Slashdot Mirror
Twitter Reinstates White Nationalist Leader's Account (buzzfeed.com)
An anonymous reader quotes BuzzFeed:
On Saturday evening, Twitter reinstated -- with verification -- the account of Richard Spencer, a leading figure of the so-called alt-right movement, and the head of the white nationalist think tank, The National Policy Institute. Spencer's account was suspended mid-November as part of a larger cull of prominent alt-right accounts... However, according to Twitter, Spencer was banned on a technicality: creating multiple accounts with overlapping uses. Twitter's multiple account policy was put in place as a safeguard to help curb dog piling and targeted harassment. [Twitter] offered to reinstate one of Spencer's accounts if he agreed to follow the company's protocols.
Vox says the move "raises the question of to what extent Twitter intends to enforce the 'hateful conduct' policy." But the suspension had also been criticized by David Frum, a senior editor at the Atlantic, who wrote that "The culture of offense-taking, platform-denying, and heckler-vetoing...lets loudmouths and thugs present themselves as heroes of free thought. They do not deserve this opportunity... today, a neo-Nazi has more right to build an arsenal of weapons and drill a militia than to speak on Twitter." But BuzzFeed points out that though the account's been reinstated, Spencer "is now tip-toeing around the company's three strike policy, which carries a permanent suspension."
Vox says the move "raises the question of to what extent Twitter intends to enforce the 'hateful conduct' policy." But the suspension had also been criticized by David Frum, a senior editor at the Atlantic, who wrote that "The culture of offense-taking, platform-denying, and heckler-vetoing...lets loudmouths and thugs present themselves as heroes of free thought. They do not deserve this opportunity... today, a neo-Nazi has more right to build an arsenal of weapons and drill a militia than to speak on Twitter." But BuzzFeed points out that though the account's been reinstated, Spencer "is now tip-toeing around the company's three strike policy, which carries a permanent suspension."
No, because then you make him a "free speech martyr" and he'll still end up getting his message out on another platform anyway.
The term "White Nationalist" is meant to evoke the term "Nazi" mixed with "KKK".
But really it's neither of those things. A nationalist (of any skin color) simply wants government to put the interests of his nation first, above those of other nations generally.
When put that way it doesn't sound scary (or even unreasonable) at all. A nationalist can still want to work with other countries, can still support legal immigration - it simply means they adopt the doctors credo "First do no Harm". That is why the chattering news must paint the term with a racial brush, to frighten children or the weak minded...
Note they never call out "black nationalists" even though there are plenty of them... that would be racist after all! But it's OK to try and evoke hate for people based on color when they are white.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
because these groups have been hitting the dog whistle so hard you'd think they picked up a coaches whistle by mistake.
And we called out Black Nationalists in the 70s. They mostly calmed the hell down and stopped being racists. The White Nationalists didn't do that when they were called out. They doubled and trippled down. Mostly because they're being used by a wealthy elite to win elections and stuff state legislatures with pro-corporate anti-worker politicians. That's what pisses me off the most about racism. It's just an excuse to give everything to the 1%.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Yes, it is within their legal rights to enforce the fuck they want.
But it's still not a good idea, specially if your plan is to actually combat white nationalism instead of just sweeping it under the rug.
"alt-right" is a concept intended primarily as a smear tactic by the Hillary campaign. White nationalists are hand-in-hand with the liberals in adopting it as a label. Since it is completely undefined, you can use it as a smear.
There's aren't any "white nationalists", KKK members, etc, in the Trump team, nor will there be. Both of these groups are utterly insignificant idiots, and have been denounced and denigrated time and time again by Trump and anyone else in his circle
You know we have videotape and records right? A ten second web search yielded this information
Trump himself is a hero to these people. What you think anyone is really buying the crap about trump being concerned about obama's birthplace? No, it was a transparently obvious attempt to delegitimize the first black president from the very beginning and it lasted just long enough to do what it needed to do. At the time Trump accused Obama of playing the best con in history, which was a bit of insight into how Trump thinks. He was lying of course, but I think even then he was thinking of playing the best con in history.
Sure on some level trump is likely racist, but mostly he is for Trump and is more than willing to deal with any racists that come along, as long as they support him. It is the same with Putin. We know Putin is a murderer. Too many of his enemies turn up dead. One even from polonium poisoning, but lead poisoning is the usual reason.
We also know he had a campaign manager with major Russian ties. We know they bent over backward to get him elected, though to be fair it was probably more to prevent Hillary. We know that he is bending himself in a pretzel to say that all of our intelligence agencies are stupid and wrong, and only he is right on russia and of course now Trump is appointing Russia's best friend in the most important position he has.
I wonder if he is afraid of his own polonium poisoning, or if there is actual marching orders. Heck, we even know that Trump is ignoring almost all of his intelligence briefings.
His decisions will cause deaths. All presidents decisions do. His uninformed decisions are bound to cause a lot more, but he is just too busy to do the damn job. Disgusting. Seriously, can you imagine Romney or McCain refusing to be kept up to date on threats?
Yes, and then let this application grow and gain neo nazi moderators and turn it into a racist safe space.
Without free discussion, and real actual discussion instead of retarded namecalling we get shit like trump in power.
Just so long as he doesn't post, say, a non-explicit picture of a mother breastfeeding her child.
Sometimes I doubt your commitment to Sparkle Motion.
It's called stormfront
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Wow... when Trump wants something done, it really does get done!
Ban the motherfucker for TOS violation and deny him the audience that feeds his hatred of everyone and everything else.
Firstly, I'm not convinced that he promotes hatred.
We've learned in the last few weeks that the mainstream media is quick to mislabel something as bigoted and other related labels, so long as it promotes their position. To get to the truth you have to actually find the statements some person was saying, and then determine for oneself whether they're bigoted or not.
(And I haven't taken the time or effort to do this for Richard Spencer, never heard of him before this moment.)
And further, asking whether Trump was bigoted caused people to post entirely non-bigotry quotes as "proof" of his racism. Mexico isn't a race, he was specifically referring to criminals, Islam is not a race (it's a culture), and so on.
It's gotten so that no one can even mention race in an academic sense without being called a bigot, because the left knows that it's an easy way to shut down debate on the subject.
Secondly, the term "KKK member" has strong connotations, "white supremacist" is largely indicative of bias, but "white nationalist" seems like it's a tailored term to insult and demean most of the people who voted for Trump. It's trying to equate voting for Trump with white supremacy, which again is a way of shutting down debate on the issue. I'm white, I want the government to put the US first in things (such as trade agreements), but I'm not a racist or hateful person. Why am I (and half the country) always marginalized by the left?
It's estimated that there are less than 50,000 white supremacists in the entire country, and less than 1000 of the tattooed, nazi-ish, violent types that you see in a Banshee episode.
Trump got elected because there are real issues that were not being addressed by the establishment, but no one on the left *or* right has owned up to this simple fact.
Instead, it's all about racism. Voting for Trump was a hate crime.
Thirdly, the left really *really* doesn't have any good sense of priorities when it comes to human rights. Apparently anything goes, so long as it promotes their agenda. This twitter thing, and the quote above, is a good example of that in practice.
We don't allow twitter to hire only whites (14th amendment &c), or only men (19th amendment). We don't allow twitter to refuse services to gays or older people or the poor or veterans, because that would be a violation of their rights.
Why do we allow twitter to violate first amendment rights?
No one is required to give you a public forum, the saying goes, but Twitter *is* a public forum.
And finally, recall about a decade ago how ISPs would turn over subscriber information to the government on request without a warrant. The government thought that was OK because the ISPs were free to refuse, and it wasn't a violation of our rights because it wasn't the government doing it.
If we let companies censor our speech, then the same situation will happen. The government can "request" something be censored, with a wink and a nudge, and it won't be the government doing it.
We're rapidly losing our free speech rights.
And it starts with leftist idiots like the OP above, who thinks it's OK to violate that right, so long as the ends are virtuous.
Freedom of speech in your US constitution applies only to the state. You ignorant fuckwit.
The first amendment only applies to congress and state legislation, you dummy.
Actually it was Hillary Clinton's infamy and unfitness for office that elected Donald Trump, in a close contest of infamy and poor fit for the job. Trump outperformed Romney in non-whites across the board. Dems could have run just about anyone but Clinton and taken the office. But no.
Huh?
It's feminists who are pissed off about FB's ban on non-sexual images that (gasp!) involve a breast. Regardless of context. Things involving breast cancer are particularly frustrating. They banned a Swedish video on breast cancer awareness. They instituted a permanent ban on a tattoo artist who tattoos nipples on women who have gotten mastectomies. There's hundreds and hundreds of examples. Photographic? Artistic? Cartoony? Banned, banned, banned. Some people have taken to representing breasts and nipples as squares as a workaround.
The thing that's most annoying about it is that they're portraying things that are distinctly not sexual as if they're sexual. A mother breastfeeding her child is not a sexual act, and it's disgusting and insulting to act like it is. A breast cancer awareness video or a survivor of breast cancer are not there for sexual titilation - they're about survival from a deadly disease. Facebook's obsession about these things is a giant insult.
You went off on a most bizarre tangent there... what on Earth does Jenner have to do with Facebook's banning of breastfeeding / breast cancer images?
Sometimes I doubt your commitment to Sparkle Motion.
The "alt-right" was developed as a term to describe groups of conservatives who are not mainstream conservatives or establishment Republicans. As a classification term, it didn't imply racism- it encompassed several different groups of thought. I'm not sure how it was turned into a "movement", despite all these groups not really identifying as such, but I know that if you change "a classification for non-mainstream conservatives" into "a movement that accepts neo-nazis", you've totally redefined the term. Probably with the purpose of painting the non-mainstream conservatives with a neo-nazi brush, despite there being a decent number of the former, and only a handful of jackhats in the latter.
Regardless, it is done, and it happened super fast and recently. Already, the non-racist conservatives who are not mainstream have begun rebranding themselves to make plain that they are not "alt-right", because now the term just means "neo-nazi".
It's feminists who are pissed off about FB's ban on non-sexual images that (gasp!) involve a breast.
I think you're misinterpreting what I'm saying. People are getting tired of being pressured to go against the grain of their biology just because it offends somebody else, and the mere fact that you're a minority can be used to justify your sins. These things, IMO, have resulted in the alt-right.
Did I not convey that properly?
Twitter has gladly helped criminals, abusers, and racists - as long as they were leftists. Some of them even have the ear of Twitter's Ministry of Truth & Safety department.
When we start hearing of people on the left get removed from Twitter (permanently), then they might have some shred of legitimacy.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
The only violation that matters is not being a proper leftist according to Twitter.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
These things, IMO, have resulted in the alt-right.
You lack historical depth. The "alt-right" has always been here, they just used to be the norm. It's only by standing up and demanding that they be recognized, that they exist and have the same rights that the so called special interest groups have managed to push society into no longer accepting the "alt-right" viewpoint as normal. Of course, they're only "special interest groups" in that they stand up to the bigots who would pretend they don't exist. When your entire philosophy rests on treating everyone who thinks differently from yourself as a sub-human with no right to exist, being stood up to does seem extraordinary.
Excellent post that points out the Left's hypocrisy. Generalizing a group based on a few of its members is bad and makes you a bigot, but it's okay for them to do it to white people who support individual freedom and free speech by painting them all as inbred hill-billies.
As opposed, I presume, to the black supremacist scum of Black Lives Matter?
According to Richard Spencer, they've just won the White House. Does that meet your standard of gaining a "lot of power"?
Me, I take them at their word. When someone tells you who they are, believe them the first time. I actually knew people who fought Nazis in Europe last century. If they could have crushed Nazism when it was just 3000 guys in a beer hall, they wouldn't have hesitated. It was that bad. I take them at their word, too.
If you want to spend time changing Nazis minds, be my guest, and I wish you luck. You can start with the incoming President's Chief Strategist. It's up to the rest of us to have a contingency if you fail.
You are welcome on my lawn.
So the whole 'personal responsibility' thing the conservatives are always going on about ONLY applies to poor people or drug addicts or whatever group you currently want to justify not helping (or more usually - going out of your way to screw by voting for somebody who promised to make a law that takes away the things that keep them alive.
It doesn't apply to rightwingers. When people go asshole neo-nazi like the alt-right - somehow that's the fault of progressives ? You do realize that this shit existed long before progressives right ? Kind of makes the "you caused this" thing an obvious piece of bullshit.
No, the ONLY thing that changed this year is that these assholes who HAVE BEEN THERE ALL ALONG - have come out of the woodwork, because Orange Hitler made them feel safe and secure in doing so. They never went away. Hell black people have been telling you how they bump into these people every day and get mistreated by them as a daily life thing for decades ! Just because you were able to pretend they didn't exist anymore, doesn't mean they weren't real.
And nobody has tried to 'feminize' society, absolutely nobody has ever been asked (at least, not by the progressives) to 'act against their biology'. I find it incredibly insulting that you seem to believe that just because I *have* a dick I automatically have to *be* a dick. What has feminists done that's so bad ? They asked you to call out your buddies when they make rape jokes - because that sort of shit make actual rapists feel justified and safe. They asked you to actually *ask* the girl before you touch her privates- and to be a decent enough human being not to take advantage of a drunk woman.
These are not 'against your biology' - it is merely being a decent human being. If you find anything they've asked for excessive- it's not your biology that's the problem, it's the fact that you are a horrible human being and the entire species would benefit from your death.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
Here's the thing.
First some background. I was born in South Africa and lived under apartheid. I'm a brown person. I'm amply aware of white supremacy and hate it with every inch of my soul. However, I've also seen black supremacy and black nationalism. While white supremacy oppressed us, black supremacy burned down our town. And yeah, I've also seen brown/Islamic supremacy (my own group). Heck, even in the UK, I have Indian Muslim family I visit that gloats how they got together and drove the blacks out of the neighborhood because they bring drugs and prostitution.
I give all that as a background because if you live in any way long enough you quickly realize how every group has an 'alt-right'. This point cannot be overstated enough.
Now when white people were just so damn powerful as it was the 'norm,' yeah we could all just pretend only white people were racist. Or I guess in modern social justice terms... that only white racists matter because only whites have power.
This is some serious bull shit in my view, because all groups have power. I'm in Canada now. I'm Indian. My high school heavily Indian. Yeah, do you think white kids had any power? Nope, they got punked off for being white same as any other people.
This is the point we are in history and why the alt-right is more prevalent. Regular white people are seeing how society is allowing every other gang to arm itself and spread itself to the teeth, while singling our only white people.
Only white people can't be proud of their identity. ...
Black power... that's a good thing. Not for me. To use modern lingo. I get triggered by black power as rioting black people burned down my home in South Africa in the name of black power.
Indian power... that's a good thing because ethnic people need to have an identity.
women power... that's a good thing.. because...feminism.
These extremist groups really only gain power when regular people starting siding with them. I'm a bit of a realist. I don't pretend we can stamp out all form of hate, but various thing in regular society have people join their 'alt-right' movement and think they are legitimate.
Again I can speak from my own example. Muslim communities are segregationist and racist to any level. You can't be openly gay. Heck, it's really tough to have openly left Islam as I did. I'm still battling through it.
I really and truly don't see any different between white supremacists and muslim supremacists and black supremacists... hate is hate.
The danger we face is that we've empowered and encouraged and turned a blind eye to all the other supremacist groups out there. White people aren't really blind to this and what is natural but to be sympathetic to the people who even have your interest at heart.
Oh I see parallels all over the place. White people might not be part of the alt-right, but they sympathize. The same way most Muslims aren't part of ISIS or radical groups, but they do sympathize. You I attend regular family functions with regular Muslim people and I get to hear wonderful conversation like:
It's sad people got killed over cartoons, but they really shouldn't be speaking about Islam anyways.
I guarantee you there's some white people today going, I'm not for hate or white supremacy, but all I want is for my kids to have an identity they can be proud of or very legitimate issue X,Y,Z.
Basically, of course you're right the alt-right has always been there. The problem is you can't just take this approach to only white people. It's basic group tribal dynamics. And society has changed quite a lot. It's not the 1960s USA where no other group had power, but white people and no other group is filled with hate and a conquest to subjugate and segregate other people.
It's sad to see us a society not really demanding every other alt-right part of society be pushed to non-acceptance as well.
It's also sad that regular white people can't just have a regular white identity and be proud of it.