speech influenced generations of engineers and scientists all over the world. JFK was not a good role model and, yet, he managed to bring out the best in a whole lot of people.
Humans are flawed - we can't escape that. Every human has a dark side but, it seems, some humans have a very large one.
Any one with half a brain will find good ideas from the far left to the far right. This "left vs right" is the dumbest thing we ever came up with. Vote and fight for ideas, not sport teams... keep the fanatism for football
On the contrary, I find the left/right spectrum a useful, if rather rough, guide to the landscape og political opinions. But of course, the devil is in the details, and you ignore them at your peril. I consider myself sort of left leaning, but I still think there are a whole lot of misguided ideas on the left, some of them flat out dangerous.
Useful to what end? So that people can easily label an idea such that tribal followers can quickly decide if they are on board? I can't think of great applications, only negative outcomes from such a simplified labeling of people and ideas.
As Karunamon said in a sibling comment, labels facilitate reasoning. Yes, labels have their inherent risks, especially such vague labels as left and right (as applied to politics).
But we live in an age of political parties. It seems we can't do representative democracy without them, for better or worse: And given that, we need a language to talk about parties' politics in broad terms. And then we inevitably come up with various axes such as left/right, authoritarian/liberal, and so forth to describe them. So long as we remember that these are rough categories, I think it is useful and harmless. But of course, once fronts harden and the tribal impulse sets in, that important caveat may be the first to go out the window.
It's about more than just reasoning. It's about coalitions. There is one fundamental label: every vote has exactly one winner. Whether it's a law or an election, there is a single outcome. The law passes or not; one person wins the election. Either way, they need at least a plurality, if not a majority.
The more dimensions there are, the more you need to make allies to reach that bar. Nobody exactly agrees with you on all things. In order to get them to vote for your things, you need to agree to vote for their things. There's no other way to achieve it.
Policy is complex and impactful, but in the end a decision gets made. The goal is to make a decision that most people can live with. That's the best you can hope for. And you achieve that by assembling a group who support each other. That group is a real thing, regardless of the label you put on it. You're either part of that group or you're not, and you have to live with the outcome.
> Why? Why should we strive to generalize something so inherently complex and impactful as policy.
Because we (most of us, myself included) don't have the capacity to reason about the entire complex mess at once. To some extent, all thinking about the real world must be simpler than reality. This is true even of mathematical models of physical reality, even more so of mental models of politics. Yes, we should strive to improve our understanding, and I struggle with this daily, but if you remove all broad categories from consideration, leaving only the details, I for one will be lost. The usual metaphor is something about forests and trees, I believe.
I definitely agree that it needs to be simplified, but I think there has to be balance and nuance. I would think a simple left vs right is the most simplistic view one can take and thus has swung entirely too far in the direction of simplifying a view.
Labels facilitate reasoning. Whether that reasoning turns out to be any good is a different question, but good luck speaking about broadly-held political beliefs without using some kind of term to represent it.
How do labels facilitate reasoning in this context? If a politician, for example, says that universal basic income would empower poorer people to become larger contributors to the economy thus having a strong ROI while raising quality of life (all of this is hypothetical I don't care to debate UBI here) - I'm lost on how knowing whether this is a left vs right policy is beneficial to anyone trying to decide if this is useful policy.
You put your finger at an important point there. When applied to a single policy, labels can indeed get in the way of reasoned discussion of the policy. I think the labels are more useful as applied to the entirety of someone's political outlook.
But if we were to apply labels to UBI, I imagine that the left would mostly be in favour, and the right would mostly be against it. Ideally, everyone should consider the notion on its merits. It's just that what way you're leaning, will inevitably influence your thinking to some extent.
Edited to add: To be more concrete, consider two possible effects of UBI: (1) Raising the quality of life of poor people, and (2) Discouraging people from seeking work. I imagine that a right-wing thinker will weigh (2) more heavily than (1), while a left-wing thinker will do the opposite. Each may even say that the other outcome is not even going to happen, or only negligibly so.
I think you're arguing my point for me here! If we don't immediately try to label something with simplistic labels people would be forced to reason about the policy based on merits rather than labels (or just not consider it at all, which I contend is entirely better than making decisions based on tribal labels)
You do have some valid points, but presently we seem to be talking past each other, so I think I'll let the matter drop for now. But thanks for giving me something to mull over.
It's completely useless when you move away from the center. The left/right spectrum bastardizes politics to only one dimension and every extreme is trying to redefine what it means, ie. "pick whichever side sounds better to you and then redefine it as the thing you care most about". And you end up with basically good/bad spectrum. Like libertarians, socialists and nationalists have completely different definitions just to exclude from it everyone else.
It means that anyone who has ideas that resemble the tenets of communism, socialism, marxism, etc. don't have a political party that pushes for these ideas. Both the leader of the Democratic party (Biden at the moment) and the leader of the Republican party (still Trump) lash out at socialism every chance they get. Even Bernie Sanders, who both sides of the aisle would label a "socialist", is pushing hard for a $15 minimum wage, something socialists would call a cop-op compromise with capitalists. We don't want a minimum wage dictated by the federal government, we want democracy in the workplace so we can vote on our own wage. Even AOC, who the right believe is socialism incarnate, pushes her "Green New Deal" which seems to be a response to climate change that does its best to accommodate capitalists.
I don't know if "genuinely left wing" is a useful phrasing.
Leftism and rightism are little more than broad, inchoate moral intuitions that are ultimately given concrete form and specific content by ideologies, philosophy and realpolitik.
For example, economic class-driven socialism and wokeness will conflict with each other but both are driven by a thought pattern that's descended from Marxism. Gendercrit feminists and the woke, same thing, but both more or less want to strangle each other.
On the right, you get can have Nietzsche-influenced hyperindividualist überman strivers and a kind of communitarian neo-trad thinking. Both clearly rightist, both in tension with each other. The GOP and the aforementioned localist Christian tradheads are definitely against each other, but not leftists.
List goes on. I'd consider the woke ideology genuinely leftist, it's just not very genuinely pro the little guy, pro the working man. Many traditional Marxists are certainly tearing their hair out from what I've read some.
From my point of view as an American who has lived in Europe (Sweden, later Germany, and the UK) my framing of the US political situation is as follows:
Democrats tend to be authoritarian and pro-centralization of power.
Republicans tend to be anti-authoritarian and pro-decentralization.
Both major parties have a long history of deep corruption. They've essentially colluded to rob the American people blind. Unfortunately, until these two corrupt institutions get together and decide to eliminate parties from our political process, the American people will have to use the threat of supporting the opposite party to get them to stay even mildly in their lane.
EDIT - The voting swings on this comment are interesting.
It feels to me as if you are focusing your attention solely on the national parties and coming to view authoritarian and centralization on very narrow terms (e.g., use of executive orders). Take a step back, look at the broader contexts of the parties at the state and local levels, and it becomes more clear that your labels are not particularly accurate.
Take centralization. You see that the Republicans are pro-decentralization. Except they're the party that's trying to delete California's air quality rules in favor of federalized ones. And also delete state net neutrality rules in favor of (lack of) federal ones. Drill down to the state level, and it's clear that their policy on centralization versus decentralization is actually about "the rules should be decided on whatever level we hold power." In states where there is a Republican lock on state government, any Democratic city that dares to pass progressive legislation will not infrequently be met with a state law restricting their ability to pass that legislation. A few states passed laws prohibiting localities from enacting mask mandates. The "bathroom bills" are another example of this effect.
I don't disagree. I believe both parties have deeply rooted issues with corruption.
On the levels that I am most knowledgeable about, the trend is roughly true. For example, Dems are the party of gun control while simultaneously militarizing police (a bipartisan effort). The moves to licensing and excessive taxation for what should be fundamental rights (e.g licenses to operate businesses, high taxes on your primary residence) is another trend that concerns me, but quickly goes out of the scope of what can be readily discussed on a forum.
My view is that both parties seek power on whatever levels they can get it. That's why I am for the abolition of political parties altogether, and a move towards a more direct democracy (public veto).
California has among the least efficient and effective governance models on the planet, overall. Switzerland also has a direct democracy, but they make it work quite well for them. Notably, they've seemed to enjoy just not doing what the EU wants. They've kept their own money, maintained military neutrality, and also maintained an extremely well-armed population.
Implementation probably matters more than the model. That said, I still prefer certain models because it aligns better with my personal principles.
I'm not well read on the subject, but you appear to know what you're talking about. What do you see as the crucial differences (especially structural) between the two implementations?
This topic gets complicated fast but it boils down most simply to:
1. Options in representation. California is essentially a single-party state. Switzerland has substantially more options in this regard.
2. California is freaking huge, Switzerland is not. Because of this, you have dramatically different interests between different regions in California contrasted with more homogeneous needs in Switzerland.
3. The population of Switzerland is not nearly as diverse as California. They speak several languages there, but overall you have a group of people with very similar cultural and historical values.
4. This point would require a small novel, but in essence California abuses the system to go around the process rather than go through it. You could describe this as the contrast between cooperative governance (Switzerland) and adversarial governance (California).
In short, if we stuck with George Washington's suggestion to lower the maximum size of congressional districts to one representative per 30,000 people, California might be in better shape. It probably would have also been beneficial to listen to Alexander Hamilton when he called parties “the most fatal disease.”
Points 2 and 3 don't seem to be things we can modify. Are they barriers to an effective implementation, or will the increased size + diversity be more friction but not a blocker?
For points 1 and 4, those sound like symptoms to a more rudimentary problem. I don't know what that problem is, but my guess is its something systemic and structural.
Points 1 & 4 could be solved either via elimination of the party system (unlikely) or if one of the several initiatives to break up California succeed (also unlikely). Simply put, the problem is that when you have one party in control there's very little incentive for them to work cooperatively with the people.
Points 2&3 are could also be solved by dividing the state up so that each region could self-govern. Given that this is unlikely, I have a hard time imagining a solution. It's extremely hard to make "city folk" understand what's going on in rural areas, and vice versa. Worse, our current political climate is such that demonizing the other group is seen as a morally acceptable thing to do, almost always without really understanding them in the first place.
The first step to solving these problems in California is to close the political divide and get the people to work together to establish better representation.
Isn’t it generally accepted that increased diversity in a decision group leads to better decisions? Splitting the state up would draw territory lines where there are only cultural lines currently.
Eliminating unions and splitting the state don’t seem to be feasible options. What else can we do, is there something less radical that can chip away to close this gap?
> Isn’t it generally accepted that increased diversity in a decision group leads to better decisions?
Perhaps evidence to the contrary, it seems widely believed that the governance of most Nordic countries and other nations like Switzerland result in (much?) better outcomes than the US. There seems to be something of a fascination with those nations in terms of their social support systems and the like. Interestingly, those nations are substantially more homogeneous the United States.
> Splitting the state up would draw territory lines where there are only cultural lines currently.
I don't think it's a given that this is a bad thing. The principle behind states and counties is that the populations can govern themselves in a way that fits their values. An extreme case, an Amish population that has gathered in a particular region, would probably not feel great about being forcibly assimilated into another group's social or governmental structures. Their beliefs are so disparate that it's difficult to imagine they would be able to find common ground.
> What else can we do, is there something less radical that can chip away to close this gap?
Acceptance of other people's values without demonization is key. The US has devolved into a state where the opposing political belief is now seen as a flaw of their character or morality. You see that Even on a site like this where the average commenter is better educated than the average citizen. (The comments about Trump supporters all supporting segregation as example).
To fix this, we need to break the echo chambers that perpetuate these beliefs. Unfortunately, because of the current polarization, it's difficult even for an elected official to agree with the opposition about any issue without reprisal from their own party or the voters.
Um, no one would ever label Republicans "anti-authoritarian". When your ideology extends from rules concerning which water fountain you can drink from, it's hard to shake the authoritarian label.
"No one" - Lots of people have a lack of awareness of what the other side thinks.
"They're fighters. When are we going to get a real fighter on our side to finally stand up to them?"
"Look, I understand being principled, but get real. They don't give a damn about principles and will break every rule to get their way. It's time to fight dirty like they do."
"Our side isn't perfect but they're authoritarians."
BOTH sides say all of these things. And they seem to think it's a joke when the other side claims to see it the same way.
No. Because in the US we've had such militias/paramilitaries historically, and they largely sought to defend and restore the authoritarian hierarchies of society.
>...your ideology extends from rules concerning which water fountain you can drink from...
The ex-Confederate, Democrat, southern states had segregated water fountains. On the other hand, here's Wikipedia's explanation of where Republican ideology originated:
>The GOP was founded in 1854 by opponents of the Kansas–Nebraska Act,[11] which allowed for the potential expansion of chattel slavery into the western territories. The party supported economic reform and classical liberalism while opposing the expansion of slavery.[12][13] Abraham Lincoln was the first Republican president. Under the leadership of Lincoln and a Republican Congress, slavery was banned in the United States in 1865.
> The ex-Confederate, Democrat, southern states had segregated water fountains
Yup, they did. Which is why they, in large part, bolted from the Democrats twice over the Democrats supporting progress on civil rights, once temporarily (as the Dixiecrats) because of the nature of US electoral politics converging on a two-party system and them not being strong enough alone to displace a major party, and then permanently when the GOP decided to leverage their post-1968 disillusionment and appeal directly to their racist urges, resulting in a partisan realignment over the subsequent several decades. There's a reason symbols of the Confederacy are seen at Republican rallies these days and not generally Democratic ones.
The origins of the GOP as an entity have nothing to do with the ideology they espouse today. It was in the wake of the Civil Rights Act that the GOP decided to appeal to white Americans disaffected by the act and make them the centerpiece of their party.
I personally have very mixed feelings about Trump as a whole. On the one hand, I didn't vote for him. I see him as divisive and as an obstacle for progress on real issues that I personally care about.
However, he has done a few things that I have sincere appreciation for. Primarily, we made significant gains towards peace in the middle east by negotiating treaties in the region. Another point in the win column (leading up the covid) was the economy. And the last major thing I cared about was reducing the US dependence on Chinese goods and labor (which are made so affordable due to inhumane practices).
Regarding authoritarianism, he has a mixed track record. He had a thing for executive orders, but he also let the states largely handle the civil unrest and covid in the manner they saw fit.
With that having been said, Trump was a Democrat for a long time, and was certainly not a typical political establishment individual. I find it difficult to attribute him to either party.
His rhetoric against TPP did more harm to US China dependence than any good he did.
"The Internet" was all in A Tizzy because the treaty spelled out some legal procedures (that withdrawing from the treaty would end), and forgot that it was aimed squarely at China.
I liked how Eric Weinstein described Trump as "existential threat". The idea was that while Trump is asking the right questions and does his best to follow up with the right policies, in the process of doing so he makes these issues "ugly" and tamed with "Trumpisism" assuring that no one ever will come back to these issues. Example: most American want stronger border, most Americans wont be caught dead screaming "... Go Home!" to anyone, but a Trump supporter is more likely to do so than most. Therefore the issue of "stronger border" is a taboo unless Trump gets re-elected
Yes that is getting insane. Sections of the border wall are unfinished and now getting extra border patrol agents to police the unfinished sections. You can be police the border but you can't build a wall. All because a wall is now connected to Trump. Yet it does the same job as border patrol agents but with less risk of people getting shot.
> I find it difficult to attribute him to either party.
When your mental model is persistently at odds with the way things work out in reality, you need to reexamine your mental model.
Trump thinks he’s a Republican. A large majority of Republicans enthusiastically agree. I don’t know what you mean by “attribute” but however he got there, Trump is very definitely a Republican.
It might help to recognize that a political party in the US is not one thing. They are a shifting coalition of groups and individuals who have found a way to work together, sometimes comfortably and sometimes not, sometimes for the long term and sometimes not. The policies shift and people change continuously as each tries to get and keep power.
Trump has changed his party affiliation five times since 1987. He was a registered democrat for many years, even going on CNN and discussing that he identifies as a Democrat. While campaigning as a Republican he said repeatedly that he didn't align with the party's platform. Then, after all that, he recently was talking about starting an entirely new party.
> Trump thinks he’s a Republican.
His own statements, both during and prior to his time as president, strongly suggest otherwise.
> When your mental model is persistently at odds with the way things work out in reality, you need to reexamine your mental model.
Trump thinks its useful to be seen as a Republican, just as he formerly saw it advantageous to be seen as a Democrat and for a brief time (his first Presidential campaign, coincidentally also the first where the Reform Party nomination would have let him funnel federal matching funds as well as donor funds into his own businesses) as part of the Reform Party.
I'm a big believer in the life experience determining the politics and Trump, Bloomberg, Biden, Pelosi, and all those other "in the urban neoliberal ruling class, spent their early careers in the urban ruling class" seem to want to solve problems using the jackboot.
If you look at actual policy Bernie, AOC, Warren, etc push (i.e. not the twitter crap they pile on to for virtue points) much less authoritarians stuff despite being "further" left because they all cut their teeth serving the interests of different demographics.
"Green New Deal" harks back to a time when our government was literally being run by a single man.
>The president stayed in charge of his administration...by drawing fully on his formal and informal powers as Chief Executive; by raising goals, creating momentum, inspiring a personal loyalty, getting the best out of people...by deliberately fostering among his aides a sense of competition and a clash of wills that led to disarray, heartbreak, and anger but also set off pulses of executive energy and sparks of creativity...by handing out one job to several men and several jobs to one man, thus strengthening his own position as a court of appeals, as a depository of information, and as a tool of co-ordination; by ignoring or bypassing collective decision-making agencies, such as the Cabinet...and always by persuading, flattering, juggling, improvising, reshuffling, harmonizing, conciliating, manipulating.[149]
That's a ridiculous oversimplification. Republicans tend to be anti government power, but A-OK with other kinds - notably both Big Business and Big Church. I guess that qualifies as anti-authoritarian in the sense that "authority" and "power" aren't exactly the same thing, but that's not a particularly useful definition IMO. It's more a difference of opinion about which kind of coercion is worse.
> This is not how politics work in the rest of the world.
Between radicalised parties it looks like that everywhere. When people have only two choices, by necessity each choice contains radicalised fringe elements. For some reason societal factors in the US give these elements a huge presence, which I don't really understand.
Its very simple for the other side to push their agenda and cater to their crowd
"See , we told you the other side was crazy"
911 truthers & marxists have always existed, however its only when the "mainstream" of the other side chose to hand the fringe a megaphone, that they came to the fore.
This was not done for debate or charity. It was to score cheap political points in the age of clickbait. Extra Bonus: they got to extrapolate the extreme over 50% of the US population, and by consequence, to expand their potential eyeball audience
Interesting. That explains why all the crazies have the microphone lately. The mainstream of the other side is giving it to them, to use them as a freak show.
And the reason it's blowing up now is because the media monopoly is over. Back when "the media" was ABC, CBS, NBC, AP, UPI, and then-centrist New York Times and Washington Post, nobody was giving the crazies the microphone, on either side. But when Fox and talk radio came on the right, and CNN on the left (and many of the former-center media moved left), then there were people with a slant, and therefore with a motivation to make the other side look silly.
But these people (on both sides) need to reconsider what they're doing. They're making the other side look silly to the mainstream, but they're also helping the fringe of the other side recruit. That may not be a very wise policy...
I believe what helped Trump win was all the (left leaning) news sites covering him saying, “look how stupid he is”, but then some saw it and sided with him. By giving him a platform, they helped put him in power.
I feel that's disingenuous. It wasn't the same way on both sides. This kind of false equivalence crops up in a lot of places but it needs to be called out.
Many high profile Remainers claimed Leavers were/are racist, ignorant, far-right, small minded, hated all foreigners, didn't know what they were voting for, were old and thus should have their vote be ignored, and worse.
Leavers claimed Remainers were ... what? Afraid of independence? That's about the worst of it from what I can remember. There was not by any stretch of the imagination the same kind of smear campaign alleging terrible motives and terrible souls.
And now this. Parler and Gab within a few months of each other. It's not left wing outlets getting hacked and dumped, is it? I'm afraid there's no equivalency here: whether it's the USA or UK, it's always the same: it's always the left attacking the right. They do not view opposition of any sort as legitimate any more and are determined to destroy conservatism by any means possible, both legal and illegal. Nothing like it exists in reverse.
First of all, having the vote was an unnecessary and idiotic political blunder. However, it did highlight not everyone agree on everything EU. There are other models that are successful too.
The reaction to the vote however, has been borderline sabotage and very nasty characterizations. This is a symptom of EU being an "all or nothing" entity, of high prestige and privilege. The result being an unmitigated mess on all levels, but do represent legitimate concerns over how EU is run vs local level.
There are many good decisions in EU too addressing broader concerns. So it's a highly complex issue which is hard to solve by a simple vote and by political processes. Yet, that's how they did it this time.
Taking the example of France, which I know better (caution: right/left in Europe does not mean quite the same as for Americans).
The left (in particular the lefter parties) accuse the right to be racists, islamophobes, antisemites, sexists, at the heel of the bourgeoisie & capitalists, hostile to the working class, and guilty of ecological inaction.
The right (not just the far right, even centre-right like the current party in power) accuses the left to be at the heel of muslims ("islamo-leftist" is thrown around a lot), traitors/threats to their own national identity/culture, weak, slowing down progress, utopists. I might be missing some, I'm biased.
The left's attacks are more personal, more violent. I have an overly-simplified theory of why that is, the left's values are much more centered around the human, and the right's values are much more centered around the economy. That means that everything for the left is personal, it's cutting deep, violation of these values trigger empathy: sadness, anger, feelings of injustice and outrage. Violation of the right's values are much less personal, more indirect, closer to annoyance than outrage.
Of course, being biased I also think that the left's argument are more violent because they're _more true_, the right mostly getting its way. We do live in a liberal world which is very right-wing (despite americans liberal being called "leftists", that always confused me, or even "communists" when communism is so radically opposed to the neoliberalism we have today)
There's also, I think (disclaimer, righty lean), kind of a lack of understanding that goods conflict with each other.
For example, how is diversity really born? Friction, separation. That's how it works biologically, and that's how cultures have grown different as well. Japanese people figuring out Japanese solutions to Japanese problems, Brits doing that in Britain, and so on. There were a lot of these when travel was more difficult, and we couldn't just bruteforce eg. heating/cooling and water away with tech and energy expenditure. And those are the things that have created the charm of the cultures themselves.
Biology's the same, animals become different to cope with environmental pressure and we celebrate this. We rightly think it's a richness.
Wanting a locality to remain more like it is and retain its character is a desire for a good, it's not an evil thing. But when we run into something that triggers moral sentiment, thought often stops there. If we close borders, we will in fact be doing nasty things to people who could use help. But that doesn't have to precisely be because those outsiders are bad, them being different is enough: They will damage a good that we'd like to keep.
On the other hand, letting them in helps said people, but abandons the good the friction of moving into the country created.
> Violation of the right's values are much less personal, more indirect, closer to annoyance than outrage.
I think this is more because the right's grown up in an environment where the things they ought to hold holy haven't been allowed to be held holy, so we get substitutes like excessively economic politics, or the ugliness of populism: It's a moral impulse that has no dignified outlet, at least yet.
Ever wonder why many right-leaning people feel like they're more or less making apologies for their existence, that there's things that should feel important, but summon the air of dusty closets and mothballs to the mind when spoken of?
It's partly because the right-wing society concept was built on a somewhat different stack. Said conservatives often call themselves right-liberals, and therein lies the problem: Liberal.
Liberalism is not merely valuing liberty, and wishing a high degree of it. It's a descendant of French Revolution type thinking, an enlightened, rationalist concept where we've finally figured out via Reason how to conduct human life, an a John Stuart Mill -ish idea of freedom as the maximization of available choices being the end in itself. Liberalism is inherently universalist in conception, since it knows the right way to live. To a liberal bent, humanity is malleable given sufficient perseverance and wisdom. Rationalist Revo!Liberty is the bedrock of society, on top of which it is built. There is an inherent devaluation of the past here, since reason will tell us how to go forward, and we can't even tell what all this rickety nonsense does - it's likely a pile of superstitious junk anyway.
This does not work for the conservative attitude - in a Burkean sense, law is the slow accumulation of patches onto a rickety pile, that contains a lot of wisdom on how to live that we don't even remember why they're there in the first place: A mountain of Chesterton's fences. Man is held to be fallible, but something that can be honed by society and faith.
Drop the Revo!Liberty lego, let a Burkean patchwork law, religion as humans must have, and more secular tradition fall into its place at the bottom as the bedrock, and insert liberty as a product. Suddenly, the mothballs disappear. The conservative no longer needs to be a brake on Revo!Liberalism's inevitable forward march, an outdated version ten years late that will assimilate most anything their ostensible opponents push as the good status quo. The ideological stack becomes alive, and he can stand on his own two feet, on solid moral ground.
The Millian concept of liberty is troubled otherwise, too: A healthy society considers its own norms Good, and thus renders the human desire to conform a moral act. If the norms cease to be that, and are just arbitrary impositions, the only real moral act is defiance, it's the only one that contains proof of moral acts having been taken. Thus we go from stained glass to obese women holding severed heads, from public sculptures to giant public buttplugs. From melodic music to Yoko Ono, from beautiful paintings reflecting the wonder of creation to random splatter driven by hype. Subversion feels radical for the while but grows empty, fast. The only real 'morality' is in not being something, and that is it. There is nothing to truly aspire to except transgression or one-upping the Joneses.
I don't have the courage to have a deep conversation about everything you're talking to, I'm just going to give a different perspective on a couple things (disclaimer: I'm talking about leftists and non-conservative like they have uniform opinions about these things. They do not, it's mostly my POV that I know to be somewhat common):
> Liberalism is not merely valuing liberty, and wishing a high degree of it
The idea that "liberalism is about more liberty" (or something we often hear in France "the left values equality more, the right values liberty more") is something is disagree with _so much_. Liberalism is about laissez-faire, jungle law, survival of the fittest. That means the powerful/rich are very free, the less-powerful are free within the bounds set by the powerful: they have to work long hours in stupid jobs and their whole society (laws, means of consumption, social benefits) is set by the powerful. In effect, almost nobody is free to do what they want, only to do what they manage to get resources for (which is often not much). Being a "wage slave" is just one aspect of it.
You're talking about the French Revolution, which is an _excellent_ example of an uprising of the working class that's been subverted by the bourgeoisie. The bourgeoisie set the foundation of liberalism on the back of the people's uprise and continues to reap the benefits, the ideals of the revolutionaries most definitely were not aligned with liberalism. We see this again in the second French Revolution, then with the National Council of the Resistance whose ideals and achievements have been deconstructed by decades of liberalist policies.
> Wanting a locality to remain more like it is and retain its character is a desire for a good, it's not an evil thing
I think it's probably the argument that non-conservative struggle the most to argue against, because it's something that's simply not important to them. They just wave it away, because having their locality remain like it is is not particularly important to them. It's not _not_ important, but it's very secondary to making sure that the people's condition (both in this locality and outside of it), ie their rights/freedom/outcomes/wellbeing, is as good as it can be. I personally find it hard to think that one can morally think otherwise, but moral is a very personal thing.
And _in addition_ to having different values on what's important (human's condition versus the locality staying the same), I also believe that more than enough diversity is created, and we need more diffusion of it rather than less. I think the biggest threat to diversity is not people moving across borders, it is global corporations flooding local markets (Americanism is an obvious example, Chinese manufacture flooding Africa is another).
> Biology's the same, animals become different to cope with environmental pressure and we celebrate this. We rightly think it's a richness.
I abhor the very notion that because something is "natural", it is a good thing for society. Especially when we're in the realm of metaphors and analogies.
The left has largely already been destroyed within the "Anglosphere". Collective bargaining has been undermined, social programs are defunded, and income and wealth inequality is increasing. The "attacks" you are referring to come from the "centre" - the technocratic "middle way" types. They do not represent left wing thought or politics.
Unfortunately, if you aren’t here on the ground floor in America, you are getting information from the news which has a tendency to only amplify the extreme cases that are “newsworthy“
In Brazil it has been exacerbated by the legacy of the military dictatorship, openly defended by the current president, and lately by the high number of deaths caused by COVID and the reactions (or lack thereof) to that.
> As far as political orientation goes, by worldwide standards America actually ranges from center-right (Democrats) to far-right (Republicans),
Does anyone have a good global breakdown of political ideology?
What we call the west (North America, Europe, Australia, etc) is about 20% of the global population. These are the sources I usually see. I’m curious about this stuff globally
OP is radically incorrect regarding where US parties would fit on a global scale. There is actually a lot of good research out available in political science papers based on large-scale surveys conducted over decades that show the US parties to be close to the middle of the right and left respectively. If you removed health care from the equation (given how messed up this is in the US) then the two parties would actually shift a bit to the left when compared to right and left political parties in other western democracies. The past five years or so may have muddied the waters slightly with the impact of populism, but prior to this point they were not significant outliers.
The US is a clear outlier compared to other western democracies in regards to public health policy. It makes little sense to try to map US healthcare debates to non-US political positions because it is almost unique. It is not about trying to fit a model, it is about removing things that add no useful information when it comes to points of comparison. And yes, it is good science.
Well, I would like to see their methodology. Obviously these are data points that are hard to assign categorical labels to, let alone quantifiable values.
I’d guess that by looking at the wide spectrum of governance with an inclusive view of Western democracies, you could come to the conclusion that economically-liberal powers share much in common.
On the other hand, when commentators make these comparisons they’re generally comparing a handful of exemplar Northern European democratic-socialist governments on a subset of hot-button issues (racial and economic justice, foreign policy, economic regulation, etc.) because that’s where the political action is.
Most of the long-running studies use the comparative manifesto project data, which tends to skew european but covers more than just hot-button issues. I think it includes Japan and Aus/NZ but not sure about the latter. See https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9248.12015 for info on the range of questions people in the field think this data can answer.
It is. But unfortunately, most people are not willing to separate the concept of progress from something that is magically inherently good. Same as with evolution or agile development :-)
Progress is not always good but it's not inevitable like evolution. Regress is entirely possible. I know too little about history to say if two party system is progress or regress.
Politics are the same everywhere. There's always an enemy and they're always dehumanized. It's always about empowering yourself and your group at the expense of everyone else.
"The specific political distinction to which political actions and
motives can be reduced is that between friend and enemy. This provides a definition in the sense of a criterion and not as an exhaustive definition or one indicative of substantial content. Insofar as it is not derived from other criteria, the antithesis of friend and enemy corresponds to the relatively independent criteria of other antitheses: good and evil in the moral sphere, beautiful and ugly in the aesthetic sphere, and so on. In any event it is independent, not in the sense of a distinct new domain, but in that it can neither be based on anyone antithesis or any combination of other antitheses, nor can it be traced to these. If the antithesis of good and evil is not simply identical with that of beautiful and ugly, profitable and unprofitable, and cannot be directly reduced to the others, then the antithesis of friend and enemy must even less be confused with or mistaken for the others. The distinction of friend and enemy denotes the utmost degree of intensity of a union or separation, of an association or dissociation. It can exist theoretically and practically, without having simultaneously to draw upon all those moral, aesthetic, economic, or other distinctions. The political enemy need not be morally evil or aesthetically ugly; he need not appear as an economic competitor, and it may even be advantageous to engage with him in business transactions. But he is, nevertheless, the other, the stranger; and it is sufficient for his nature that he is, in a specially intense way, existentially something different and alien, so that in the extreme case conflicts with him are possible. These can neither be decided by a previously determined general norm nor by the judgment of a disinterested and therefore neutral third party.
Only the actual participants can correctly recognize, understand, and judge the concrete situation and settle the extreme case of conflict. Each participant is in a position to judge whether the adversary intends to negate his opponent's way of life and therefore must be repulsed or fought in order to preserve one's own form of existence. Emotionally the enemy is easily treated as being evil and ugly, because every distinction, most of all the political, as the strongest and most intense of the distinctions and categorizations, draws upon other distinctions for support. This does not alter the autonomy of such distinctions. Consequently, the reverse is also true: the morally evil, aesthetically ugly or economically damaging need not necessarily be the enemy; the morally good, aesthetically beautiful, and economically profitable need not necessarily become the friend in the specifically political sense of the word. Thereby the inherently objective nature and autonomy of the political becomes evident by virtue of its being able to treat, distinguish, and comprehend the friend-enemy antithesis independently of other antitheses."
—Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political. [emphasis mine]
This is a very fascinating quote and, at least in my opinion, a gem in a this garbage fire of a thread. It puts in words, much more concretely and verbosely than I ever could a thought I’ve had in the back of my mind for a while now. I will have to look into this book more
I disagree that Democrats are center-right. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez or Bernie Sanders are definitely left wing, even for European standards.
But you might be partly right. One of the reasons for that are rules of political marketing (rarely politicians have enough courage to ignore them). One of those rules says that you need to differ and polarization is good. You want to win? Show how different you are.
Another rule is that people don't vote with their brains but with emotions. So stirring emotions is needed. Humiliating your opponent is a good recipe for high emotions.
Social platforms are magnifying differences, emotions, so there is no much more left.
As a result democracy is not in the greatest shape now, some would even argue that it resembles more democracy of Roman Empire from triumvirate times (it was only a facade for the mob that was manipulated by those with power) than system that John Stuart Mill or Alexis de Tocqueville had in their minds.
No, most of the stuff Bernie and AOC advocate for are considered fairly centrist policies in western Europe. Universal healthcare coverage? Paid parental leave? These are the norm in western Europe, they're not radical in the least.
In my country, the party (and we have representatives from ~20 parties that are in nationally significant seats of power, 9 parties in the national assembly) that is considered the most "right-wing" actually supports _expanding_ the universal healthcare (EDIT: specifically, they want it to include dentistry, which we currently pay for except for in rare circumstances.)
It's not a centrist policy at all - the parties (I think there are two, one of which is probably the Libertarian party) that don't support it here don't hold _any_ elected seats on any level. Not even a single city council seat in a backwater town in the middle of nowhere.
So yeah, this is the norm. I'm not saying this to argue, I'm saying it to reinforce you (hopefully that's obvious) :-)
"Tyranny in democratic republics does not proceed in the same way, however. It ignores the body and goes straight for the soul. The master no longer says: You will think as I do or die. He says: You are free not to think as I do. You may keep your life, your property, and everything else. But from this day forth you shall be as a stranger among us. You will retain your civic privileges, but they will be of no use to you. For if you seek the votes of your fellow citizens, they will withhold them, and if you seek only their esteem, they will feign to refuse even that. You will remain among men, but you will forfeit your rights to humanity. When you approach your fellow creatures, they will shun you as one who is impure. And even those who believe in your innocence will abandon you, lest they, too, be shunned in turn. Go in peace, I will not take your life, but the life I leave you with is worse than death."
AOC and Bernie are picking a $15 minimum wage as the hill they are willing to die on at the moment. Changing the minimum wage from one insufficient value to another slightly larger yet still insufficient value isn't exactly what the left has in mind when they talk about controlling the means of production.
The rest the Democrats are far to the right of Bernie, AOC et al.
The left will tell you the mainstream Democratic party is working to minimize the impact of the left wing, and succeeding (see recent failures to enact progressive policy on minimum wage and immigration.)
It is not a good thing if people go around thinking that their friendly republican neighbor or grandmother/grandfather is a nazi. It might lead some (who doesn't know better) to think nazism isn't that bad.
Besides, Nazism is a particular brand of evil and you fight them better if you learn the correct terminology, so it is a win-win (unless ones goal is to make the divide in American politics even wider by branding those at the other sites as the ugliest of all men.)
Also I haven't seen a single swastika or other NSDAP related flag on any republican event. Do you mean the confederate flag or something?
And we've also just proven my point together as well: so many people have been calling ordinary people nazis that when someone actually bring nazi symbols and colours to the convention I refuse to believe it. (And yes, I will check more sources before I claim this happened.)
Edit: read and reread the link. I couldn't find anything to connect the Republican party and all those flags? I specifically searched for "convention", "party" and "stage" based on your comments but I saw nothing relevant.
Now English is not my first language but are you sure you gave me the correct link, and if so, can you point me to the smoking gun?
There isn't a smoking gun. That's not how dog whistles work. But the supporters who agree with this stuff feel heard and emboldened.
And there are lots of other data points to go with it. The singer of the national anthem on that stage, for instance, disagrees that Disney no longer sells "Song of the South", an explicitly racist film from their archives.
These things all work together to paint a clear picture.
I'm not sure what you think is a lie here. A part of the party marches with a flag with that symbol. You can find it in guides to neo-Nazi symbols. Then their stage is shaped like it.
It's very important to put the burden of proof on the political party that has actual Nazis in it, not on people pointing to what's a very strong coincidence.
No, some jackasses who are not "a part of the party" might use some image on some flag that I've never even seen with a rune nobody of any importance had ever heard of since WWII until yesterday.
That's the fact of thing.
If you want to talk about imagery, let's talk about the Bolshevik imagery incorporated purposely into the groups who ran the recent "summer of love" who were pandered to and supported by people like the current sitting Vice President of the United States and the Speaker of the House.
Donald Trump never supported any nazis or supremacists. The Republican Party has never supported nazis or supremacists. In fact it was the Republican Party that killed the KKK and the Republican Party that won the civil war and ended slavery. The Republican Party didn't have a KKK Grand Wizard in the Senate until ten years ago, and didn't run two of his protegés for president.
So...
Go on making up stories about runes nobody has ever heard of. It sounds like desperation to shift blame for your own beliefs onto other people.
the only people who could see a nazi rune in that stage are people who made up their minds that the people who created it must be nazis in spite of all evidence to the contrary. The rest of us over here in sane world don't evaluate obscure nazi symbols nobody has ever heard of for how we can include them in stage layouts.
And that's the last I'm going to engage with you on this absurdity.
The Charlottesville protestors used that symbol explicitly (see link). CPAC hasn't come out with a denial that their stage was that shape intentionally. If it wasn't, they would have.
> CPAC hasn't come out with a denial that their stage was that shape intentionally. If it wasn't, they would have.
We are quickly approaching "have you stopped beating your wife" at this point.
I don't think it would change anything if they came out and said it wasn't intentional.
Some friends of me got viciously attacked last year over some perceived fraud. They responded by publishing their books sinve they had nothing to hide.
What happened? Story just changed: "They are so crooked they managed to hide it from both the police[0] and a big four accounting company." was tje new story.
[0]: who investigated them for three years, first secretly, then openly after a previous false accusation.
That's very different from "Your supporters used a Nazi symbol, then your stage had that symbol, and you won't say explicitly that you aren't connected to Nazis."
> The Charlottesville protestors used that symbol explicitly
Okay, so what? Should I start adding all the random incidents where people made something that was coincidentally shaped like swastika to the Wikipedia article as examples of modern usage?
> CPAC hasn't come out with a denial that their stage was that shape intentionally.
They did, they called it slanderous.
> slander (noun) - the utterance of false charges or misrepresentations which defame and damage another's reputation
CPAC cancelled some black dude for anti-semitism. They didn't do that after he was saying anti-Christian and anti-white stuff, only after he started saying that Judaism is illegitimate or whatever. But yes, I'm supposed to believe that they're using Nazi imagery on purpose.
Yes, because attacking them for that stage is slanderous? That's what slander is.
I haven't seen anyone picking up that "dog whistle" besides people like you.
edit: search on twitter the phrase "cpac rune based" or "cpac stage based". If it was a dog whistle, I would expect someone to pick up on it and call it "based". Yet the only people who are talking about it are the people who are making those stupid accusations. Literally no one cared about it until you made a big deal out of it. And still barely anyone cares.
I would NOT expect someone to talk about it publicly. That's why CPAC would hedge and not openly deny they used a Nazi symbol. This is how a group that knows they need to hide communicate with one another.
You know what? You convinced me, you're right. All those Jewish people that are involved in the CPAC are totally followers of Hitler's ideology. You're clearly a very smart and intelligent person, so I don't need to care if you will make yourself look like a fool, just like I don't need to care about this joke of a conference that called itself "America Uncancelled" and then proceeded to cancel people.
Please kill all of my snarky comments in this thread with downvotes, as they were inappropriate and it's a flamewar that has no place on HN.
That's not true: they denied it almost immediately. Like QAnon, it's a hard question on whether to even acknowledge these kinds of conspiracies[0], since denying them can even help to spread them.
The Trump wing is without question populist, nativist, often conspiratorial, and caught in a cult of personality. But they're not Nazis, and by trying to conflate these things, you do a disservice to the victims of actual Nazism (note the publication I linked to, from a country of founded by Nazi survivors that has quite a few supporters of Trump).
Charlottesville Nazis likely did use it, but they're far from being Trump supporters. They deeply distrust him because of Jared and Ivanka. And they're a tiny, tiny percentage of our population - all extreme right-wing groups combined (neoconfederates, Nazis, militia, etc) are well under 1%. You'll see SPLC trumpet things like "30% rise!" without mentioning how tiny these groups are (and they have a good idea about how small they are, it's just harder to fundraise when you discuss these things).
In the US, a majority of GOP voters believe that Democrats stole the election, and that Joe Biden is an illegitimate president. Here is a pollster that is respected by US conservatives:
Many also believe that patriotic violence is acceptable to protect the legitimacy of democracy. What kind of conversation do you have when people believe their democracy was stolen from them?
There is no way at this point for the GOP to safely retreat from the position that Joe Biden is an illegitimate president. To do so would be political death.
Biden doesn’t hate anyone; he’s basically a republican minus the silly cult of personality. His actual political values align with the GOP from a decade ago. Anyone trying to paint him or Harris as “far leftists” is confused at best and probably trying to manipulate you. The far left has no party that represents them; the democrats pay lip service to progressive policy but aren’t willing to spend any political capital to actually do anything about it.
Claims about electoral fraud are a regular occurrence in American politics.
Democrats made similar claims about at least the 2000, 2004, and 2016 elections.
Trump's claims about election fraud and the sheer number of lawsuits are an escalation but it isn't a difference in kind.
Edited to add the following.
The child post correctly points out that I should have mentioned Trump's inciting a violent attempt to overthrow the government. This wasn't a deliberate omission.
No, stop spreading misinformation.
I never saw in my life before Trump an American president that refused to concede and that pushed an angry mob armed with guns, handmade bombs and restraints to invade the Capitol to try to kidnap and kill the politicians, with the Vice President being the first target.
How about inciting his supporters to attempt to halt the transition of power? It seems like you conveniently forgot about that while drawing your false equivalence.
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2004_United_States_election_vo...) has a pretty good summary of the issues. The voting machine claims were a big deal at the time; I remember a lot of news coverage about that the voting machine companies were owned by Republicans.
> On the left I see claims of disenfranchisement done through legal means, which whether you agree with or not is at least something real and concrete.
I agree that disenfranchisement is an issue and am in favor of federal voting standards and protecting the voting rights of convicted felons.
I remember 2004 well, and the concerns around electronic voting machines. But there were no allegations of impropriety once the count took place. The rest of that Wikipedia article is the usual list of enfranchisement issues.
I haven’t seen anyone claiming Russian hacking changed the vote tallies of 2016. I remember the hacking “questions” being quite clear that the results of the election were not in question.
> What kind of conversation do you have when some people believe you condone the cheating of democracy?
A conversation with my friends on the left about how important gun ownership is when the right is armed to the teeth, and last summer showed the police won’t protect the left from right-wing violence. We have to do it ourselves, which means acquiring firearms and training with them.
The US is headed towards a civil war. Pretty sure it’s unavoidable at this point, though it’ll take some years to play out. Biden pushing strong gun control could be enough to do it.
“ America actually ranges from center-right (Democrats) to far-right (Republicans”
Calling democrats center right by worldwide standards is a bit of a stretch.
If you are comparing to worldwide, please remember a large majority of the world are still socially far right by American standards, take women’s rights and gay marriage for example.
If you are comparing to the West, democrats are far more left wing than much of Europe’s parties (apart from maybe Sweden), most social justice movements originate from the states and these are in-line with the democrats policies.
> This is not how politics work in the rest of the world.
Actually, it is. It's just in places that you probably don't want to live in:
> Donald Trump’s Republican party has become more illiberal and retreated from upholding democratic norms in recent years, a study has found, with its rhetoric shifting closer that of authoritarian parties ruling in Turkey, Hungary, Poland and India.
> The research by Sweden-based V-Dem Institute highlights what it calls a “global trend” where “the median governing party in democracies has become more illiberal in recent decades”.
US animosity (i.e. firings for utterances of a word, lambasting any org. that doesn't meet certain criteria as 'White Supremacist', politicians blatantly lying about the election and running procedural coup attempts, lying on every Tweet) - is not really a left/right thing.
It's mostly raw pathetic populism, incited as much by the press as any other group.
It is the media and short election cycles. The politicians who serve long terms(senate) generally get along with each other because they have to work together, while members of the house and the president must keep media frenzy since they are constantly in election mode. Also, if you pay attention - it is no longer left vs right, more like localism vs globalism. Of course media portrays localism as nationalism, and globalism as progressivism
This type of anti-American sentiment is boring and old-hat. I often hear it made by Europeans who still insist EU countries like France and Germany are so much better. In reality EU is a polarized racist political swamp.
From the first sentence alone, I can already imagine what kind of community Gab has... The "freedom of speech", as in "freedom of hate speech" kind of community, probably.
Earlier when I was looking for what backend stack they used (I had forgotten they forked from Mastodon) I found an article from last November about their new CTO, and had a lol moment: "its newest CTO…former software engineer who spent more than seven years at Facebook…Gab is happy to introduce our new CTO…With 23 years of industry experience, he brings extensive backend infrastructure knowledge and insights from across the stack…worked as a “production engineer and developer advocate” at Facebook"
At Hacker News, the people concerned about "cancel culture" were, somehow, never concerned about the erosion of privacy and freedom of speech of ISIS. Or just ordinary muslims. Or Sikh that look like muslims to idiots. Or the forever-ban of nipples. Or the freedom of speech of members of House and Senate, typically exercised without gallows waiting for them outside. Or the victims of whaterever-the-fuck #gamergate was.
The sloganeering about "freedom of speech" or "cancel culture" has, at this point, really run its course and it's completely obvious that it is but a thin veneer over opinions that, for now, cannot be stated in polite company.
That's a misunderstanding of the slippery slope logical fallacy.
The slippery slope fallacy is when someone says that the causal chain A to B to C will necessarily play out.
It's not a fallacy if they're arguing instead for its plausibility.
The fallacy also doesn't assert that slippery slopes don't exist and never play out in reality.
So it's false to say that the slippery slope as a concept is itself a fallacy. That doesn't follow from the slippery slope logical fallacy as it's formally defined.
How have they come for wallstreetbets? Huffman testified to congress:
> “WallStreetBets may look sophomoric or chaotic from the outside, but the fact that we are here today means they’ve managed to raise important issues about fairness and opportunity in our financial system,” Huffman said. “I’m proud they used Reddit to do so.”
> By this logic, we shouldn't make or enforce laws because someday, someone can pass a law against harmless behavior.
In a so-called liberal state we shouldn't send people behind bars for political reasons, not even fascists. Sending the people that protested at the Capitol behind bars is being done as a result of politics.
You are forgetting the word "purely." If some fascist incites people to riot and innocent police officers get killed (hypothetical example), then there are strong political reasons to put the perpetrators behind bars for their crimes. Law and order is a political issue. Protection of institutions is a political issue.
The First Amendment doesn't say you can incite a riot as long as it is a political riot. That a crime is politically motivated (or politically impactful) does not somehow absolve the perpetrator.
Surely you don't believe that the only politically motivated crimes are cases of incitement...yet I think you're a bit off track anyway, for a different reason.
> In a so-called liberal state we shouldn't send people behind bars for political reasons, not even fascists
Note the "shouldn't" -- even if your point were valid, it's moot because this is a conversation about "should" not "do."
Gitlow v. New York upheld conviction based on a loose interpretation of "clear and present danger," and later Feiner v. New York held that the police can take action against speech when there is a clear and present danger. But again, none of that matters because we're not debating legal theory, nor implementation of law.
Are you suggesting that we should pardon all criminals who are motivated in part or in whole by political reasons?
The Berlin wall was called the Antifashistischer Schutzwall (anti-fascist protection wall). A lot of the repression in communist countries was justified with reference to fascists and reactionaries.
While they may not call him a fascist outright—it would be indelicate considering his Jewish ancestry—there are plenty on the left who consider Pinker's thinking a sort of gateway drug to fascism.
First they came for the fascists. Then they came for the conservatives. Which made fascists recruit conservatives. Then they came for free speech advocates. Which made fascists recruit them. Then they came for capitalists. Which made the fascists recruit them.
Don’t you worry, the fight isn’t over. The more you ban, the larger the counter groups get and the more radicalized they get. You see it today already. Book burners were never on the correct side of history.
Hailing from a country that both experienced fascism and, ironically, is currently seeing some domestic activity in this regard, that's not how it's going to go.
Fascists don't "recruit" anyone - as a cult of power they require full compliance, so they're incompatible with a great many conservatives and essentially all free-speech advocates.
Yep, but even so the “free speech” thing is a false premise to begin with.
The public rebuke against places like Parler and Gab is not an attack on free speech. It’s ostracism. Those people still have 100% of their rights to free speech perfectly intact.
The constitution protects against restricts on your right to expression. It does not protect against other people refusing to listen to you or refusing to put up with you.
Based on some of the tweets around this, I got the impression the vulnerability was introduced by Gab devs.
EDIT: Plus this:
> Just to reiterate in relation to Gab getting hacked, I’m not aware of any vulnerabilities in Mastodon at the moment and based on what I have seen in their code modifications the vulnerabilities they have are the ones they themselves introduced (along with never porting security patches from us)
I've been following Hacker News for over a decade and my sense of the community is that it has always been overwhelmingly pro free speech at any cost (even in the cases where it would protect something outright illegal). Now I'm hearing from many in the same community that free speech has been "weaponized" and must be controlled for the greater good. What happened? Seriously.
HN is what it is because it is not free speech absolutist. Posts get flagged. People get banned. This keeps spam and shills down to a level that signal can stand out from the noise.
So in theory, people here may be "free speech absolutists", but in practice, we enjoy the environment that the moderation here enables. At some level, we know via experience that free speech absolutism is not where we want to live.
And yet, the "censorship" has a pretty light touch. It doesn't censor for viewpoint (in the ideal), but for false or misleading comments, or for personal attacks. (Yes, I know, HN doesn't always live up to that ideal.)
It could be that HN's theory is coming around into alignment with it's practice. We're seeing in the wider world that free speech absolutism can cause problems, and that heavy-handed censorship also causes problems. Speaking broadly, what HN is realizing is that we want a wider world that is more HN-like.
I'd be fine with prison for phone spammers who ignore the "do not call" list. You could argue "free speech", but there's more to it than that - they're invading my space and time when I don't want them.
You can say anything you want, as long as you do not infringe on my rights, such as by consuming my resources (time, telecom services, fax paper, etc) when I explicitly said not to (via a Do Not Call listing, etc.)
It's similar to a No Trespassing sign; you can picket on public property (free speech), but doing that on private property (when marked with a sign that fit certain criteria, in most states) might get you arrested and charged with a crime.
In the U.S., the rights of the individual generally trump "public interest".
> No one will argue free speech for that, because you're now consuming someone else's resource (time, mobile minutes, etc) when they explicitly told you not to.
All of the arguments for “free speech” against platform content policies are exactly arguing for consuming someone else's reseources against their expressed direction, so it's provably false that that is sufficient to prevent people from arguing for entitlement based on “free speech”.
In that case, the rights of the (private) service provider are in tension with those of the (also private) individual, so it's a matter for legislation and the courts. Congress has passed laws protecting the speech of the individual within certain types of service providers, i.e. telecom/ISP/website publishers.
> Congress has passed laws protecting the speech of the individual within certain types of service providers, i.e. telecom/ISP/website publishers.
Telecoms, yes, ISPs and Websites, no. FCC adopted regulations under statutory authority it saw as allowing, but not requiring, thatnfor ISPs, but later retracted them. Websites have liability protection for hosts for user content specifically to encourage host moderation of user content, rather than creating an entitlement against such moderation.
Traditional unamplified speech is ok in all shapes, but I think the amplification power of social media has shown the damage hate speech can do at scale, and people have become more cautious about what’s ok to amplify.
Many individual beliefs are really tribe beliefs. If the tribe beliefs change then the individual beliefs will change too, because the individual was never really committed to them.
This happened recently in 2020 from Jan to May on the Coronavirus. The party of “no big deal” reoriented from left to right and many people reoriented with it.
Tribe beliefs on free speech have changed and those who align with those tribes have changed with it.
> Now I'm hearing from many in the same community that free speech has been "weaponized" and must be controlled for the greater good. What happened? Seriously.
Is this really an opinion espoused here (in non-greyed-out downvoted comments) or is this a straw man / exaggeration? This is an actual question, not meant as a flame.
I would suggest that HN broadly is in fact more accepting of the idea that platform holders should somehow moderate their content than it used to be, but HN also remains (broadly) very skeptical of the platform holders' ability or will to execute such policies well or fairly.
The truth is that platform holders have de-facto moderation - that is, their algorithmic feeds that decide what to amplify and what to bury in the name of generating ad revenue. It seems to me personally that these approaches are failing us all, a fact that has only become really obvious in recent years. I would say this development has now opened up a lot of room for discussion.
I don't feel the same sentiment here. But for the sake of argument, two things have happened:
- data driven manipulation by platforms reaching the majority of the population. Pushing the spiciest posts to the top to increase emotional interaction
- the emergence of new fascists under the guise of free speech. With the downfall of traditional gatekeepers in media, new gatekeepers have emerged - and they are not the benevolent kind.
I don’t think people are less pro free speech. I think people are grappling with it being a leaky abstraction. The binary framing doesn’t really help us figure out how to deal with nasty replies from randos in your notifications, or the implications of algorithm design which scores the discovery of information, or the simple fact that a motivated party can run propaganda campaigns using sockpuppets. Dealing with these things isn’t about censorship, it’s about maintaining a healthy community.
I dont see these conversations as being anti free speech so much as “agreed, but what next?”
People disdain the humanities here, so they learn some lessons the hard way.
The real question is if people actually want to live in a society with absolute free speech. I think that’s a no.
Hate speech is protected as long as it doesn’t involve violence, but in practice, hate speech almost always leads to violence.
Something people never talk about is how the founding fathers thought that virtue was a necessary quality for a democracy. If we lived in a society that held virtue in high esteem, there would be no limits to speech. But we don’t, our society values fame over everything, even money.
Plus, we live in a post truth era. People hate truth-tellers here.
Well...there was the small matter of a violent insurrection at the Capitol Building by people who variously: flew the Confederate flag, believed Democrats eat babies, refuse to believe the results of the election, all of which are nonsense beliefs or causes that were magnified on social media.
At some point people in general - and HN in particular - have to decide when to rein in bad actors crying wolf. Otherwise they take over - literally.
The size of the community has likely grown significantly over the years, and with it a change in the demographic of your average commenter. What started as place for tech entrepreneurs, entrepreneur hopefuls, and technologists with some years under their belt has changed into something that is more representative of the young tech worker population as a whole. The earlier demographic likely had a strongly libertarian bent, whereas the current demographic likely has a strongly progressive bent.
Every society that grows past the point where people are largely self-sufficient needs some way to settle on common truth if it is to remain stable. But it also needs a way to update what it considers to be true, because sometimes what it decided is true turns out to be wrong or later becomes wrong as circumstances change.
That update mechanism needs to have some friction, though, so that you don't make too many wrong updates.
Free speech is a mechanism that helps with the updates, and up until maybe 30 years ago we also had an effective form of friction on it.
That friction took the form of the cost of getting an audience. You could say or publish pretty much anything you wanted other than things that were outright illegal. But it cost money to get your speech to a wide audience. The bigger the audience, generally the more the cost.
If what you wanted to say was close to the current common truth, it was a lot cheaper. The farther from that you got, the harder it was to find someone who would pay to get you a large audience.
In those cases where what you wanted to say was far from the common truth and so you could not come up with the money to get a large audience, you'd have to resort to spreading your message on a small scale. You might even have to start out spreading it in person one on one or by writing letters to people one on one.
If what you were trying to spread was actually true, it would eventually overcome that friction. You'd slowly convince people, until you might have enough who would pay for your self-published book or subscribe to a newsletter. They might start spreading it. It might take a while but eventually you'll get there.
If what you were trying to promote was just flat out wrong and borderline insane, such as that California's large wildfires last summer were actually ignited by space lasers run by the jews, or that the elites are kidnapping children and drilling holes into their heads to harvest adrenochrome, you'd have a real hard time getting that message out. And if you did manage and it started to gain a little traction, debunkers would quickly get debunkings out which would spread faster, making it harder for your thing to spread.
With a lot of people getting almost all their information from social media, that form of friction has to a large extent gone away. It is a lot easier and cheaper to get a large audience.
Debunking takes time, and by the time a debunking is out there for the false stuff to have already taken root. On top of that, people are now exposed to a lot more information (both true and false), leaving much less time per item for evaluation. And it is much easier to create new false things than new true things. This means that even if a debunking of something does come around to your social media feed, you might miss it in the flood of new false stuff in there.
And on top of all that, its not just cranks and crackpots producing the false ideas now. First, you've got state sponsored entities doing it to try to harm rival states. Second, you've got content farms that make up sensationalistic stuff designed to generate clicks, so that they can run ads on it.
Free speech absolutionism is stupid. You can limit free speech without actually harming anyone (please don’t mention the slippery slope fallacy)
Some things just DONT need to be said. Racial slurs in the wrong context (attacks), holocaust denials, etc. these things have NO positive outcome. None. Nothing at all in the world will change if you ban these things.
We can have free speech while stopping extremism and getting rid of scum like Gab and parlor is the first step.
I don't know anything about this situation but in general you're absolutely right. Unfortunately when you have thousands of people trying to become the next @donk_enby, 'pretty uncommon' becomes just a matter of time.
I wonder if two party system is really so different from one party system since it's the systems of bureaucracy is what dictates lives of people and those pretty much stay the same and evolve very gradually in the direction of profit for the wealthy.
Maybe it's more stable because it gives each half of the population their own enemy to hate, and periodical "wins" over that enemy?
Maybe China will learn this trick eventually and split into two fractions that will periodically swap the highest positions between themselves?
10 years ago I'd have agreed that the parties are the same. Now I can't say that, and looking back, I was simply uninformed.
I don't think the US government bears any resemblance to authoritarian nations who lock up journalists left and right. The truth is the federal government isn't very strong at all; it's the citizenry who do the heavy lifting, whether that means reporting, growing businesses, or defending our security. We would be much less effective without the willful actions of people every day who believe in what this country is or can be.
Similarly in one party system, system of power is even weaker. That's why it resorts to locking up journalists and has to resort to violence against public bit more often than two party system does.
Also power comes from the people in single party system as well. They are the one who build economy and meaningfully secure their own environments through various non-obvious systems.
Single party system wouldn't be that strong without people just going about their business and building up wealth for the government to reasonably exploit.
Parties are not the same. They can't be. But both taken together along with the systems that they interact through they can be seen as single entity. And relations of this single entity with the rest of society are not that different from relations between single party system and country it rules. Any differences come from the fact that two party system has stronger grip and more stability thanks to delivering one thing that people need and single party systems are struggling to credibly provide, and enemy to hate.
> Similarly in one party system, system of power is even weaker. That's why it resorts to locking up journalists and has to resort to violence against public bit more often than two party system does.
That's insecurity in my book, not weakness. Locking up and disappearing people over what they say shows the government has power over the people, not approval from them.
> Also power comes from the people in single party system as well. They are the one who build economy and meaningfully secure their own environments through various non-obvious systems.
I agree, but in a dictatorship the people are held back from what they could contribute.
> But both taken together along with the systems that they interact through they can be seen as single entity.
Perhaps they seem that way from far away, but the parties can and do change their positions over time and they compete with each other to please the public. A single party system may also respond to the people's will but since speaking your mind publicly is forbidden, you never really know who made a given decision. Someone may get blamed for it but you won't know if they were the true decider. That's why you see the same party maintain control, the top decision makers cannot be held accountable. Mao is still revered despite causing widespread famine, for example.
> Any differences come from the fact that two party system has stronger grip and more stability thanks to delivering one thing that people need and single party systems are struggling to credibly provide, and enemy to hate.
That's right, in a multi-party system the people can hold the previous admin responsible for any failures by electing a new party or individual. It's not so much about people needing an enemy as it is about acknowledging that all people make mistakes. It's hard to get people to publicly take responsibility for their actions and it's next to impossible for that to truly happen when a single party rules. In a multi party state, the losing party has a chance to come back and usually that involves some admission of error, otherwise the public may view them as stubborn. In a single party state, mistakes are either excused forever, or if you fall out of favor, then you have less chance to recover.
To see that it's actual weakness is enough to look at a few decades of history of China for example. They had single party for a long time, but were regularly on the brink of societal upheaval and even experienced few times very large changes, with a lot of people in power suffering as a result.
Nothing like that happened in two party system. When some people in US start to feel that they are manipulated by both parties (occupy, blm) you can see how they behave. And they are met with overwhelming force until they burn out and disperse again.
> I agree, but in a dictatorship the people are held back from what they could contribute.
Dictatorships are yet another thing, different than one party system. They limit people very severely just because they don't invest in any infrastructure that doesn't directly serve the dictator. And he is just one person (plus his most important people) and has limited needs and imagination. How much people can contribute depends mostly on what tools and infrastructure people are given. Even a completely free person without tools and infrastructure won't be able to contribute much because its the technology and economy around us that makes our work valuable.
> Perhaps they seem that way from far away, but the parties can and do change their positions over time and they compete with each other to please the public.
To see the bigger picture it's better to take few steps back so you can stop trees from occluding your forest. Sure. Two parties compete, they discuss, they change their positions, they seem to respond to what people currently want. But in practice most change is driven under the hood by influence and money not by the public discussion. And the public discussion is held just to explain away things. USA has for profit prisons not because people decided. But because someone with money and influence figured it might be a good way to earn more money, and pulled the right strings in the system of power. First you see the opportunity, introduce the change and then either keep it out of public discourse or just spin it as the best thing since sliced bread.
> A single party system may also respond to the people's will but since speaking your mind publicly is forbidden, you never really know who made a given decision. Someone may get blamed for it but you won't know if they were the true decider. That's why you see the same party maintain control, the top decision makers cannot be held accountable.
Most top decision makers in two party system stay hidden and unaccountable as well. Person who decided it's a good way to publicly market opioids was not elected. And you have no idea who are the elected people who were influenced to not be interested in this subject.
If the decision turns out to be especially bad, you sometimes can find out who made it or at least who was chosen to be blamed for it because system of power drags this person into the limelight to punish them publicly. Same thing happen in single party system, where many former revolutionary colleagues had public trials for their wrong decisions (sometimes accurately, sometimes wrongly, but always very selectively, same as in two-party system).
> Mao is still revered despite causing widespread famine, for example.
What does that prove? US still reveres slave owners and native people slaughterers. Cult of Mao got stripped down a lot when Deng Xiaoping came to power. It was scaled back to the useful level.
> That's right, in a multi-party system the people can hold the previous admin responsible for any failures by electing a new party or individual. It's not so much about people needing an enemy as it is about acknowledging that all people make mistakes.
Two-party system is different from multi-party system. In multi-party system, the party that made the bad decisions doesn't get elected next time. People elect some other party offering some solutions and they have at least few parties and proposed solutions they can choose from. Offending party often has it's reputation tarnished so much that it dissolves. Politicians that formed this party need to join others, seek new alliances, come up with new ideas how to regain reputation. Actual change is possible.
In two-party system you just get few years of respite, before you are forced to begrudgingly let the offenders back into the offices and to again control your life by reverting many decisions of the other party.
> It's hard to get people to publicly take responsibility for their actions and it's next to impossible for that to truly happen when a single party rules.
Ultimately what's important is what happens, not who takes responsibility for that.
> In a multi party state, the losing party has a chance to come back and usually that involves some admission of error, otherwise the public may view them as stubborn. In a single party state, mistakes are either excused forever, or if you fall out of favor, then you have less chance to recover.
In multi-party state yes. In two-party state it's not a chance. It's inevitability.
Alabama technocrat checking in to say I have no involvement with national US politics whatsoever and echo OP’s “wow what the fuck sentiment”. I do sometimes interject myself into local politics but even that is distasteful due to the left vs. right mentality.
Born and raised in the US of A, can’t wait until it implodes and the dogs kill each other. Cannot fathom what just happened in this country other than the power of celebrity.
This increase of extreme assault on free-speech platforms should be worrying to everyone. Not too long ago, we were hailing the "internet" as a free fair space. Now it is a free fair space ... for everyone but some kind of people.
I'm for free speech but this specific kind of targeted attacks is getting out of hand.
If HN removed your comment it could be seen as an exhibit A. But you being downvoted has nothing to do with free speech, you’re still allowed to say what you wanted, but if people disagree, they have the right to downvote you.
Except I (throwawei) had to login to another account (this one) to reply you as the downvotes triggered some soft ban limit on the account from replying/commenting.
So much for free speech...
I would post photos holding today's newspaper to prove ownership of both accounts. Probably not worth the trouble anyway
You got banned because some automated system might’ve concluded you were a bot or spam account. You didn’t get banned because of the context of your speech. (At least not to my knowledge)
They're called guidelines not rules or commandments. People violate them all the time and get away with it and I'm pretty sure that's why they're called guidelines. There's one person moderating here and that's dang. I've had plenty of pushback for both the left and the right I've got no shortage of karma.
Kinda new on here but am loving the bare bones feel to the forum. The karma bit in my previous comment was added as a sarcastic aid. I personally don't care much for gaining karma. Thank you for this extra context. Very helpful.
It's the last place where curiosity is not only allowed but encouraged to flourish. It's a special place. I figured you were joking but there's been a lot of green handles around lately and they may not get it. I hear there can be a massive culture shock coming to HackerNews so sometimes calling out the obvious can be helpful.
Get yourself a real handle and join the community officially!
Last I checked it's not illegal to be a fascist. Hacking computer systems and stealing data however is illegal. Whether this is right or wrong is debatable. Free speech shouldn't be.
It actually is illegal in a fair amount of jurisdictions, and depending if your fascism includes calling for imminent lawless action, as fascism quite often does, it may not even be protected in the United States.
1 often capitalized : a political philosophy, movement, or regime (such as that of the Fascisti) that exalts nation and often race above the individual and that stands for a centralized autocratic government headed by a dictatorial leader, severe economic and social regimentation, and forcible suppression of opposition
People that support mass censorship of people discussing political ideas fit the definition of an authoritarian closer than any textbook conservative I know. I'm concerned about all forms of authoritarianism, including those that want to eliminate the free speech of their political opponents by labeling them as "fascists" or "communists" to exempt them from their rights even more than what they would do to a criminal. It's a matter of integrity and it's often confused with support of those ideas. This is because the authoritarian mindset usually categorizes all people who are against it into one category since their ideas cannot stand up to nuance. This is why they seek to ban speech.
If you allow the people who want everyone not like them to be forcibly marginalized or killed to have the same rights as all others, they will relentlessly try to flip that around until they're the only ones with those rights. We have to stop such behavior at almost any cost. This was made blindingly obvious to the majority of the population during WWII.
It's a damn shame how so many are forgetting those lessons now. It could very well lead to something even worse than that war. This is why what you seem to think should be "common knowledge by now" isn't.
Speech and violence are different things. You don't have to be tolerant of bad ideas (and indeed you should not be) but you do have to protect the rights of all human beings to express them.
Protecting the legal rights to publish, and personally/morally tolerating the publication of abhorrent things are two entirely different concepts.
No one person or group should ever be permitted to declare themselves the arbiter of truth.
> You don't have to be tolerant of bad ideas [...] but you do have to protect the rights of all human beings to express them
Is there no limit to this? Knowing how horrible human beings can be to each other, is there really no point at which we draw the line and say, no further? Because there very much are numerous examples of where we do so according to the law.
As uncomfortable as it may be, the conversation about who should be silenced must continue. For as long as we face the prospect of fellow humans encouraging their peers to harm other fellow humans for bad reasons, there is no sane alternative. It's probably something we'll have to deal with until/unless the dubious promises of transhumanism become real.
> Is there no limit to this? Knowing how horrible human beings can be to each other, is there really no point at which we draw the line and say, no further?
Who said there is to be no limit? I explicitly clarified the limit: violence. Words are fine. Violence is not.
> As uncomfortable as it may be, the conversation about who should be silenced must continue.
Not if you want to continue having those conversations. Silencing people is a violation of their human rights, once those go out the window for a certain segment, it is simply a matter of time
before that segment is bent and twisted to include you.
Idk, if we are gonna be more libertarian with speech, why not do the same for hacking? It's really not much of a crime compared to a lot of other things and is arguably a form of speech.
I'm on Gab because Twitter was banning users like zerohedge and random joke accounts for seemingly no (or very little) reason.
I literally just post about finance on Gab and I've never personally seen anything hateful on there. I'm not saying it doesn't exist - I don't follow those kinds of users anyway - but I've seen plenty of hate on Twitter and I've never felt Gab was particularly hateful or radical.
I think we're still in gray area around speech restrictions. What actually worries me is the glee people are taking in it. Yes, maybe a particular case did cross the line and incited violence, but it's a something something very serious and scary, not something to celebrate.
I think the gray area is why the far right thinks that "free speech" means "free-from-consequences speech".
They have their free speech already. They go on various platforms, and say whatever they want until people get mad and private companies make a money-based decision to ban them.
According to the libertarian view of the world: this is all working exactly as intended. Everyone in the system is making a private decision and speaking with their wallets.
> They go on various platforms, and say whatever they want until people get mad and private companies make a money-based decision to ban them.
The far right is general taken to mean ultra nationalists that attack minority groups. Every major social network has hate speech in their terms of service, and very few people complaining about censorship are complaining about enforcement of rules against actual hate speech.
> very few people complaining about censorship are complaining about enforcement of rules against actual hate speech.
Citation needed. But honestly, it doesn't matter because it doesn't change the fact that this is the libertarian ideal situation. The government is not mandating anything. All "cancel culture" is created from private individuals making their own private decisions, and that includes corporations banning anyone they like for any reason. It's right there in the name "culture". No one is required to do anything, it's just that it's an advantageous decision at the cultural level to do what most people want.
Any suggestion that there is a problem with this is in contradiction to the libertarian idea of free speech.
Twitter isn’t a monopoly? What’s the other popular social network where political discussion happens?
You coming up with David Duke as an example of a controversial ban is an excellent example of my argument. Was this considered controversial? Who supported Duke remaining on Twitter?
Can you provide some evidence they catered to hate groups? It was my understanding they attracted hate groups due to their policy of 'free speech', but did not specifically cater to them
The request was for evidence about whether Gab caters to hate groups. I chose examples for their glaringly obvious nature as opposed to their popularity.
Well, I don't really care how many followers these accounts have - How many look at their posts daily withouth following the account, as not to "expose" themselves.
The American National Socialist shows a huge group of Nazis plus a Swastika in their banner picture, does it really matter then how many followers they have?
Not that it's representative, but it is certainly a "feature" of gab.
When Trump was banned from Twitter, they literally cited [0] “To all of those who have asked, I will not be going to the Inauguration on January 20th.” as a reason to ban him and claimed that it must be read as inciting violence. The other tweet wasn't as jaw droppingly banal but it was still perfectly acceptable political fare.
It is pretty clear they didn't have any quotes to back up supposed incitement. There is a lack of evidence behind the innuendo. It is likely they banned him for representing conservative views.
Either the context around Trump's tweets shot over your head, or you are you being obtuse. The very link you provided explains the context which you completely ignore in your post.
Sorry, what does this even mean? What does it mean to "cater to hate groups" beyond promising them safe harbor? Do you think they have a "Hate" button instead of a Like button? A search engine for minorities to dox? Lynch mob organizing features? I really don't know how much more catered you can get beyond saying "we're the site you want to use, but without the pesky rules." Trying to dissect the semantics here is pedantry beyond my comprehension.
Using this logic, Facebook is a site that caters to hate groups, mass murders and sexual predators. Your standard seems to be that one drop poisons the well, given that all social media is guilty of this accusation.
Yes, this is a frequent and somewhat well-founded critique of FB, which has been accused on multiple occasions of knowingly/negligently facilitating violations of human rights at scale, despite repeated warnings about the risks. Facebook PR has tended to oscillate between happy-sounding blurb about upholding free speech, building communities etc., and zapping large numbers of problematic accounts and groups after the company has been embarrassed, though without any semblance of external accountability.
It's certainly not FB's raison d'etre but it has been an ongoing problem that the firm has been reluctant to confront.
Imagine my surprise when after January 6th I saw more than a few articles praising people for turning in their close relatives for having attended the Capitol protest. I had thought that only happened in Stalinist Russia, i.e. turning in your parents or brothers and sisters to the State for political motives.
It would be for political motives if the stage would somehow reward you, like bumping you up in the list for villas or fancy cars, or just having "good person, rats on their family" in your file for later.
Denouncing crimes, especially crimes some people consider to be among the worst possible, against democracy, even when committed by close family members, is purely a matter of personal choice and conscience.
In what convoluted mistreatment of facts and/or logic and/or morality is it either new or unexpected to, if one is capable of it, support law enforcement in the prosecution of terrorists?
How is it OK to hack a private website, go through heaps of private data of random users? Why this was done is irrelevant. Hacking is illegal and whoever did this should be facing consequences.
This is completely off topic but are you aware that governments are parts of economic systems and there are kinds of governing closely associated with capitalism as a whole?
As much as I love open source, Gab should have never been open source. It seems very unwise to make a highly targeted free speech social media platform available for easy backend code analysis. No wonder they were hacked.
I don’t believe that Open Source == Less Secure. See also: Linux, Ngix, Postgres... Many many open source projects are secure. They’re not perfect but an argument could be made that they’re more secure BECAUSE they’re open.
Software with crosshairs on its back practicing garbage security practices will be pwnd the same regardless of it’s open-ness.
Honestly. With a lot of the tools out there these days. I question if it’s even faster to hunt security bugs by reading the source rather than just attempting common exploits via tooling.
It is way easier to find a software vulnerability in a backend you have the code for, instead of probing a black-box backend for vulnerabilities. For instance, you can use static analysis tools to discover vulnerabilities.
How is Linux supposed to be a good example of a secure open source project?
I'm not really convinced by Postgres either, software like that inherently exposes very little attack surface unless the attackers already have access. Nobody is interested in exploiting Postgres.
I believe they had to release their source code in order to comply with the AGPL, because they forked off mastodon right? I’m not sure if they decided to go with mastodon as the basis for their codebase in the beginning or if that was a later decision.
I just looked it up and the history is that they did it so that users could access the site using fediverse clients, because their own clients were getting pulled from app stores.
ofc there is that whole discussion about whether open sourcing actually affects application security, having your security model assume that attackers already have access to the source code, etc. Not to mention it looks like they did make quite extensive modifications on top of the mastodon code. Some of the code that people have discovered lying around in the gab codebase is really embarrassing.
That is not a fair assertion, as source confidentiality to limit wide-spread computerized and manual inspection of backend code to find flaws is just one of many tools to mitigate attacks.
For instance, in this case a group with sufficient security research skills politically opposed to some of the gab users seem to have utilized the source-code to find a vulnerability the Gab team had not discovered yet.
Not just one vulnerability, gab's CTO replaced every activerecord and stored procedure SQL call he could find with a string substitution based raw query (without any escaping or anything)
Isn't this the reason most privacy conscious people advocate for OSS solutions? Precisely because their security can be verified and not prone to some undocumented backdoor that is secure purely through obscurity. Also "many eyes make all bugs shallow" etc etc.
In the case of Gab "many eyes make all bugs shallow", but those eyes in this case had malevolent intent so the value of those extra eyes is dubious for a platform with as many high-skilled tech enemies as Gab has.
It would be wild if there was some coordination of an intentional vulnerability in Mastodon or one of its dependencies. I don't think it happened here but I can easily imagine the future of open source moving in that direction, i.e. trying to damage entities whom project maintainers don't like who use their liberally licensed software (which has no warranty). Already Gab exposed that federation is just another rake to step on and doesn't necessarily save you -- their wiki page has a section that sums up the immediate reaction after their switch: "Mastodon stated that most Mastodon instances had blocked Gab's domains, preventing interactions between these instances and Gab,[47] and that Tusky and Toot!, two popular Mastodon mobile apps, had already blacklisted Gab's domains and banned Gab users from using their app"
