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GoDaddy Expels Neo-Nazi Site Over Article On Charlottesville Victim (bbc.co.uk)
Reader Big Hairy Ian writes: Web hosting company GoDaddy has given a US neo-Nazi site 24 hours to find another provider after it disparaged a woman who died in protests in Virginia. The Daily Stormer published a piece denigrating Heather Heyer, who was killed on Saturday after a car rammed into a crowd protesting at a white supremacist rally in Charlottesville. GoDaddy had faced calls to remove the white supremacist site as a result. The web host said the Daily Stormer had violated its terms of service. "We informed the Daily Stormer that they have 24 hours to move the domain to another provider, as they have violated our terms of service," GoDaddy said in a statement on Twitter. Previously, some web users had called on GoDaddy to remove the site -- including women's rights campaigner Amy Siskind. Violence broke out in Charlottesville, Virginia, after white supremacists organised a controversial far-right march called "Unite the Right".
This isn't a First Amendment issue.
GoDaddy has the right to toss anyone off of their service for violating their Terms of Service.
Mr. Hu is not a ninja.
As usual, private enterprises want to distance themselves from objectively horrible people because it may cost them money.
As usual, objectively horrible people suddenly decide that it is "censorship" if private enterprises decide that they do not want to be associated with said objectively horrible people, and completely forget about the whole "freedom of association" thing.
Because they're the ones running down their opponents with cars...
Unless they're literal Nazis.
I mean, come on. They're fucking Nazis for chrissake. If your business model relies on not alienating Nazis, then there may be bigger problems than your profit/loss statement.
You are welcome on my lawn.
So those guys displaying swastikas, giving Nazi salutes, chanting "blood and soil", one wearing a t-shirt that said "Nazi" on it... Those guys weren't Nazis?
It wasn't a small group or one or two people, it was large numbers of them and the others there did nothing to stop it, didn't ask them to leave and didn't leave themselves when the chanting started.
It was organised by nationalists, including the ex-Grand Wizard of the KKK. But those are two sides of the same coin.
No need to be pedantic about the exact terminology. You had Nazis marching in your streets, not even bothering to cover their faces any more.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Out gay man here. I have defended, and will continue to defend, people like Nazis, skinheads, the KKK, or any other organization to have a platform in the public square to spew whatever hate that they want. That is their right, and it should not be abridged. It doesn't matter if it's the KKK or the Phelps church protesting at soldier's funerals. They have the right to their opinions, and that right should never be taken away.
So how exactly am I, a proud leftist progressive, hating on the first amendment? How am I wanting to curtail the KKK from protesting? I cherish the freedom granted to every single person under the Constitution, and will defend that right to the death.
"As a side note, they could at least have put in the effort to make real torches. All you need is a stick, a rag, gasoline/kerosene, and some wire."
And these are the guys complaining about manufacturing jobs.
Nazis, aka National -Socialists-, are NOT far right.
They are of the Left. Perhaps right of communism
That's one of the greatest cons ever. They adopted socialist policies to gain popularity - typical demagogue stuff, promise to bring all the jobs back, blame all the problems on some identifiable group (the Jews) etc. Once they got into power they forgot all that stuff and enacted far right policies, which was their intention all along, and forgot about the socialist stuff.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
While I totally agree with this idea it has not always worked this way in practice, leading the right (esp the extreme right) to feel that it is "leftist" censorship. The case of the baker who refused to make a cake for a gay couple, was sued and lost shows that corporations don't always have the right to do business the way they want. As a libertarian I think GoDaddy should be able to refuse to host anyone they see fit and bakers should be able to refuse to bake cakes for whomever they don't want to. The inequity gives the appearance of favoritism for one side.
--- Tolerance is the axiomatic "virtue" of those without convictions ---
Glad to see I wasn't the only one that thought of mid 1930s Germany when they saw pictures of hundreds of young men marching around in (citronella tiki) torches.
Yeah I thought the same thing, you know what it reminded me of? When the nazi's started fighting back against the antifascists(aka antifaschistische aktion) who were violently assaulting people in the streets, at protests and so on.
You do realize that that article you linked to states that Antifaschistische Aktion formed in 1932, nearly a decade after the Beer Hall Putsch? The AA might have been a continuation of the RFB, but even the RFB was formed in 1924. The SA/Brownshirts were formed in 1920/21. Hard to paint antifascist groups as the violent aggressors with a timeline like that.
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
https://www.theatlantic.com/ma...
https://www.washingtonpost.com...
http://www.npr.org/2017/06/16/...
and then there's Youtube. I could go on an on and on.
I could give two fucks what it ment in 1921. TODAY, the Antifa are a facist violent group of fucktards that should be labeled for what they are, a terrorist organization.
Life is not for the lazy.
And let the equivocation begin! Oh, those poor downtrodden Neo-nazis and White Supremacists. All they want to do is expel every black person, Latino, and anyone else in their long laundry list of people they hate.
Storm Front has the right to say what it wants. It has absolutely no right to force anyone else to carry the message for them.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Really? It's what they call themselves.
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DH...
You are welcome on my lawn.
...every bit of content they are part of serving.
This kind of short-term virtue signaling on the part of a corporation is going to have long-term consequences, when people use this precedent to make them responsible for every shitlord post ever made on anything they're connected to.
Next thing you know, they'll be coming after GoDaddy for comments on articles, and naughty memes.
You clearly don't know what the word meant, ever.
Antifa has ALWAYS been violent, you can consider that a bad thing - they believe they are fighting against evil. And they were US allies in the war.
But what they are not is, in any way, subscribers to fascist ideology. Punching somebody is a far-cry from being a fascist, ESPECIALLY when you're punching fascists. Neither does censorship make you fascist. Nor even authoritarianism.
These are all things that fascists did - but they are not exclusive to fascism, not symptomatic of fascism, nor a requirement FOR fascism.
On the other hand the idea that a country or state should be dominated by a particular cuture or race - that IS a defining attribute of fascism. The original NAZIs were fascists as well. The Neo-NAZIs remain so. Richard Spencer is an absolute fascist. Dozens of people in Charlottesville were waviing signs with the fasces on it (a bunch of axes tied together) - literally the symbol of fascism and in fact, the origin of the word.
The word STILL means what it meant in 1929 and using it to mean whatever the fuck you want it to mean achieves only two things:
1) it makes YOU look like an uneducated idiot
2) It gives cover to actual fascists to continue posing a danger to the entire world.
Neither of these are good outcomes.
You may think AntiFa's violence is no longer justified, I would argue that this weekend proved otherwise - but to call them fascist is merely to prove you don't understand what fascism was or why it was evil. You associate some of the things that some fascists did with the concept and call all who do those things fascists - all you do is make the most evil people on the planet look less evil by claiming that less evil people are on par with them. By your reasoning every republican who ever banned porn is a fascist too. After all - fascists did censorship right ? Every dictator no matter if they were a communist or a far right capitalist is a fascist by your stupid definition - even though they would not agree on ANYTHING.
It's not some catch-all word that describes everybody from Pinochet to Stalin.
It describes a particular ideology - that of Musolini, Hitler and their modern incarnates. Nobody, NOBODY else qualifies. The most fascist leader in the world today is Donald Trump. He subscribes to the overwhelming majority of the fascist ideology. That and that ALONE can qualify anybody for the name. It's the name of a certain ideology - nothing else.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
So those guys displaying swastikas, giving Nazi salutes, chanting "blood and soil", one wearing a t-shirt that said "Nazi" on it... Those guys weren't Nazis?
Well that's a good question now isn't it? Because the person who put this thing together(UTR) goes by the name of Jason Kessler. Who right up until November 2016, was an avowed leftist, democrat supporter, proud obama supporter, and so on. We'll use the SLPC's own database on that. And he suddenly established a new organization called "Unity & Security For America" in January of 2017. Now one can't forget either that he was working for CNN at one point.
Now you can ask what does this have to do with anything. Well it's starting to smell a lot like "bird dogging" something that democrats did several times during the RNC primaries, and during the 2016 presidential race. This is right out of the playbooks of Scott Foval and Bob Creamer, who were pushed out of the DNC when it came to light that they had been paying protesters to be violent at rallies. The most famous case of this was the near-riot in Chicago.
Now go read these two articles here and this article here. Then ask yourself why this organization's event(UTR) was announced on the facebook page of the Traditionalist Workers Party. Sounds very right-wing to me, doesn't it comrade. That's the same organization with ties to Yvette Felarca(of By Any Means Necessary or BAMN fame), who was arrested in relation to starting a riot....in California. I'll let you guess which one.
And now, we go off to the races. I'll say, there's a chance, a possibility that a devout democrat that deep could flip and support Trump. I've met them, the other stuff just doesn't seem to match up on the other hand. Especially the announcements.
Om, nomnomnom...
I never said it wasn't coercion. But it can only be an act of STATISM if it's the STATE doing the punching.
And NEITHER of those things is fascism.
Fascism is NOT a word that means "statism" OR coercion. Those have FUCKALL to do with what the word means
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
The government is bound to allow free speech. A corporation doesn't have to put up with things they find objectionable. There are other options for those pushing hate and GoDaddy is certainly in the right here.
This is one of those very tough cases, to be honest. I believe that a website disparaging a counterproster at a nazi protest is utterly repulsive, and I didn't see the website so I don't know if they were encouraging others to do the same (the article [yes, I read it] is unclear on the exact content), but for the sake of argument let's assume the site simply discussed their twisted agenda and said lots of very mean and repulsive things, but did not make an explicit call to violence.
GoDaddy does not want to host the site. Fine. Will Twitter allow them to keep an account? I mean, they seem to turn a blind eye toward ISIS, but they too are a private company and don't have to enforce their ToS evenly. Let's assume Amazon does the same thing and disallows them to use AWS, and let's also assume Google blacklists the domain from ever showing up on a web search, because 'a corporation doesn't have to put up with things they find objectionable'.
Will their ISP disconnect their account if they set up their own web server and point their domain toward their own self-hosted web server if the ISP finds their message objectionable?
Freedom of Speech has had two interrelated issues in the information age. The first is that even free speech was far more limited when it was 'a dude on a soapbox' vs. 'another dude on a soapbox', or more specifically, printing presses and 'a dude on a horse', because the distribution model was still far more limited than what we have today. Would the first amendment have been phrased differently if it was viable to foresee this very situation at that time? I don't know.
The second issue is what I dub 'the corporate abstraction layer'. The government can't do X, but a corporation can, and the government can compel a corporation to do X, so X is done. The government gets to point to the corporation to prove they didn't do it, the corporation gets to point to the government compelling them to do it, and thus there are few repercussions to either. The government is bound to allow free speech, of which 'posting on the internet' has been included as per a number of court decisions. However, every means of exercising that right, at some point, passes through a corporation which is not required to adhere to the first amendment if they sufficiently disagree with the content.
We now find ourselves in this problematic situation. I loathe everything this group stands for and sincerely wish they would all stop. However, I do believe they have a right to place their message on the internet. GoDaddy is in a pretty bad spot right now, because they can either stand for free speech by siding with a group that is highly unpopular in the court of public opinion. For them to do so would likely result in a boycott, mass domain migration, and no shortage of bad press. For them, it would be the worst possible hill to die on, especially since it gives them a better public standing to ban them. On the other hand, they have set a precedent of banning 'sufficiently unpopular speech', which nobody cares about 'now'. 'First they came for the neonazis'...
Thus, we have found ourselves in a place where free speech is no longer a right, but a privilege granted by some combination of actuarial tables, NSLs, and the court of public opinion. As terrible and abhorrent as these protesters are, it is this very type of situation for which the first amendment must be clearly defined in the 21st century, and a platform be given equally for unpopular ideas as popular ones.
Thank you Slashdot, for allowing me to post my unpopular opinion.