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.
Ok, yeah GPU passthrough is still a no-go for Qubes right now. It sounded like you might've been in the market for a general workhorse hypervisor, but 3d gaming is the one area in which it's definitely lacking.
On the other hand, I should protest that Qubes does make for a superior casual gaming and retro/oldschool gaming experience. There's something to be said for running 2d Steam games (ones that don't have Linux compatibility), Fallout 2 and other oldschool Windows games in their own window sitting in the task bar right next to your Linux apps, with no WINE involvement and no Windows desktop or secondary taskbar in sight.
(If you can't get 'em running in Windows 7 you will need to go through a secondary XP/98/95 desktop, through.)
Free speech is a concept that exists independent of the government's attitude. The very fact that Milo is claiming to want to use 4chan for free speech shows that he is talking about free speech as supported or tolerated in the private sector.
There's a bunch of other laughable nonsense in your post, like the American government supposedly not protecting free speech if it tramples on someone's right to privacy and isn't of "legitimate public concern" (Are you quite sure you aren't thinking of some other government here? Like the UK's?), but the key disconnect here is this nonsensical obsession with the first amendment that has permeates this entire discussion.
Free speech does not begin or end with the first amendment, and in the context of Milo's plans here it is mostly irrelevant except to the extent that he will ultimately forced to take down some stuff that the courts have ruled are not protected by the first amendment. (Even in those cases, the list of restrictions tends to be construed pretty narrowly and as red letter law are subject to judicial revision over time.)
Random legal opinions (presented by you as fact and without qualification as to the "tests" courts customarily invoke) from a dotcom aren't really all that interesting, Milo has not to my knowledge been arrested or subject to an injunction for anything he's posted, so until he has it's safe to assume you've no idea what you're talking about.
If you don't have specific requirements necessitating another solution (a longer support window, perhaps), I really can't recommend Qubes highly enough. You can run conventional Xen HVMs alongside Qubes AppVMs which 1. are damned fast, 2. can utilize shared templates for disk space efficiency and easier updates, 3. have tools for quickly and securely sharing files or clipboard contents and 4. allow you to intelligently mix and manage color-coded windows in a single task bar. These features are available with Windows 7 as well (Windows 10 is still in development.) Yes, they're stuck using Fedora for the base for now (they'll move to something minimal and more secure down the road) but you can have BSD or arbitrary Linux distro guests and Dom0 doesn't have any network access so there's no reason to be paranoid about it.
The fact that it's probably the most secure full-featured desktop distro ever made (particularly on machines that properly support vt-d) is largely a result of it being a powerful hypervisor. Some people seem to think that it being an ultra-secure OS must mean its crippled or cumbersome but nothing could be further from the truth; it's been a usability win across the board and has been my daily driver for over a year now. I do wish the GUI had better built-in snapshot functionality, but backup functionality works fine and there's nothing preventing you from using btrfs and/or LVM.
Ah ok, so you are using uBlock Origins. I think the element picker feature (the eye dropper thing) took care of it for me.
As far as laziness goes, my uBlock Origin philosophy is this: try to run in a whitelist only mode if I'm not pressed for time, but as soon as I get a website running properly I immediately go through and globally blacklist (or sometimes just locally blacklist) everything I haven't whitelisted.
This extra step only takes a few seconds, and it means that if/when you get frustrated or pressed for time, you can simply switch over to permissive / blacklist only mode. New domains will of course be permitted by default, but since you've been setting up blacklists as you go most of the junk should still be blocked on websites you've already visited (and if you blacklisted those domains globally, they will also be blocked on any new site you visit.) This is the best of both worlds, allowing you to be as lazy as often as you want without throwing away the effort you went through on those days when you actually took the time to manually whitelist each domain. (And of course when I say "whitelist", of course I mean gray/"no-op". I almost never use green/always-permit whitelisting.)
For maximum fine-grained control, you can add uMatrix (written by the same guy) or Noscript into the mix but other than a lack of cookie management, I find that uBlock is more than sufficient for a daily driver.
I think I saw those that a while back. uBlock element picker worked just fine on it, I think, so two clicks and its gone.
uBlock is more or less a replacement for ABP, Noscript and Request Policy, although I think there are a few areas that NS covers that it doesn't (like anti-XSS). GPL, lighter memory footprint than ABP and it comes configured with Easylist out of the box. Very easy to use once you understand what the boxes in the GUI represent and you can effortlessly switch and combine whitelisting and blacklisting approaches. I can't recommend it highly enough.
people on the internet seem to take "free speech" to mean "you are obligated to give me an audience and platform, listen to me and you are not allowed to criticize me either directly or indirectly or else you're threatening free speech"
The thing is, very, very few people say that. For every person that says something like that, you have five hundred people trying to lecture us that the first amendment doesn't forbid Twitter from banning people. Yeah, no shit. But it's still censorship, and it's not healthy or desirable.
And you keep trying to imply we're in favor of places being filled with spam and shitposts. Either you're unaware of Milo's history or you're being deliberately deceptive when you say stuff like that. User-controlled filtering tools (whether opt-in or opt-out) are not at all the same as deleting someone's words so that no one can read them and then banning them so that they can't say anything else.
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.
Once again with this strawman game, and even linking to the very xkcd that I've linked to many times that perfectly illustrates the muddied thinking going on here.
Milo never said that the First Amendment makes what Twitter did illegal. Milo says enough dumb shit without you shoveling even dumber shit into his mouth for him.
Equating free speech with shitposting and demanding to be heard and respected demeans free speech and needs to stop!
None of that has anything nothing to do with banning people from a platform like Twitter and removing the words they've written so that others can't read them and judge for themselves. I'm all users being given the option of for filtration and opt-outs, and at least in some regards it's entirely desirable to filter some things by default. But that has nothing to do with *censorship* -- the removal of words and the 'prior restraint' of banning someone from saying anything else, even to those who do wish to hear him speak.
If you want to argue that the government should never pass any common carrier type laws that would prevent such censorship, you're free to do so. If you want to go even farther argue that Twitter acted entirely correctly in doing this, you are free to do so. That simply means that you do not believe in free speech.
Are you now or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party of the United States?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
While we're on the subject, what are David Duke, Jared Taylor and the rest of their KK buddies up to?...
I'm really, really not down with/. reporting on hate group leaders like they are the Kardashians.
Milo says a lot of dumb shit, but he's not a neo-Nazi. Opposing Islam or feminism or gratuitous usages of the race card does not make one a neo-Nazi.
People like you are the reason why SJW is a term of disparagement. People like you are the reason why Trump is so popular with independents, despite his being laughable bad in just about every dimension.
Do you really not understand the damage you and your ilk are doing to your own (presumed) cause? This is what the situation looks like to reasonable, nonaligned people of some intelligence: Milo is a twat and a troll, but when he (as a gay man) wanted to speak in Orlando after the Pulse nightclub shooting, the police advised him not to and the university prevented him from speaking due to security concerns. The police refused to protect him... because they were too busy protecting mosques. Including mosques that hadn't had any threats (unlike Milo, who had already received death threats.) Including mosques that have hosted speakers that have called for the murder of all gay people, everywhere. This is not a situation you should be playing polar-politics with.
Offer reasonable people a reasonable alternative, or keep playing this game and watch as they choose actual apologists for Hitler over the apologists for the Islamic State.
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.
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.
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 place*, wtf. My brain apparently tried to meld free speech and safe space, which makes no damn sense. Although... actually, might not be a bad slogan for Milo's vision for 4chan: "The Safe Space for Free Speech."
Slashdot Mirror
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.
Ok, yeah GPU passthrough is still a no-go for Qubes right now. It sounded like you might've been in the market for a general workhorse hypervisor, but 3d gaming is the one area in which it's definitely lacking.
On the other hand, I should protest that Qubes does make for a superior casual gaming and retro/oldschool gaming experience. There's something to be said for running 2d Steam games (ones that don't have Linux compatibility), Fallout 2 and other oldschool Windows games in their own window sitting in the task bar right next to your Linux apps, with no WINE involvement and no Windows desktop or secondary taskbar in sight.
(If you can't get 'em running in Windows 7 you will need to go through a secondary XP/98/95 desktop, through.)
Free speech is a concept that exists independent of the government's attitude. The very fact that Milo is claiming to want to use 4chan for free speech shows that he is talking about free speech as supported or tolerated in the private sector. There's a bunch of other laughable nonsense in your post, like the American government supposedly not protecting free speech if it tramples on someone's right to privacy and isn't of "legitimate public concern" (Are you quite sure you aren't thinking of some other government here? Like the UK's?), but the key disconnect here is this nonsensical obsession with the first amendment that has permeates this entire discussion.
Free speech does not begin or end with the first amendment, and in the context of Milo's plans here it is mostly irrelevant except to the extent that he will ultimately forced to take down some stuff that the courts have ruled are not protected by the first amendment. (Even in those cases, the list of restrictions tends to be construed pretty narrowly and as red letter law are subject to judicial revision over time.)
Random legal opinions (presented by you as fact and without qualification as to the "tests" courts customarily invoke) from a dotcom aren't really all that interesting, Milo has not to my knowledge been arrested or subject to an injunction for anything he's posted, so until he has it's safe to assume you've no idea what you're talking about.
If you don't have specific requirements necessitating another solution (a longer support window, perhaps), I really can't recommend Qubes highly enough. You can run conventional Xen HVMs alongside Qubes AppVMs which 1. are damned fast, 2. can utilize shared templates for disk space efficiency and easier updates, 3. have tools for quickly and securely sharing files or clipboard contents and 4. allow you to intelligently mix and manage color-coded windows in a single task bar. These features are available with Windows 7 as well (Windows 10 is still in development.) Yes, they're stuck using Fedora for the base for now (they'll move to something minimal and more secure down the road) but you can have BSD or arbitrary Linux distro guests and Dom0 doesn't have any network access so there's no reason to be paranoid about it.
The fact that it's probably the most secure full-featured desktop distro ever made (particularly on machines that properly support vt-d) is largely a result of it being a powerful hypervisor. Some people seem to think that it being an ultra-secure OS must mean its crippled or cumbersome but nothing could be further from the truth; it's been a usability win across the board and has been my daily driver for over a year now. I do wish the GUI had better built-in snapshot functionality, but backup functionality works fine and there's nothing preventing you from using btrfs and/or LVM.
Ah ok, so you are using uBlock Origins. I think the element picker feature (the eye dropper thing) took care of it for me.
As far as laziness goes, my uBlock Origin philosophy is this: try to run in a whitelist only mode if I'm not pressed for time, but as soon as I get a website running properly I immediately go through and globally blacklist (or sometimes just locally blacklist) everything I haven't whitelisted.
This extra step only takes a few seconds, and it means that if/when you get frustrated or pressed for time, you can simply switch over to permissive / blacklist only mode. New domains will of course be permitted by default, but since you've been setting up blacklists as you go most of the junk should still be blocked on websites you've already visited (and if you blacklisted those domains globally, they will also be blocked on any new site you visit.) This is the best of both worlds, allowing you to be as lazy as often as you want without throwing away the effort you went through on those days when you actually took the time to manually whitelist each domain. (And of course when I say "whitelist", of course I mean gray/"no-op". I almost never use green/always-permit whitelisting.)
For maximum fine-grained control, you can add uMatrix (written by the same guy) or Noscript into the mix but other than a lack of cookie management, I find that uBlock is more than sufficient for a daily driver.
uBlock Origin*
I think I saw those that a while back. uBlock element picker worked just fine on it, I think, so two clicks and its gone.
uBlock is more or less a replacement for ABP, Noscript and Request Policy, although I think there are a few areas that NS covers that it doesn't (like anti-XSS). GPL, lighter memory footprint than ABP and it comes configured with Easylist out of the box. Very easy to use once you understand what the boxes in the GUI represent and you can effortlessly switch and combine whitelisting and blacklisting approaches. I can't recommend it highly enough.
people on the internet seem to take "free speech" to mean "you are obligated to give me an audience and platform, listen to me and you are not allowed to criticize me either directly or indirectly or else you're threatening free speech"
The thing is, very, very few people say that. For every person that says something like that, you have five hundred people trying to lecture us that the first amendment doesn't forbid Twitter from banning people. Yeah, no shit. But it's still censorship, and it's not healthy or desirable.
And you keep trying to imply we're in favor of places being filled with spam and shitposts. Either you're unaware of Milo's history or you're being deliberately deceptive when you say stuff like that. User-controlled filtering tools (whether opt-in or opt-out) are not at all the same as deleting someone's words so that no one can read them and then banning them so that they can't say anything else.
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.
Milo never said that the First Amendment makes what Twitter did illegal. Milo says enough dumb shit without you shoveling even dumber shit into his mouth for him.
Equating free speech with shitposting and demanding to be heard and respected demeans free speech and needs to stop!
None of that has anything nothing to do with banning people from a platform like Twitter and removing the words they've written so that others can't read them and judge for themselves. I'm all users being given the option of for filtration and opt-outs, and at least in some regards it's entirely desirable to filter some things by default. But that has nothing to do with *censorship* -- the removal of words and the 'prior restraint' of banning someone from saying anything else, even to those who do wish to hear him speak.
If you want to argue that the government should never pass any common carrier type laws that would prevent such censorship, you're free to do so. If you want to go even farther argue that Twitter acted entirely correctly in doing this, you are free to do so. That simply means that you do not believe in free speech.
You can't have your cake and eat it too.
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.
Do you really think that "they" are so monolithic? Despite the fact that Milo is unapologetically gay?
Where do you place professed non-violent Islamists, by the way? Are they "us" or "them"?
(Or perhaps I should say, "us or *the other*". )
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..
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.
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.
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.
off-topic communications would NOT be protected*
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.)
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.
While we're on the subject, what are David Duke, Jared Taylor and the rest of their KK buddies up to? ...
I'm really, really not down with /. reporting on hate group leaders like they are the Kardashians.
Milo says a lot of dumb shit, but he's not a neo-Nazi. Opposing Islam or feminism or gratuitous usages of the race card does not make one a neo-Nazi.
People like you are the reason why SJW is a term of disparagement. People like you are the reason why Trump is so popular with independents, despite his being laughable bad in just about every dimension.
Do you really not understand the damage you and your ilk are doing to your own (presumed) cause? This is what the situation looks like to reasonable, nonaligned people of some intelligence: Milo is a twat and a troll, but when he (as a gay man) wanted to speak in Orlando after the Pulse nightclub shooting, the police advised him not to and the university prevented him from speaking due to security concerns. The police refused to protect him... because they were too busy protecting mosques. Including mosques that hadn't had any threats (unlike Milo, who had already received death threats.) Including mosques that have hosted speakers that have called for the murder of all gay people, everywhere. This is not a situation you should be playing polar-politics with.
Offer reasonable people a reasonable alternative, or keep playing this game and watch as they choose actual apologists for Hitler over the apologists for the Islamic State.
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.
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.
Free speech needs a safe space.
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 place*, wtf. My brain apparently tried to meld free speech and safe space, which makes no damn sense. Although... actually, might not be a bad slogan for Milo's vision for 4chan: "The Safe Space for Free Speech."