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Germany Denies Plans to DoS Neo-Nazis
Over the weekend, we learned that Germany's Minister of the Interior, Otto Schily, was thinking about
DoS'ing neo-Nazi sites
-- not a new form of censorship, but the first time a government has put it on the table. Each country has its own type of
content so abhorrent
that its censorship must not be questioned. If a Bush cabinet member had mentioned that the U.S. is considering ping-flooding Dutch providers of (what we would call) child pornography (nude 17-year-olds), would anyone protest? Soon China will take Falun Gong off the net with trin00 and Kuwait
will SYN-flood rogue sites that show pictures of women voting. But anyway, yesterday,
the Ministry denied such plans,
so the chaotic Balkanization of the net is postponed for another six months. Yay!
My translation of the slug from the April 5 story would be:
Innenminister Otto Schily is considering paralyzing foreign Nazi websites with hacker attacks. For this, the Ministry wants to use so-called Denial-of-Service attacks. With similar methods, hackers last spring blocked out broad portions of the Internet.
And a friend's translation of the April 8 denial:
Schily denies "hacker methods" against Nazi websites
Minister of the Interior rejects assertion his authority wanted to close down Nazi websites with "hacker methods"
BERLIN. The Ministry of the Interior led by Otto Schily (SPD) denied it wanted to act against Nazi websites using "hacker methods." What will be used in the fight against right wing extremism would only be determined by the law, a spokesman said on the weekend.
The story was updated re Kuwait (not Iran) and women voting.
Everybody else has already commented on the rediculousnes of this post, but they seemed to have missed one:
spray DDT over villages growing Cocoa
Um, DDT kills insects (and is pretty effective at it as well!) Spraying DDT over cocoa fields would only cut down on the Malaria in the region. Now I know that you are going to go off on the US killing all of those poor defenseless mosquitos and trying to eradicate an entire life form (Malaria bacteria) but I can assure you that the people in the region won't mind.
The only reason I can even consider this America bashing is the environmental impact of DDT, notably the thinning of eggshells of nearby seabirds; however those studies have been mostly debunked already and I can't believe that you are basing your otherwise logically sound[1] ranting on this flimsy evidence.
[1] For some definition of logically sound.
Down that path lies madness. On the other hand, the road to hell is paved with melting snowballs.
I read the internet for the articles.
Hmmm...I hadn't heard that there was a War on Chocolate.
Learn something new every day.
Nazis have. If you ask them, they would reply that they believe that their system of morality is entirely valid and acceptable. No society believes that it is evil. What you should have said is "don't people have the same morals as me?". It's the same kind of transformation as R.A.Wilson's "War on Some Drugs".
I'm updating the country to Kuwait. The CIA World Factbook's entry on Kuwait says "Suffrage: adult males who have been naturalized for 30 years," etc. Interesting that after five minutes of looking through dozens of countries to try to find one that denies the vote specifically to women, the only one I could find was one whose government my country went to war to defend.
Jamie McCarthy
Jamie McCarthy
jamie.mccarthy.vg
Obviously you didn't click the link (which was my addition, not a submitter's). It points to a collection of papers and speeches by my late friend Stig Hornshøj-Møller, who had researched the Nazi propaganda film Der ewige Jude.
Stig had argued, and persuasively demonstrated, that the 1941 Nazi propaganda film is no longer a threat to democracy, and that screening it for young people in particular can help them understand Nazi use of propaganda. And yet the film is still strictly regulated by Germany, to the point where instructors have to apply to the government for permission before using it even in the classroom.
Go check out his work. It's fascinating (IMHO) to see how the film has changed in sixty years from a tool of persuasion, to an object to be feared, and, finally, hopefully, to a historical document to be learned from.
Jamie McCarthy
Jamie McCarthy
jamie.mccarthy.vg
You're inconsistent: "Considering the amount of teenage pregnancies and abortions..." followed by "...in the latter [16yr olds] case the participants are able to oversee the consequences..."
Apparently they either don't see the consequences, or they don't give a flying, er, fuck.
--
--
Don't like it? Respond with words, not karma.
Same old, same old - this is just the modern version of what has happened for ages in the propaganda wars - like in radio, like Cuba today Jams Radio Marti, and then there's China's control over public opinion, etc, etc, etc.
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
> The most important thing about selective censorship (which is what we are discussing here)
> is that you need to determine who decides what is offensive.
This conversation is getting too abstract. Even if Germany had decided to go through with the DoS attack, it would have been against entities and ideas that are highly illegal in that country. So in this case "what is offensive" is decided by the law. And it's not really a question of offensive material, but of illegal material. Since German law doesn't apply abroad, they sensibly decided that it wasn't a good idea after all. However, they would be legally fully justified to mount a DoS attack on German servers hosting NN material.
> So two 17 year olds can have sex, but they just can't take a picture of themselves doing it.
What's so unusual about that? You can also breast-feed your baby, or have it lie completely naked on a changing table and apply cream on its behind, yet you'd probably get in trouble if you gratuitously photographed and posted these acts.
In the US we can decide who runs our country (and by extension much of the world) at 18, but we can't decide to have a drink until we're 21.
Most people would not object to certain types of "censorship", such as the fight against child exploitation. The problem is that once you do decide to engage in censorship at all, the line between acceptable and unacceptable is very blurry. I think it's very important to maintain open dialog between policy makers and the public to keep this line on the acceptable side.
> Germany does, in many cases, provided it is nazi material.
Germany is a strange case precisely because of its recent history. It is really between a rock and a hard place: if they do away with the unconditional Nazi censorship, many will take that as being soft on faschism. If they keep enforcing it, many will (and do) accuse them of limiting freedom of speech. I think for the forseeable future it doesn't much matter what they do. In another fifty or a hundred years time might sufficiently buffer them from history to do away with the current anti-Nazi policies.
> so I think we can count this out.
:-)
My feeling also. Don't know about the kicking in doors thing
> I don't believe in censorship in any form, regardless of how much the material might be
> found offensive.
I'm a bit ambivolent about that. There are valid points on both sides. I have a problem with sites like those tracking abortion doctors in the US and encouraging physical actions against them. Freedom of speech should be granted only when it doesn't limit others' freedoms, particularly the freedom to live.
> The flip side is that freedom of speech enables John Skinhead to spout Nazi propagander if he
> wishes - just as God-loving bible bashers are allowed to preach that we're all going to Hell.
> Just as I'm able to proclame my atheism and contempt for hate-mongers - as God-loving
> bible-bashers generally are.
You're making it sound like groups that actively incite and organize violence against minorities and groups that simply spout bias are essentially the same. Most countries' laws will disagree with you, and the difference between the two is usually used as a yardstick of censorship and denial of freedom of speech. There's a big difference between saying that you're a worthless human being, and saying, oh, yeah, by the way, let's organize some riots and gangs and bash your head in and kill you.
What is the opinion of China flying recon planes around the US? No problem, with that, right?
What, you mean like the russian submarines that have spent the last few decades cruising up and down our coasts? I don't recall us ever sinking one, or taking its crew hostage.
And, god forbid they had an emergency, we would certainly let the crew members see their own ambassador in less than a few days, and return them home pretty quickly. The sub we'd probably hang onto for a while and eventually give it back (as I fully expect the chinese to do with our plane -- yes, it's our property, landed in an emergency, but they can just "keep an eye on it" for a few weeks). Did american subs ever play chicken with russina subs? Probably, but you know if they had crashed the whole damn world would be bitching us out about it -- we would have had a coast guard cutter out there in minutes to rescue both crews.
There is no excuse for holding hostages of people who make an emergency landing, an even less than none for not letting a foreign citizen even see their own ambassadors. People and property are two different things.
---------------------------------------------
Recursive: Adj. See Recursive.
Because, especially in this situation, there is very little to compare between the two.
When you bomb a nazi organisation's HQ, you damage and destroy property (not just the HQ, but buildings around it), and kill people (again, not just the nazis, although as long as they're not killing people, they have just as much right to live as the next person).
When you ping-flood a website, you bring down a website. No-one gets hurt, nothing gets damaged (expcet maybe the pride of a sysadmin or two).
It would be different if it was computers controlling, say, air traffic or power generation that were targeted, but when a website gets taken down like that, no-one gets hurt.
Sure, it would almost certainly damage diplomatic relations between the two countries, but anyone who would even threaten to go to war over such a thing should not be in a position of power.
I acknowledge that such a break-down in relations could, eventually, lead to war, but it should certainly not be anyone's first reaction.
Cheers,
Tim
It's official. Most of you are morons.
Why would China care if US citizens couldn't access Chinese web sites?
I can't imagine that a Chinese version of Amazon would do much overseas trade, for example.
I can see the point in blocking eg the American subnet from being accessed by the rest of the world, as that would have some considerable economic impact. However, for countries that don't even use the same alphabet, I honestly can't see it having a particularly great effect.
Cheers,
Tim
It's official. Most of you are morons.
If you do decide to fight it, then you have a very difficult question to answer: What right do we have to express our opinons?
/. over a comment posted.
Sure, I think probably most people here would agree that Nazi beliefs are morally repugnant. So, do we fight against them?
Well, therein lies the problem - I seem to remember a while back, lots of people here getting very righteously indignant that the RIAA was seeking injunctions against people and sites who posted the DeCSS code. More recently, people were pretty annoyed that the Co$ threatened
I can't rationalise protesting against the latter censorships, whilst participating in the former, myself.
Cheers,
Tim
It's official. Most of you are morons.
That's assuming that all the packets take the same route to the target, of course.
The best way to DoS a server, imho, would be to use a distributed attack, from a number of different subnets.
That way, not only does the server get hit with more packets (there's no guarantee that one machine will be able to take down the server), but they take different routes to the target, which helps to ensure that more of them get through (as you don't risk taking down any of the intervening nodes).
Besides which, the "worst" that can happen is that you overload a router or two on the way there; you are not going to be able to ping-flood an airport's or university hospital's critical systems in that way, unless they are also acting as a router (or you're really dumb, and fire at the wrong IP address, and the firewall lets the packets through...)
Cheers,
Tim
It's official. Most of you are morons.
Why? Is it because they feel that pornography is not acceptable but Nazism is?
They censored themselves whilst raising issues about censorship!
I personally have no probelms with pornography but take enormous and personal issue with Nazism.
I find it odd that we can all have sex at 17 (in the UK the age of consent is 16) but killing Jews (or promoting it or excusing it) is wrong.
Hm!
Craig.
You can have sex much younger if you like (12 or thirteen), however it has to be pretty clear that it is voluntary (adults having sex with children is definately not allowed but 14 year olds having sex is not illegal perse). Considering the amount of teenage pregnancies and abortions, I think the dutch approach might be a bit more realistic, kids fool around anyway. As for child pornography, I think any western country is pretty intolerant towards it.
However I think there's a difference between 6 year olds being forced to do stuff they don't want and sixteen year olds having sex. You might make the argument that in the latter case the participants are able to oversee the consequences whereas younger children cannot.
Jilles
Basically that means you're in deep trouble if the 12 year old says otherwise (for instance when they've grown up, this stuff happens a lot). However, the reality is that people are capable of having sex from the age of about 12/13 and do so. There's nothing wrong with that. What is wrong is rape and adults having sex with 12 year olds usually falls into this category. The intention of the law is that if you are 12 you can have sex if you want to. Mind you, if you are a 12 year old boy and want to have sex with a 12 year old girl, both parties are doing something illegal in the US. In holland it is either rape (always illegal, no matter what age) or just two kids fooling around (in which case we teach 'em to use condoms).
Jilles
- I think lots here would protest that scenario
- age of sexual consent varies from state to state in the US
-earlier age of consent doesn't necessarily make for a freer society. It makes kids freer earlier.
Nex
Afghanistan? The Taliban doesn't seem to like women doing anything...
Really, any government with an official religion is worthy of mocking, take your pick.
The countries that attempt to censor net content of any sort should be blocked by the rest of the net, at the peering routers level. This ought to be a peering requirement. We know Red China is censoring us - we should simply block all of their sites from visibility to the rest of the fscking world! They might get a clue in about ten years,... maybe.
But this is easier said than done, unfortunately. Suppose you run a node router connecting to many other nodes. You forward all the traffic you get. How will you know what any of your peered routers drop? You won't, unless you implement a traffic logging server that compares requests against responses. Even then, you'd have to have a way to figure out which were real requests versus errors, an impossible or at least very difficult and error prone task. Most peering routers won't even attempt to do this at all.
Countries are going to get away with this short sighted censorship, at least until protocols and DNS management schemes are improved to catch it. Oh well, I don't really have anything to say to or hear from osama@bin_ladin.org, anyway. No loss. And people in oppressed countries will always have some ways around the "official" Internet.
But it _would_ help to simply cut the high-speed links to countries known to be censoring network content for political/economic/religious reasons. (State religions are abominations. So are official State political and economic restrictions.) Now here's something George W. might really get behind, if he could only remotely understand it!
Doesn't any action by the government against the Nazi sites just play into their whole "Jews control the government" line?
You owe me a new needle for my irony meter.
/.
/. If the government wants us to respect the law, it should set a better example.
That's a wonderful argument in favor of spammers and against the various RBLs. After all, the spam really doesn't hurt anyone, and doesn't cost actual money, right?
Best Slashdot Co
I usually get annoyed when Americans see Europe as one homogenous place. It's 50 very different countries. This time it seems to be a European with the same misconception. Weird!
Anyway, the age of consent is different in every country. In Sweden it's 15.
Someone said that it differs between US states as well. Isn't there a federal limit at 18 though? Or is that only for porn?
The net will evolve to route around it. Preventing DDOSes is pretty straight forward when you get right down to it and they're noticably hard on the network outside the site they're attacking, as well as the sites under attack. While it currently takes more effort than it's usually worth to trace a DDOS (Unless you're a multi-millon dollar company) the routers WILL evolve to the point where an attack is automatically detected and shut down near the source.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Each country has its own type of content so abhorrent that its censorship must not be questioned.
There is no form of censorship which cannot be questioned.
Some Ministry not knowing what it actually might mean says that they will try to deny an internet service to nazis meaning that they will ask ISPs to cut them off and some ultra extremist geek makes it into DoS attacks. Nothing new... No story here, really. Birng some REAL news, please.
If programs would be read like poetry, most programmers would be Vogons.
Why is every babeled translation considered informative?
Because then people don't have to manually Babel it themselves, thereby saving them time.
'The German law causes itself however out'? What a [load of?] crap.
Yes, I know Babel mangles most things (especially German). However, which of the following do you understand better?
[German] Wer die Angriffe für das Innenministerium durchführen soll, ist noch nicht bekannt.
[Babelled] Who is to execute the attacks for the ministry of the Interior, is not well-known yet.
Sure, it ain't English good, but it gets across the point...
--
This is what I've been fearing since the first time I've heard of a government attempting to take a site off the air that it disagrees with. This, if left unchecked, will mean the absolute end of the internet as a way to get all sides of the issues, all means of research and all ability to have honest and open discussion of any topic.
A government may have to limited right to decide what can/will be distributed within it's borders, but that does NOT mean it has the right to cross political boundries and attempt to tell the rest of the world what it can and cannot have out on it's pages.
The US is horrible with this and that is not helped by other countries who run hollering for the US to 'do something' about purely internal matters within a country.
Just because you do not like the message does not mean you have the right to silence the messenger. I wish all governments would understand that and allow honest discourse about all subjects.
DanH
Cav Pilot's Reference Page
Cav Pilot's Reference Page
UNIX - Not just for Vestal Virgins anymore
That's what the Internet was created for: keeping crucial installations running in the event of nuclear war. You don't get much more into "lives at risk" than that. You've probably parroted or at least heard the saying: "the Internet interprets censorship as damage, and routes around it". This comes from the fact that the Internet interprets damage as, well, damage, and routes around it. TCP is designed for reliability.
Many people have been brainwashed to believe the Interet is unreliable. It is not. Web sites are singularly bad at being fault-tolerant, due to being the single point of failure. Most instant messaging programs are pathetically fragile, due to having to go (unencrypted, no less) through the provider's server. And sadly, the active destruction of "open relays" destroys a tremendous amount of the usefulness of SMTP. These are just examples of stupidity, though, or of people trading reliability for other factors.
Look at DNS. Or IRC (although most networks aren't set up for real reliability, sadly). I know people who have had their continent's main Internet link ripped from the ocean floor, and they were back in minutes talking like normal. I would have no problem trusting my life to a properly designed and implemented Internet-based system.
Please explain to me what any of this has to do with the Internet. The only thing I can see as remotely relevant is "other means of communication". Well duh. But the Internet is likely the best, most efficient, and sometimes the only realistic way of transmitting certain information. Say you've got a hospital with MRI images, and they've got an expert from somewhere else helping them perform this crucial operation. How else would you suggest they transmit the data? By fax?
Now, if your network is set up right, you will have redundant links, and a decent admin should be able to block many of the bogus packets at the main routers. But if the attacking country is serious, they will likely go after all of these, and do their best to avoid being filtered. Flooding the networks with garbage is one of the few ways to really damage the Internet. If someone started DoSing my country, I would absolutely consider it an act of war.
--
TO BUY A NEW CAR WOULD MAKE YOU SEXUALLY ATTRACTIVE.
Well, there's always something called freedom of speech; it's not up to the German minister go around on the internet like a real hauptstormbahnfuhrer, and blocking all sites that he doesn't like. The only way to deal with these situations is through the proper international legal channels, no country should be their own judge in these matters. I mean what would be next:
Well, it is off topic, but Iranian women, in fact, do have the right to vote.. and do vote massively. Seems some of those "freedom fighters" do not mind slighting other people as long as this does not infringe on their right to, well, slight other people.
Of course, "admittedly" is the key word here. The German govt was plain stupid in leaking their plans. If Dubya wanted to DoS me, I'd probably have no way of knowing it was ordered by him.
Jordan is a fairly benevolent dictatorship.
King Hussein died, and his son hasn't changed much at all... He's mostly playing the role of a lurker, watching and learning. I don't think he's changed much of anything in the year he's been in power.
A host is a host from coast to coast, but no one uses a host that's close
I certainly would. I find the whole idea of child pornography repellent, but in Europe, sex is legal at 16. Sorry Americans, we're just plain free-er thinking than you. If you don't like what we do, it's your problem, not ours.
I remember hearing about it on CNN.
Keeping
Any skript k1dd13 with good intentions can take them down with a simple macro- and the government can keep their hands clean.
Do Neo-Nazzis use Passport?
We here in Germany always have had free speech as of 1949 with the release of the new constitution.
But such ideas always were to come out, though they usually were cut down fastly. Even the government wanted to forbid a fascist party and it couldn't.
IMO it just would create lotta more net traffic, while the target sites just would move.
-mirabilos
--
My Karma isn't excellent, damn it! (And
Remember also that in the case of felons, you can run the country but can't decide who runs the country!
"My mother works for Microsoft now. A whole other cult."
I know what this post is going to do, but hey!
/. readers are anti-semetic.
I want to know why so many
When I put up my first web site I had blue ribbons all over it, animated ones and all that.
But you are talking free speech (which believe it or not isn't a world wide thing) and a Nazi's right to it.
Free speech is an idea, just like some idiot thinks it's a good idea to wipe out a race of people. Free speech didn't become a big thing until the US Constitution. And free speech in the US isn't/wasn't so people could talk about ways to kill people and what not. It was set up so you could say in public this is the way I am - and you didn't have to worry about someone killing you.
And here in the US the Supreme Court ruled that your speech may not impose a risk of injury on another person or you may not use speech to insite violence.
How does someone get off saying that banning Neo-Nazi sites (and other HATE groups) is like living in Nazi Germany? How? Are DoS attacks going to kill anyone?
If someone wanted to ban sites that talked about a new form of government and "hey lets institute it" - then that would be wrong. But if a country wants to keep hate from spreading then it's fine with me. I wouldn't expect a site promoting the sacrifice of Christian babies to stay up for long, so why would I expect a Nazi site to stay up?
-One thing that people don't know about Nazi's is that the party believed in a constant state of war until the supreme people would only be left. Killing not just Jews, but everyone. Even those people who are going to flame me, yes you with the blonde hair and blue eyes.
See people need to know what they are saying when they say any form of censorship is wrong. Censorship exists all around us all the time. Yes; here in the US you have a right to free speech, but you also have the right to be who you want to be and sites which would make you afraid to be who you are infringe on your rights as well.
I don't blame Germans one bit. Nazi's hopefully are in the past lets leave them there.
People think that it's a God given right to be able to express your views. It's a shame you would defend that while knowingly backing a person who would take even one life in the name of hate.
"Linux is better than Windows" is free speech
"Lets all go to CowboyNeal's house with torches" is a crime in the USA
Get your Unix fortune now!
If an organization, government or private, publicly decided to begin doing this, the resulting DoS attack from every pissed-off slashdot reader, angst-filled script kiddie, and livid free-speech activist, worldwide, would be enough to cripple (and make an example of) any organization.
It would take only one and it wouldn't ever be an issue again.
Over the weekend, we learned that Germany's Minister of the Interior, Otto Schily, was thinking...
It doesn't say, anywhere, that the "we" refers to people in the US. Because there was a mention of the US government doesn't mean that the assumption was made that all readers were from the US.
I notice how most people want their rights and their "Freedom of Speech" yet many find it inhumane for someone to possess opinions that differ from their own.
I'm far from a racism since, and have friends from all walks of life, including those with racist views, and while they don't appeal to me in any fashion, those with ideas other than my own still deserve the same amount of respect I would ask for to uphold my freedom to say what I want.
How can you honestly think in terms of fairness to say "My ideas are right" when it may be ethical to you but not to others. Sure I despise racism, sites but I will say this, they are entitled to their own opinions and the same right to express it, as I can express my opinions, etc.
On the subject of Denials of Service, I particularly don't buy that notion any government would partake in that for those reasons. I could however see a U.S. --> China DoS showdown between moronic kiddiots, but I can't see the government wasting their time, and money doing this.
Side note: For those into studying the effects of Denials of Services, and higher protocol based attacks, I wrote a paper on it a while back addressing attacks, fixes, but never finished it. Who knows maybe I'll pick up on it again some time soon
360 degrees of Karma
It also used to be a mess to get out - you typically had to go to your local priest or similar and hand him a statement saying you didn't wish to be a member anymore, and frequently they'd be upset about it and try to convince you not to.
Now, however, it is very easy.
The issue of separation keeps resurfacing at regular intervals, often when the debate starts raging about whether or not gay and lesbian priests are supposed to have the same rights as others, or similar issues where the conservative leadership of the church is heavily at odds both with Norwegian law and with the people in general.
Sweden has taken some steps towards separation, in that the local leadership of the state church is actually elected. A while back a group of atheists or agnostics (don't remembers which) actually almost managed to gain control of the church leadership in some counties, because most people don't give a damn about who contols the church.
Sweden is clearly the Scandinavian country where the debate seems to be least heated, and where it seems the path is pretty clear towards separation, and where there has even been talks about deciding on a specific year (don't know if anything was agreed on with regards to that) for separation or for a vote on it (I don't follow Swedish politics much ... :-)
The issue of separation is important not the least because the state church get advantages none others do: In Norway the state church can count as members anyone who has not actively registered as non members, or that haven't registered as a member of another recognized religious or atheist organization, and that have parents that are members of the church.
The other organizations, on the other hand, have to get the membership of the child reaffirmed at the age of 15, and effectively have to require membership dues or similar methods of getting a legally recognizable recognition of your membership to get money support from the government.
The state church doesn't have to care about their membership numbers to get money, either. The way the money allocation is done is that the government decides how much to give the state church, then divides that sum by the number of people that haven't left the church, and that is the amount of money that the other organizations will get per registered member.
This effectively mean that because the church has seriously bloated membership numbers because most people don't care, the state church get a lot more money per active member than the other organizations get.
The state church also have special legal privileges (at least in Norway, don't know about the rest of the Scandinavian countries). For instance the king (and possibly the prime minister?) and at least half the cabinet has to be members of the state church.
In many cases they may represent organizations that do so offline, or hidden for view, or they may represent "research institutes" and similar that claim to do unbiased research on nazi ideology, but that acts as propaganda fronts. Some of them will take great care to avoid anything that can be construed as inciting to violence or racial hatred, and leave that for private conversation with people interested in their sites.
That does not mean they don't pose a threat.
But it does mean that you suddenly have to go much farther in censoring ideans and thought if you want to stop them.
Germany does, in many cases, provided it is nazi material. Most other countries do not. Many countries have special provisions for nazi propaganda, but most of them are specific enough to only prevent material or manifestations of ideas that clearly incite violence or racial hatred, and allow material that present, discuss, or even can be interpreted as propaganda for, nazism to go through.
One could discuss whether those laws should be stricted, but there's a slipperly slope from censoring hate groups to censoring legitimate political activity, and the further down you go, the harder it is to stop.
You think of the number of people who have died for freedom of speech (about the government and stuff - I'm not really clued up on this stuff) in wars. How would they feel if they died to that some misguided idiot can publish Nazi worshipping literature. In any form.
The flip side is that freedom of speech enables John Skinhead to spout Nazi propagander if he wishes - just as God-loving bible bashers are allowed to preach that we're all going to Hell. Just as I'm able to proclame my atheism and contempt for hate-mongers - as God-loving bible-bashers generally are.
However, I also believe that people can make up their own mind. It's not like hate pages are two-clicks away. You search for it. The fear is that these pages will coax people into forming similar opinions of hate. In my opinion if they are reading those kind of pages then your attitude and opinion is already that way inclined.
Either that or you want to see for yourself just how misguided people who waste their time publishing hate material.
So, in conclusion my point is that if you want to hate blacks, Jews, Gays, whites, minorities, majorities, women, etc you will, regardless of what web pages or literature you read. If you are easily swayed by hate material, surely you can be swayed the other way...
Anyone agree ?
Claric
--
There's no problem that cannot be solved with a suitable amount of high explosives
Here's all you've ever wanted to know about the age of consent around the world.