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Milo Yiannopoulos Wants To Buy 4Chan, Promises Free Speech Haven (hollywoodreporter.com)
An anonymous Slashdot reader quotes The Hollywood Reporter:
Milo Yiannopoulos, an alt-right hero known for his banishment from Twitter, is preparing a bid to acquire his own social media firm: 4chan... The Hollywood Reporter learned that Yiannopoulos, with the help of a wealthy backer, is preparing to approach 4chan owner Hiroyuki Nishimura, a Japanese entrepreneur, with a bid this week. Contacted Saturday, Yiannopoulos confirmed plans for a possible acquisition but did not offer details.
"As a free-speech fundamentalist and a student of Internet culture, I appreciate how fragile and precious the 4chan ecosystem is and how much it gives to the wider Internet -- even if some corners of it, such as /pol/, don't always approve of me very much," Yiannopoulos said... "I spoke to my lawyer this morning about purchasing the business... I intend to approach the current owners in the next few days with an offer."
Yiannopoulos added this his philosophy as an owner "would be very simple: free-speech central, no ifs, no buts."
"As a free-speech fundamentalist and a student of Internet culture, I appreciate how fragile and precious the 4chan ecosystem is and how much it gives to the wider Internet -- even if some corners of it, such as /pol/, don't always approve of me very much," Yiannopoulos said... "I spoke to my lawyer this morning about purchasing the business... I intend to approach the current owners in the next few days with an offer."
Yiannopoulos added this his philosophy as an owner "would be very simple: free-speech central, no ifs, no buts."
PEPE
I'm not actually sure who I want in charge of the place less, him or Martin Shkreli.
sad that so called social media as they expand try to restrict speech to what is acceptable in a drawing room of bourgeois white women, and internet has to depend on a self described faggot troll to consciously create a truly free speech haven.
It would have to be literally free. Anyway, who needs the stupid thing... there are many alternatives and most of them are better. Let 4chan die and let the alternatives thrive.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
And when you say "freedom of speech" you mean the freedom to be a white supremacist neo-nazi hate monger. Sure, this is America, and we have the First Amendment and all, but let's not pretend he's doing/being something noble.
While I disagree with Milo on many, many things, he seems to be committed to free speech above all.
Also he showed that he is able and willing to learn and change his oppinion when presented with new facts: There are famous tweets from him where he accused gamers of being immature, but a few month later he recanted and even tried to learn how to play Dota2.
On the other hand I fear that 4chan may turn out to be un-monetizeable. Most advertisers will never agree to show their ads there, not even on the worksafe boards, plus most 4chan users probably have an adblocker enabled anyway.
Whether you like 4chan or not (I don't, particularly), you have to agree that speech there has been pretty freewheeling. And that's perhaps 4chan's most redeeming feature, the one feature I wouldn't want to change. And Milo is, simply put, the best possible custodian of free speech. Whether you like Milo or not (I happen to like him, a lot (no, I'm not gay (but I have nothing against gay or any LGBT people, and am probably bisexual (this is a lot of nested parentheses, huh? But am keeping track, we're at number 4.)))) you must admit that there are few people as dedicated to free speech as he is.
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
you mean the freedom to be a white supremacist neo-nazi hate monger
Sure, and also the freedom to be a lying leftard knee-jerk SJW. They go hand in hand, and fuck you for sniveling about it.
There's a reason why the ACLU defended the Nazis in first amendment cases. Educate yourself.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
The term "social media" has become much more encompassing than it used to be. Nowadays any place two or more people can interact is being labeled as "social media".
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
Milo is hardly a white supremacist or neo-Nazi. He's pretty far right, to be sure, and I can't say I disagree with the "hate monger" characterization, but "white supremacist" doesn't fit, and neither does neo-Nazi.
Examine even your most deeply held beliefs. Nobody is always right.
Keep in mind that even moot, the founder of 4chan and a guy renowned for his protection of free speech, had to ban all the GamerGate harassment. It's not that he particularly wanted to, it's that legally he had to or no-one would want to host or advertise on his website. In other words, it wouldn't be able to pay for itself. Plus, he would be dealing with a lot of log requests from law enforcement.
8chan only manages to ignore harassment and child porn because it's small and doesn't cost much to run. So depending on your personal definition of "SJW", you might find that Milo is one of them when he is forced to delete threads and wield the banhammer.
I also wonder where Milo would find the time for 4chan, considering he works for Breitbart and tours and is supposed to be running that college scholarship fund that is already behind schedule.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Milo's all about freedom of speech. I don't know if he can keep the lights on at 4Chan
Well, as a fan of free speech, you'd think he'd have turned up to the employment tribunal that resulted from his seemingly failing to keep the lights on at a previous venture.
If he owns 4chan, they can't ban him from it. Makes complete sense.
Mr. Hu is not a ninja.
Al Gore once titled a movie of his "an inconvenient truth". The premise being that the truth can be isn't convenient, pretty or profitable. It's an argument that was widely embraced by the left when it was in there favor. Now that it is against their favor it is condemned (flashbacks of wikileaks anyone?).
Milo has previously stated that in today's society only trolls are allowed to speak the truth. This position used to be taken by the court jester or fool, the one person who could speak freely, to say what no one else dared. In today's society sites like 4chan have become the fool, saying what no one else dares.
4chan or it's replacement while always exist because history has always demanded that the truth be told, no matter how politically incorrect it is.
"when you say "freedom of speech" you mean the freedom to be a white supremacist neo-nazi hate monger."
Definitely! Or maybe freedom to be advocating a homosexual lifestyle, or freedom to be a pornography spreading filth monger, or freedom to instruct people about making bombs or cooking meth.
Yes, in the USA there is a First Amendment, but that only provides a little protection against government censorship. It does nothing to restrain the militant, hate-filled SJWs from using every tactic imaginable, including brute force, to stifle speech that they don't like.
Creating a forum for unpopular opinions and controversial material is an entirely noble enterprise
he meant free as in not paying for it.
"They were pure niggers." – Noam Chomsky
>>but let's not pretend he's doing/being something noble.
Sure he is. In fact, he is providing a vital service. He is shining a big searing spotlight on how free speech is being restricted on college campuses, and all the hypocrisy that entails. Of course, one has to be outlandish and outrageous to cut through all the noise and attempts to dampen the message, but that seems to be something Milo revels in, so maybe he is uniquely qualified for the job.
>> white supremacist neo-nazi hate monger
You Social Justice Warriors really need another smokescreen other than race and fascism to throw down every time your views are questioned. The country has pretty much caught on to the tactic. (You can thank the violent BLM movement for expediting its demise; boy, what a miscalculation THAT was, wasn't it?) Y'all should try being, I dunno, entertaining. Like Milo.
Without those evile white men recognizing that these things are indeed horrible, we would still be in antiquity, ethics-wise.
Slavery, sexism and all other kinds of barbarity were "business as usual" for 95% of human history.
Yiannopoulos added this his philosophy as an owner "would be very simple: free-speech central, no ifs, no buts."
Let me know how that goes for you 5 seconds in when somebody posts child porn or makes a credible threat of violence.
Last time I checked, the government wasn't trying shut him or 4chan up/down. There isn't a need for a haven, he just wants a place for shitty people to be shitty people on the internet. Equating free speech with shitposting and demanding to be heard and respected demeans free speech and needs to stop! Obligatory XKCD: https://xkcd.com/1357/
Rejoice...... :/
You're messin' with my Zen Thing, man.....
no, Milo is all about trolling and shitposting. This has absolutely nothing to do with free speech https://xkcd.com/1357/
You don't understand 4chan do you? Or free speech for that matter. In the appropriate boards, like /pol or /b you can attack white people, call for the death of all men, advocate communism, extreme leftist anarchism, or whatever you want. And 4chan won't ban you, or censor your posts. Now, if you says stuff the user bases doesn't like, well they may insult you, tell you to get cancer, ignore you, hell they may even debate you. Free speech works for both sides. This is way better than most left wing boards, which I have noticed will censor your post, or ban you if your opinions stray too far from the mainstream.
you mean the freedom to be a white supremacist neo-nazi hate monger
That's what freedom is for. You don't need free speech protections to say what people want to hear.
> Milo's all about freedom of speech.
He's also all about big brother spying on the people.
Your hair look like poop, Bob! - Wanker.
Except those are mostly what are known as "lies", not facts. The worst cases of modern oppression and extermination have certainly not been committed by 'white' people, particularly if we further limit it to those white peoples that are traditionally considered to make up 'the West' (and thus exclude the attempted ethnic cleansing in the Balkans, which America and Western Europe opposed.) And you are free to look up the statistics on rape and molestation yourself; the causative agents are more complicated than either side wants to admit, but using a simple and naive survey of the facts the racist-tinged radical right of today usually comes off looking a lot better than the 'reverse'-racist radical left.
And it doesn't help your cause that gay white men (including but certainly not limited to aberrant right-wingers like Milo) are being removed from their former place of victimhood. I'm not at all sure what the radical left hopes to accomplish by intentionally ejecting millions of people from their base.
The really sad part is, you guys could've easily taken the wind out of the sails of the alt-right by simply being rational and favoring free speech, but instead you've chosen to double-down on that reactionary white-bashing that, while kinda cute and perhaps even thought-provoking in the 1990s, comes off as rather delusional and self-destructive in 2016. You've given people like Milo the high ground, and it's going to take you at least half a generation to get it back.
Neo-nazis. I think even anti-death penalty ACLU lawyers would have been happy to pull a lever at the Nuremberg gallows.
He had to do absolutely nothing at all.
That Gamergate had anything to do with hatespeech at all is a blatant lie, made up by Gawker and their ilk and repeated ad nauseum by everybody else.
Why? Because that was easier than admitting that, yes the gamers were right, there was no ethics whatsoever to speak of in gaming journalism, everyone whas sleeping with each other, discussing on what to report and what not to mention etc...
It really is outrageous for gamers to demand just a minimum of standards in the way of journalistic integrity.
I was there on 4chan back in August 2014 when it really started: No hatespeech whatsoever. Any post even slightly hinting that violence of any kind was appropriate was reported and taken down quicker than even child porn. On Twitter and the other, moderated, social medias, the situation was even more tame: A Data scientist ran a statistical analysis on tweets containing the #gamergate hashtag and found that less than 0.2% of them were hostile in any way. Keep in mind that this tag was also used by the SJWs and the trolls (of both sides).
All supposed death threats (which by the way happened before that tag was even created, meaning that they were not even part of Gamergate) have been thoroughly debunked.
I think what really made the mass media (well video game mass media at least) so angry, is that this bunch of outcast nerds did not keel over and die when ordered/expected to, but instead had the audacity to fight back, completely politely. And what a fight it was: Using only polite emails and even paper letters, they got pretty much every single advertiser to pull out from Gawker and their subsites, contributing to its well earned demise, they got the FTC to update its guidelines on hidden advertising, they got an apology for the creator of Sins of a Solar Empire who had been falsely accused of rape, they greenlit a steam game from a femminist that had been bullied (including death threats) by other more extreme femminists for not being as rabid as she was supposed to be (Seedscape), they made The Escapist and even IGN adopt an ethics codex and of course they got many of the ringleaders of those 11 articles along the "Gamers are dead" line fired (those articles were released completely coincidentally all on the same day, I am sure the secret GamesJournoMailinglist that Milo uncovered later had nothing to do with it). Not officially of course, but many had their contract not renewed or were let go for "creative differences".
Meanwhile moot was spending weeks in europe with his not-girlfriend who was a SJW and at that time writing an academic paper about him.
It is kinda sad that currently the most objective article on GG is the one on encyclopediadramatica. The one on wikipedia is so biased that even Jim Wales spoke out against it. Of course they cite sources (mostly from Gawker) so by Wikipedia standards the article is fine.
Yes. Why do you think he needs a new toy to yell "Look! I'm relevant!"
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I know, right? The 21st century is all about properly censored and curated 'safe spaces.' WTF is he thinking?
Oh, this gets interesting. Elaborate, please!
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Sure, and also the freedom to be a lying leftard knee-jerk SJW. They go hand in hand
No they don't. If you believe in free speech, you must believe in free speech for people that disagree with you, but just because you believe in having the right to say certain things doesn't mean that you believe in free speech. Milo definitely believes in his right to say certain things. He's far less into other people having the right to say things that contradict him.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
While we're on the subject, what are David Duke, Jared Taylor and the rest of their KK buddies up to? How about the USA neo-Nazi movement? Are they looking to buy a strip mall somewhere? How about the Bundy clan? Are they looking to build a new outhouse at their compound? Does Dylan Roof have a special someone he is prison pen-pals with now?
I'm really, really not down with /. reporting on hate group leaders like they are the Kardashians.
Yeah. A site that was started in 2003 is 20th century, moron.
Pretty funny how right-wingers cry freedom of speech to defend their inflammatory bullshit but are the first ones in line to whine like babies about Colin Kaepernick exercising that right by quietly kneeling during the national anthem. Everyone is a hypocrite, on both sides.
Yes it does. Trolling and shitposting are speech. They are covered under free speech, like all speech.
== Jez ==
Do you miss Firefox? Try Pale Moon.
He's free to kneel all he wants, doesn't mean we have to watch it or like it.
Picture this: Milo standing in front of Twitter Inc, yelling
"Oh, no room for Milo, huh? Fine! I'll go and buy my own microblogging service. With Blackjack! Aaaaand hookers!"
Then again, what'd he do with the hookers... Ahh, screw the whole thing!
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
And you don't think his fabricated Leslie Jones tweets show an underlying racist worldview? I mean, why did he even start that war? What was the intent?
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Is fabricating tweets by an actress because you don't like a movie reboot a noble enterprise?
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
It's like the bar in Mos Eisley but without the nice parts: scum and villanry, all day every day.
So ... it's like every other social media service?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
The government isn't trying to shut down trolls and shitposters. Trolls and shitposters, however, demand to be heard and call that free speech. Being judged for what you say does not violate your free speech. Social media platforms are not obligated to grant them a platform for their speech either. Facebook and twitter are not the government and can do whatever they want.
That in and of itself isn't hypocritical unless they try to force him to stand. You're allowed to criticize other people's speech, but trying to prevent them from speaking at all is different (and worse). Yes, the NFL and colleges are (mostly) private property, they can decline to host events or give a platform, etc. but one of the major reasons for going to college is to be exposed to new ideas and learn how to think better. You can't do that if you refuse to listen to any points of view besides your own.
Examine even your most deeply held beliefs. Nobody is always right.
You know what happens when white men really become angry? Everybody else ends up in a mass grave, that's what happens.
Cambodia, Tibet, Rwanda, Turkey, Saddam-era Iraq, etc.
You want to argue Hitler trumps stuff like that, fine, but that requires admitting (rightly or wrongly) that the Jews have suffered the most and it also implies that they are non-white.
This might come back to bite you in the ass if you ever want to argue that some disputed cases of land theft in the immediate aftermath of that persecution were the worst atrocities ever committed and our current support of Israel is therefore entirely unjustified.
I think it was less "so much harassment - we have to ban it" and more "a movement targeting (among other things) the media, advertisers don't want anything to do with that because it goes directly against their interests".
Examine even your most deeply held beliefs. Nobody is always right.
Ever heard of the Holocaust?
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
angry white men how they're responsible for most of today's ills, whether rapes, mass shootings, extermination of species and people, child molestation and child rape
The only one of those that's even arguably true is extermination of species and people, and even that has the caveat of only applying to the last few centuries. Plenty of people and cultures were wiped out by non-white people farther back.
Examine even your most deeply held beliefs. Nobody is always right.
And Milo seems to deliberately distort the idea that just because we have freedom of speech in the U.S., it doesn't require anyone to allow him on their privately owned or publicly traded forums.
The First Amendment protects people from government interference in their speech (with certain exceptions). It does not stop Twitter from banning him (which they did) should they decide to do so.
I think the real reason that Milo wants to buy 4chan is so he can have something resembling a social media platform that he can't be banned from.
Mr. Hu is not a ninja.
Well, clearly, the Ghostbusters remake went back in time and ruined his childhood. I saw that on the Internet, so it must be true.
Mr. Hu is not a ninja.
If I can get a bit more theoretical here, a number of people have posted the Free Speech xkcd comic. It's absolutely right that there is a difference between 'the government won't arrest you' and 'no one should be compelled to host content they disagree with'. For this reason, I am indeed glad that Milo is keeping 4chan as a place where people can indeed post unpopular opinions.
However, I've been thinking about this recently: to what end is it not required for there to be a platform given? Twitter doesn't want to host offensive tweets. Fine. I'll join the four people on Google Plus and do it. Well, seems the other three people on Google Plus don't like my offensive speech, either.
Okay. I'll head on over to HostGator and install Friendica and make my own place where I can post my offensive things. Well, HostGator says I can't do that on their servers, rinse and repeat for GoDaddy, BlueHost, and 1&1. I head over to Amazon and rent some server time there, but Amazon says I can't post my offensive things there.
Fine, no more cloud for me - want something done right, DIY time. So, I call up Verizon and get their you-can-have-a-web-server FiOS package and load up an old desktop with a LAMP stack and host it myself. Verizon says they're not obligated to give me a platform, and when I call Cablevision, I get the same story. So, "no one is required to give me a platform" is, at its logical conclusion, a statement that can prevent a sufficiently offensive message from ever reaching the internet.
What is the reasonable expectation here? Should someone sufficiently down the line be expected to provide the same platform to hate speech as they provide to acceptable speech? Obviously I paint a picture of a fairly remote possibility, but it does raise the question of how "freedom of the press" works if no one will sell you a printing press.
Discuss.
I don't, or at least I don't think it in and of itself is enough to show that. He's said multiple times that he prefers black men - which could be racist, depending on objectification, etc. but it doesn't make him a white supremacist.
He's a pretty effective troll. I think he targeted her because of the Ghostbusters frenzy the alt-right whipped themselves into, and her past tweets indicated she would respond poorly to racist remarks. Trolls use what tools they can to get a rise out of someone - it doesn't always mean that they actually believe what they're saying. And it didn't help matters that she started actually having a meltdown caused by a lot of his followers. I doubt he intended it to go as far as it did. He was definitely trying to get a rise out of her, but being banned from Twitter isn't good for him in the long run.
Examine even your most deeply held beliefs. Nobody is always right.
The Left hardly has a monopoly on assuming "everyone less extreme than me is bad".
Examine even your most deeply held beliefs. Nobody is always right.
The best way to defend against speech is to let people hear it and either ignore it or learn to argue against it. Free speech is essential for this reason, and if that was not the case the world and US would never have been able to improve. Not just science and technology, but overall social improvements. We would not have Government Welfare if not for people advocating an unpopular position, as one easy example.
What you are doing is attempting to claim that every person involved in a movement is responsible for every other single individual's actions and statements within the movement. If you want to play that game, do you believe that all people in BLM want to kill all cops, rob and vandalize all people with more money than they have (which is not much when you are not working), and kill all white people? I'm guessing that in that case because it's your side you would deny the over generalization, but yet you use that same over generalization with others.
Do you have any other double standards or hypocritical positions you would like me to explain to you?
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
::sigh:: Here's what Milo thought about "free speech" just a couple years ago. "So perhaps what's needed now is a bolder form of censure after all, because the internet is not a universal human right. If people cannot be trusted to treat one another with respect, dignity and consideration, perhaps they deserve to have their online freedoms curtailed. For sure, the best we could ever hope for is a smattering of unpopular show trials. But if the internet, ubiquitous as it now is, proves too dangerous in the hands of the psychologically fragile, perhaps access to it ought to be restricted. We ban drunks from driving because they're a danger to others. Isn't it time we did the same to trolls?" As found here. He's not for free speech, he's for whatever gets him attention. Twitter did nothing more than quiet a very hateful, angry voice that Milo himself argued should be quieted.
Ah yes. The Holocaust, the ultimate evil... (no seriously it was pretty bad, dont get me wrong).
10Million victims, more or less.
Chinese Civil wars usually dont get fun until they reach 20 million victims. (Not just the ones in the 19th century, they had several that made it into this order of magnitude)
Mongol Conquests: 25 Million
Communism is clocked at (conservatively) 100 million victims. (If we consider that Fascism was only created in a desperate bid to stop communism you can get easily as high as 150 million vicitims for commnuism)
I guess I should be happy for you: Obviously you underestimate just how murderous humans can get, regardless of race.
Must be great to be this innocent.
Sure. I've also heard of "Israel", that thing that popped up after the Holocaust that much of the left wants to constantly demonize and insist that we not support in in any way. I also vaguely recall something about my country fighting against the country that perpetrated the Holocaust.
I also remember the killing fields in Cambodia, the horrific oppression in Tibet, Rwanda (bonus points for the first one to blame this entirely on whitey), the Armenian genocide, etc. Some of these things happened pretty recently, whereas there are very few people still alive today who actively participated in the Holocaust.
The OP said "today's ills". The Holocaust is many things, but it is not "today's ills" by any reasonable definition of the term. This isn't about exonerating our past or current crimes; it's about pointing out this ludicrous, self-destructive streak on the left that unironically asserts that white/western/American self-flagellation is a panacea for the world's ills.
So you just conveniently cherry pick dates. It's called moving the goalpost.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
So you just conveniently cherry pick dates. It's called moving the goalpost.
No, you disingenuous twit. As I just clearly explained, the OP originally planted the goalpost by using the phrase "today's ills". In my original reply, I clearly indicated that I was addressing this specific topic via my use of the word "modern." You are the only one who is attempting to move the goalpost here.
The journalistic integrity angle is pretty weak because it all started as a reaction to a lie about a female game developer having an improper relationship with a journalist.
The simple, undeniable fact is that 4chan banned discussion of GamerGate because of all the harassment. It's kind of incredible that you now consider moot to be an SJW or heavily influenced by one, when the guy bent over backwards to defend free speech and all the bullshit that people on 4chan got up to. 4chan is hardly known for it's strong social justice stance.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Your freedom of speech is an individual right to speak without Governmental interference; when you put on an organisations uniform, you appear to be a representative of that organisation not an individual. If you say things that harm your organisation, you will likely be removed from that organisation. Colin Kaepernick is just a spoiled middle-class kid trying to pretend he's ghetto; he was playing an image game and it blew-up in his face. The NFL has ratings problems and the brass will gladly duct their responsibility in it and shove all of the blame on to Kaepernick. The NFL is probably secretly glad he volunteered to be the pariah because if Kaepernick didn't exist, the NFL would have to invent one. You have to have a scapegoat on standby after all.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
the Jews have suffered the most and it also implies that they are non-white. Jews are not white. They are, genetically, the same as Palestinians. No one would ever say a Palestinian was white.
You're thinking of Sephardic Jews. My post was implicitly dealing with Ashkennazi Jews, the primary victims of the Holocaust and the majority of the Jewish diaspora in America. You can argue (as many others have) that they are non-white as well. I don't hugely care myself, but other than some parts of the extreme right, I think the overwhelming majority of modern America treats them as white.
That seems like a pretty stupid use of the shitload of money that's going to be required to buy this thing. Maybe he could just get therapy for his emotional problems with it and the world would end up a better place, instead of just perpetuating the self-congratulatory bullshit of the "Extreme free speech" community on 4chan.
But that would require the ability for introspection, which this cat clearly lacks. So never mind--buyout 4chan it is!
Who did what now?
I dislike the man quite a lot. But completely agree, there is no one else I know of that I would trust quite as much to keep/improve the free speech aspect of 4chan.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
...because we were so far unable to hear unpopular things on the Internet, which is heavily censored.
From way over at the other end of the political spectrum, I don`t think the issues that Amy Goodman & co at ``Democracy Now`` like to follow are as well-covered by larger media outlets as they `should` be, but, I don`t imagine that CBS has other priorities because of some dark conspiracy; Amy`s fave topics just get lower ratings.
As for *COMMENTS* ... as for the notion that The People are unable to be heard for lack of a web site that lets them get their thoughts out for all to see...holy cow, I`ve been reading the most astonishing nonsense spewed by eccentrics and nuts onto the Internet since it was invented; I mean, 30 years since the first conspiracy-theory threads on USENET.
The notion that we NEED one more takes my breath away, like saying our society doesn`t have enough access to Big Macs; the notion that he can SELL one more in a saturated market - by perhaps being extra-friendly to some particularly objectionable bunch that have worn out their welcome elsewhere...that makes total sense.
There is only one angle: the journalistic one. Everything else was tacked on top of it.
It was no lie either, she even thanked him in the credits of her "game", go get it, its free on steam.
There was no harassment whatsoever (no seriously, I have never ever seen a more civil and polite discussion on 4chan, on any board), thus the banning could not have been because of that. He defended free speech in 2011 and then claimed in 2014 that 4chan was never about free speech, one of the reason he became a persona non grata on his own website. Why he did a u-turn we do not know, may have been a crush, may have been one sided love, may have been SJW-brainwashing
The one demanding to be heard are the social justice cancer. They are the one claiming all platforms, "reclaiming" internet that they never owned or created, so them and only them can speak. They are the one specifically excluding peoples base on race (White) and gender (male). And they get hated for it. What did they expect? A Nobel prize? (LOL the Nobel comity is so stupid it might actually happen)
Shitposting is criticizing them. Shitposting is yelling at them. Shitposting is boycotting them. Shitposting is showing them the door.
Shitposting is EXACTLY what the XKCD comic you linked is defending. Shitposting is free speech.
The "Gamers are Dead" 11 articles are what first introduced me to Gamergate. The one posted on Ars was a poorly written shitpost hit piece trying to shame the reader into hating the object of its derision. That prompted me to search out the reason why they'd tarnish their brand in the attempt. I thought I'd be done in a moment but discovered a rabbit hole with no bottom.
Whatever Ars hoped to achieve by participating in that vile coordinated smear campaign, they did succeed in losing me forever.
Actually, on closer examination it seems neither Ashkenazi nor Sephardi are "identical" to ethnically Arabic peoples in the region. I'd look into this further but I'm frankly just not that interested. Putting aside some interesting but extremely controversial arguments about whether specific genes for enhanced intelligence might some day be isolated and found to be more prevalent in one race or another... in the context of our discussion, racism is about culture, not genetics.
The Left has gained such control over media, academia, and government that certain ideas were entirely banished from the public eye. This left us with "cuckservatives," or neoconservatives who believed in Leftist goals through conservative methods, as the only option to the Left. That option was not an alternative, so the Alternative Right arose.
Censorship can occur through many methods. It is not merely a legal term; it means disallowing your ideological opponents from expressing necessary ideas as a way of weakening them. Doxxing people, getting them fired from their jobs, and otherwise destroying their lives is a means of censorship. This is why anonymous internet forums like 4chan came about: people wanted to talk about these taboo things.
Milo is "alt lite," according to most, in that he is from the libertarian tradition of anarchy with free markets more than the Alt Right mainstream of opposing equality. He will be fair as an owner of a free speech site, as there is nothing on record showing him ever supporting censorship or trying to censor others.
Alternative Right.
We live in Leftist times, under governments dedicated to equality and diversity, and therefore Leftist views are uncontroversial and for that reason, perceived as "inoffensive."
It is the same thing as someone in the Soviet Union saying that they support the Party. Well, who doesn't? Vaclav Havel makes a good point with "The Power of the Powerless" on this topic, which is that people go along with the dominant paradigm out of fear, not agreement.
"No platform" is designed (per its origins with Antifa in the 70s) to eliminate the chance for ideological non-conformists to express themselves. It is entirely enforced with fear. No sane person should support it, because it creates a compulsory hive-mind which refuses to consider that it might not be entirely right in its assumptions.
Alternative Right.
That's the same type of thing the racists and nazis might say. Your excuse for hatred and violence mirrors theirs: "People who aren't like us are doing nasty shit."
Jared Taylor continues to write at American Renaissance, which is experiencing increasing popularity as people become dissatisfied with the Establishment Narrative.
Many are independent homelands through regional and local communities.
Alternative Right.
Our government actively shuts down speech it does not agree with.
And in Europe, government shuts down un-PC speech all the time. The new anti-troll policies are just part of the assault; these governments also collude with social media and raid the homes of people who say the "wrong" things.
Do you trust government to define what is true, and what is not, by censoring what they perceive to be untrue or "offensive"?
Alternative Right.
Control works by an obvious mechanism: define something necessary as taboo in order to force everyone to do what the controller intends.
Right now in the West, many topics -- diversity, sexual equality, democracy, socialism -- are protected by making criticism of them taboo.
A sensible middle position is to remove the taboo, and see what is actually true, and then act on that instead of the control mechanism.
Alternative Right.
Not to mention the long history of Leftist violence, including the French Revolution in which whole families -- men, women and children -- were sent to the guillotine, and the ensuing Napoleonic Wars which were designed to force all of Europe to be Leftist.
Ideologies do not change. They want total dominance and control. Censorship non-conforming speech is just one of the many methods they use toward that end.
Alternative Right.
Have you seen the leaked IRC logs?
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
FFS, the topic at hand is "today's ills" and "modern oppression."
This includes Turkish oppression of Kurds (and perhaps the continued denial about the Armenian genocide), Chinese oppression of Tibetans, blacks oppressing each other in Africa, Mexicans oppressing indigenous people, and yes it includes a few cases of whites oppressing non-whites. For example, I'd say Australia's current shockingly paternalistic attitudes towards their Aboriginal citizens constitute at least mild oppression by any reasonable definition. (They recently banned all pornography specifically from aboriginal areas, apparently because they think that if they allow aboriginal peoples to get too horny they'll run out and rape the first child they see. I wish I were making this up.)
Whites are not the biggest oppressors on the planet at this moment in time. (But I don't particularly think that whiteness is a useful cultural identifier, particularly on international scales.) And they certainly aren't the most likely to rape or molest in America, like the OP apparently tried to claim. (We can argue about whether the statistics need to be adjusted for poverty and/or institutional racism, but the OP flatly asserted that these things were mostly caused by white people in today's world.)
Free speech needs a safe space.
Wow, so Munroe fell for it too. This is such a weird, demented, twisted line of logic that says free speech as a concept makes sense only in the context of governmental oppression.
Guess what, if a private golf course discriminates against a black person... it's racism! It's racism regardless of whether or not the government is the one doing it. It's racism even if it's legal for them to do it.
If you're against free speech, at least have the courage to say so. You don't get to redefine the term just because you feel uncomfortable openly opposing free speech.
I'm sorry, but no. The kind of double talk you're pushing in that post is undermining free speech. You can't say that "only my preferred type of free speech is okay" if you actually believe in free speech. Milo has not pushed for suppression of dissenting opinions. He may vigorously disagree with certain people and very vocally express that disagreement, but he has never pushed to make that dissent illegal or restricted in any way. I can't say the same for the leftists he is often at odds with. Either it goes both ways or there is no free speech. Free speech does not mean "everything I find agreeable is ok", free speech means free fucking speech.
Yes, in particular those from the secret chatrooms (well, the password-protected chatrooms) the gamesjournos used to coordinate their attacks.
As a preemptive clarification, I would support free speech for any general purpose communication platform. I support companies voluntarily doing this, but I would also support an expansion of common carrier type rules that would compel all general purpose platforms to accept all legal, non-disruptive (e.g. spamming and crapflooding) content. This is because I think that freedom of speech is more important than AT&T's (or Facebook's, or Twitter's, or Youtube's) "right" to decide who I'm allowed to talk to or what I'm allowed to talk about.
And if you disagree with me? If you think that the "right" of fictitious entities to dictate social mores is more important than free speech? Well, I think you should be heard as well. You should be able to espouse this hateful opinion on any and all platforms that you might choose to use.
Free speech does not begin or end with the First Amendment.
Sure, and also the freedom to be a lying leftard knee-jerk SJW. They go hand in hand, and fuck you for sniveling about it.
For someone who purports to defend free speech, you're pretty intolerant of those who don't share your views.
Yep, by attempting character assassination rather than trying to invalidate his point you are practising your own form of censorship. Censorship is not just done by governments, companies, religious organisations, communities and individuals can all be censors, all it requires is that a dissenting opinion be suppressed by force. About 10 years ago, an episode of Top Gear was filmed in the American south, one of the challenges was to drive deep into the bible belt with pro-Liberal and pro-Gay slogans painted on their cars. The cars were openly attacked and forced to be abandoned by the presenters. Jeremy commented to Richard Porter, TG's script editor that he "was almost killed to death". That was a good example of how mobs censor people, in the heart of the "land of the free" no less.
In fact, I consider you the worst of all forms of censors, instead of trying to rationally deal with the GP's point, you called him names hoping that people would get angry at the GP and ignore your terrible message, you're attempting to suppress the OP's opinion by force and ironically, drawing more attention to it.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
Have you seen the leaked CON logs, or the leaked logs that show a bunch of the prominent anti-GG people trying to dox mombot? Pretty much all of the big names in the whole GG fiasco (on either side) turned out to be awful people. Doxing happened to both sides, there was harassment on both sides, it was a big mess. But almost nothing was written about the bad stuff anti-GG did, because they were the ones allied with the "journalists" GG was attacking (amongst others).
Examine even your most deeply held beliefs. Nobody is always right.
Must be related to Hillary Clinton.
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
by your logic, people disagreeing with you is an affront to free speech and that any criticism is oppression. Everyone is obligated to listen to you blow hot air or else they're oppressing you
so twitter should be obligated to give him and others like him the ability to bully and harass without consequence, even if that leads to a loss of business as people who don't want to put up with it opt-out of using the platform? In what twisted world is it okay to compel a private company to host something that hurts its own business? That isn't free speech. He can have have the "anus of the internet" if he wants, but we aren't obligated to pay attention to him anymore. I can't see it turning out well for him. There's a reason why 4chan is having financial troubles: no one wants to put their money behind that shit!
Free Speech _IS_ a blank check. Private organizations can say what ever they wish, just like people can say what they wish including people working in Government. If a company promotes bad policy they go out of business. If a person misrepresents the company, they can be terminated but still speak their piece. If a politician says things you don't like you vote for the alternative candidate and remove them from office. You can only get to those positions by actually listening to a side you may disagree with.
Your attempt to jump from free speech to libel demonstrates a complete lack of maturity and failure to comprehend "accountability". If I lie about you sure, I can and should be sued for lying. I stand up for my words and attempt to avoid dishonesty, but I can say what I like. You don't have to agree, and if I'm wrong prove me wrong. Do so in court and get a paycheck if the Judge believes you.
What you, and the Marxist/Progressive/Left attempt to do is criminalize and silence thoughts they dislike. You believe that thought and action must always coexist. Ever been mad enough to commit violence against someone? You may not have acted on it, but by your own definition you should be in jail for life because we all rationalize good and bad behavior. The difference between the criminals and everyone else is that the criminals act on the rationalization, most of us do not.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
rekt
Question everything
Telling lies, repeatedly attacking critics and handing off attacks to his circle?
Well THAT "first amendment zone" will be dead on arrival!
so twitter should be obligated to give him and others like him the ability to bully and harass without consequence
Yup. Illegal harassment should be deleted and reported to the authorities. Tools should be given to people to block people they don't want to hear from. Twitter could even aggressively promote premade block lists (though I'd prefer opt-in instead of opt-out.)
In what twisted world is it okay to compel a private company to host something that hurts its own business?
Mysteriously, phone companies never went bankrupt even after decades of not censoring their customers. Common carrier rules provide some precedent showing how this sort of thing has worked in the past, though I am making a normative argument, not a positivist legal argument.
That isn't free speech.
This refrain comes up so much that I'm just going to have to copy/paste my analogy response:
Guess what, if a private golf course discriminates against a black person... it's racism! It's racism when the government does it. It's racism when a private business does it. It's racism even if it's legal for them to do it. And so it is with free speech.
If you are against free speech (in whole or part), you should at least have the courage to say so. I have no more patience for this newspeak game.
Not likely. I think you haven't met an ACLU lawyer before. I suspect they would have condemned the whole affair as an ex post facto witch-hunt.
And yes there are other caveats: I've already mentioned that disruptive communication (flooding) wouldn't be protected. And off-topic communications (including spam) in certain areas of the site (not the whole thing) would be protected. And users could be given free reign to block or even ban whomever they want within their own voluntary communities. That doesn't mean I'd always agree with how those powers would be used...
Right now, I'm only talking about genuine speech (speech-speech, not copyrighted songs or porn or whatever) being completely banned from an ostensible general-purpose social media sites. For an example, on Youtube you are no longer allowed to say that you hate all Muslims, even if you repeatedly clarify that you are not conflating them all with terrorists, but that you simply hate the Qu'ran and that as a matter of general principle you hate people who promote nonsense. Right now, this is a sentiment that cannot be communicated on Youtube anywhere.
I'm against that policy. I'm not against individual users deleting off-topic, intellectually bankrupt anti-Muslim comments under their videos; actually, I'm strongly favor of that (though ideally I'd prefer a filtration system like slashdot where users could still view them with an opt-in.)
off-topic communications would NOT be protected*
Back to your safe space, honey!
You're being childish. If you disagree with me then disagree with me; stop pretending that not listening to someone is exactly the same as destroying their words so that no one else can listen to them anymore (via that channel).
Quick, see if you can come up with some other ridiculous counterargument involving a bullhorn outside an apartment building at 3am or having sex in Walmart as a political statement.
I'm not saying that anyone has to listen to anything. All users should be given the tools necessary to filter out the noise, and I suspect a plethora of curated opt-in block lists would quickly emerge, some promoted by the platforms themselves. And that's more or less fine.
No I get that, criticize all you want. But people are calling for him to be kicked from the team. That is crybaby stuff.
Not exactly. It's the default space that allows expression. I suppose it does need protection from those who would try to take it over to impose their own limited views as the default. These typically take the form of anti-'harassment' and 'hate'-speech laws.
I have seen the CON logs, and they don't show what you think they show. They were a private chat, so anything posted was not "doxing" because they key element of doxing is that the information is made public. Otherwise any organization or business that holds your name and address would be "doxing" you.
What they actually show is how Crash Override Network investigates instances of harassment and abuse. Because the people doing it are typically idiots, they often post about it or otherwise link their abusive messages to their facebook accounts. And of course, facebook accounts often have a real name attached. In other words, research for filing police reports, because the police don't know how to facebook.
You can't really compare that to the GamerGate IRC logs. People admitting they hate their victims and just want to ruin their lives, talking about all the sock puppet accounts they made to create the #notyoursheild hashtag etc. Remember, they are not the sharpest tools in the shed, they are the same people who openly talked about how they could use charity donations to make the "PR untouchable" on 4chan, as a cover for their harassment.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Let me clarify that, then: Right now, free speech needs a safe space. It shouldn't, but it does.
A generation of citizens, now old enough to vote, appear convinced that free speech is a completely meaningless concept (I'm not talking legal vs. illegal, but whether the term means anything at all) outside of a narrow discussion of the First Amendment. I sometimes try to suggest that maybe Twitter shouldn't censor people on political grounds by using an argument that phone companies don't generally go around telling people whom they are and aren't allowed to speak to or what they're allowed to talk about... the response is either silence or "Well, why not? They're a private company and free speech is entirely meaningless / worthless / irrelevant if we're talking about private companies and not the government."
And if you don't see what's wrong with that argument, try replacing "anti-free speech" with any other controversial activity.
To be fair, a lot of conservatives do get this. It's just a minority who demand others don't criticise them that are the problem. They are usually indirect about it, complaining that people lost their jobs or were otherwise negatively affected by it, but of course the implication, the only possible alternative, is to silence criticism.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
I'm just waiting for someone to point Watson at /b/.
Have gnu, will travel.
The First Amendment protects people from government interference in their speech (with certain exceptions). It does not stop Twitter from banning him (which they did) should they decide to do so.
Milo never argued the First Amendment makes it illegal to do what Twitter did. This might just be the biggest straw man of all time... pretending that people who support free speech are trying to misinterpret the constitution.
And Milo seems to deliberately distort the idea that just because we have freedom of speech in the U.S., it doesn't require anyone to allow him on their privately owned or publicly traded forums.
You people are the ones who are grossly distorting the idea of free speech (yes, I just linked xkcd as an example of how NOT to do something), although I'm not certain if you're doing it deliberately. Free speech has a definition outside of constitutional law and even outside of any courtroom. It is a thing that you can choose to support or not support regardless of whether or not you are acting as part of a government.
That doesn't mean anyone has to or should listen to any jackass who opens his mouth. I'm not advocating against filters or opt-in block lists, but supporting free speech generally means advocating that people who want to voluntarily read a political opinion that has been published through a general purpose communication platform should be able to. I'm not saying illegal/legal, I'm just saying *should*. If you are against this, if you think that Twitter and ISPs and phone companies should be dictating our political speech and social mores, then then you are at least to some extent against free speech.
Guess what, if a private golf course discriminates against a black person... it's racism! It's racism when the government does it. It's racism when a private business does it. It's racism even if it's legal for them to do it. And so it is with free speech.
In fact, I consider you the worst of all forms of censors, instead of trying to rationally deal with the GP's point, you called him names hoping that people would get angry
Argh. Let's get this shit straight: censorship means to impede the ability for voluntary listeners (sometimes including those who might not currently be aware of the message's existence) to listen or read your actual message. There are some caveats we can toss in here like disruptive communications (flooding, 3am bullhorn shouting, etc.), opt-in and opt-out filtration (including comment moderation), and those lively debates about whether naked pictures count as speech but let's put that all to the side; the point is censorship involves an impedance of access or perhaps awareness. That is all. You're right that it goes way beyond the first amendment--corporations can do it and individuals can do it to and the harm is very similar (differing mostly in extent), but bad argumentation is something else entirely. If you need a label for certain bad arguments, go use one of those informal fallacies of argumentation; they're usually badly abused, but they're fine in principle.
Just please, please don't dilute and distort the definition of "censorship" any further than it's already been distorted. It's bad enough trying to argue with all these ignoramuses who believe that certain things are only not worthwhile, but are in fact completely meaningless unless it's the government that's doing it..
Every time you play this pathetic witch hunt game, you weaken the word "racist" and make it that much harder to call out actual racists.
And you don't think his fabricated Leslie Jones tweets show an underlying racist worldview? I mean, why did he even start that war? What was the intent?
Underlying trollish worldview, plus she was in a shitty movie/trailer, plus people were trying to defend said shitty movie by calling everyone who disliked it a racist and/or misogynist.
The golf course bit was an analogy illustrating government vs. nongovernment stuff. I don't hugely care what actually happens. Golf isn't important to a healthy, open society like communication platforms are. If cell phone companies suddenly started discriminating against people based on politics, the country would not become a better place.
"I may not agree with what you say, but I'll defend your right to say it."
God, I hope you were just using some clever reverse psychology to get a crowd of people saying "Damned right." because that'd be manipulative but perhaps a good way to get the story straight.
I want neo-nazis to be able to say what they want and do what they want, within legal lines. I have my own rights to reject from private platforms I control, and to not be obligated to inhabit theirs.
you mean the freedom to be a white supremacist neo-nazi hate monger
Sure, and also the freedom to be a lying leftard knee-jerk SJW. They go hand in hand, and fuck you for sniveling about it.
Yep, by attempting character assassination rather than trying to invalidate his point you are practising your own form of censorship. Censorship is not just done by governments, companies, religious organisations, communities and individuals can all be censors, all it requires is that a dissenting opinion be suppressed by force.
If that wasn't the pot calling the kettle black... The pro-censorship position has always been to declare certain things to be Truth and not to be questioned because even questioning the premise is offensive. Like when it's "All races are equal" vs "All races are not equal" only one answer is correct and acceptable. Any other answer is to be silenced, if not by law then by harassment, intimidation and blaming the speech for the violent, lawless actions of others until the person accepts the one Truth and stops offending people with his or her foul, non-conform ideas and opinions. Today we call these things like "politically correct", SJWs and "safe spaces".
The concept is hardly new, a hundred years ago "Homosexuality is an abomination" and "Jesus Christ is our Lord and Savior" might have been the Truths and those who questioned it perverts, sinners, apostates, heretics and blasphemers. Different names, same truthers. Free speech is the opposite of imposing truths, no matter how controversial or offensive your ideas are you have the right to have them and argue for them. That there are no holy cows, no taboos that can not be challenged. And we hope that good conquers evil in the end, depending on who we think are right and wrong but not by banishing it. This is Voltaire's "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to death your right to say it".
The alternative is to say that people can't deal with free speech, that it corrupts and destroys individuals and societies. Everything from a kid being called mean things online until he or she kills himself to how Hitler said so much shit about Jews to enable the Holocaust. I can't guarantee that the free exchange of speech will lead to a good and inclusive society or the right ideas winning, but I think it's the lesser evil compared to a weaponized attitude to speech where it should be a controlled substance and the majority defines what is and isn't acceptable. Mostly because it doesn't change people's true opinion and gives the claims of being oppressed and silenced validity.
I'm sure there's some "fire and brimstone" preachers that think I'll be burning in hell, but I don't need a safe space from their hate speech. My life is my own and I'm the one deciding how to live it and what gives it purpose and meaning. And that's what people need, it's to have self confidence not being so frail and insecure about their own life that the world shatters every time someone invades their safe space with a dissenting opinion. That of course doesn't mean we should stop caring or to help those who need support or to argue against the things we disagree with. But I think everyone needs a "screw you, it's my life" attitude at their core. Because people will disagree with you.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
I think all of you haters should give up your obsession and try to accomplish something that doesn't involve tearing other people down.
[...] supporting free speech generally means advocating that people who want to voluntarily read a political opinion that has been published through a general purpose communication platform should be able to.
Here's the problem with this: This definition of free speech denies the right to free association. A privately-owned and privately-run communication channel should (again, not talking legally, just "should") be able to refuse to associate with anyone they want. And yes, that runs into the racism problem, too! This middle ground, where competing rights and competing responsibilities clash, are part of what makes moral philosophy interesting.
But actually, this is beside the point. The big social media businesses do not have a monopoly on public communication. Milo will always find an outlet where people who want to hear what he has to say can hear it, right up to the point where that particular schtick no longer serves his purposes.
sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f(q{sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f});
and very sad that 4chan is considered the last bastion of free speech on the fucking internet.
"Completely politely"? What universe are you living in? Gamergaters participated in sustained harassment of multiple women, including death threats and publishing of personal information (e.g. addresses). Women who dared criticize them, no matter how mildly, became the subject of targeted harassment themselves (e.g. when Felicia Day posted that she had been fearful of saying anything at all on the subject, her home address was posted within minutes).
his definition of free speech denies the right to free association.
Holy shit. I don't know how to respond to this any more. I mean, I can either copy/paste bits from the post of mine you just replied to, or I could just scream obscenities at you until you go away. Let me try the former. With bullets this time:
* Guess what, if a private golf course discriminates against a black person... it's racism! It's racism when the government does it. It's racism when a private business does it. It's racism even if it's legal for them to do it. And so it is with free speech.
* I'm not saying illegal/legal, I'm just saying *should*.
* Milo never argued the First Amendment makes it illegal to do what Twitter did. This might just be the biggest straw man of all time... pretending that people who support free speech are trying to misinterpret the constitution.
* If you are against this, if you think that Twitter and ISPs and phone companies should be dictating our political speech and social mores, then then you are at least to some extent against free speech.
A privately-owned and privately-run communication channel should (again, not talking legally, just "should") be able to refuse to associate with anyone they want.
Ah ok, just noticed this. Did I say "should be legally prohibited from refusing association"? Did I? No, I didn't.
Now, *elsewhere* (in other replies) I do talk about the possibility of expanding common carrier type of laws to make this a legal compulsion. As a matter of fact, I take a very dim view of "freedom of association" type of arguments when dealing with imaginary people (or Joe Twitter a good friend of yours?) who run general purpose open to the public communication platforms, but that's another argument entirely. Even conceding (just for the sake of argument) that the government should never trample on the right of powerful imaginary people to discriminate and dictate the acceptable forms of political speech in our country, it does not follow that they *should* discriminate any more than it follows that the owner of a private golf club *should* discriminate against black people. I'm going to copy/paste that bit one more time, because it really didn't seem to sink in:
Guess what, if a private golf course discriminates against a black person... it's racism! It's racism when the government does it. It's racism when a private business does it. It's racism even if it's legal for them to do it. And so it is with free speech.
Specifically limiting this conversation to political/social commentary speech only (for the sake of argument), of the sort that Youtube and Twitter do not currently allow ("I *do* hate all Muslims, not because I say that they are all terrorists, but because they believe and propagate nonsense and lies" is one current example of a Youtube thoughtcrime), I am pro-free speech with no disclaimers whatsoever. Anyone who destroys words because they contain thoughts such as these and then refuses to let the speaker say anything else on their platform is not pro free speech under any reasonable definition of the term.
This should not be a controversial thing to say, but you people apparently cannot deal with the fact that you are anti-free speech, so you want to redefine the term that lets you support the targeted censorship of political speech while still feeling good about yourselves:
"I'm anti-racism because I think the post office shouldn't discriminate against black people, but I still am in favor of private golf courses refusing to let them play. I'm not merely in favor of their *right* to refuse to let them play, but I'm in favor of them actually refusing! But that's ok because there will always be a few other golf courses that won't. So yeah, I'm an anti-racist."
My other analogy involves phone companies suddenly becoming interested in whom you call and the contents of your conversations. I'll let you work out the details for that one yourself.
This will be a good thing.
The main new issue with the big social media sites is trend to "international" funding and new global ownership.
That offers international funders a say in comment policy forever changing US free speech foundations.
Why risk account closure or been reported per nation for further action by commenting on the news or any gov/mil/spy policy?
Free public comment on any topic is now been altered on huge once "free" US social media sites to avoid teams of the site's new global censorship teams.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
The amount of bad faith (or simply very, very wrong-headed) red herrings one has to deal with in this conversation is simply stunning.
Let me be very, very precise: for the sake of this argument, we are talking about preventing readers who are voluntarily interested in reading something... from reading that thing. Words have been destroyed due to the ideas they convey, and the speaker banned from using that platform ever again. That is the context surrounding the jackass martyr of Milo I'mnotgoingtomemorizethatlastname. It has almost nothing to do whatsoever with laws concerning telemarketing or unsolicited political robocalling.
A specific example I prefer (although not quite specific to Milo) is Atheism-is-Unstoppable's (another guy who's more than a bit of a jackass) banned video wherein he very clearly explains why he hates 'all Muslims'--not because he thinks they are all terrorists (he repeatedly uses the phrase "on a spectrum"), but because they believe and propagate lies, and sometimes dangerous lies at that. This video was deleted and accounts censured at least half a dozen times.... not just original, but they also sanctioned everyone who reposted it in solidarity. This is bad. And if you're in favor of this behavior from Youtube, you are not in favor of free speech in any meaningful sense of the term. You can't hide behind "bububuthe first amendment doesn't make it illegal for Youtube to do that!" That's a non-answer to the question of whether or not they should do it.
That is my thesis. I'm not saying that all of your side tangents are unimportant or uninteresting, but there is SO MUCH WHITE NOISE on this issue that I have to insist that people remain on-topic. It appears at though 90% of the people who fervently oppose free speech have convinced themselves that they're really pro free speech.
Ok but now we're talking in circles, you did it first, no you did it first, etc. How about we all just stop.
Make that GAY white supremacist neo-nazi hate monger. Gays have the right to be neo-nazis, too!
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
Cambodia, Tibet, Rwanda, Turkey, Saddam-era Iraq, etc.
You want to argue Hitler trumps stuff like that, fine, but that requires admitting (rightly or wrongly) that the Jews have suffered the most and it also implies that they are non-white.
They were all a bunch of amateurs. Wake me when you hit 9 figures...
Regards,
Chairman Mao
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
While Lenin was white, he was also decidedly on the LEFT of the political spectrum, so if the Left would like to claim and own his purges and deaths of tens of millions - more power to them!
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
I didn't say the CON logs showed doxing. They showed a lot of shitty behavior, but not doxing. The doxing was "Zach attack", and was mostly different - although some of the same people, notably Izzy Galvez - were involved. That's why I said "or" in my post. And many of the anti-GG people talked about hating their opposition too. #Notyourshield had some sockpuppets, but many of those accounts were real - it started off fake but attracted some real support as well.
Examine even your most deeply held beliefs. Nobody is always right.
I think most people get this, but it's always the loudest, shittiest people who get attention. Most of BLM, for instance, have good intentions, but it's the random looters who get attention. People like to make caricatures out of people who disagree with them - it makes it so much easier to ignore them later.
I will take any opportunity to criticize people who try to get others fired for their political views. Criticizing other views is fine, and if it's good criticism, I welcome that. But I oppose trying to get someone fired over views for two main reasons. First, unless their views are directly related to their job, it's irrelevant whether they support anarcho-communism or a totalitarian state headed by Mitt Romney - they deserve to be able to earn a living with their work, and people causing problems for a company is shitty. Second, from a pragmatic standpoint, nobody has ever changed their views on something after being fired for expressing them. No racist will say "boy, those blackies aren't so bad after all, they really do get the shit end of the stick" if they just got fired. They'll have the opposite reaction, in most cases. If you want to succeed and convince people, getting them fired is one of the worst ways to do that.
Examine even your most deeply held beliefs. Nobody is always right.
The "if you're not with us, you're with the enemy" argument. Congrats on that.
Pretending to be ghetto? There's nothing ghetto about his taking a knee for what he believes. NFL would have needed to invent one? Are you drunk? Because you sound like a drunk guy at the bar.
FYI, this may not have been clear, but I was neither agreeing nor disagreeing with you. What I was trying to point out was that this is one of those situations where rights compete and that makes it interesting, ethically speaking.
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There is nothing about MY that is far right.
Well, you may have been intentionally shifting the subject slightly and I missed that, but for the sake of simplicity in my first reply I was attempting to keep the conversation entirely away rights, just leave it within the realm of shoulds and desirables.
It a distinction that is not just frequently lost in this debate, but usually lost.
You're the one that brought it up. If you don't want to discuss that, don't bring something up. Seriously, don't. It's the same reason I don't buy your excuses about the golf course. YOU brought it up, and it's not my fault you didn't realize it was a REAL issue, with its own reality.
Nonsense. I did not bring up telemarketing. I brought up phone companies in the context of how it would work if they started censoring people and ideas.
And I brought up golf courses in a different context than the one you fixated on. Not just different, but actually completely opposed to. I brought up the golf course analogy specifically to move the conversations away from one of rights to one of shoulds, but you decided to ignore this and tried to steer the conversation back into rights anyway.
I think that Youtube needs to be proactive in their management of a lot of content.
And so, with a little bit of reading between the lines here, you are not in favor of free speech on Youtube. While society is still trying to figure out how it treats new media (and in particular these hugely popular proprietary walled gardens), I consider this to be on par with phone companies deciding whether conversations are appropriate, i.e. this means you don't believe in free speech in any serious or practical sense of the word. Free speech only in governmental contexts, with restricted speech everywhere else, is not a terribly useful thing to have. Better than nothing I suppose, but only just barely.
That said, from your description, I can already spot a lie to it.
That's really only possible if you're a Muslim, a pantheist who believes all of the books are true (snort), if you think those nonsensical ideas aren't dangerous (hah), or if you want to quibble about whether cultural but atheistic Muslims are actually Muslims (snore.)
I don't agree with a sentiment of hatred; I think that's a strong word that doesn't convey where I stand but there is something deeply offensive about banning human emotions from being expressed even when using only coolly calculated words.
Beyond that, I would be against removing the video almost regardless of its contents. If it were Nazi propaganda, I would think it would be vitally important that any member of the public could view it and toss another comment of disgust, derision and truthful analysis on the pile. Over the long term, sunlight is the only viable disinfectant. If we force all miscreants to develop and maintain their own private walled garden, completely insulated from criticism...
And if you want to know why I insist on it, there's a large share of purported free-speech advocates that are not particularly honest or genuine
If you claim to be a free speech advocate and you are in favor of general purpose new media platforms (like Youtube) policing political speech then you aren't particularly honest or genuine. Free speech as a concept is meaningless except when discussing the treatment of speech you disagree with, and free speech that nobody can use (because there's no government sponsored Youtube)... isn't all that useful.
Please note that at no point in this post did I discuss the creation of new laws compelling anyone to do or not do anything. That is an interesting topic that I touched on elsewhere (and I suspect we'd have some disagreements), but there is a completely separate conversation here about what Youtube *should* do (akin to whether the golf course owner *should* discriminate against black people, were it legal), not about what it is or should be legally compelled to do.
If you don't think X should do Y, then what will you do about it? Go ahead and answer it.
I think common carrier laws should be expanded such that if you are providing a platform for the communication of an arbitrary or broad array of ideas, open to the general public, that you should not be able to police that content except to block or remove illegal content.
I have almost no sympathy whatsoever with appeals to the rights of poor ole Joe Twitter, this imaginary person whose rights of free association would be violated by such restrictions. If everyone is forced to do it, no one will suffer from lost business because no one will be able to offer a sanitized alternative. Opt-in blocking can and undoubtedly would be encouraged.
Lots of other details I could get into here, but this is obviously what would be most conducive to a society and government ostensibly based on the free exchange and criticism of ideas. However, there needs to be a VERY large wall erected between what I just said here and my other post, because 90% of the people (yes I pulled that out of my ass but I'm being conservative here--it's more like 97%) on the opposite side of this conversation, yourself included, insist on dragging the question of rights into every single fucking corner of this debate.
That's why I put this is a separate post. Big wall. Completely different argument being made here. If a golf course owner bans all black people, there is a question of whether he should that exists completely independently of the question of whether he can (or whether we should change it so that he can or can't). If you believe that he should ban all black people then you are not an anti-racist, full stop. It doesn't matter what your opinions are about his rights (either what you think they are or what you think they should be); the fact that you believe he *should* deny entry black people means you are not anti-racism. I really hope I don't have to draw you a little diagram (with arrows) to illustrate how this analogy maps onto Youtube's censorship, but I'm starting to suspect that I might need to.
Exactly, the phone companies censoring ideas. In particular, telemarketing and political calls.
I'm not playing this game with you, sorry. Any reasonable person will realize the stark difference between communicating with someone who wants to listen to you and communicating with people who do not wish to be disturbed. This is why censorship of crapflooding, spamming and telemarketing are treated much differently than the censorship of unpopular political opinions (which anyone is free to ignore or even block, client-side.)
That's why reasonable people treat them differently, I should say. I said two or three replies ago that it was a valid problem to consider, but it is emphatically not the problem at hand.
Or if I want to point out the biggest flaw, that would come up if he'd done it to say, Christians, is that he's painting in a broad stroke.
No. That's not a flaw. Fuck Christians. Their nonsense is dangerous, too. (And is, in fact, nonsense.) At this precise moment in history, it is apparently not quite as dangerous--globally speaking--as Muhammad's nonsense, but that's another discussion.
I suppose I'm just "dodging real issues" if I wished to prevent this debate from growing at a geometric rate, though?
If you're not going to do it,
I provided a second post exploring this other angle. It is necessary to maintain strong separation because other people, including yourself, will fail to properly separate shoulds from legal rights.
As far as everything else goes, I think we've at least cleared the air. I am pro free speech in a real and pragmatic sense and you are not. I'm not sure I particularly feel like embarking on a wider discussion on whether one can combat the unsavory elements using "bleach", except to say that it's doomed to fail. If this were North Korea maybe you could, but not when they already have so many other tools at their disposal.
The Stormfront forums are uncomfortably large (and are heavily policed against outsiders injecting logic into the debate), but you know what? Give them a Facebook and Twitter and Youtube page, and most racists won't ever bother visiting it. (UBBs are so 2003.) And on Youtube, there will be the thumbnail of a reaction video just to the right of the bullshit you just watched. A lot of people might not bother clicking on that video, but some will.
Preemptive clarification: One of the omitted details here involves spamming, crapflooding and other communications that degrade performance for the on-topic exchange of ideas. As I said in my other post, there is no reason to consider the blocking of disruptive communications, socially/morally/legally/technically speaking, in the same way that we consider the blocking of unpopular sociopolitical speech.
There many more potential nitpicks here that I have ready answers for, if you really insist.
Yeah, watch what happens when you post THAT video. Seriously, I dare you.
Many, many, many people have posted "that video", including Atheism-is-Unstoppable, the buffoon who posted the aforementioned video on Islam. Youtube never removes "that video" on Christianity, because they don't consider radical Christians to be in need of coddling.
Right now, on the internet, it's a much, much more problematic criticizing Islam than criticizing Christianity, because both the delusional wing of leftists and the Islamists are opposing you. You could say "Try doing that on the streets in Texas" and my response will of course be "Try doing that on the streets in Mecca. Or Birmingham. Or Dearborn."
A little while back the #KillAllAtheists was one of the top hashtags trending on the Arabic version of Twitter, but nothing was done. This was as the killings of prominent atheist bloggers in Bangladesh were going on, so it's not like it's just some idle nonsense, either. Twitter, apparently, was too busy banning people like Milo to bother themselves with such things. And prior to that, they were taking pre-ban steps in an attempt to reduce the popularity of his account (like giving him un-verified status, as I recall) specifically because of his stance on Islam.
And when Milo wanted to talk, as a gay man, at UCF in the aftermath of the Pulse nightclub shooting, the police refused to protect him. He could point to the death threats made against him and they still refused protection and for that reason UCF refused to let him speak. The police were too busy, it seems, protecting every single mosque in the city, regardless of whether or not a threat had been made against them. Immediately afterwards, I saw them protecting the mosques in my city as well. I checked, but there was no report of a threat being made against those mosques.
And you know what? Good on them! Protecting mosques is great... up until the point where they refuse to protect Milo, because all of their men are too busy looking tough outside the mosque in Orlando that hosted a speaker who openly called for the murder of all gay people just months before the shooting.
You deny the reality of the facts on the ground, both on the internet and 'IRL', at your own peril. If the left refuses to remedy this situation, the country will swing right. It's as simple as that. I wish it weren't, but there it is. People don't have time to go out and form their own party of sane people. Instead, I see former leftists making excuses for Trump's antics. Trump may yet lose, but someone else playing a wiser version of him will sail through the next election with a comfortable margin if things continue as they are.
I don't know that we have a problem at hand. Milo wanting to buy 4chan was the start of the discussion, but we're clearly divorced from that.
It is intimately connected to his stated and implicit reasons for doing so. See above.
Milo is a jackass, but he is very much correct on a narrow range of points. There are a few times in the past year when little clips from Fox News (stumbled upon by accident, as I never seek it out) actually made me nod my head. This is a bad fucking sign. I am quite sure my own opinion of the situation hasn't been changing in recent years; it's just that Fox that has sensed and is weaseling their way into a void, attempting to exploit the left's weaknesses against them.
Yes, you are. If you weren't, you'd have flat out admitted I do have a legitimate grievance
I did that three posts ago. Do you also want to assert that rap music is annoying? Sure! I agree! But not relevant. Milo wasn't banned for spamming or telemarketing.
There is no trouble whatsoever differentiating censorship of flooders and censorship of unpopular opinions and your continued attempt to conflate these two, as if SEARCHING OUT A VIDEO ON YOUTUBE BY SUBJECT (because they're never going to put this shit
I'm not going to curate a set of links for you but if you wish to educate yourself on the current state of affairs, Youtube is the easiest way. It's the most popular means of mass communication and easy to listen to whilst you multitask. If you really believe that criticism of Christianity on the internet is lacking, I suggest you start with Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris and Dawkins before moving on through all of the prominent atheist Youtubers like The Amazing Atheist, Sargon of Akkad, Cenk Uygur, Steve Shives, etc.
Be sure to make a note of the popularity of these videos and the like/dislike ratios, and read some of the comments. Then go watch the pro-Christian vids, make a note of the like/dislike ratio and read the comments there (if they're even enabled.)
Atheism is beating Christianity on the internet among the people who care enough to debate these things, period. It's having a much, much tougher time vs. Islam, partially because there are many more ultra-conservative Muslims in the world than there are ultra-conservative Christians but also because they are being given so much assistance from prominent self-flagellating wings of the left, including many of those aforementioned Youtubers who don't hesitate to criticize Christianity (Steve Shives, Cenk Uygur) and also from Youtube itself.
I gave up 20% in. Zero desire to continue this if you're going to jackknife from point to point, alternating nonsequiturs with arguments that contradict what you were previously saying. Should've realized you weren't being intellectually honest here as soon as it became clear you weren't going to shut up about the off-topic telemarketing tangent.
Well that's a poorly articulated, generalized screed. Anyone except you is guilty of something you can't quite describe. You know they're guilty because you're angry and obsessed, and conclusions of others' guilt naturally follow from that.
If you spend some time not being angry and obsessed, you'll find a lot more people around who aren't enemies.
See this is what I meant about not treating my grievance as legitimate.
Adjust your brain or adjust your glasses. I said two or three times, very very clearly, that I agreed it was a legitimate grievance. It was simply off-topic, because Milo was not banned for telemarketing or spamming and no one in their right mind would confuse banning for political speech with banning for spamming. These acts do not appear alike. The debates surround each topic are tangential at best.
I have declined to read beyond this first sentence. Go improve your crappy reading comprehension skills (and/or your crappy strawman skills) with someone else.
Yeah, no specifics again. Lots of things are "false" (and many other spooky words) but nothing specific. Because that's the way it goes when you're obsessed and angry: other people are bad because ... ... they just are.
I have also made multiple attempts to get you to recognize that I'm fact, those telemarketers and spammers have associated themselves with free-speech advocacy
I said this like 5+ posts ago: I would also support an expansion of common carrier type rules that would compel all general purpose platforms to accept all legal, non-disruptive (e.g. spamming and crapflooding) content.
I never concerned myself with flooding issues. Technical countermeasures should first be used. When these are not sufficient, distinctions can be made pretty easily between crapflooding/spamming and non-spamming communications and I would support any measures necessary to keep such disruptive communications in check. This is almost entirely orthogonal to the issue at hand. The courts do not have a problem distinguishing the act of arresting someone because he's a member of the Communist Party of America vs. arresting someone because he is screaming into a bullhorn at 3am.
This is as much as I feel like addressing this issue at the moment. I've done so only because you asserted an overlap. I counter-assert that this overlap is minimal and there is virtually no disagreement among us on this issue except that, possibly, I would always prefer technical countermeasures be exhausted prior to "censorship" policies (e.g. content removal, bans and/or arrests, depending on the context) being used, but when it comes to disruptive communication (which DOES NOT INCLUDE "HATE SPEECH"), I am in principle fine with either.
even when it was your own initiative that brought up a subject.
Are you still repeating this lie? I did not bring up telemarketing. I brought up phone companies concerning themselves with the person you are calling and the contents of your (non-telemarketing) conversation. This are two very, very, very different things. In the context of my example, both people are willing participants and want to hear what the other person is saying, but the phone company is censoring them anyway.
Despite my ever-increasing suspicions that you are trolling me, I have further clarified the differences in my attitude toward telemarketing and other disruptive communication in another reply.
There is a further wrinkle here in that phone calls are one-to-one while Twitter is one-to-many (but with some lingering one-to-one aspects), but I'm not following you down that rabbit hole unless/until you demonstrate intellectual honesty with the points I've just clarified.
Which it was.
You should try it. I said free speech protections are for unpopular speech, and that haters like you should give up your obsessions and do good things for people instead of trying to tear people down. Which part of that is "false"?
If you're not an angry, obsessed hater, then why are you name-calling random internet people in a discussion a week later? Why do you want to "smack down" and "shut up" people who aren't like you?
The is the stupidist troll attempt I've ever seen.
You are blatantly trying to change the subject from a clearly defined, interesting one to something entirely different (and something that's rather boring and cliché) and you are *whining* that I won't talk about it at length, even when I provide you with a short summary of my position and state that I'm in broad agreement with you.
It might be infuriating if it weren't so dumb.
This conversation is now about how airline food sucks. If you don't spend at least 10,000 words agreeing with me that airline food sucks, you are hereby deemed to be dodging the issue.