Slashdot Mirror
EFF Takes On Online Harassment
Gamoid writes: The Electronic Frontier Foundation has identified online harassment as a major challenge facing free speech on the Internet, and lays out its plan to fix it. They say, "Online harassment is a digital rights issue. At its worst, it causes real and lasting harms to its targets, a fact that must be central to any discussion of harassment. Unfortunately, it's not easy to craft laws or policies that will address those harms without inviting government or corporate censorship and invasions of privacy—including the privacy and free speech of targets of harassment. ... Just because the law sometimes allows a person to be a jerk (or worse) doesn’t mean that others in the community are required to be silent or to just stand by and let people be harassed. We can and should stand up against harassment. Doing so is not censorship—it’s being part of the fight for an inclusive and speech-supporting Internet."
This kind of stuff, if where Freedom of Religion Ends.
>> identified online harassment as a major challenge facing free speech
There's a bigger challenge in France right now: http://www.bbc.com/news/live/w...
The greater internet fuckwad theory posits that anonymity is a negative influence, but anonymity also allows people to express themselves without exposing themselves to harassment.
Good luck with that.
The route from "this is harassment that should be censored" to "this is something we 'all' disagree with so it should be censored" is a very slippery slope and the internet is piled high with the bones of dead forums who fell down that path. What is harassment? I can't say, "I'm going to kill you" but can I say "I wish you were dead"? Can I say "I hope your dog dies"? "You are an idiot for these reasons"? Can I say "Go play in traffic"?
There are various hug boxes on the internet where even vigorous disagreement backed with reason is seen as harassment. A more appropriate question than "should harassment be stopped" is "Who should be permitted to define harassment for a community"?
If video games influenced behavior the Pac Man generation would be eating pills and running away from their problems.
Well, as long as it's not a case of "your rights end where my feelings begin" then there isn't really a problem. If things are legal, who cares? Beyond that, it's an enforcement issue. Individual sites already have their own policies, so if a user is not satisfied with the policies and enforcement of the site they are using, that is not a problem as the user can discontinue using the site.
The problem is anything can be harrassing... Take the recent cartoon for example, obviously some people felt harassed by it. Posting your countries flag could be harassment to others. Posting your favorite team's win on Facebook could be harassing your friend who's team lost. Saying evolution is true is harassment to way too many people. Where do you draw the line, and then which side of it is the right side?
Hundreds of posts of people talking past each other coming right up.
for taking a stance that recognizes that online harassment is real, but that we need to be smart in how we deal with it. Part of me relates this to malware, if you're stupid enough to agree to install all the various garbage on the internet you sort of deserve it. At the same time the internet has become a place for everyone and is no longer a place dominated by nerds who don't much care is someone tells them to suck a llama's ass or what have you. I'm just really scared of any knee jerk legislation that might come up in the next few years, npr frequently has stories about internet bullying and they scare me (not for the bullying.) We have a generation that grew with the mentality of "Daddy Bender, Bethany is picking me." and when someone says something harsh to them they think that is not acceptable and that the person must not be tolerated. How to we accommodate those who are easily upset by bullying and not mess up the internet for those of us who enjoy the freedom of /b? I think TFA has some good suggestions that help build a middle road.
Censorship is always, absolutely unacceptable. A person that raises his hand to censor another should have that hand cut right off!
Here on Slashdot, harassment and censorship go together like bread and butter.
So you can all stuff your groupthink modpoints up your ass.
"You can't take away people's right to be assholes! That's who you remind me of... an evil Mr Rogers." - Simon Phoenix, Demolition Man
Wear your thickest skin
People tend to see anyone disagreeing with them as "harassment".
Note how I will get down-modded "troll" for the following sentence: I think Xbox One is a better platform than Playstation 4.
Not edgy enough? How about this radical opinion: For all it's flaws, Windows 8's UI is many times more usable than whatever Ubuntu is trying to do.
Blood still not boiling? I don't think Jar Jar Binks was that bad of a character, considering that Star Wars is primarily a franchise designed to sell toys to children.
And this is a real and serious problem.
There is one local character with a personality disorder who carefully hides online and constantly, for years, weekly attacks and smears taunts and insults local people just going about their online and offline business.
If it were fair and open criticism, so what.
If it were a national site, so what.
If they were attacking CEOs or politicians or bureaucrats... good!
But for local communities it's a real problem when people with serious asocial problems use all of their efforts, for YEARS, on a weekly basis, to simply do their best to degrade any and all online and even offline interaction and assassinate people's character out of simple avarice. They have a serious problem, and they make us part of it.
Such people always existed. There are people with profound social problems in this world who derive pleasure from hurting others in petty ways. But when you are talking about small communities, and easy carefully protected anonymity, and prolonged sustained effort fueled by a psychological disorder, you have a new phenomenon.
Not even just for the local community. It's not healthy psychologically and socially for the sick person to indulge their bad behavior rather than get help.
This article isn't my location, but here's a good write up from a few years back similar to what I and others in my small city have to deal with:
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09...
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Online harassment is a symptom of a larger problem.
Time was you could deal with online harassment by clicking the block button. The ability for someone to follow you across forums and services was limited. Today, we insist that people use their real names, link their accounts and allow friend-of-friend connections on modern web services. We make them input their phone numbers, of all things.
We say to people "if you don't like it, don't use it". But there is no good reason for people to insist on these functions. They insist on them only because people have always been singularly identifiable, and some people find it odd to operate in a space where that might not hold true.
However, there is a good reason to insist we trash them: cyberbullying.
It's far easier to to dox people if you can google their name and get dozens of results. Far easier to follow people if they're linking their facebook account to things, and you've got a clandestine link to their facebook account. Automatic stalking.
Yet, when people like me suggest that this "publicity by default" concept is bad, and say that people should be allowed to delete accounts when they no longer need them, we are told "it's a post privacy world, deal with it" and "everything on the internet is pubic and permanent, deal with it".
Maybe that's not a good paradigm?
> doesn’t mean that others in the community are required to be silent or to just stand by and let people be harassed. We can and should stand up against harassment. Doing so is not censorship—it’s being part of the fight for an inclusive and speech-supporting Internet.
Yeah! Harass the harassers! Surely this will not fall victim to subjectivity, differing points of view or appropriateness, or mob mentality!
Head on over to tumblr to see what this attitude brings about.
Unstable people set the norms, and regular people get harassed.
"Friendly reminder that all PIV sex is rape. :)" :)"
"Friendly reminder that white males cannot understand discrimination because of intersectionality.
"Kill all cis-het men!"
I think they should be clearly distinguished instead of throwing everyone on the same basket.
There are those people, like pretty much everyone on the internet that sometimes will get too bored, and will throw some hooks to cause some flame wars etc.. and well, this happens and sometimes its even fun, as it ends killing boredom.
But then there are the stalkers.
People that get fixated in making someone's life hell, someone that keeps "chasing the prey", that seeks every place the victim goes and slanders and don't let it go etc..
Those are indeed truly evil and should be clipped somehow.
As I'm sure you're aware, this move by the EFF was prompted by anti-gamer activists who see it as a way to silence criticism against them and their tactics.
They already have gotten a forum that was trying to allow its users to fund itself kicked off Patreon for the crime of hosting gamers. They did it by crying "harassment" and forcing Patreon to change their terms of service as the forum wasn't doing anything illegal or against the original TOS.
They're getting gamers kicked off Twitter by crying "harassment." It's a serious problem and a real threat to true freedom of speech. If the EFF goes through with backing these anti-gamer wingnuts, I know I'm never going to be donating another cent to the EFF.
Since last year we've seen the legitimate criticism from a customer revolt misrepresented (on an incredbile scale) as "harrassment."
And there was also harassment that was described as harassment. Gemergate was/is mess, with lots of problems from lots of directions. Simplistic posts like yours here that are just "my side" tribalism are part of the problem.
Read the fine article. Despite the misleading summary (oh, Slashdot, please never change. Especially not to Beta), the EFF is coming down on the side of free speech and against censorship, either by governments or by forum owners. When they say "We can and should stand up against harassment", they're referring to "counter-speech".
They later refer to GamerGate
And the context clearly implies that the latter is NOT what the EFF wants to happen.
The likely outcome from this will be total loss of free speech rights, how else do you stop online harassment when literally anyone can say literally anything is harassment if they don't like it.
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
A lot of people will be talking past each other on topics like this because we don't agree upon what is meant by freedom or by speech.
Sometimes the answers are easy. Many nations protect the people from the government with respect to the political freedom of speech. That's great, but harassment is rarely political and is usually an act of individuals or (non-governmental) groups. Yet expanding the definition of freedom of speech presents problems. Harassment is not about imposing upon people speaking loudly or frequently. It is about intimidation. This intimidation takes many forms: threats, diminishing one's sense of self, reducing a person in the eyes of others. All of this is to achieve a particular aim, by reducing a person's ability to respond to the harassment. That includes creating an imbalance of speech to favour the perpetrator (i.e. the victim cannot speak out). The question isn't so much, "is it a valid form of speech," as it is, "should one person's speech be able to suppress other people?"
I'd buy that if the anti-freedom anti-gamer crowd wasn't crowing about how they "got the EFF on their side." There is a huge problem with people using harassment claims to ban free speech, and this isn't addressing that issue.
We can and should stand up against harassment. Doing so is not censorship—it’s being part of the fight for an inclusive and speech-supporting Internet."
Bull shit, because who gets to define harassment? It's the beginning of the end of freespeech.
inclusive and speech-supporting Internet
?huh? Is that Newspeak?
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
MOD PARENT +5 INFORMATIVE + INIFINITY!!!
Filter error: Don't use so many caps. It's like YELLING.
the ones who seem to get the most harassment are the ones who have a habit of bringing it on themselves, see this post for proof
course I dont go running off and whine about it, but that's cause im not a special unique snowflake who needs to be protected when I act like an ass
So, you're basing your interpretation of the EFF's intent on the words of people who do not represent the EFF?
It is /. and the EFF who are too, uh, "lazy" (yeah that's the ticket) to investigate the actual harassment. Once again, a Slashdot article makes reference to Gamergate in the context of harassment, but all the victims mentioned just happen to be on the anti-GG side. I'm beginning to have doubts that this is an honest mistake.
Pro-GG people have been doxxed:
http://imgur.com/BNlLKcn
So was the creator of #notyourshield, and his workplace was harassed until he was fired:
https://twitter.com/Moldybars/...
http://i.imgur.com/9ieHMu9.png
A prominent anti-GGer called for the doxxing of all Gamergate supporters:
http://i.gyazo.com/5db582013ac...
An article that claims to know all about Gamergate appears completely ignorant of the majority of relevant harassment, not to mention the Harassment Patrol. At least the pro-GG side makes an effort to detect, condemn, and report this shitty behavior, no matter which side it comes from.
Yeah, they also crow about Gamergate being dead, but despite all the funerals there's no body. Never mind what the anti-gamers say; they've been known to lie. EFF doesn't take sides on Gamergate, they only mention it as a "magnet for harassment", which I think is undeniable -- people on both sides have been doxxed, swatted, and mailed undesirable stuff.
It absolutely is, and the EFF is against it. Much of the section on "Companies Are Bad at Regulating Speech" is about it
The nigh-constant downmods on my posts have stopped!
Nice -1 there, son.
And there was also harassment that was described as harassment.
And that would have been fair enough if they hadn't also
a) pretended the tiny minority (and third parties) carrying out harassment accounted for the entire movement, in a transparent attempt to distract from and cover-up for the corrupt journalists, and
b) completely ignored all the harassment coming from the anti-GG "direction."
Therefore the coverage was intentionally biased, and decidedly anti-Gamergate rather than anti-harassment.
There are MUCH more important battles to be fought than stuff like online harassment.
Good grief, if someone is harassing you, whether it is online or in the real world, ignore
them and they will go away when you quit responding to them. This is basic behavioral
logic.
Perhaps the EFF has been instructed to stay away from stuff that really matters by those who
could make life difficult for the EFF, namely the US government. Now that would make sense -
the EFF wants to be seen as a crusader for "rights" and a crusade against online harassment
is not anything which will bother those in power. So the EFF can pretend to be useful and get
contributions from gullible idiots while at the same time staying off the turf the government has
made it clear the EFF needs to avoid. I am open to other explanations but the preceding seems
very plausible to me.
Say, for whatever reason, valid or not, you perceive me as annoying and contrary and generally pin-headed, and you undertake to call me truly despicable names in the most contemptuous and filthy manner imaginable. Every day. Until you expire. Are you harassing me? No. You aren't. It wouldn't even rise to the standard of mild annoyance. Why? Because I am immune to such rhetoric under all but the most trying circumstances, and even were you somehow to reach such a malodorous level of offense, you're still 100% within the bounds of acceptable speech in my book; I just have to cope with it (which would require just about zero effort, I assure you.)
But the next person in line? They might break down into tears, wander off into the nearest bathtub, and slit their wrists if you simply called them a douchebag or implied they had too many pimples.
Whose fault is this? What is our responsibility in the matter of such weak, unprepared, or broken personalities? Should we pad the very walls and take out all the tubs and razors and knives and muzzle each and every one of us to prevent poor Cluetard McDimwit from wrist slitting lest something rises to the level of offense in the dim, dysfunctional reaches of what passes for his mind?
I've said it before, and I'll say it again:
Prepare your kids, and yourself, for exposure to the opinions of others, and gird yourself appropriately lest there is (gasp) an encounter with differing opinion, surprising and/or not-to-your-taste behavior, or OMFG, someone intentionally being nasty, crude or stupid. Or all or the foregoing. It is not anyone else's job to do this for you or your children; and it is not anyone else's responsibility if your failure to do so causes unrest, or worse, in minds you failed to prepare. Including yours.
In order to have freedoms, we must be educated well enough, and prepared well enough, to deal with them. If the fact that some cannot deal with them is sufficient to the cause to limit those freedoms, then eventually, they will erode away to nothing. Likely there will always be some personality on the borderline of collapsing at some provocation, imaginary or otherwise. Should we really attempt to tune our whole society to the lowest possible standard of discourse as a result?
Think very carefully before you endorse force of any kind as a remedy for "offense." To borrow somewhat from Jefferson, if it does not pick my pocket, break my leg, or falsely portray my reputation in some measure likely to cause material or financial consequence... then no remedy is called for; no coercion of law appropriate; and no sympathy required.
Having said that, the owner of any private venue has every right to set arbitrary limits on speech and behavior within the venue. You don't like it, leave. End of story. Such r
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
The once great EFF has jumped the shark. Dam I have to get myself a new hat.
Ouch. Please read this.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
A lack of anonymity means people are held accountable, but that "accountability" is in the eye of the beholder, so it cuts both ways, and it definitely cuts against the person who isn't anonymous if others going after them are anonymous. The first thing that comes to my mind, then, is to have some degree of separation between anonymous/pseudonymous areas of communication and debate and "real name" ones. I'm not sure that's feasible (how to really draw such hard boundaries in such an interconnected age?) and I worry there'd be problematic results from such segregation. But it does seem to me like some of the more recent issues have been as bad as they've been due in no small part to a disparity of where the harassers and the targets are on the anonymous->pseudonymous->eponymous continuum.
I remember sigs. Oh, a simpler time!
See subject & this link for details of her ac post stalking + harassing me http://slashdot.org/comments.p... for YEARS now - since 2010 iirc, & merely since I showed she was full of shit on libeling myself saying "APK is a know nothing who never worked in the industry" -> http://slashdot.org/comments.p... & I put that to rest with concrete, verifiable, & UNDENIABLE contrary proofs AFTER I proved her wrong on Windows and b.s. she spewed incorrectly...
Funny - now that's she's occupied with HER OWN MEDICINE being served her this week, confronting her on trolling myself?
WELL (pointing that link above out & HOW she's "started up" with me again) guess what?
The nigh-constant downmods on my posts have stopped!
(BarbaraHudson's obviously blown all her modpoints & those of her sockpuppets, which she's definitely been shown to keep here on /. in 3 accounts of hers I know of - she can't downmod me constantly anymore now... funny that, eh? Not!))
"Someone" (Barb probably) didn't like I posted these facts last 2 times I posted it here http://yro.slashdot.org/commen... + here http://yro.slashdot.org/commen... downmodding them - so, here they are, again... lol!
APK
P.S.=> I learned something a LONG time ago: NOBODY is going to fight your battles for you unless they too have a stake in whatever's going on themselves - so fight back with truth & facts like those in that link above I used to "name & shame" such online trolling scumbags... apk
Uh, okay. When did they do that, again...?
Obama proposes $20 billion dollar to pay for $40 billion dollar of 2-year community collage students when there is a $40 Trillion Dollar Loan repayment gap!
The Big-O is sucking his Hawaii Bong as if there were no Bong for Tomorrow!
What a drug-head looser this Obama.
The first GG link is about Felicia Day, and is actually one of the Guardian's more balanced pieces (which ain't saying much), including as it does Sam Biddle's "Bring Back Bullying tweets". It doesn't even include the word "misogyny", which is probably a first for the Guardian.
The second (broken) GG link is to some of Brianna Wu's nonsense -- but the EFF includes that link not to support but to criticize the proposed solutions included: "our first thought is to worry that such legislation will be misused to target victims, not the perpetrators of harassment".
The link about Sarkeesian (who did indeed get a death threat from someone who had been after her since long before Gamergate got started, confirmed by the pro-GG side.) doesn't even mention Gamergate, though it is tagged with it.
The "Open letter to the gaming community" doesn't mention Gamergate and doesn't say anything pro-GG would disagree with; you may recall when someone who was anti-GG started an "inclusiveness" campaign with a heart logo, lots of Gamergaters started using it, and the person running the campaign briefly added a message telling Gamergaters they weren't welcome in this inclusiveness.
But the EFF article isn't just about Gamergate, and counting links doesn't really show anything; for one thing it's easier to find anti-GG links in mainstream sources for obvious reasons. If you read what the EFF said in the body of the article, they're against censorship (both by governments and private companies who run online forums) and they don't consider "harassment" the sort of thing anti-GG considers harassment : "Weâ(TM)re not talking about a few snarky tweets or the give and take of robust online debate, even when that debate includes harsh language or obscenities". I certainly can't see them endorsing the idea that politely disagreeing with hateful mentions of oneself (a.k.a "sea-lioning") is harassment.
We can and should stand up against harassment.
EFF meeting:
Lets make a search engine?
- Google done that
Lets make the world more connected?
- Facebook/Twitter did that
Fuck it, lets enforce our own laws on the world and get donations to do it.
- Roger that. Lets create an issue that doesnt really need to exist and make people fall for it. Lets ignore the things that really matter like world hunger, corrupt governments and corporations. But hey, at least EFF will get popular sifting shit down peoples throats that DOESNT REALLY MATTER.
Challenge accepted.
http://sjwar.blogspot.com/2014...
You said a single. There are many references to this case, and it's not the only case, but you can do your own homework.
How is the Riemann zeta function like Trump rallies? Both have an endless number of trivial zeros.
There is an on-line forum site where in certain sub sections there are groups of regulars, some of who have elevated privileges, who have devise a very subtle and distributed form of harassment that is designed to goad individuals into over reacting as a pretext for permanently censoring them. Whenever a new account appears they probe the person to ascertain their political opinions and if they decide that the victim does not conform closely enough to their beliefs they initiate the distributed harassment and entrapment campaign.
Good luck trying to control that sort of organised and systematic bastardy.
Nobody has the right not to be offended, but people do have the right not to be stalked or harassed.
That means I'm free to state my opinion. What I'm not allowed to do is follow you around, waiting for you around every corner, repeating whatever vile thing I want.
Saying somebody is an idiot on Facebook is one thing. Spreading rumors is another. Stalking is another. Again, I don't know why we need special cyber-laws, because many of these things are ALREADY illegal without specific cyber-laws being needed.
* Following somebody around wherever they go, online or not: stalking
* Spreading untruths with intent to harm or defame: libel/slander
* Creating false facebook profiles, etc: impersonation
etc
"Behold, the Lord, the LORD of hosts, shall lop the bough with terror: and the high ones of stature shall be hewn down, and the haughty shall be humbled". Isa 10:33 per subject line http://yro.slashdot.org/commen... except he's winning against the organised and systemic bastardry especially vs. its ringmaster BarbaraHudson and her sockpuppets "And it was revealed in mine ears by the LORD of hosts, Surely this iniquity shall not be purged from you till ye die, saith the Lord GOD of hosts" Isa 22:14 which has killed BarbaraHudson's already questionable integrity and reputation here on this site due to her sockpuppetry, ac trolling and stalking "For this is the day of the Lord GOD of hosts, a day of vengeance, that he may avenge him of his adversaries: and the sword shall devour, and it shall be satiate and made drunk with their blood: for the Lord GOD of hosts hath a sacrifice..." Jer 46:10 Today's that day for the troll stalker harasser BarbaraHudson "The LORD hath opened his armoury, and hath brought forth the weapons of his indignation: for this is the work of the Lord GOD of hosts" Right here APK Hosts File Engine 9.0++ 32/64-bit http://start64.com/index.php?o... "The image this title brings to mind is of a mighty military commander, one who can at a mere word summon rank upon rank of protective power." in hosts files which BarbaraHudson hates but can't do a damn thing against as shown here http://slashdot.org/comments.p... and did a "Run, Forrest: RUN!!!" from after downmodding it.
APK
P.S.=> Just kidding on being the ACTUAL "Lord of Hosts" (afaik @ least, lol) - it just fits (considering I am into hosts as shown above for more speed, security, reliability, & even anonymity online, for less but doing more than *ANY* other SINGLE "so-called 'solutions'" for all of those (none I know of do all of that by themselves, & certainly not as efficiently on all fronts noted))... apk
I got banned from there a couple of months ago, pretty sure it was I called out Rose Eveleth, posting on one of her articles that her old site titles "Ladybits" is just as sexist (actually far more so) as Matt Taylor's shirt. I emailed them, and their reply: "I've checked in Disqus and it unfortunately looks like you have been blocked by one of the moderators. Banning is done at the discretion of our moderators - typically when a user engages in personal attacks or uses other uncivil language - and we support their judgement. Additionally, I cannot view which comment resulted in your account being blocked. My apologies. "
I did nothing of the sort, all I did was point out the chain showing she's a hypocrite. No wonder old-school newspapers are dying if huge papers like The Atlantic don't even have control over their own webpage, and are just accepting on faith whatever unknowable actions their volunteer "moderators" are doing. I know I could go register again, but that's not the point. The Atlantic loves their free speech, but seem brain dead defending others on their own web site.
Turn night into day.
Fuck them.
History will record that the secret word that made the internet censor itself was, "harassment".
Dear 'hosts file guy', replying to your own anonymous posts is a sure sign of psychosis ...
I enjoy the tears of the trolls. Like a damphyre, only for trolls, I am a troll who eats other trolls. MY fear in your "help" is typical of lawyers/law: a subculture of grievance lines your pockets well. In the end, you will try to "help' a troll who is being trolled by me for being a troll. no thanks. I am much better at excoriating trolls than any of you will ever be.
Get rid of anonymity. If users can hide behind a veil of online anonymity, if they can always be relatively assured that no one is going to trace down that AssH/\t350 is really Wendel Jeppers of 113 Terrace Dr., Apt. C, Meat Hollow, KY, and that there is almost no chance that one can deliver a summons to him, you will not get rid of harassment. Couple that with the fact that there is no authority which can get rid of a troll once and for all, that they can sign up with a new anonymous account, and it's easy to see that the EFF folks are idiots in this case.
It's all good to have folks stand up and decry harassment when it happens. We'd all like to think our better angels triumph over evil. They don't always (or is that often?). That's why we need identity, laws, and authority. Because certain idiots in this world need to be separated from polite society (and hopefully rehabilitated before being let back into that society) because they do cause harm.
The good news is that Bayesian probability and AI will soon be good enough to identify trolls, harassers, and other assorted knaves by the way they write - write enough like a troll, watch your post get bounced and your account cancelled - no appeal, go away. We'll have control. It's probably not the kind you want though, as these technical solutions always have collateral damage.
So, Internet idiots, you've all been warned several times. Are you going to grow up, act like adults, and control yourselves or are you going to be leashed? Your choice.
That is all.
Doing so is not censorship—it’s being part of the fight for an inclusive and speech-supporting Internet.
Given the amount of damage SJWs have done to free speech in just the past year, at this point, barring the EFF coming out and flat-out denouncing specific instances of people abusing anti-"harassment" policies, I do not trust the EFF to be truly standing up for free speech. As the EFF points out, it is way too easy to cry "harassment" and get people banned for what's simply free speech.
The left-wing anti-free speech movement has way too much popular support by simply using the "misogyny" and "racist" buzzwords. They lie and claim they're being "harassed" without any actual evidence that they are, and they are destroying people's lives over it. I need to hear the EFF come out explicitly against them. I want to hear them condemn Brianna Wu and her constant "signal boosting" to get people banned from Twitter and fired from their jobs.
Until that happens, I can't trust this isn't just another use of the word "harassment" to curtail what should be protected speech.
...is the same way we fight spam - filter it.
Seriously, just have a plugin in your browser that censors the words you don't want to see, and *BAM*, we're done. No need to control the troll, just don't look at them.
I find your characterization to be inaccurate. Freedom means the ability to do something, as opposed to the ability to not do something. Every time people are restricted from some action, their freedom diminishes, which would be going in a negative direction.
I would not argue with the contention that in many ways, freedom in the US is diminishing; but I would insist that this is not a condition that is justified by our constitution. We never really were able to meet the standards of our own constitution, and today, we are presently being subjected to unauthorized government action that is eroding our constitutionally guaranteed freedoms quite severely in a number of areas. Ideally, something would arrest this process, but it doesn't look like there's much hope for it. So I'll be primarily discussing our constitution and our ideals here; please understand that I am well aware that the reality is often "other."
In the EU and within member countries of the EU, restrictions on what you may do as an individual, harming no one, extend beyond matters of speech. Nazi memorabilia -- sale, purchase, collection -- serves to demonstrate how individual freedoms are repressed by state actors to the detriment of the citizens (and which also provides a rather sobering mechanism to suppress history.) Collecting people's passports at their hotel demonstrates another way individual freedom is restricted, in this case, the freedom to travel and the freedom to control one's own data. Being forbidden to keep arms limits the ability to defend home, family, business and employees from criminal elements, and that's a very significant negative.
I honestly do not see how these kinds of things can be described as "positive freedoms"; they directly reduce freedom without providing a gain in freedom elsewhere, and so seem to me to be inherently negative with regard to freedom overall. You would have to present an excellent defense of your contention in these contexts to change my outlook on this.
Most rights generate limits when colliding with other rights, whether they be the same right, or another. A classic go-to is "your right to swing your fist ends where my nose begins." The key to making this idea work as best it can is a very careful determination of where the nose is; in the case of speech, if the "nose" consists of simply hearing something as it does in some places outside the USA, I would assert that the limit is set incorrectly. When government uses coercion backed by force to limit one's ability to express an opinion in a public venue, characterizing that as a positive seems more than wrong; it seems ridiculous.
When speech does more than communicate words -- for instance, should it fall into liable or slander -- then limits arise, because we're no longer dealing only with communication. We're dealing with harmful aggression in a very real and concrete sense. In the USA, as elsewhere, reputation is something of value, and attempts to damage it unjustly are viewed quite dimly by most of our body of law. Other examples include coercive speech, other threats, harmful volume levels, and various types of concrete incitement to action. So there's no perfect freedom of speech here, nor do I think there should be, but in the matter of expressing one's opinion and the communication of ideas, we're definitely quite free, and a good deal more so than those in the EU are in some of the member states.
Although I think your characterization of "negative" is inaccurate, I'd be very interested to see what you have to say in regard to the bad things you think we are free to do without interference. Again I am speaking of our constitution and our ideals, not the current state of unauthorized law, which restrict us as much, and in some
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
If possession of anything to do with the events was prohibited, yes, in fact it would provide a chilling effect.
But if you were to buy the lab coat, or a box of unused envelopes that said "from the desk of..." of some idiot who mixed up some anthrax and put such a thing on display with a plaque explaining what it was, that would be both interesting and provocative of conversation where reason could be brought into play. Nazi uniform, medal, helmet, sigil, patch, letterhead, enigma machine? Same thing. I'll get to firearms below.
As to your first point, no -- but the real question here is, does this have anything to do with the line you posit? Does that line even exist? Let's look closely and see.
With memorabilia, we are talking about, at best, things like daggers, officer's swords and Lugers. Usually we're not even talking about those, but instead, flags, patches, uniforms, medals, a whole range of non-weapon artifacts and records.
These things add no notable destructive power to the individual that making them illegal eliminates. None at all. Take the Luger, for instance. Can't own a Nazi Luger? No, but you can own other pistols, rifles, and etc. Many of them far more destructive, longer range, etc. Hunting is legal (yes, even in Germany) and of course knives and rolling pins and pitchforks and poisons and so forth are in every home. So clearly, we're not talking about anything to do with adding destructive power not already easily available. I have a Luger, you have a Desert Eagle, You're going to make the bigger hole, believe me. You have a quality .222 scoped rifle, I have a Luger, you can shoot me dead before I can even see you in the distance.
So memorabilia and WMD do not exist on a continuum from one to the other. Which was my whole point. WMD are dangerous force-multipliers, hence deserve some special treatment. Memorabilia is not, and does not. But wait!
In the (rare, enormously expensive) case where a historical object actually might be a force multiplier -- say we were talking about a Messerschmidt fighter or a Tiger tank -- then there are other laws that reasonably control ownership, arming, firing and operation of such a thing -- Nazi or otherwise. That would exist on a continuum with WMD. Because it's pretty much that. The amount of damage you could do with a working Tiger (or fighter aircraft) before you could be stopped would be amazing (we've actually seen this happen in the US with older US tanks.) But note that the reason the working Tiger or fighter would be prohibited has nothing at all to do with the fact that is an historical object; it's because they can crush things, blow huge holes in things, drop bombs, all the while being basically unstoppable until very scarce resources are brought to bear upon the machine in question. And in turn, those remedies may create more of a mess. So no tanks or fighters without oversight (and usually, permanent neutering. Concrete down the tank barrel, removal of machine guns and bomb racks, etc.)
Now, WMD. Does that change what an individual can do, multiply their force as does the Tiger tank? Of course it does. More so. So you see, memorabilia do not exist along a continuum with Tiger tanks and WMD. Therefore, the rules applied to WMD should not be applied to memorabilia. Your posited "line" does not exist. It's apples and strudel. No comparison. Memorabilia does not provide force multiplication.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.