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Discord Bans Servers That Promote Nazi Ideology (theverge.com)
A popular video game chat service with over 25 million users announced today that it had shut down "a number of accounts" following violence instigated by white supremacists over the weekend. Discord, the service "which lets users chat with voice and text, was being used by proponents of Nazi ideology both before and after the attacks in Charlottesville, Virginia," reports The Verge. "We will continue to take action against Nazi ideology, and all forms of hate," the company said in a tweet. From the report: Discord declined to state how many servers had been affected, but said it included a mix of old accounts and accounts that were created over the weekend. Among the affected servers was one used by AltRight.com, a white nationalist news site. The site's homepage includes a prominent link to a Discord chat which is now broken. The company said it does not read private messages exchanged on its servers. Members of those groups reported messages in the chats for violating Discord's terms of service, the company said, and it took action. "When hatred like this violates our community standards we act swiftly to take servers down and ban individual users," the company said in a statement. "The public server linked to AltRight.com that violated those terms was shut down along with several other public groups and accounts fostering bad actors on Discord. We will continue to be aggressive to ensure that Discord exists for the community we set out to support -- gamers."
hello 20 year old me. i spent the last fifteen years working with people who censor themselves so they wont lose their jobs and health insurance for their families and their housing. and it is always white males who they are afraid of firing them. so in the real world censorship is an economic reality. in fantasy land its a principle that says its ok for nazis to burn flags. but nobody can say they were groped by the boss, name their rapist, disagree with unfair policies , complain about unsafe working conditions, incompetence, corruption, etc. that is where actual censorship exists in 2017.
There's an elephant in the room that no one's talking about.
"Unite the right" was not afforded the protection of law during their rally.
Furthermore, law enforcement purposely directed the rally-goers into the antifa crowd, putting them in significant danger.
The Antifa crowd was flinging urine, poop, and one ralley-goer suffered permanent eye damage from having acid (!) thrown at him. The police were widely observed as doing nothing to stop the fighting.
Think about this for a minute: The government withdrew the protection of law from a group based on their political ideals. The state governor and the mayor simply decided not to enforce the law for an ideology they don't like.
This is a profoundly scary thought - that a political faction within the government can simply decide not to enforce the law in order to promote their narrative.
I'm going to have to side with the ACLU on this one. Hate speech is protected speech, and UniteTheRight should have been allowed to peaceably assemble.
There is condemnation, for sure. And sometimes the media is not quick enough to report on it. And I am also happy to have seen more and more Muslims taking direct action recently. It pains me very much to watch my culture and my history be maligned and vilified, and I do not take this position lightly.
I am not lying, there are many secular/moderate Muslims who are the way I describe. Some are within my own family, who are highly educated (often in Western countries), and highly secular. They call themselves Muslims, they participate in Ramadan (generally), but they drink alcohol, don't pray 5 times a day (or even at all), and generally are like most Christians in the west. Like me, if they actually thought about it, they would probably become atheists.
Often they will make arguments along the lines of "The US invasion of Iraq was an act of terrorism, and that was much worse than ." Again, very similar to the right pointing the finger at BLM or whoever in response to what happened in Charlotte. It's not that they are right or wrong, but rather that it doesn't matter. You can't deflect from your problems by pointing out others' problems.
The War in Iraq was wrong. 9/11 was wrong. What happened in Charlotte was wrong. Period. Moderates on all sides must condemn violence in all forms, without hesitation and without caveat.
Many people are familiar with the Bill Maher/Ben Affleck/Richard Dawkins argument on radical Islam. After that episode aired, I showed it to my very devout (but completely OK with my apostasy :D) friend, Mohamed. He is like a brother to me. At the end of the argument, the comparison was made between fundamentalist Christianity and Islam. Bill Maher said (paraphrasing) "One is herpes, and the other is cancer." That is a very strong statement, and my initial reaction was to take offense, even as an atheist.
After that, Mo and I discussed the issue at length. It was very heated, although we weren't arguing against each other, per-se. At the end, he looked at me, his eyes misty, and said "I'm mad. But I'm mad because they are right."
Only crack the nuts that crack. You don't put the ones that don't crack in the sack.
Hard fascism and hard socialism are not the same, but both are authoritarian. This puts them in the lower part of a Nolan chart, the upper part of a Pace News chart, or the right side of a Pournelle chart.