There Are Real Threats To Free Speech Everywhere. Cancel Culture Is Far Down The List
from the cancel-me-already dept
I’ve written a few times lately about the overreaction many people seem to have to claims that “cancel culture” is a “threat to free speech.” Obviously, there are some examples of people overreacting to speech they dislike, but more often than not, the claims of “cancel culture” are really assholes upset that they’re being held accountable for being assholes. Even in the few cases that do appear to be unjust overreactions to speech, it feels like the people who make the biggest deal about it are actually those who are hiding behind those rare legitimate cases to hide their own fear of facing consequences for their own speech. A friend has referred to this as “cancelled man syndrome,” in which people who know they’re spewing questionable nonsense are scared to death of finally being called on it. It’s perhaps a close relation to “imposter syndrome,” but rather than having to just deal with your internal insecurities, you deal with it by insisting it’s unfair for people to criticize you too vocally.
Adam Serwer, over at the Atlantic, has a good article on all of this, and comes up with his own term for it: “the tyranny of the ratio” (“the ratio” being what happens when you tweet something so monumentally stupid, that you have way more responses calling you out than either likes or retweets). Of course, “the ratio” is just a form of counter speech. It can sometimes be wrong, certainly, but it’s not an attack on free speech. But, as some fear facing such a maelstrom, they seem to associate pointed criticism with at least “attempts” at cancelling.
Serwer’s piece is entitled The Right to Free Speech Is Not the Right to Monologue, and it’s worth reading. It talks about lots of the usual crew, who bemoan cancel culture, trying to turn the stabbing of Salman Rushdie into some sort of commentary on cancel culture (it seems that lots of pundits want to co-opt Rushdie’s situation with their own pet causes). As Serwer notes, though, the supposed “culture of free speech” is always under threat in some form or another, and on the grand scale of things, arguing that people are screaming at you on social media, seems rather benign compared to the past:
Free speech requires a robust exchange of views without the coercion of threats and violence, and self-censorship in response to social pressure is a genuine risk. Yet by definition, there is no free speech if one person is allowed to make an argument and another is not allowed to object to it. Nor has there ever been a time in American history when freedom of speech was not threatened with proscription by the state, or when one could express a controversial opinion and not risk social sanction. In short, the culture of free speech is always under threat.
In almost every era of U.S. history, the bounds of free expression have been contested. In the founding era, patriots tarred and feathered royalists. Before the Civil War, southern states passed laws that could be used to prosecute the dissemination of abolitionist literature and sought to prevent the Postal Service from delivering antislavery pamphlets, saying they would foment insurrection by the enslaved. Mobs followed the abolitionist Frederick Douglass across the North, throwing rotten eggs, stones, and menacing slurs at the orator at speaking events. After Reconstruction, white supremacists destroyed the office of Ida B. Wells’s newspaper, The Free Speech and Headlight, following the publication of an editorial arguing that lynchings of Black men accused of raping white women were in fact punishment for consensual relationships. The Red Scares of the 20th century saw Americans forced from their jobs and prosecuted for leftist beliefs or sympathies on the grounds that those were tantamount to a commitment to overthrowing the government. Out of that crucible emerged a civil libertarian concept of free speech that many have mistaken for timeless rather than a product of a certain history and a particular arrangement of political power. The idea that certain forms of speech or expression justify or provoke violence, let alone that blasphemy does so, is not an invention of modern social-justice discourse.
From there, he highlights how there are many actual threats to free speech that are happening right now, every day, and which don’t seem to be mentioned by the pearl-clutching crowd of “oh no cancel culture” worriers. Perhaps it’s because these threats are a lot more structural than they are ideological, and also, if anything, both the state-level threats and the mobbing threats can be seen perhaps more often from the right than the left (contrary to the popular narrative).
Yet, as Aaron R. Hanlon recently wrote in The New Republic, this wave of censorship laws in Republican-controlled states bears scant mention among many of the most prominent self-styled defenders of free speech, or at least, far less than the tyranny of the ratio. But we do not become little Rushdies when our inboxes and mentions are inundated with deranged filth from disturbed strangers, as a result of the public-facing profession we chose and the technological advancements that make us more accessible to such people.
It is not minimizing the power of digital mobs to say that spending decades with the state-backed threat of an assassin’s blade at your throat is coercion of a different magnitude. The wrath of an online mob can be harrowing: harassment, outrageous falsehoods, and threats are not pleasant to bear, and can threaten not just your mental health but your livelihood, and in extreme cases your safety. To pretend that seeking to avoid such an experience does not condition what people say and how they act would be foolish. But to pretend that this is a left-wing ideological phenomenon rather than a structural one, when educators, medical providers, election officials, and others from all walks of life are being driven underground by right-wing influencers who can conduct a mob like an orchestra, would be equally foolish.
As Serwer notes, some of this is a spectrum, and it may be more difficult to identify what is and what is not appropriate, but I’d argue that’s also what is allowing the claims of “cancel culture” to be adopted as a shield by those who don’t want to face even the slightest bit of actual accountability.
State censorship and violent compulsion are relatively easy to identify and oppose, if not always easy to prevent. When does accountability become harassment? When does protest become coercion? What views should be acceptable to state in polite society, and which should be appropriately shunned by decent people? When does a voice of criticism become the howl of a mob? When does corporate speech become corporate censorship? No society in human history has ever had simple answers to these questions. In a free society, sometimes people will choose to be horrible, and there is little to do other than make a different choice and counsel people to do the same.
Presenting these dilemmas as similar to an attempt to silence someone with a theocratic death mark is trivializing, and ahistorical. There has never been a golden age when anyone could say what they wanted without consequence, only eras in which one shared perspective was dominant.
There’s much more in the full piece that is worth reading, so make sure you go read the whole thing. However, it also calls to mind a few other recent pieces on this general topic. Ken “Popehat” White, last month, wrote an excellent piece in which the subhead (to me) tells the story more than the the headline: “Cancel Culture” Has Victims, But You’re Probably Not One Of Them.
In it, he discusses yet another case of two Harvard professors whining that one of them has been “cancelled, in a sense” because people… walked out on his speech.
Mr. Silverglate is a Harvard graduate and professor, crusading attorney and defender of rights, repeatedly published author of important books, founder of the Foundation for Individual Rights In Education, and a sought-after gripping speaker. He has not been fired, expelled from any organization, depublished, or even (so far as I know) shunned on Martha’s Vineyard. Here’s what happened: he was invited to speak to private high-school students on the subject of free expression, he used the racial epithet commonly known as the n-word in the course of accurately quoting the title of Prof. Kennedy’s book, he did so several times, some of the students walked out, he continued to speak with the rest of the students, later the school sent its community an apology for the epithet being used in the classroom and said it was inappropriate, and the school wouldn’t print Mr. Silverglate’s response. In other words, some people (rightly or wrongly, rationally or irrationally) didn’t like some of his free expression and responded with their own free expression. If there have been other consequences, he hasn’t mentioned them.
The two professors (Harvey Silverglate and Randall Kennedy) then took to the internet to bemoan this sordid state of affairs, pulling a “woe is me, the cancelled academic” because students walked out on Silverglate. As White notes, they don’t even seem to acknowledge the student’s expressive rights, but rather focus solely on their own fragile egos.
One of those things is not like the other. Walking out isn’t shouting down or blocking. Moreover, Mr. Silverglate and Prof. Kennedy apparently believe that dropping the n-word is acceptable but walking out on Mr. Silverglate for dropping it is not “acceptable.” They seem to posit a known and absolute standard of decorum under which one is proper and the other just isn’t. They do not seem to acknowledge that some people may be as passionate about the n-word being inappropriate at school as they are passionate that it’s proper, or that people who feel that way have a legitimate interest in expressing their dissent. They don’t seem to recognize the irony of decrying incivility in the context of a fundamental dispute over what’s civil. Nor do they consider that even if we agree that the n-word can be appropriate at school, that people might disagree about whether a particular use is pedagogy or mere provocation, education or edgelordism. One senses that the authors believe their role is to dispense wisdom and the role of the students of Milton Academy is to sit there and take it.
In turn, this reminds me of a whining screed in the NY Times that highlights the other side of this. NYT opinion columnist Pamela Paul has been writing a bunch of slightly weird columns, including one back in July that was, ostensibly, about how some publishers are getting scared away from publishing books, because they fear social media backlash. The piece does make some half-hearted “both sides” arguments in highlighting Republicans actually looking to ban books, but mostly focuses on “the left” speaking up (i.e., presenting their own speech) to try to explain why some books shouldn’t be published at all.
You can understand why the publishing world gets nervous. Consider what has happened to books that have gotten on the wrong side of illiberal scolds. On Goodreads, for example, vicious campaigns have circulated against authors for inadvertent offenses in novels that haven’t even been published yet. Sometimes the outcry doesn’t take place until after a book is in stores. Last year, a bunny in a children’s picture book got soot on his face by sticking his head into an oven to clean it — and the book was deemed racially insensitive by a single blogger. It was reprinted with the illustration redrawn. All this after the book received rave reviews and a New York Times/New York Public Library Best Illustrated Children’s Book Award.
And again, yes, you can find examples that feel unfair, but are they truly up there as “censorship,” as Paul’s article claims?
Yet, as Julian Sanchez rightly notes, there’s a somewhat throwaway line in Paul’s piece that inadvertently tosses out her entire thesis.
In case you’re unable to see it, the part that Sanchez quotes from Paul’s piece reads:
It is certainly true that not every book deserves to be published. But those decisions should be based on the quality of a book as judged by editors and publishers, not in response to a threatened, perceived or real political litmus test. The heart of publishing lies in taking risks, not avoiding them.
But, as Sanchez explains in retort:
Here’s where it breaks down most clearly, I think. Because once you make this acknowledgement, you’re haggling price, and it’s obscure why an editor’s judgment should only take one kind of market reaction—expected demand—into consideration.
And this, to me, gets at the root of all of these debates. It’s easy to scream cancel culture, or censorship, or the idea that people are resistant to ideas they disagree with (which is not, actually, supported by the data). But many of these things turn on the actual marketplace of ideas. You or I might disagree with where things came out in the end, but in many of these cases, it does appear that editors, or publishers, or schools, or whoever else is being accused of “bowing to the mob” are actually paying attention to what that “marketplace” is saying. And that includes understanding how the market might respond to the publication of a book, or having a speaker who is unwilling or unable to take into account listener’s views, or whatever else the issue may be.
Again, no one is saying that this always works out fairly. It doesn’t. Mobs can go off the rails, and treat people unfairly. That’s always been the case. And some organizations may overreact to a mob, when they should stand up and push back on them. But, almost all of this actually is speech itself.
It’s messy. It’s not always accurate, but it’s how speech happens. To whine about “cancel culture” seems to be mostly missing the point. It seems a lot more like attempts to be able to speak up without consequence, and to not have to face the reactions to your own speech with expression from others.
In the first article we discussed above, Serwer notes that it’s not always easy to see where the line is. And that’s true. But if we’re going to support the “culture of free speech,” it would certainly help if people stopped treating mere offense as an attempt to “cancel,” and recognized the vast differences between state attempts to silence speech and the expressive wishes of others.
Filed Under: cancel culture, censorship, culture of free speech, free speech, marketplace of ideas
Comments on “There Are Real Threats To Free Speech Everywhere. Cancel Culture Is Far Down The List”
A bit of a tl;dr per my POV
Some people aren’t afraid of being “cancelled”, so much as they’re afraid of one of three things:
Of the three, only the third is something to truly fear, as the overzealous can easily move from the realm of speech to the realm of illegal actions. (To wit: Look at all the anti-trans supporting the bomb threats against children’s hospitals.)
Nope, can't agree
If I post an article on my blog and people make ahem heated replies in the comments, that’s a consequence of free speech.
If I post an article on my blog and people pressure my employer to fire me because of it, that’s cancel culture.
Obviously there are people conflating the former with the latter — the article references examples — but the vast majority of what I’ve seen referred to as cancel culture are the latter. The victims are numerous and mostly unknown, as far from every case makes it into the media or “goes viral”. Coercion is an unacceptable response to speech.
Re:
No, that’s still speech—and your employer has every right to ignore it should they so choose. Critics and assholes demanding a thing be done doesn’t mean the thing will be done; if that were true, the U.S. government would be executing queer people at the behest of power conservative Christian preachers.
Re: Re:
Whoops. Replace that with this:
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Re: Re:
In many states, like California it would be illegal for the employer to fire the employee for their lawful conduct outside of company on their time.
I’m sure you believe that such “lawful conduct” laws are fascist.
Re: Re: Re:
If an employer that faces a negative reputation only because one of their employees was a complete shithead outside of work, what is that employer supposed to do—accept that their business will suffer and keep the shithead on the payroll?
Yes, a government mandate to enforce employment in that situation does seem a bit fascist to me. If you think it’s not, I’d love to know why.
Re: Re: Re: News at 11
OH look Chodaboi has a stupid opinion.
Re: Re: Re:
“I’m sure you believe…”
Projection is a hell of a drug Chipolata.
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Re: Re: Re:2
And the simp agreed he thinks lawful conduct laws a “fascist”
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Re: Re: Re:3
simp deez nuts
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Re: Re: Re:4 Not My Type
Dont think you are my type and I’m a top.
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Re: Re: Re:5
Rekt
Re: Re: Nope.
Pressuring an employer to fire someone is not speech, it is coercion. Those doing so are attempting to destroy the speaker’s livelihood, which has considerable and obvious negative consequences. That they may not get what they want does not mean they are permitted to try.
Re: Re: Re:
It’s also legal. I can threaten to boycott a business if they don’t fire someone who works there for saying something I disagree with. Whether that business listens—or cares about losing my business—is on them.
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Re: Re: Re:2 Tortious Interference
“It’s also legal.”
Depending on the arrangement between employer and employee it can be torturous interference. Not that you would know that. You live in your parents basement so you just think free speech this free speech that.
Re: Re: Re:3
Next thing we know, you will be complaining that someone informing you that you are an arsehole, which you are, is interfering with your free speech rights.
Re: Re: Re:3
Almost every company have a clause in the employee contract that says that if an employee damages their reputation they can be fired for cause, which isn’t a breach of contract and that is never tortious interference.
Re: Re: Re:3
Nope.
Contract Law says it’s legal.
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Re: Re: Re:4
“Nope.
Contract Law says it’s legal.”
“Tortious interference, a common law economic tort, occurs when one party interferes with the contracts or relationships of another party with the intent of causing economic harm.” FindLaw
That is pretty much what you morons are talking about.
Re: Re: Re:5
It’s always amazing how you come up with faulty theories how the law “should work”, because if it worked as you suggest every ambulance chaser would have their appointment calendar filled for years to come.
So let me enlighten you once again to something you probably don’t understand, tortious interference between an employer and employee means that a third party through their actions caused one of the two parties to breach the employee contract.
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Re: Re: Re:6
” two parties to breach the employee contract”
This entire question is about pressuring an employer to fire an employee. Depending on how the contract is written that could very well break the contract or can you not read you fucking moron.
“Depending on the arrangement between employer and employee it can be torturous interference.”
Like I said it all depends on the wording.
That said. No you fucking idiot for there to be tortious interference there doesn’t need to be a broken contract there just needs to be damages.
Even if ultimately my employer did not break the contract, if I as an employee end up having to hire council because of your interference I can sue your fucking ass.
This is the real world not Mike’s ‘but muh free speech’ fantasy land.
Re: Re: Re:7
It’s not my problem that you don’t understand the specifics so I’ll once again enlighten you: Either the contract have stipulations covering how and why an employee can be terminated as long as the employer follows those regardless of the reason there can be no tortious interference, or, the employee are fired without cause which breaks the contract. There is no real third alternative.
g with such a situation.
If the contract isn’t broken, how can there be damages if the company didn’t do anything wrong?
Oh, nobody is stopping you from suing. There have seen numerous idiots who tried that, all they got was a fucking huge bill from the lawyers and a dunce hat.
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Re: Re: Re:8
“If the contract isn’t broken, how can there be damages if the company didn’t do anything wrong?”
The damages are on you. We are talking about tortious interference. You, a third party, attempting to interfere with the contract between two other parties. Why are you so fucking dumb. If the employee you tried to get fired has to hire an attorney and go through arbitration that’s damages you caused you fucking moron. The employee who contract you attempted to interfere in can sue you for the cost of the arbitration. Fuck you are stupid.
Time and time again Mike’s Misfits prove that they are just a bunch of Man Children living with their parents.
Re: Re: Re:9
Making an employer aware of their employee’s actions isn’t an improper or wrongful act. An intentionally false claim would be wrongful though.
Therefore, even if the employer breached contract (however it was worded) and fired the employee, a tortious interference claim would fail. A breach of contract claim against the employer might still succeed, however.
Under your logic, if I posted an online review saying anything about a cashier at a fast food restaurant and the cashier was fired because of my review, then “depending on the arrangement” I would be liable for tortious interference. Your argument is ridiculous.
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Re: Re: Re:10 Not What it Says
“An intentionally false claim would be wrongful though.”
Not required that the claim be false. All that matters is how the contract is written. If you are trying to get the employee fired for something outside of the bounds of the contract true or not that is a tort.
Re: Re: Re:11
Incorrect. as point 3 of my above-quoted statement says, it must be shown that I acted intentionally and improperly. Showing that I acted intentionally would probably be pretty easy – I’ll grant that. So that leaves the question of “Were my actions improper?”
Researching my response led me to a Utah case where the Court said “we conclude that in the absence of any improper means, an improper purpose is not grounds for tortious interference liability. ” If you read some of that decision, the Court even admits that it tried to come up with justification for improper purpose liability (you could argue that trying to get you fired for reasons unrelated to the job itself was an ‘improper purpose’), but in the end it was unable to do so.
In other words, it doesn’t matter if I “interfere with your contract”/”try to get you fired” if my actions in doing so don’t cross any relevant legal lines. And it would seem that revealing truthful information doesn’t cross any relevant legal lines.
Re: Re: Re:9
I was not aware that your wilful ignorance and sucking of NeoNazi dick went so far as to not understand what that meant.
Re: Re: Re:9
You should really read up on what the above actually entails, perhaps ask a lawyer too so he can explain it to you in very small words.
Some examples:
* You complain to a restaurant owner that you had slow service and the waiter was snippy when you complain about it, this results in the waiter being fired – does this count as tortious interference?
* You rent a car, when you go and pick it up you find it hasn’t been cleaned and there’s trash laying everywhere. You complain to the rental company and the employee who was supposed to clean the car is fired – does this count as tortious interference?
* You see a social media post spewing hate and racial slurs from someone who just a bit earlier made a post about where he works, informing his employer about this and causing him to be fired – does this count as tortious interference?
I can keep giving examples where someone tells a company about something that results in an employee getting fired, but it’s never tortious interference because ultimately it is the company who decides what to do with a complaint regarding an employee.
So lets have some examples of what is actually said about tortious interference:
* Tortious interference with a contract occurs when someone improperly induces a breach of contract between you and a third party.
* Tortious interference with contract arises when a defendant intentionally convinces or causes a third party to breach its contract with the plaintiff, which results in damages to the plaintiff.
* Tortious interference with a contract occurs when a party improperly disrupts a contractual relationship between other parties. A business has a claim for tortious interference with contract when it can show: (1) the existence of a valid contract; (2) the defendant’s knowledge of that contract; (3) that the defendant intentionally caused a breach of that contract without justification; and (4) resulting harm.
Funny how they all mentions breach of contract..
There are of course something called improper conduct in tort law, but telling a company that you won’t do business with them until they fire an employee you don’t like isn’t improper conduct.
As usual, you haven’t bothered to actually learn how something works and instead made up your own simplified meaning of it so you can apply it to situations it has no bearing on.
Re: Re: Re:10
“Some examples:
* You complain to a restaurant owner that you had slow service and the waiter was snippy when you complain about it, this results in the waiter being fired – does this count as tortious interference?
* You rent a car, when you go and pick it up you find it hasn’t been cleaned and there’s trash laying everywhere. You complain to the rental company and the employee who was supposed to clean the car is fired – does this count as tortious interference?
* You see a social media post spewing hate and racial slurs from someone who just a bit earlier made a post about where he works, informing his employer about this and causing him to be fired – does this count as tortious interference?”
“I can keep giving examples”
Like I said you can make up all the examples you want. It all depends on the nature of the employment, if there is a contract, what the wording of the contract is.
Like all of Mike’s Misfits you speak in absolutes.
“You see a social media post spewing hate and racial slurs”
This is a good example. If you are in a state with a lawful conduct law as part of its labor law then it would violate the contract and you would have committed a civil tort.
Re: Re: Re:3
… said nobody who posseses or has ever demonstrated any understanding of law (or literacy), ever.
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Re: Re: Re:4
Like you have a fucking clue.
Re: Re: Re:5
Do you have a rebuttal argument, or do you have more projection meant to hide your own inadequacies?
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Re: Re: Re:6
“… said nobody who posseses or has ever demonstrated any understanding of law (or literacy), ever.”
Is not an argument you fucking dipshit.
Re: Re: Re:7
Neither is calling me a dipshit.
Re: Re: Re:7
And you can’t even argue without going every 3 sentences into insults, ad hominems, disinformation and threats of rape.
You are, at best, a bully.
Re: Re: Re:7
So your answer to Stephen’s question is the latter, then.
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Re: Re: Re:8
I was responding to you not Stephen you fucking dipshit!
Re: Re: Re:9
Your projection meant to hide your inadequacy proves otherwise.
Re: Re: Re:9
Hey Charizard you manage to make it a whole day before you threatened to rape someone yet?
Re: Re: Re:5
Yes, we actually do.
Unlike you, who is so wilfully ignorant that you don’t even know about how the courts work.
Yes, the courts do come in STATE and FEDERAL flavors. And the STATE COURTS are lower than the FEDERAL COURTS. Which is why plaintiffs and defendants can appeal to the FEDERAL COURTS if the STATE COURTS do not deliver a satisfactory ruling.
Re: Re: Re:6
No, that’s not how it works. You can appeal federal court decisions from district to appeals to the Supreme Court, and you can appeal state court decisions from the lower court to a state court of appeals to the state Supreme Court to the US Supreme Court, but neither the federal district courts nor the federal courts of appeals can hear appeals from state courts. Additionally, when it comes to interpreting state laws and state constitutions, federal courts generally defer to the relevant state supreme court on those questions.
Re: Re: Re:7
I stand corrected, then.
Re: Re: Re:
They are, in fact, permitted to try. This is a very odd claim to make.
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Re:
Agree. Cancel culture is about using private actors and private business/market power to enforce censorship the government itself is precluded from doing.
All examples of market power being used for censorship universally show it’s being wielded for left-leaning causes.
Re: Re:
Yes or no: Do you truly believe every example of “market power being used for censorship” has always been led by “left-leaning causes”, such that absolutely no right-wing causes whatsoever have ever called for boycotts of powerful companies or demanded government intervention in the free market?
Re: Re: Re:
I’m not aware of them actually wielding market power. I can list off many instances of left wing censorship wielding market power, but no instances of right wing companies wielding market power to censor.
Amazon(books), Cloudflare(8ch, lolcows), Google(various, parler, gab, etc), Microsoft(parler/gab), Paypal/Stripe(FSU, Gab, etc.)
Individuals arguing for a boycott is not really leveraging market power. But in the few instances I see the right argue for a boycott, it’s generally retaliatory. The abuse of market power for censorship is universally a feature of the left.
Re: Re: Re:2
It literally is.
You must be new here. Lots of the right argue for boycotts of things that express support for gay rights, trans rights, pro-choice positions, etc. I remember them arguing for a boycott of Harry Potter after J.K. Rowling mentioned that she thought Dumbledore was gay.
Re: Re: Re:3
I love the irony in how conservatives would be more likely to support Rowling these days because of how she’s dug her heels into her TERF bullshit.
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Re: Re: Re:4
Indeed. The only solution is to shame and humiliate conservatives out of existence. We can start by calling them child molesters en masse until they cave.
Re: Re: Re:5
That would be counter-productive as it would allow them to just dismiss any criticism, even valid criticism, as just more unfounded accusations. They’re already terrible enough with what they do, no need to make stuff up.
Re: Re: Re:6
We don’t need to make stuff up. Everybody knows that Catholic priests molest the choir boys. Their followers can either bear responsibility for enabling child abuse, or they can join us in toppling their corrupt institutions.
Re: Re: Re:7
Newsflash: not all conservatives are Catholic. Heck, I doubt even a majority of conservatives in the US are Catholic. Even disregarding the fact that not even all Catholic priests molest choir boys or whatever, the fact is that calling all conservatives “child molesters” solely because many (or even all) Catholic priests are (or were) child molesters relies on completely invalid logic.
Re: Re: Re:8
It’s not invalid logic. It is a moral imperative to humiliate anyone who believes in an imaginary sky friend.
Re: Re: Re:9
If that’s the case, then you should also agree that people who believe that Jesus was made up are also open to same derision as people who are followers of Abrahamic religions.
And the Jesus mythers are just as bad, if not more, than the “imaginary sky friend” believers, since the Jesus mythers not only have a terrible understanding of history and the historical process, but also possess the same destructive wilful ignorance as the religionists…
Re: Re: Re:10
No, because atheists are awesome. Atheists are the embodiment of inclusivity, except where people expect us to lower ourselves at the behest of idiots who don’t see the beauty in docking.
Re: Re: Re:11
Not necessarily. Just like not all Christians are bigots, not all atheists are inclusive, let alone “the embodiment of Inclusivity”.
Not all atheists “see the beauty in docking”, y’know.
Re: Re: Re:12
Give them time. True love always wins eventually.
Re: Re: Re:13
Guess what: not everyone gets or wants true love (ever heard of asexual aromantists?), and true love can mean different things to different people.
Furthermore, you could say the same thing about theists; give them time. You have not actually used non-fallacious arguments to support your assertion about humiliating Christians.
Re: Re: Re:14
You would stand with anal vore Rule 34ers smoking weed than stand with a conservative.
Good. All the better for us.
Re: Re: Re:9
Yes it is. The premise (Catholic priests have been known to molest choir boys) doesn’t demonstrate the conclusion (all conservatives are child molesters). Therefore, the argument is invalid.
First, even if that second statement is true, your argument is still invalid. In fact, the second statement is irrelevant to everything else said thus far. We’re talking about two groups: Catholics and conservatives. Catholics aren’t even a majority of Christians, nor are they a majority of conservatives. Additionally, many Christians as well as many non-Christian theists are not conservatives. We’re also discussing whether or not a specific statement about conservatives is true. Whether or not theists ought to be humiliated says nothing about the truthfulness of any of the relevant statements nor about the validity of any arguments. It’s a non sequitur.
Second, on what grounds is it a “moral imperative” to humiliate all theists? Is it on the grounds that Catholic priests are known to have molested choir boys? Because, again, Catholics aren’t the majority of all Christians, let alone all theists. And if it’s for “believ[ing] in an imaginary sky friend”, that also doesn’t follow because it is not necessarily a moral imperative to humiliate everyone who is wrong or delusional. If it’s because conservatives are often bigoted against LGBTQ people, many Christians are not conservative, either, and have no problem with LGBTQ people and granting them equal rights.
Re: Re: Re:10
Our failure to shame the imaginary friend believers and the conservatives got us the Trump administration. Our failure to squash them like the parasitic filth they are led to the destruction of the right to abortion.
You may not have thought it was a moral imperative then, but it sure is now.
Re: Re: Re:11
Again, Not All Christians! That some Christian conservatives participated in an insurrection says nothing about all Christians or all conservatives. Same with abortion. Plenty of Christians are pro-choice. You’re committing the same fallacy used in “Some geese are black, therefore all geese are black.”
You have given no justification for the claim that humiliating all theists, rather than simply some Christians, is a moral imperative, either. At best, you have given a justification for humiliating fundamentalist Christians and nothing more. A moral imperative means that it would be immoral not to, and I fail to see how you get there. You have also failed to explain why the actions of extremists reflect on moderate members of the same group.
Again: it is not a moral imperative to humiliate everyone who is wrong or delusional. This applies even if some of them are also violent or immoral.
Re: Re: Re:12
We do it with Hyman Rosen. We do it to people who refuse to believe someone who looks conventionally feminine is in fact a man, and the same for someone thinks a person who looks conventionally masculine isn’t a woman. We shame them, humiliate them out of the public circle until they carry the flag we do.
Look at your comment histories. Between the person too fabulous to contain and fools too blinded by hate to celebrate lesbian love, where do you think we stand? There is no room for straight white Christians who have unjustly filled their coffers and pushed their narratives at our expense. They complain because they realize the world is tired or tolerating their nonsense, and they now have to grapple with their insecurities from losing their ill-gotten positions.
Re: Re: Re:13
Yeah, because they aren’t just being wrong and delusional; they are also spreading harmful ideas and/or engage in harm themselves. That’s where a moral imperative is at least arguable. Many Christians don’t share those qualities, often being on the same side of this debate as you on the issues of homosexuality and being transgender; some even use their religion to justify that stance.
Also, incidentally, Hymen is an atheist, not a Christian. I’m pretty sure he’s straight, but I know nothing of his race. Regardless, he is an atheist, he is not a straight white Christian, yet he is still a transphobe. Remember what you said about atheists being “the personification of inclusivity”? Yeah, well, Hymen is clearly evidence that that’s not the case.
You are apparently on a side that believes that everyone should participate in same-sex love (even if they don’t wish to) and that all Christians feel the same way about issues like abortion or LGBTQ. I oppose that just as much as I oppose “fools too blinded by hate to celebrate lesbian love”, though I personally encounter the latter a lot more often.
I agree, but you’re assuming that all straight white Christians have done this, which is simply not the case.
One of the proudest moments I had in my church was when a congregation full of only straight white Christians (with some Asians)—many of whom are pretty conservative—voted almost unanimously to have a happily married gay man as our pastor (there was only one “no” vote, and he had been absent for over a year beforehand and only showed up to cast that vote). The previous pastor had also been quite vocal on the issue of homosexuality, endorsing it as another form of love just as valid as traditional partnerships.
I can agree that many straight white Christians are bigots and fools who should be called out as such, and I agree that you have the right and reasonable motive to call theists beyond that specific category fools for their belief in a god(s). Where I draw the line is lumping all straight white Christians into one basket like you do and claiming (as you do) that they should all be humiliated because some of them are bigots and fools.
Again, you are describing a subset of Christians, and not even a particularly large one (though larger than I’d prefer, but then I’d prefer the number to be essentially 0). None of this explains why it is a moral imperative to humiliate all theists and not just the subset of Christians (and other theists) who are actually a problem.
Once again, it is not a moral imperative to humiliate everyone who is wrong or delusional. It may be reasonable, understandable, or justifiable to do so, and there are some for whom you could argue there is a moral imperative to humiliate because they try to force their wrong beliefs and/or delusions on others in a harmful way; however, you have not limited your assertion that way at all.
Re: Re: Re:14
So we humiliate him until he caves. This doesn’t jeopardize my position at all, even more so considering that everyone dogpiles him, and deservedly so.
The best case scenario this describes is that I am a vocal minority and therefore do not pose any form of serious threat. Even then, it is to people who richly deserve it.
Your church is enlightened enough to see the truth. And yet you could be doing so much more. You could have more sexual minorities in your midst, in positions of leadership, to lead your congregation into a new era of true love, not one primarily populated by breeders.
The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing. Most Christians are clearly not interested or invested in shaming the bigots in their midst, such as the lone person in your example. He should have been rendered a pariah, harangued until he saw the light.
If theists will not police themselves, it behooves the rest of us to jolt them into action. The alternative is more of Hyman Rosen, or four more years of Trump.
The only thing necessary for straight white assholes to win is for women, non-binary people, yaoi fanfiction writers, futanari 3D animators, cuckoldry communities, NAMBLA members, lesbian dominatrixes, and all the other colors and alphabets of the wonderfully, fabulously diverse spectrum of love to do nothing. Until straight white men are toppled from their positions of power, we are all at risk.
Re: Re: Re:6
You say that like they don’t already dismiss all criticism.
Criticism alone will not remove them from their positions of privilege. Nothing short of active undermining will do to swing the pendulum towards the people who actually deserve them: gender and sexual minorities.
We did it with Stonewall, we’ll do it again.
Re: Re: Re:5
Credibly a pedophile Roy Moore got nearly 50% of the vote. Can’t shame those who lack any grasp of the concept.
Re: Re: Re:6
Then we shame those who support them, or are tangentially related to them. Bury them and leave no stone unturned.
Re: Re: Re:7
And then you get Jan 6.
I’d say these people and their supporters, enablers and voters are beyond any sort of legal means to kick them off.
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Re: Re: Re:8
Sexual minorities have had to put up with straight people for far too long. Who’s going to call a lesbian, a gay, a transgender person a bigot? Eventually, we’re going to reach boiling point. And then love will win.
Re: Re: Re:9
shut up, you right-wing hack
Re: Re: Re:10
Blame the right-wing hack, yes. Not me.
Re: Re: Re:9
Aren’t you the subtle one.
Might as well be honest and tell me what you really wanna do.
Re: Re: Re:9
I mean, lots of rightwingers do (albeit usually wrongly so), and even if you are homosexual and/or transgender, I would call you a bigot since you said this clearly bigoted statement:
Like, I’m all for equal rights for LGBTQ+ people and fighting against homophobia, biphobia, and transphobia, but you’re going too far in the other direction towards heterophobia.
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Re: Re: Re:10
Heterophobia doesn’t exist. Nobody can ever be bigoted towards someone straight. It’s biologically impossible.
Try posting on tumblr or imgur whether heterophobia is possible. It’s simply not a thing.
Re: Re: Re:11
tumblr? You can’t be serious. Like I said 21st century tech lets the village idiots coalesce to the point that they dont realize they are still just the village idiot.
Re: Re: Re:12
Man, when Chozen’s the one calling you an idiot and sexual deviant…
Re: Re: Re:13
… it means he’s projecting again.
Re: Re: Re:11
You appear to be living proof that it does. It is nowhere near as prevalent as homophobia, nor is it as big of a problem in general (due in part to its rarity), but it does (apparently) exist. Admittedly, I had no prior experience with anyone else who was actually heterophobic, only trolls pretending to be, but I assumed there likely were at least a few somewhere in the world solely based on the law of large numbers and my understanding of human nature.
But please, do explain, preferably with citations to peer-reviewed studies by relevant experts, how heterophobia is “biologically impossible”. This ought to be interesting.
Re: Re: Re:11
My personal experience with tumblr or Imgur is practically nonexistent, but I’m pretty sure that you can’t figure out if something is a thing solely by posting on those sites about whether it is possible. That strikes me as an incredibly unreliable way to get information about anything.
Re: Re: Re:12
You’d might as well ask me to find a peer-reviewed study that says unicorns don’t exist. Again, it’s simply not possible for heterophobia to exist. If you won’t believe me, believe Stephen T. Stone. He insists that I’m a right-wing troll. Therefore my supposed heterophobic identity doesn’t exist. It’s not wrong to call out straight people in the same way it’s not wrong to call out Nazis. Punch up, not down. Either way, anger is stoked at straight white people.
Try it for yourself, then. Suggest to these communities that heterophobia exists, and see what responses you get.
Nobody who is progressive believes that heterophobia exists. It’s a lie dreamt up by overprivileged straight white theist males who realize that their ironclad grip on power is coming to an end.
Re: Re: Re:13
I’m not asking you to prove that it does exist. I’m asking you to prove that it’s biologically impossible. It is biologically possible for unicorns to exist; they just don’t. Likewise, whether or not heterophobia does exist, biological impossibility is another story.
What mechanism makes it so that heterophobia is biologically impossible? If you can’t provide evidence that demonstrates a mechanism that prevents heterophobia from existing, then the default assumption is that possibility or impossibility is unknown, with possibility being more likely.
You made the claim that heterophobia is impossible; therefore, you have the burden of proof. I can prove that a 90-foot-tall human is impossible, or that massive objects capable of moving slower and faster than the speed of light in a vacuum is impossible. When something is biologically or scientifically impossible, it can still be possible to demonstrate impossibility.
Again, at best, that demonstrates that Stephen believes that heterophobia does not exist, not that he believes it is impossible for heterophobia to exist.
Stephen is far more likely than I to assume someone is a troll or liar. I generally prefer to give the benefit of the doubt. Stephen is more likely to assume someone is pretending to be a leftwing extremist than I am.
Plus, it’s not really a good point for you. Basically, your options between us are:
Either way, what you’re saying is heterophobic. Whether or not you genuinely believe what you say doesn’t change whether or not the things you are saying are heterophobic. Statements can be heterophobic even if people cannot.
See? This is a heterophobic statement. If you genuinely believe that, that would make you a heterophobe. If you don’t, you’re a troll pretending to be a heterophobe.
Nazism is a racist ideology by design. Being straight is not an ideology at all. The two aren’t comparable.
I oppose punching up or down if the target doesn’t deserve it. I oppose punching down more strongly, but I don’t tolerate punching up indiscriminately, either.
The difference is that, when punching up indiscriminately, you’re also stoking anger against gay people.
To what end? It doesn’t matter what responses I get because that is not a reliable way to get information on literally anything at all. It wouldn’t even get me reliable information about the communities themselves because trolls exist. That’s not how you learn anything, period.
I am not wasting time gathering info in a way that I know will get me unreliable results.
No, it’s a real term for something that may or may not exist that has been misused by overprivileged straight people (male and female, white and nonwhite, theist and atheist) who either realize that their ironclad grip on power is coming to an end or are oversensitive to being called out for their bigotry.
Also, I’m not asserting that heterophobia among people or genuinely held ideas definitely exists. I’m stating that what you are saying is heterophobic, which would make you a heterophobe if you genuinely believe what you’re saying, which in turn would mean that heterophobia does, in fact, exist. In other words, whether heterophobia exists as something genuinely held depends on whether or not you believe what you’re saying. I cannot know for sure what is in your head, and I prefer not to make assumptions about that without a lot more evidence than I have available, so I’m not coming to a firm conclusion either way about the actual existence of genuine (as opposed to feigned) heterophobia.
I’m also saying that I’m unconvinced that heterophobia is biologically impossible. That would require something that prevents heterophobia from existing through biological processes, and I have no reason to believe that there is. Again, even if it’s nonexistent doesn’t necessarily mean it’s impossible. You have the burden of proof on that claim.
Both of these are not the same as asserting that heterophobia does exist as something people genuinely believe. The first one is that what you said is heterophobic, and you can say heterophobic things without being a heterophobe if you are a troll. The second is simply me not accepting your claim about heterophobia being impossible (not just nonexistent) without evidence.
Re: Re: Re:5
You calling people “child molesters” without proof is no better than the kinds of conservatives you rail against spending a week doing heinous anti-queer shit like helping Nazis protest a drag bingo event, calling in bomb threats to libraries over queer literature, and destroying the windows of a queer-friendly community center.
You talk of shame, but you lack any yourself. You are not the hero of a grand war. You’re not even an assistant (to the) grand hero. You’re one lone dipshit who either wants to troll everyone here by acting like what they think a radical queer leftist sounds like or sincerely believes the Primal Theory should be the absolute first (and only) resort instead of the absolute last.
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Re: Re: Re:6
I am no hero, nor do I expect to be one, but if I stoke more disgust towards the bigots forcing us to hide our true selves and natures, then my work has been a success. It continues until all the flags of every “freak” community flies strong and proud over the false legacy of our oppressors.
Re: Re: Re:7
Not wanting to be a hero is fine.
Wanting to be a queer terrorist though, is not fine. Especially when one tries to use “love” as an euphemism for violence.
At that point, you might as well take off the mask.
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Re: Re: Re:8
What lies behind the mask are communities of furries, cuckoldry advocates, BNWO supporters, femboy societies, anal vore animators, and other fringe members of society who have been repressed for their expressions of love. We will become mainstream. There’s no holding us back.
Re: Re: Re:7
Such disgust should be based solely on accurate (or at least reasonably inferred and not disproven) assertions. Calling all (or even most) conservatives “child molesters” is not such an assertion, especially given that your only stated evidence of this is that Catholic priests have been known to molest children in their church (such as choir boys), and it is very much not the case that most conservatives are Catholic at all, let alone Catholic priests specifically, and even then, it’s not the case that all Catholic priests have molested children.
Right now, what you are doing is no better than the conservative bigots who are trying to ban any books or talks about sexual orientation and/or gender identity, claiming that they are trying to stop grooming. You’re also no better than those who attacked gay people by claiming that they’re all pedophiles. The ends do not justify the means, and in this case, your means are also counterproductive towards your proclaimed ends.
There are already plenty of valid reasons to be disgusted with conservatives, homophobes, biphobes, and transphobes. We don’t need to resort to claims that have no rational basis in reality like that.
Re: Re: Re:8
Between the assertion that a gay is likely to be a groomer, and the assertion that a priest is likely to be a molester, which would you rather believe?
I rest my case.
Re: Re: Re:2
Big Oil: Clamped down on actual data indicating that global warming was a thing… as indicated by their own research, and continues to pour money into global warming denial bushit.
Koch Industries: Too fucking many to mention.
News Corp: Continues to peddle Republican Nonsense, playing as a sort of support to enable a shitton on Republican idiocy.
Big Tobbacco: Tried to clamp down on smoking being bad until they lost a big lawsuit.
The AMERICAN GOVERNMENT: Oh wait, what’s this about THE HOUSE COMMITTE FOR UNAMERICAN ACTIVITIES?
Agribusiness: Continues to fund propaganda against PETA, not that PETA needs such a corrupt industry against them.
Cancel Culture WAS invented by the right, and the right continues to use the market to censor certain opinions.
Re: Re: Re:2
Your lists contains exactly zero instances of non-halluconatory corporate censorship.
Re: Re: Re:3
I’m really curious how Microsoft could be considered to have “censored” Parler or Gab. What platform were they removed from that Microsoft controls?
Re: Re:
.. said nobody mentally competent, ever.
Re: Re:
“Cancel culture is about using private actors and private business/market power to enforce censorship the government itself is precluded from doing.”
That’s a really complicated way of saying you don;t like it when the “Free Market” negatively effects things you like.
Re:
You are wrong. You’ve still made the speech, and your freedom of speech has not been reduced even a little.
The fact that that speech has consequences is irrelevant.
Blogging is the reason there is no such thing as cancel culture. Literally anyone can set up a website in 30 minutes and spend the rest of their lives saying whatever they want. Will there be consequences? Maybe.
But as the WHOLE FUCKING POINT OF THIS ARTICLE BRINGS HOME, there have always been consequences for free speech. Yes, including job loss.
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Re: Re: Nope.
“You can say whatever you want, but you may find yourself ostracized from society, unable to find work, broke, homeless and starving” is not by any stretch of the imagination “freedom of speech”. Only unpopular speech requires protection; if the only protected speech is that which toes the party line, your society does not support free speech.
Re: Re: Re:
Except it is. Freedom of speech doesn’t include freedom from consequences. If the consequences of saying something stupid include people and private entities no longer wanting to associate with you, that’s some tough fuckin’ shit.
Re: Re: Re: Do I really have to post that XKCD comic again?
““You can say whatever you want, but you may find yourself ostracized from society, unable to find work, broke, homeless and starving” is not by any stretch of the imagination “freedom of speech”.
That is precisely the definition of Freedom of Speech, homeboy. It’s freedom from Government consequences, not freedom from the consequences of your own actions.
Re: Re: Re:
But is it the government organizing that bullshit?
Here in Singapore, people have been fired from their jobs, harassed by “rogue government agents” and ideological footsoldiers, and even arrested for criticizing the government. And the organizer of those movements? The government.
Show me an example in America since the fall of the Berlin Wall that the GOVERNMENT was responsible for those firings and whatnot.
Re: Re: Re:
Yes or no: Are private citizens acting on behalf of the government when they are doing so?
If so, that’s illegal. If not, it’s speech if it is factual. If not, it’s slander.
Re: Re: Re:2
It’s also speech if it’s pure opinion or opinion based on disclosed facts, or if the speaker reasonably believed it to be factual.
Re: Re: Re:
Tell me you’re a straight, white man without telling me you’re a straight, white man…
You want to live in this fantastical 100% consequence-free world because you’ve likely never experienced the harm would be caused if anybody could say anything they wanted at any time without receiving any pushback.
Forget about restrictions on government actions; societies police themselves by accepting some behaviors and rejecting others. If more people in society decide that, for example, they don’t like racist, homophobic, xenophobic or bullying speech, then there will likely be negative consequences for those that engage in it. This is pretty basic human nature.
Re: Re: Re:2
Or, to put it simply…
Don’t be an asshole, don’t be creepy, and most of all, treat everyone like a human fucking being.
Re:
“We don’t want to be associated with this chucklefuck” is your employer’s Free speech.
Back in the old days, they might drag you out of your house and lynch you.
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I think there are lots of examples of censorship. Paypal, Stripe, Amazon, Microsoft, Google, have all been proven to engage in political censorship. Cutting off people’s bank accounts or servers isn’t “censure” it’s cancellation.
Ignoring these actors shows you are maliciously misdirecting people, not surprising when Google is a main funder of techdirt, but don’t try to sell your shilling as legitimate concern.
Re:
Do me a favor, would you?
Define “cancellation” in this context—and do it without using the word “consequences” or any synonym thereof.
Re: Re:
Cancellation is any act carried out with the intent of causing censorship or injury to another as retaliation for speech, or carried out for the purpose of censorship by intimidation.
Censure is a verbal/written response, it is not accompanied by things like cutting off people’s bank accounts, cancelling contracts, refusing business service, shutting down servers, or the like.
Cancellation is acceptable when an editorial company for example a TV station cancels a host that disaligns with their message. But it should not be practiced by fintech or infrastructure companies. Social media imo is a bit of a grey area. a
Re: Re: Re:
Yes or no: Should Cloudflare have been forced by law to continue serving Kiwifarms?
Re: Re: Re:2
In my opinion, yes, absolutely. Kiwifarms is a terrible website full of garbage, in my opinion. But I don’t believe I, (or Cloudflare) should get to decide something is garbage that should be eliminated in retaliation for their speech. That is cancellation and should be prohibited by law except when the “cancellation” is constitutionally protected editorial discretion or moderation that occurs at the platform (e.g. twitter, facebook) level or higher (NOT the IaaS/SaaS level, that should be a red line where cancellation is regulated/prohibited).
Re: Re: Re:3
Cloudflare isn’t a public utility. For what reason should it not have the right to decide whether it will associate with a given website based on the speech of that website?
How is Cloudflare deciding to terminate Kiwifarms as a customer based on the speech found at Kiwifarms not a form of editorial discretion or moderation?
In short: For what reason should the government mandate that Cloudflare do business with Kiwifarms, Stormfront, and 8chan—three high-profile shitpits that Cloudflare chose to stop protecting?
Re: Re: Re:4
Because I think infrastructure providers (like Cloudflare) should be regulated like utilities.
Second, I don’t support a general right to drop customers because you dislike them.
Cloudflare’s anti-dos service should be regulated as a common carrier service.
The government should take away the power of companies like cloudflare to engage in censorship.
I don’t think that renting servers or not is “editorial discretion”. Editorial discretion involves republishing or not. A private mail carrier refusing to send your mail because they don’t like your politics is a form of discrimination, not editorial discretion.
Editorial discretion is not a blanket license to discriminate or refuse business with someone because you disagree with their speech. It permits you only to refuse to speak. I don’t view DDoS protection as speech.
Freedom of association makes some level of sense when applied to individuals but not to large corporations, particularly when they are violating other rights which the government has a compelling interest in protecting. I am not aware of the freedom of association being extended to corporations. Can a business refuse to associate with black customers? The answer to that I think was no.
Re: Re: Re:5
I’d love to know how far up and down the Internet infrastructure ladder your belief goes. Do you think a website hosting company is a utility, and should therefore be legally barred from refusing to host any kind of legally protected speech?
For what reason?
For what reason?
A hosting provider should—and does—have every right to decide what kinds of speech it will and won’t host/associate with. That decision is either editorial discretion or moderation, depending on which term one feels is more appropriate.
It…kind of is, unless you want to argue that social media service, hosting providers, and companies like Cloudflare should all be unable to decide what speech it will and won’t host/associate with.
Well, it is. And even if it isn’t extended to the corporation as an entity, it’s still extended to the people who own and operate the corporation.
If that business is privately owned and not open to the general public? Generally, yes. As I mentioned in another comments section, Augusta National Golf Club didn’t invite a Black man to join until nearly 60 years after the opening of the club; because the club was (and still is) an invite-only private insititution that doesn’t open its doors to the public, it was legally allowed to not invite Black people into the club.
But if that business is a public accomodation, such as a grocery store or a hotel? No, it can’t deny service based on a customer’s race. A business that opens its doors to the general public doesn’t get to decide who makes up the general public.
Re: Re: Re:5 Why do they always hate the First Amendment?
“Because I think infrastructure providers (like Cloudflare) should be regulated like utilities.”
You think the same about U-store it warehouses? Cause them Cloudboys are pretty much just storing your data and letting people access it whom you decide to have access.
“Second, I don’t support a general right to drop customers because you dislike them.”
Why do you hate the First Amendment?
Re: Re: Re:5
Holy fucking shit!
I didn’t know that Denial of Service attacks, which are considered CRIMINAL ACTS, were so commonplace that everyone NEEDS them to do things like check emails and watch important advisories on the current pandemic!
To get get load balancing and DDoS protections to be common carrier, you’d need to prove that these things are necessary for people to function.
You need a phone to get a job, interact with people and, I dunno, in very extreme cases, get information from the government on what the seven fucks is going on if we’re reduced to freaking SMS.
You need water to survive. Food too.
And I’m pretty sure a DDoS attack isn’t so widespread that I’d be physically affected by it! Hell, if DDoS attacks become so frequent that we need DDoS protections, then you might have a point.
But the fucking fact is, DDoS attacks are less common than you think, and botnets are a FINITE RESOURCE.
Re: Re: Re:3
Cloudfare did not decide KiWifarms should be eliminated, it just told them to go and find a replacement for Cloudfare services. Cloudfare does not have the power to throw somebody off of the Internet as it is not the only hosting and CDN service available.
Re: Re: Re:2
Yes or No: should a power company be forced to give you service if they don’t like your politics?
How is that any different than Cloudfare? They both offer backbone-type service to the general public.
The “they can go find another hosting service” trope doesn’t work here, because solar, wind, and generator energy are available to everyone.
Re: Re: Re:3
Yes. The power company is a public utility…
…and Cloudflare is not.
Re: Re: Re:4
Most power companies aren’t publicly owned and operated, they’re private entities, just like Cloudfare.
You still haven’t made any distinction between the two that’s meaningful; in fact, you’ve relied on a false premise that power companies are built, maintained, and operated by government entities.
Re: Re: Re:5
Irrelevant. Power companies are public utilities. What truly essential goods/services does Cloudflare offer, such that it qualifies as a public utility instead of a privately owned service provider?
Maybe you should do some reading on what a public utility actually is.
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Re: Re: Re:6
“Irrelevant. Power companies are public utilities.”
They are public utilities because the law made them such. Yet you insist that state has no power to make such laws apply to BigTech.
Re: Re: Re:7
If the state wants to turn an ISP into a public utility, hey, so be it. But trying to turn Twitter into one is ridiculous because, as the existence of literally every other form of interpersonal online communication proves, Twitter isn’t an essential utility.
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Re: Re: Re:8
Then how in Halleck was MMN regulated. Many utilities don’t actually own the infrastructure they use.
Re: Re: Re:9
A local TV station on cable TV is not a social media site on the Internet.
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Re: Re: Re:10 Irrelevant
Irrelevant, does the state have the power or not. If the State of New York can regulate a cable TV provider that doesn’t own a single cable it uses it can regulate social media.
Re: Re: Re:11
You are aware that what it regulated was essentially the use of bandwidth on a public access system, right?
I doubt you understand why that matters since you have opted to discard factual reality.
Re: Re: Re:11
What the CA government can regulate is…
the infrastructure that brings cable TV to the house. Or the spectrums of wireless information transfer/radio frequemcies.
These things are then parcelled out and sold to the highest bidder. And that’s where it usually ends.
In order to turn a TV station into a common carrier, the TV station has to be compelled, by the government, to broadcast government stuff. And no, not as PBS and that stuff.
It is very rare for that last paragraph to be a thing, but I’m sadly not American. So I’d be glad if people that aren’t fascist enablers could tell me if I’m wrong.
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Re: Re: Re:12 Halleck
“What the CA government can regulate is…
the infrastructure that brings cable TV to the house.”
You are making that up. Read the fucking decision that Mike loves to cite. In Halleck Gorsuch recognizes that states has the legal authority to regulate MMN despite MMN not owning any infrastructure or using public infrastructure. The infrastructure MMN uses is owned by Time Warner. The only possible “Public” involvement is hypothetically some cable may be burred in public utility easement.
Nothing has to be publicly owned for a utility to be regulated as public.
Re: Re: Re:13
This is true.
Now tell us how Twitter qualifies as a public utility and maybe you’ll have something approaching an actual argument.
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Re: Re: Re:14
It is a public utility when the government says it is just like anything else. Cable TV existed for around a quarter of a century until the first FCC rules were adopted.
Re: Re: Re:15
When has the government said Twitter, or any social media service like it, is a public utility?
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Re: Re: Re:14 Twitter
Twitter transmits communications between parties using wire and/or airwaves as such all social media falls under the communications act.
Re: Re: Re:15
Utterly wrong, Twitter allows people to post to its site for other people to read. ISP’s transmit packets between users and Twitter, but Twitter no more transmits or offers public carriage that any user of the mail, phone or other common carriage services.
Re: Re: Re:15
Twitter is more like a virtual museum/archive. When you post something, you (generally) don’t specify or limit who can or does receive it. Indeed, it is entirely plausible for it to not actually be viewed by anyone at all and no one else to know it exists at all. Instead, the post is like a donation to a museum, and then others request to see it on demand.
For a common carrier, there is no requirement for the recipient(s) to actively do anything to receive the item after it’s sent. Furthermore, the sender has to specify at least one person or address to be the recipient, and anyone/anywhere not specified cannot access whatever has been sent via the common carrier absent action by a recipient (forwarding it or publishing it). Even mass-mailing requires a list of addressees and cannot be viewed by anyone who didn’t receive it initially. On top of that, a common carrier does not have to (and often doesn’t) keep whatever was sent once the transaction is complete.
Twitter has none of those characteristics in common with common carriers. A “recipient” of a Tweet generally has to explicitly ask to receive a given item or receive notice that something is available, a sender doesn’t need to (and often doesn’t) specify or otherwise restrict who or how many receive the content, and Twitter keeps whatever was sent long after a transaction is completed (unless the sender requests to delete the post or their account or Twitter’s content moderation team deletes it).
Re: Re: Re:13
Citation:: Eric fucking Goldman.
Re: Re: Re:13
If they don’t own infrastructure, don’t use public infrastructure and don’t use private infrastructure, do they then beam the programming directly into the brains of people?
The whole point with the case was that MNN used public infrastructure (ie the public access system) and Halleck/Melendez argued that that made MNN a state actor.
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Re: Re: Re:14 Funny
Funny Mike has posted links to that decision dozens of times. None of your morons have read it. MMN used Time Warner’s privately owned cable.
Lots of “public utilities” are completely privately owned. A typical private electrical utility uses no public infrastructure form generator to meter. But they are still regulated as public utilities.
Time and time again Mikes Misfits prove how fucking stupid they are.
Re: Re: Re:15
So what? The law doesn’t say Twitter or other social media services are public utilities, so that argument is ultimately irrelevant.
Re: Re: Re:15
Public utilities are usually local monopolies, and counted as essentials for living in a modern society. Twitter Facebook etc are not monopolies, and nowhere near as essential as electricity, water, sewage etc.
Re: Re: Re:16
If anything, Internet access would be a public utility. Twitter is just another method of communicating on the Internet, right alongside IRC chatrooms, email, Discord, Facebook, 4chan, Mastodon servers, private messages on sites like DeviantArt, and basically every other kind of communications protocol or service. To believe in the idea that social media services require public utility regulation is to believe those services offer the only method of online communication; only a fool would believe that.
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Re: Re: Re:16
“Public utilities are usually local monopolies”
Hello is who is this?
Hey AC its the 20th century calling for you.
lol
You are fucking clueless that hasn’t been the reality for decades. Natural gas and water are the only utilities where there is still common place.
Re: Re: Re:17
Electricity and waste disposal are still generally local monopolies. I can’t decide who provides those for my house; it’s decided by where I am. And, in many places, landlines are also local monopolies, or at least duopolies, as is cable. About the only utility I can think of that isn’t a local monopoly or duopoly is cell phone service. There are other common carriers, but as far as utilities are concerned, that’s it.
Re: Re: Re:17
You cam make this stop at any time Chocodile. Unless you are into getting publicly humiliated. In which case, please continue.
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Re: Re: Re:16
Not really true anymore local electrical can still be a local monopoly but there are plenty of deregulated states and areas where people have a choice. Same with trash. I dont live in a particularly large city but there are two trash collectors to chose form.
Re: Re: Re:15
The only moron here is you because if you have actually read it, it only shows that your reading comprehension is trending towards abysmal to nil.
The MNN is using a public access system provided by RCN, Time Warner and Verizon because of their franchise agreement with NYC, ie the cable franchise given to those cable operators stipulates that they also have to fund and provide infrastructure for public access. Since it’s the NYC that have stipulated this, guess why everyone calls it a public access system?
If you actually bothered to read and understand the background and facts of a case you would have known this but instead you go full stupid every time and latch onto something taken out of context to come up with some “novel” legal theory.
Re: Re: Re:15
So the underlying infrastructure is a public utility.
Time Warner here is a common carrier.
MNN, using this public utility, provides a cable TV service that has at least one public access channel due to certain requirements to use said infrastructure.
And cable is subject to different standards than Twitter, which doesn’t even use cable at all, unless you want to argue that Twitter is a cable TV provider.
You are still going to fucking try, anyway, despite ALL NINE NINE SCOTUS judges disagreeing with your bullshit.
Maybe you should stop being a fascist and live in the real world. And no, I would still not fuck your race traitor ass even if you paid me. Or the other way round.
Re: Re: Re:15
[Projects facts contrary to evidence]
Re: Re: Re:15
Poor cenoptaph. Your grindr date run screaming out of the house again? Is that why the hissy fit?
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Re: Re: Re:16
Homophobe,
No I don’t use grinder you fucking child. I prefer to start my relationships with other men in a more traditional manner.
Re: Re: Re:17
…so, you try to rape them?
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Re: Re: Re:18 Daddy
Please I’m not interested in your daddy fantasies little boi.
Re: Re: Re:19
Yes, we know, you’re only interested in raping sex offenders in prison for the lulz.
Re: Re: Re:19 I mean you put it right out there
“Daddy
Please…”
Sure sounds like you are interested, Clorox.
Re: Re: Re:17
Me thinks the lady doth protest too much.
Re: Re: Re:5
Republicans arguing that internet providers are public utilities is peak stupid and peak flip-flop. It’s hysterical watching you clowns turn intellectual cartwheels in order to pretend that you’re suddenly FOR the things you’ve railed AGAINST for a decade the moment your prior beliefs become inconvenient.
Re: Re: Re:5 Dig up stupid
“they’re private entities”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_utility
Re: Re: Re:5
No one has said otherwise. It is also irrelevant.
Yes, he has.
[citation needed]
Re: Re: Re:3
Last I checked, load-balancing and DDOS protection aren’t backbone-type services.
I mean, some indie game developers don’t even USE load-balancing services until AFTER their game goes viral…
Re: Re: Re:2 No, they shouldn't.
Hate speech is not protected, any more than “free speech” means you can shout “fire” in a crowded theater.
The bar for declaring something as hate speech needs to be very high — but it is my understanding that however high it is, Kiwifarms pole-vaulted over it.
Re: Re: Re:3
Holy shit, it’s a two-fer of bad free speech bullshit! Those are rare as hell.
Re: Re: Re:4
There’s still a few forms of hate speech that are not 1A-compliant. Namely, any sort of threat that involves physical violence or alluding directly to physical violence or anything that will be charged as a crime.
So yes, you are free to spew disinformation regarding the minority you hate, for example, and scream racial ephitets. 4chan does that all the time.
What you can’t do, though, is to incite crimes against minorities or people. You can call someone a thieving bastard, but you can’t say “now kick his ass until he can’t walk”. This is merely an example. You can’t, also, suggest that the minority you hate expose themselves to ionizing radiation. Again, this is another example. One that will acgually get you kicked off Twitter.
Re: Re: Re:5
That’s not because some forms of hate speech are illegal, but because direct threats and incitement is illegal.
Not sure why you bring up Twitter, since we’re talking about the law, but this example would also be legal. Telling someone to go expose themselves to radiation isn’t a threat.
Re: Re: Re:6
Interesting to note.
I assume you do know the implication of exposing yourself to ionizing radiation, ie, gamma rays/nuclear radiation. Implying that some minority should go get cancer, while legal under 1A, pushes very close to the harassment line to me.
Re: Re: Re:7
It’s protected by Brandenburg.
“I’m going to kill you.” would be against the law, but “it would be a good idea if you would be killed” was upheld by Brandenburg (which overturned Schenck v. United States, the decision whence “Fire in a crowded theater” came.
Re: Re: Re:8
Duly noted.
And well, maybe it’s a very stupid idea to poke a certain hornet’s nest.
Re: Re: Re:3
“Hate speech is not protected, any more than “free speech” means you can shout “fire” in a crowded theater.”
Gonna stop you right there.
Read this.
https://abovethelaw.com/2021/10/why-falsely-claiming-its-illegal-to-shout-fire-in-a-crowded-theater-distorts-any-conversation-about-online-speech/
Then come back and let us know how it felt learning that you were wrong on every single level of that sentence.
Re: Re: Re:3
Oof, you must be new to the whole free speech discussion…
Re: Re: Re:
“Cancellation is any act carried out with the intent of causing censorship or injury to another as retaliation for speech, or carried out for the purpose of censorship by intimidation.”
We used to call that a boycott. Ya know back when it didn’t affect things you liked.
Re:
Man, the trolls are out in full force.
Quick reminder: Mike has been “cancelled” by Google for criticizing Google, to the point where the bloody site had to transition to software NOT infected with Google tracking code.
And Mike has accepted money from the Kochs before. But a single contribution doesn’t mean much in your eyes, because Mike constantly criticizes ypur ilk.
Welcome to the consequences of your fucking actions. It’s a shame you get to break the law and we can’t.
Re: Re:
It’s only a matter of time before Chozen defaults to the rape threats.
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So if I make bricks, getting fired for talking about politics outside of work is “free speech”? I call bullshit. Courts already rejected that logic and rightfully so. One of the few areas I agree with them these days.
Re:
Too bad. An employer can generally fire someone who brings a negative reputation upon said employer. Freedom of association is protected in the same constitutional amendment as freedom of speech and expression, after all.
Re: Re:
Additionally… in a “right to work” state they don’t even have to come up with a reason. As long as they didn’t fire you for being in a protected class, they are good.
Re: Re:
Courts have upheld laws that prohibit employers from firing employees because of outside of work speech. But we do not have such laws at the federal level, only certain states (e.g. California). We should enact such laws nationwide. Corporations don’t have a right of association, that only applies to individuals.
Re: Re: Re:
Guess who owns and operates a corporation.
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Re: Re: Re:2
Yup people and nonetheless courts rejected claims that the freedom of association allows a corporation to refuse to associate with black customers. I don’t know what your point is. Are you suggesting it would apply to e.g. Cloudflare? I’m pretty sure freedom of association precedents wouldn’t block such a law, and I’d gladly take you (or Cloudflare’s lawyers) to court to find out.
Re: Re: Re:3
Gee, it’s almost as if refusing to associate with someone based on their speech and conduct is different from refusing to associate with someone based on an inherent trait that they can’t control. Imagine that~.
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Re: Re: Re:4
I don’t think that was the logic but I’d have to dig up the actual court cases because my memory on the reasoning is fuzzy. There are cases like the shopping mall free speech case that clearly support a regulation like this applying to cloudflare. In that case the court held that a shopping mall could be prohibited from ejecting customers based on their speech, holding the right to editorial discretion didn’t apply to refusing non-speech services like shopping. The court also held that government can extend the freedom of speech protections to cover certain private conduct beyond the scope of the first amendment.
Re: Re: Re:5
Oh, yay~. Another Pruneyard citation~.
Pruneyard dealt with free speech issues in places within a mall that were analogous to public spaces outside of malls. Under Pruneyard, a mall can’t kick someone out of the mall for passing out flyers in a food court—but it can kick someone out for doing the same in areas meant for foot traffic, and individual stores within malls can still kick people out for the same reason. Cloudflare is nothing like a public space, so I fail to see how the logic of Pruneyard applies here.
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Re: Re: Re:6
The point is that it was still private property and the court rejected a wholesale First Amendment right for a private party to exclude/refuse business with someone based on their speech.
The central holding of Pruneyard was that the First Amendment did not preempt California’s free speech applied to private corporations laws. I fail to see any reason consistent with Pruneyard why Cloudflare’s actions would be protected by the First Amendment if the government enacted law(s) regulating DDOS protection and load balancing as common carriers.
The discussion around public spaces in Pruneyard was really only relevant to the analysis of California law, not the 1A in that context. Central holding of Pruneyard is applicable to this situation. Maybe a more detailed writeup is in order, but I am very confident it would pass muster unless the courts decide to get pretty radical (as they sometimes do) and rewrite a lot of precedent.
I do think platforms like Twitter have an argument that they are publishers entitled to moderate (and anything less and you cannot control your own servers) but when you rent infra to others I think some government enforced neutrality is a good thing.
Debates should be won on the merit of the arguments, not which team can shut the other side’s websites and email servers down.
Re: Re: Re:7
“Debates should be won on the merit of the arguments, not which team can shut the other side’s websites and email servers down.”
Ok, you lost due to a lack of understating on the difference between a public space and a private company.
Thanks for playing.
Re: Re: Re:7
And it did so in a narrow-as-hell context within a single state.
That has to happen first, though. Until it does, that logic is irrelevant.
Which companies, then, should the government force into helping Kiwifarms?
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Re: Re: Re:8
“And it did so in a narrow-as-hell context within a single state.”
No such thing! The SCOTUS doesn’t make such narrow decisions that apply to only one state.
Re: Re: Re:9
from the wikipedia article
In American constitutional law, this case established two important rules:
So yes they can make a ruling that only Applies in California.
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Re: Re: Re:10
“under the U.S. Constitution, states can provide their citizens with broader rights”
stateS plural you moron Pruneyard applies to every state in the Union. Any state can do the same thing California did. Which is what Texas just did.
Re: Re: Re:11
From Wikipedia:
Even if Pruneyard applies to “every state in the Union” (and “if” does a lot of carrying there), not every state in the Union agrees with Pruneyard. By and large, Pruneyard only really affects California.
Re: Re: Re:12
Pruneyard isn’t even applicable to Pruneyard shopping center any more. If someone were to start handing put leaflets there like before, current precedent means they will lose if they try to sue.
Re: Re: Re:11
Tell me you don’t know how the American courts work without telling me you donn’t know how the American courts work.
Despite you being an actual American citizen. The fucking outsider knows this much, at least.
Re: Re: Re:7
Or insisting that they can speak, and exercise the hecklers charter, on all platforms.
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Really???
“State censorship and violent compulsion are relatively easy to identify and oppose”
Really??? How many court cases were dismissed under section 230 before a judge finally allowed one to proceed to discovery before we found out that Twitter and the government were coordinating censorship?
Re:
Yes or no: Can you prove that this is true, such that Twitter was—and maybe still is—receiving direct “do this or else” orders from the federal government to censor specific users/speech under threat of legal punishment?
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Re: Re:
“Can you prove that this is true, such that Twitter was—and maybe still is—receiving direct “do this or else”?”
“do this or else” is not what the law says you fucking ignorant dipshit!
Agian “Go Fuck Yourself!”
I dont give a fuck what you think that law should be you fucking ignorant pathetic manchild!
Re: Re: Re:
I’ll accept that as a “no”. Thank you for your honesty.
Re: Re: Re:
That’s an ironic way to end a tantrum in response to a simple question.
Re: Re: Re: Chugga Chugga Chodda Boi
Next up on the tantrum train. Threats of violence sexual, then physical. CHOO CHOO all aboard!
Re: Re: Re:
It literally does.
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Re: Re: Re:2 Where?
“It literally does.”
Cite the court case that says only “do this or else” amounts to state action.
I doubt the KKK needed the stick to lynch people at the direction of the state.
You are a fucking piece of shit!
Re: Re: Re:3
Pretty sure that if the government tells you to do a thing under penalty of legal punishment, no matter what the punishment, you doing the thing amounts to being coerced by the state into performing as an agent thereof.
Gee, it’s almost as if some of those that worked forces were the same that burned crosses. Imagine that~.
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Re: Re: Re:4
“only”
You FUCKING HACK!
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Re: Re: Re:4
Cite the fucking case that says ONLY “do this or else” amounts to state action!
Cite it you fucking stupid piece of shit!
Prove your fucking claim!
Re: Re: Re:5
Make me.
Re: Re: Re:5
Cry moar Chubby
Re: Re: Re:5
Wow Chozen, have you not heard of the Criminal Code/Penal Code and, I dunno, related laws?
And it comes in STATE and FEDERAL flavors!
Re: Re: Re:5
You made the claim, therefore you need to provide the proof.
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Re: Re: Re:6
Proof has been posted over and over again. Stephan is attempting to change the rules of what is and is not state action by pretending that ONLY government coercion amounts to state action which is not the law. The onus is on Stephan to prove that.
If Stephan were correct than none of the actions taken by private actors at the behest of government during Jim Crow were state action because they didn’t need to have their arms twisted.
Again you morons with your childish interpretations of law would void most civil rights law if you were actually correct.
Re: Re: Re:7
Please point out exactly where and how I made that exact claim in that exact wording (or a close equivalent thereof).
…says someone who wants to void Twitter’s right to decide what speech it will and won’t allow on its platform.
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Re: Re: Re:8
“…says someone who wants to void Twitter’s right to decide what speech it will and won’t allow on its platform.”
No such right exists. Its not their speech (Pruneyard ) and their “platform” is open to the public in the public interest (Munn).
Re: Re: Re:9
Irrelevant. A platform like Twitter can still choose what speech it will or won’t host regardless of whether anyone would think that speech belongs to Twitter. Yes or no: Should the law force Truth Social to host speech that disparages Donald Trump?
Also irrelevant. As Halleck states, a private entity opening its doors to the public doesn’t make that entity a state actor. In the case of Twitter, that means Twitter is a public forum in only a colloquial sense. Yes or no: Does Gab being open to the public make that platform a true public forum?
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Re: Re: Re:10 Not the Issue
This isn’t state actor law its regulatory law. Your a private cable carrier isn’t a state actor but its still a regulated utility. At no time in Halleck did Gorsuch deny the State of New York’s legal authority to regulate MMN.
Nothing in New York’s regulatory code required MMN to carry Halleck’s programing. If it did that would have been different. “Must carry” regulations con cable service providers have been found to be perfectly constitutional.
You might find this surprising but I agree with Halleck. Its a narrow ruling that doesn’t say what you think it says because you confuse “public utility” and “state actor.”
Re: Re: Re:11
Please explain how Twitter is exactly like a cable service provider, such that those regulations can and should apply to Twitter.
No, I don’t—because neither one of those phrases applies to Twitter. It doesn’t become either a public utility or a state actor by virtue of opening its virtual doors to the public; you haven’t yet provided any citation of law or legal precedent that says otherwise, beyond that one horseshit 5th Circuit ruling that will almost certainly be appealed (and hopefully demolished).
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Re: Re: Re:12
“Please explain how Twitter is exactly like a cable service provider, such that those regulations can and should apply to Twitter.”
Please explain how a cable television service provider being required to carry channels is constitutional but requiring the same of Twitter would be unconstitutional?
You dont understand the Constitution. You think we can have one constitutionally interpretation in one context and a contradictory one in another. That’s why you are dumb enough to think that a restaurant can be required to serve black folk but twitter cant be required to serve conservative view points.
You want a constitutional interpretation that applies only to BigTech and no one else. Your moronicism would void almost all Civil Rights law.
Re: Re: Re:13
Requiring a restaurant to serve Black people—and to serve them equally—makes sense because saying otherwise would push Black people that much more out of the public sphere. When we step into the public sphere, we must make room for everyone else to be in the public sphere with us. We compromise our own conduct to make room for others who may not think, speak, and act like we do. That’s how society works.
Requiring Twitter to carry all legal speech makes no sense at all because someone getting banned from Twitter doesn’t push them out of the public sphere. Donald Trump got banned from Twitter, and he still does TV interviews.
Twitter is, in a colloquial sense, a public forum. But that doesn’t mean the law can make it host third party speech any more than the law can force Amazon or Walmart to sell any given book. If you can cite a law or legal precedent that says the government can make Walmart sell a specific book, you might have a better argument to run with. (But you can’t. So you don’t.)
As I’ve said (and you’ve completely ignored) before: **I want the law to equally apply to all social media services, regardless of the size or the political leanings of a given service.*** Whether the law says Twitter does or doesn’t have to host all speech, that holding should apply to Facebook, Parler, and queer-friendly Mastodon instances. One service shouldn’t be singled out by the government for the compelled hosting of speech because of its size or its political affiliation (real or perceived).
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Re: Re: Re:14
“Requiring a restaurant to serve Black people—and to serve them equally—makes sense because saying otherwise would push Black people that much more out of the public sphere. When we step into the public sphere, we must make room for everyone else to be in the public sphere with us. We compromise our own conduct to make room for others who may not think, speak, and act like we do. That’s how society works.”
But that is not what makes it Constitutional. This goes all the way back to Daniel 1969. In order to claim freedom of association you have to be selective. If you are not selective AKA 139M active daily twitter users, no reasonable person would consider it your association.
Re: Re: Re:15
Even though a grocery store is a public accomodation, it isn’t under any obligation to carry all legal speech. The owners of that store can put up a bulletin board at the entrance of the store and still retain the right to take down, say, a white supremacist flyer—even if nobody thinks the store supports white supremacists.
That logic holds in cyberspace, too. Even if nobody thinks Twitter itself posts racial slurs and anti-queer screeds, the higher-ups can still refuse to host that speech—and the people who post it. Freedom of association runs both ways: If you have the right to refuse an association with Twitter, Twitter has the right to refuse an association with you. Even if no one else thinks your speech is Twitter’s speech, Twitter still has no legal, moral, or ethical obligation to host your speech; you have yet to offer a single citation of law or legal precedent that says otherwise.
Re: Re: Re:14 What you ARE is protected, what you DO is not
Requiring a restaurant to serve Black people—and to serve them equally—makes sense because saying otherwise would push Black people that much more out of the public sphere. When we step into the public sphere, we must make room for everyone else to be in the public sphere with us. We compromise our own conduct to make room for others who may not think, speak, and act like we do. That’s how society works.
Expanding upon that even if the law was insanely changed to make ‘conservative’ a protected class right alongside race it still wouldn’t help the people whining about ‘censorship’ because (running with the idea) while a store isn’t allowed to refuse service to someone because they are black there aren’t required to serve them in the face of toxic and hostile behaviour.
A store may not be allowed to kick a customer out for being black but they are allowed to kick a black customer out for being hostile to the staff or otherwise engaging in objectionable behavior that violates the store’s rules, and unless the ‘conservatives’ wanted to claim not just that they need ‘protection’ but that they deserve extra protection above and beyond what other protected classes get their own behavior would leave them right back at square one, being shown the door for what they do even as they dishonestly try to claim that it’s what they are that’s causing people to boot them out.
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Re: Re: Re:15
“What you ARE is protected, what you DO is not”
Where does it say that in the Constitution? Nothing you are spouting is what makes civil rights laws constitutional. I’m sure its what you think the law should be but that isn’t what it is. Have you read Daniels or Roberts? The case law around this has absolutely nothing to do with “What you ARE is protected, what you DO is not” you fucking ignorant douche.
Re: Re: Re:16
I can almost smell your synapses burning from over here, Chickadee.
Re: Re: Re:13
The Supreme Court explicitly addressed this question when ruling on most of the CDA, stating that the “must-carry” provision of the FCC’s power is only constitutional for broadcasts due to the extremely limited bandwidth available for literally everyone. That rationale doesn’t apply to the internet at all, let alone to services available on the internet.
I don’t see a contradiction here. The issue was under what circumstances can a government’s restriction on speech be permitted despite the 1A. Such carve-outs have historically been very narrow and strictly defined, so the presumption is that a restriction on speech is presumptively unconstitutional unless there is a court case that gives an exception that fits clearly with the given circumstances. These exceptions are very context-dependent.
Being black is an intrinsic and immutable characteristic. Talking about conservative viewpoints is not.
No, it applies to everyone with a few previously and clearly defined exceptions (e.g., broadcast TV, postal and shipping services, public utilities, telephones services, and state agencies) which edge services like Twitter clearly don’t fall under.
No part of “Civil Rights law” does or has ever included political views, political party, or speech or anything similar to any of those things. Those are simply not protected classes at all under civil rights law, nor should they be.
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Re: Re: Re:14
“The Supreme Court explicitly addressed this question when ruling on most of the CDA, stating that the “must-carry” provision of the FCC’s power is only constitutional for broadcasts due to the extremely limited bandwidth available for literally everyone. That rationale doesn’t apply to the internet at all, let alone to services available on the internet.”
I would love to have that argument your fucking dolt. There are fewer choices today than there were then. You want to have a fucking scarcity argument?
Re: Re: Re:15
Twitter isn’t the only social media service, or only form of communication, on the Internet. When you want to have a scarcity argument, it helps if you actually have a scarcity against which you can argue.
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Re: Re: Re:16
ABC, NBC, CBS, DuMont, and maybe a large local like WGN Chicago. That was the market in 1950s. That is a larger Market then modern social media. So I would love to have that argument. At it wasn’t because of limited bandwidth that VHF band had 12 channels 2-13 so less than half were used.
Re: Re: Re:17
Okay, and…since the availability of spectrum isn’t an issue with the Internet, what does that have to do with Twitter?
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Re: Re: Re:18 Scarcity
The fundamental issue is scarcity. It doesn’t matter why its scarce. In the case of social media its the nature of the market.
Re: Re: Re:19
What scarcity are you talking about, such that Twitter should be forced by law to carry all legally protected speech?
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Re: Re: Re:20
That there are fewer large social media options today than there were VHF channels in the 1950s and 60s.
Re: Re: Re:21
“Attention” is not a scarcity that can be regulated by the government. Find a better argument.
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Re: Re: Re:22
“Attention” yes it is numb nuts. Thats what freedom of the press means you disphit!
Re: Re: Re:23
Wrong, freedom of the press meant that you could own a press, and print whatever you wanted to. It became associated with newspapers because back in the days the constitution was written, most press owners printed a news sheet or paper, along with other printed items. It does not promise that you will have any audience.
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Re: Re: Re:24
It means free access to the press. The Crown controlling access to the press both through defacto and dejure methods was employed for hundreds of years as the primary way to suppress speech. The Crown didn’t remove restrictions on radio and TV advertisements for the Scottish independence movement until the 1960s.
Re: Re: Re:25
… said nobody literate, ever.
Re: Re: Re:23
The government can’t stop you from speaking—but it also can’t make people listen to you. “Attention” is not a scarcity that can be regulated by the government. Find a better argument.
Re: Re: Re:19
Again, you misunderstand what is meant by “scarcity” here. The issue is the scarcity of the medium used to reach an audience. Scarcity of the audience/consumers is not relevant. By your metric, every market has a scarcity, meaning businesses would have no 1A rights at all.
Re: Re: Re:15 You asked bro.
You want to have a fucking scarcity argument?”
Ok Camero, Twitter is an effectively unlimited service, therefore I win.
Re: Re: Re:15
Setting aside the fact that this is patently false (there are currently far more social media sites and other sites that accept user-generated content than there were TV stations in total back then, and there are also far more such websites now than there were when the CDA was written), it’s also completely irrelevant. Spectrum is an exceptionally finite resource. You cannot simply create more spectrum than there already was. And if company X has a certain spectrum, no one else can use that spectrum, at least within a rather large geographic area.
This is not the case for social media sites or the internet. The limiting factors there are servers/storage capacity and unique addresses, both of which can be expanded later. To create a new website, all you need is a server, a unique address for your website and server(s), and internet access, none of which prevents others from creating their own websites accessible to the same people.
Again, the Supreme Court explicitly said this when it declared most of the CDA unconstitutional. The carve-out for regulation of content on public airwaves was expressly reserved only for such a situation where there is a firm, immovable cap on the total number of providers in a given medium, and there is no such cap on websites. The number of services currently available on that medium is irrelevant; only whether there is an intrinsic cap to the number that can be available that is not absurdly large.
Re: Re: Re:9
Twitter is not open to the public like a shopping mall, but open to those who agree to their terms of service and create an account. That means it is more like a club than a public space.
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Re: Re: Re:10 Irrelevant
Irrelevant, the free speech issue in Pruneyard is again ‘no reasonable person would consider it the hosts speech’ the 4th and 5th Amendment ‘but muh private platform’ argument is void because of various laws and precedence concerning wired and wireless communications.
As I have said before to deaf ears, at no time in Halleck does Gorsuch deny the state’s right regulate MMN even though MMN owned no infrastructure and it used and only used private infrastructure.
Re: Re: Re:11
And that still holds no bearing on whether Twitter, a privately owned service that is in no way analogous to a shopping mall’s public gathering spots, can choose whether to host certain kinds of speech.
So what? The ruling doesn’t say Twitter can be regulated that way. Considering how two subsequent rulings—Prager University v. Google LLC and NetChoice v. Attorney General, State of Florida—both cited Halleck as part of decisions that affirm the right of interactive web services to moderate speech how they see fit, I’d say Halleck is far closer to saying the same thing than it is to saying “the law can force Twitter into hosting speech it otherwise wouldn’t”.
Re: Re: Re:2
So uh, should we tell Chozen about TItle 18 (or the 50 versions of the criminal code), which does say “do not commit crimes or else”?
Re: Re: Re:
Sadly no, that’s not how debates work, you lazy, wilfully ignorant NeoNazi.
You made the claim, you prove it.
Stephen has merely asked if you could prove your assertion.
I have read some of those articles, and again, tipoffs are NOT coordination. And no, it’s your claim. Mine is “tipoffs are not coordination”.
Re: Re: Re:
Jeez. Talk about zero to a hundred.
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Re: Re:
With the recent discovery of emails between Twitter and the White House, the answer is YES.
Re: Re: Re:
Yes or no: Do those emails prove that Twitter was—and maybe still is—receiving direct “do this or else” orders from the federal government to censor specific users/speech under threat of legal punishment?
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Re: Re: Re:2
YES
Re: Re: Re:3
Show me the proof, then.
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Re: Re: Re:4
Don’t be a typical lazy Democrat and expect other people to do your work for you.
You might want to get out of your echo-chamber media bubble to find the information, though. Just like the Cayler Ellingson story: it makes the Democrats look really bad, so the media tends to lightly, if at all, cover the story.
Re: Re: Re:5
The burden for proving a claim lies with whoever made the claim.
Put up or shut up, son.
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Re: Re: Re:6 Backwards
The burden of proof is on you. You are making the claim that it is only state action if the government says “do this or else”. Prove that claim. Cite the case law you fucking moron!
Re: Re: Re:7
No, because the presumption is that an exception is narrow absent case law that says otherwise. Demonstrate the case that has held that a government saying anything else has made the private company a state actor under this doctrine.
Re: Re: Re:5
Don’t be a typical shithead and not provide proof when you make a claim.
Re: Re: Re:5
If you make the claim, you provide the proof, which assuming you are not repeating some rumor you heard, should be easy, as you should know where to find it. Telling others to find it, make it look like you are repeating rumors, and while you believe the proof is out there, you are too lazy to do your own research.
Re: Re: Re:5
So you admit you’re just lying. Typical reich-whinger.
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Re: Re: Re:6
Onus probandi incumbit ei qui dicit.
The burden of proof is on Stephen to prove that “do this or else” is the only thing that amounts to state action.
I know the rule. I know the case. But the onus probandi is on Stephen to prove his argument that only if the government says “do this or else” that amounts to state action.
Re: Re: Re:7
Except that wasn’t part of my ask, nor did I ever say anything approaching it. Don’t shove words down my throat that didn’t first come from it.
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Re: Re: Re:8
Then why ask for proof of coercion if coercion isn’t the only thing the government can do that amounts to state action you deceitful piece of shit!
I know the case law. I know the case. I know the date. I could cite it in a second. But the burden of proof is on you, you stupid mother fucker.
Re: Re: Re:9
Because I didn’t say “coercion isn’t the only thing the government can do that amounts to state action”. What I asked…
…was whether you could prove that Twitter was receiving direct orders from the government to censor people that could be interpreted as a “do this or else” directive.
But I guess I should’ve expected this level of complete misunderstanding, voluntary or otherwise, from Mr. Public House-ing.
Re: Re: Re:9 Now on to threats of violence
Chickencordonbleu is really losing his shit out here today. I wish I could say this was unexpected.
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Re: Re: Re:10 Chickencordonbleu?
Chickencordonbleu? lol
You tried you really did but you just aren’t smart enough to pretend you have wit.
You got to have some wit, the ability to play with words, and a sarcastic sense of humor to come up with things like Mike Manchild or Mike’s Misfits. You are too stupid, too slow witted, and don’t have the command of the English language to cut people down.
You are the kind of person who thinks of the best comeback 3 years later lol
Re: Re: Re:11
No, you really don’t. That’s some middle school–level horseshit.
You’re the kind of person who thinks rape is funny.
Re: Re: Re:11 Can't take it musch less dish it out bro
“You tried you really did but you just aren’t smart enough to pretend you have wit.”
Damn son that one struck a nerve.
Re: Re: Re:11
And you don’t even have the required three braincells to actually sit down and think.
I’ve seen bacteria and viruses with more tact than you do.
Also, Calling people names? That’s witty? I’ve seen five year olds with more creative naming sense than you.
Perhaps you’d like to throw a tantrum? Threaten to rape me? Do worse than that?
You’re a bully, a NeoNazi bully, and I won’t cry when you finally kick the bucket.
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Re: Re: Re:12
“Calling people names?”
“You’re a bully, a NeoNazi bully”
A Latino who family fled fascism in South America is a “NeoNazi” bully. Who is just calling people names?
Re: Re: Re:13 Alos a little bitch
“A Latino who family fled fascism in South America is a “NeoNazi” bully. Who is just calling people names?”
A self hating NeoNazi bully who’s family no longer speaks to him.
Re: Re: Re:13
[Asserts facts not in evidence]
Re: Re: Re:13
Well, if you’d just look at how you’ve behaved throughout the site, I’d say I’m well within my rights to call you that.
You defend fascist rulings, white supremacy and far worse, while trying to harrass, threaten and otherwise shut down debate without actually trying to engage. If this was meatspace, I’d be reaching for the closest available wooden pole to defend myself with, for it’s a reasonable fear that you are likely to pull a knife or a gun at me. With the intent to harm me. Physically, at least.
It osn’t defamation if I state facts and CAN back them up with evidence.
Re: Re: Re:14
There’s edgelords trying to proclaim the rise of the Black New World Order and empire of femboys – and then there’s Chozen, the prime example of a self-destructive Trump simp. You’d think this sort of idiocy would have been weeded out of the gene pool by now…
Re: Re: Re:5
“Don’t be a typical lazy Democrat”
Now my dog is barking for some reason?!?
Re: Re: Re:5
That’s not being lazy; that’s just how rational debate works. You made the claim, so you have the burden of proof. Otherwise, we are free to assume you’re just making it up and to disregard your assertion.
You are assuming without evidence what Stephen’s media-use habits are.
Question: Does Vice not count as the media? Because they were the first one to pop up when I Googled “Cayler Ellingson”, and they seemed to give it pretty fair coverage.
More to the point, that doesn’t justify shifting the burden of proof.
Re: Re: Re:6
In fact, regarding Cayler Ellison, I also found articles debunking the assertion that the national media ignored the story, finding that they covered it at least as much as similar cases of (allegedly) politically motivated hit-and-runs.
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Re: Re: Re:4
Actually this is false but members of the biden administration did encourage censorship which is illegal. In general the government is prohibited from encouraging private actors to do what it is prohibited from doing directly. Particularly wrt the 1A.
Re: Re: Re:5
Yes or no: Can you provide any evidence that proves, without ambiguity, that the Biden administration has directly and knowingly encouraged any social media service to “censor” anyone?
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Re: Re: Re:6
Yes. https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.deseret.com/2022/9/7/23340108/biden-censoring-facebook-twitter-attorney-general-lawsuit-social-media%3f_amp=true
There’s plenty more. I keep a list of articles like this on hand.
Re: Re: Re:7
That’s hardly “censorship”. If anything, it’s Facebook producing more speech in response to speech, which…well, ain’t that how free speech is supposed to work?
This lacks a bit of context—specifically, whether the account tried to pass itself off as an official account belonging to Fauci.
This is borderline, although I can still see why both the government and Facebook would be interested in curbing COVID misinformation—the government for public safety purposes, Facebook for legal liability purposes. But I’m not seeing anything there, or elsewhere in the article, that amounts to the government demanding Twitter, Facebook, etc. delete/“censor” certain speech under threat of legal consequences.
Not to say this isn’t a concerning turn of events—of course it is—but until I see proof that the government directly and knowingly ordered social media services to act on behalf of the goverment, I’ll save my concerns for the move by conservatives to enforce compelled hosting of speech on those same services.
Re: Re: Re:8
“This lacks a bit of context—specifically, whether the account tried to pass itself off as an official account belonging to Fauci.”
That context is important: It claimed to be the official Fauci account, when it was not.
Re: Re: Re:7
You just proved you have zero proof. Well done, lemming.
Re: Re: Re:3
… said nobody literate, ever.
Re:
zero
Re:
Note: Chozen told this deliberate lie in another thread a week or two back, and as yet has not produced even one piece of evidence that supports it.
He’ll most likely respond to this comment with yet more evidence that proves my point, same as he did last time.
Re:
Tipoffs aren’t considered coordination.
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No Good Counterargument
Typically, the only speech reaction of the woke mob is shrieking and howling. It’s usually not eloquent, and helps reinforce the original speaker on the basis that insults are the best that the opposition can do. That’s why most cancel culture is based around censorship– the primary way for left wingers to win the argument is to prevent speech.
-Koby: Techdirt’s resident cancel culture victim.
Re:
Remind me, who’s going around trying to ban books written by/about/for queer people/people of color in libraries?
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Re: Re: Re:
Parents.
Re: Re: Re:
And what political affiliation are those parents, and the political operatives and organizations that organize and train those parents on how to have books yanked from libraries, generally associated with?
(ProTip: It ain’t “the left”.)
Re: Re: Re:2
Yeah, cancel culture is overrated as a threat to free speech. At least First Amendment covers that. The real threat to free speech way above on the list is the ever-expanding restrictions on free speech in name of Copyright. When it comes to governmental suppression of free speech in name of Copyright, the First Amendment does not cover that.
First Amendment says “Congress shall make no law …abridging the freedom of speech..” But Congress does in name of Copyright. And it does not matter for legality so far as the courts are concerned that the law actually has nothing to do with promoting innovations and art. This is really problematic.
Re: Re: Re:
The parents didn’t read any of those books. They were told what to complain about.
Re: Re: Re: Closet fuhrer
Oh look it can answer a question. Just not the one that would directly out it as a fascist.
Re:
[Projects facts contrary to evidence]
Re: Bravely sir Kdawg ran away
“-Koby: Techdirt’s resident cancel culture victim.”
Remember when we tried to get you to reply to a single question and you still won’t answer it?
Re: Re:
Repost the song again.
Re: Re: Re:
I would, but I get yelled at because i would just post a new line of bravely sir robin ran away but with kobys name every time he posted something. It got annoying.
Re: Re: Re:2
I have a high tolerance for repetition. Frankly, if out_of_the_blue was still showing his dumb face around I’d post that limerick to mock him (you know the one).
Re:
Cancel culture from “the left”, ie, communists, involve the same shit your NeoNazi ilk would LOVE to do.
That is, violence, secret polices and sowing a general environment of fear and distrust to the point where families would sell one another out, either for petty gain or because they crackes under pressure.
Then they get shot and their bodies dumped in open mass graves.
Hitler did it. Stalin did it. Mao did it too. So did Pol Pot and Sukarno. Lesser forms were also used by the US in WW2, which usually did not lead to murder, but would also have shitty effects on the people in the shitlist, ie, THE HOUSE COMMITTEE OF UNAMERICAN ACTIVITIES. If they weren’t victims of the various internments or the brutal suppression of the Bonus Army.
What’s it gonna be, Koby? Are you gonna defend genocide as a form of censorship?
Like claiming to be attacked by unicorns...
Ah cancel culture, otherwise known as assholes facing consequences for their actions. I mean bloody hell when walking out of the room rather than continuing to listen to someone dropping a racial slur multiple times is treated as some heinous attack on free speech it’s kinda hard to take people like that serious.
Re:
Distinguished free speech professors playing the victim card for speech they personally taught to the people, even.
At that point I’ll take the claims of being gored by a unicorn. At least I can say “You totally meant rhinocerouses, right?”
Actually no, it could be called moderation. But editorial discretion is applied to publishers.
Social media is a publisher because they republish pages submitted to them incorporated into thier content. Editorial Discretion is a subset of moderation. Cloudflare’s business rests on the servers/datacenters/etc so they are infrastructure providers.
Refusing to rent space on a website: Editorial discretion. Allowed.
Refusing to rent a virtual machine/cdn/load balancer/dns record: Infrastructure discrimination, not editorial discretion. Not allowed.
It gets trickier with certain website-as-a-service providers but we don’t need to discuss exactly where to draw the line, just that IaaS should be regulated and platforms should not.
And Cloudflare is a public accommodation that should be similarly regulated.
Clearly VMs/IaaS are utilities/infrastructure not speech. Website hosting could go either way, I lean towards publisher if they control most of the HTML and only allow you to input text, but infrastructure if you can upload your own arbitrary html/scripts/edge functions/php/etc. I would say that is case-by-case based on the facts. Platforms like Twitter are definitely publishers and permitted editorial discretion.
Re:
Let’s cut right to the point. Yes or no: Should a website hosting company be denied the right to refuse service to a website espousing white supremacist beliefs?
It is, so far as I know. But speech and conduct are not inherent traits. Being a disruptive little shit is not the same thing as being Black or queer.
I want you to be absolutely clear about this, so I have one more question for you.
What they-exist-right-now Internet companies should the government compel by law to service any customer regardless of their speech or conduct? In other words: Who should the government force to help Stormfront?
Re: Re:
I think it depends on what the “website hosting company” does. If they just stick your files at a url/IP, then I would say yes because the website host is essentially a bandwidth provider and file storage provider. But if they “publish” your content as part of their web service, e.g, your text alongside advertisements they provide on the web page, then they would be a publisher which can refuse to host them.
IaaS Providers, e.g. VM rental services: Microsoft Azure, Google GCP, Amazon AWS, Linode, Digital Ocean, etc.
CDNs, e.g. Cloudflare, Bunny, Akami, etc.
Anti DDOS e.g. Cloudflare
Payment Processors/Banks, e.g. Visa, Chase, Well’s Fargo, Paypal, Stripe, etc.
IaaS Storage e.g. Amazon B2, Backblaze, Linode Object Storage.
ISPs e.g. Comcast, AT&T, Verizon, SpaceX, T-Mobile
DNS registrars e.g. GoDaddy, Gandi, etc
Edge Computing e.g. Google, T-Mobile, etc.
Load Balancers e.g. Cloudflare, MS Azure, Linode, etc.
Re: Re: Re:
By that logic, NeoCities wouldn’t be allowed to kick people off the service for posting content that violates the NeoCities TOS. You really wanna run with that argument?
Let’s say one of those companies refuses to service a site like Stormfront. What, then, should the government do to punish that company for its decision to refuse helping a white supremacist shitpit?
Re: Re: Re:2
How about allow a civil suit with injunctive relief and attorney’s fees? “Free speech for me but not thee” doesn’t work. I am sure you are in favor of allowing them to censor because Cloudflare agrees with your current ideology. But what if it didn’t? Tech companies don’t live that long, the landscape changes a lot. We should enact laws now because you don’t want to live in a world where Trump Web Services decides what you can host online. Or do you want to be unable to host a website because Parler Communications decides that you’re too radical with your pro-LGBT sentiments? If you start saying ‘ermahgad we need IaaS neutrality’ only when your side is being censored, the other side is unlikely to be sympathetic. We could live in a world in 10 years where SpaceX/Starlink is the only internet provider, and if you don’t agree with Elon Musk you aren’t allowed to be heard online. Put a stop to it now before it’s too late.
Regulating IaaS is a natural extension of Net Neutrality, which we also need to pass. Maybe IaaS Neutrailty? Internet Neutrality?
Re: Re: Re:3
Given how long it took Cloudflare to finally kick Kiwifarms to the curb, I don’t think they agree with my “current ideology” as much as you want to believe they do so you can win an Internet slapfight. But hey, you keep thinking that’s the case.
And if web hosting were even remotely close to being a monopoly such that Donald fucking Trump could control whether I can post something online, I’d be the first one lining up to
get shot by the Secret Service as Iprotest his bullshit.What you’re asking for is a law that goes further than protecting the right to free speech. You’re asking for a law that says the government can force a company to work with people it doesn’t want to work with—to ensure that bigots and other such shitheads get to control whether a company will work with those shitheads or go out of business to stand on principle/avoid being punished by the law. Do you seriously not see how fucked up that is, that the future of the Internet could possibly rest on whether companies will let themselves be coerced into working with some “very fine people”?
And if you start saying “ermahgad the law needs to force companies into hosting Kiwifarms”, you’re guaranteed to not get anything from me besides a hearty “fuck you”.
ha
haha
hahahahahahahahah
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA—
Look, dude, I’m all for trying to figure out the point along the line of the Internet’s infrastructure where the government should have the unassailable legal right to coerce a company into helping horrible pieces of shit spread horrible speech, but you don’t have to insult my fucking intelligence by saying shit like that.
Re: Re: Re:4
I kinda see you in this light, you think it’s okay because you don’t like them. You think it’s okay for society to shut down unpopular speech. Putting that power into the hands of corporations is imo, even worse than the government having the power. And the problem is that cloud providers jump on the bandwagon of public opinion.
I believe unpopular speech should be protected because maybe 1 in 100 heretics claiming we’re all nuts is going to be right. Allowing them to host a webserver, without requiring anyone to share it, is a good compromise which allows people to evaluate the content and share it if they think it credible. Right now that process of people sharing stuff they believe is short circuited by big corporations controlling who can host content. I don’t trust them either. I’d rather let the marketplace of ideas do its work.
Re: Re: Re:5
Already available in various ways, including co-location, where a company with a backbone connection hosts servers bought and paid for by anybody who wants that service. Also, anybody can pay for business connection, and host their own servers.
Re: Re: Re:5
While I agree that corporations dictating what you need to know, say and eat is bad, that’s… admittedly a bit further from where we are at right now.
But the 1st Amendment already guantarees that.
What if I don’t want the money of those fine folk? Are you saying that my 1A rights have to be violated just vecause I have to host those fine folk to fulfill some ivory tower bullshit fantasy?
The marketplace of ideas is dysfunctional, but it’s working, as seen by… Cloudflare doing a ton of handwringing as they told Kiwifarms to bugger off and embrace the dickery of the CIA’s Tor network.
Re: Re: Re:5
Let me put it this way: if they did the same thing to TechDirt, I’d be disappointed, but I would still say they have that right.
Re: Re: Re:5
[Projects facts contrary to evidence]
Re: Re: Re:3
I live in a country where any criticism of the political leaders and organs of state WILL result in said political leaders taking actions to ruin the critic’s life.
Elon is a fucking idiot who chose not to read up on how to manage a social network AND contract law, apparently. Despite his actual intelligence.
And Starlink? Nowhere near being an actual ISP monopoly that Bell was.
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Re: Re:
Then, if Twitter, et al., want to deny service to a subset of the general public, they should put their service behind a paywall.
Until then, STOP CENSORING PEOPLE.
Re: Re: Re:
This argument doesn’t even make sense. Twitter suspends/bans people based on their conduct and speech, not their race, age, etc. Any privately owned business that opens its doors to the public can do the same. Or are you seriously and sincerely going to argue that a McDonald’s can’t kick out someone who keeps yelling racial slurs in the middle of the store?
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Re: Re: Re:2
So if McDonald’s just says those dirty negroes are disruptive (so they can deny service to a subset of the general public), you’d be okay with that?
Re: Re: Re:3
I don’t respond to otherwording, especially not when it’s this bad. JFC, dude.
Re: Re: Re:3
You’re confusing McDonald’s with Denny’s (until 1995).
Re: Re: Re:
That’s not how anything works, the ability to remove disruptive people from your property does not in any way depend upon charging them money to enter first.
Re: Re: Re: Doesn't matter if it works for you or not.
“Until then, STOP CENSORING PEOPLE.”
How bout no?
Re: Re: Re:
I’m sorry the internet, generally speking, isn’t like the SomethingAwful Forums, where the right to interact with the community and see more than 6 months of archives is indeed, locked behind a paywall.
And they still ban people who do not follow their terms of service.
Also, censorship is something done by the government, if we’re gonna drag 1A into this.
Re: Re: Re:
Can’t stop what never started, sipshit.
Late to the party
Wrote a long comment. Error 429 are it. So you get the short version now.
I don’t think engaging in the same arena counts as cancel culture. Getting ratioed, students walking out of a lecture, protesters and counterprotesters etc. You might not have a perfectly even playing field, but it’s close enough. Both sides can be heard. Speech vs speech.
What I think counts is going to unrelated third parties to make life difficult for someone whose opinion you didn’t like. Like threatening their employer with a boycott unless they fire the person who had an opinion. Or filing false police reports. Swatting. The goal isn’t to engage speech with more speech, but to stop speech from happening. Stop people with opinions different from yours from being able to express them. That’s what cancelling means to me. Suddenly finding themselves unemployed and homeless works wonders for shutting people up.
Admittedly, this does get murkier in some arenas. If someone say, makes a book with bad things in it, should the only reasonable response be making your own book? Probably not. I’ll leave that to smarter people to figure out.
Re:
That’s free speech.
Those are crimes.
And the goal of everyone who bitches about “cancel culture” is to sidestep any consequences for their speech and conduct by proclaiming that those consequences are “cancel culture”, “censorship”, or “silencings”.
No. Reasonable responses include openly discussing what makes the content of the book “bad” and asking others (including bookstores, regardless of whether they listen) to not support the author. Demanding to have the book banned from libraries, yanked from all store shelves (physical or digital), and the author prevented from ever publishing another book are unreasonable responses—because they’re all censorship. And as mentioned above, having the author swatted would be a flat-out crime.
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Re: Re:
“That’s free speech.”
If there is a contract that’s tortious interference.
Re: Re: Re:
Only if the contract is broken.
Re: Re:
Looks like there’s only one thing we flat out disagree on. I don’t see going to someone’s employer and threatening them as free speech. If it is the asshole’s own company, then sure boycott the shit out of it. His company, his opinions, his consequences. But threatening a boycott over something some lowly worker said, on their own time, while not representing the company in any way? I don’t think the company should be dragged into what is essentially a dispute between two people, but it’s way too easy to weaponize most employers in this way. US companies anyway, where firing someone without cause is less risky than a boycott might be.
Is this legally considered to be under free speech? Probably yes, as I don’t see it falling under any of the exceptions I know of. Do I think it should be, hell no.
Big exception – statements made while representing their employer. In store uniform, during work hours, on company website, that kind of stuff. Even if it’s as small as your verified twitter bio saying you’re a {profession} at {company}, that can be seen as making statements on behalf of your employer. That kind of stuff can and should be reported to your boss.
As for the people trying to use “cancel culture” accusations as a get away from jail free card, fuck them. Trying to use a legitimate issue as a shield for something completely different is an evil move. I also have a personal hatred for people trying to redefine words to mean what they want it to mean.
i meant to do only a quick reply and this quickly ballooned in word count. sorry about that. maybe if i was smarter i could write shorter posts
Re: Re: Re:
“I’m not going to shop here any more, and I’m going to ask my friends to do the same, unless you get rid of this racist piece of trash on your payroll.” I fail to see how that isn’t free speech: You’re not threatening the employer with a criminal act and the employer is free to say “fuck off, you won’t be missed” in response.
Let’s say that someone who works for a company that serves the general public uses a racial slur on social media to demean a specific demographic therein. Without punishing the employee in any way, how could the company best reassure everyone that the employee’s beliefs aren’t going to affect, or haven’t already affected, the way that company does business with people from the insulted demographic?
Re: Re: Re:
So, Jessica Price or Thomas Parrott then.
Jessical Price: Some crazy bitch off her meds, quietly released from Paizo (a known den of assholes) without fanfare for apparently her stance on worker protections or something, then hired by ArenaNet despite the public interests of ArenaNet making known how much of a crazy bitch off her meds Jessica Price was. 11 months later (and apparently being protected from her consequences of shitting on people on the ArenaNet forums, according to longtime ArenaNet customers and forumgoers), went on a long, unhinged Twitter rant when a community contributor politely, if mildly presumptiously, sugested something she already did as part of her job.
Thomas Parrott: Formerly of Games Workshop. Defended a minority Youtube content creator and GW customer against a white supremacist fan of GW. Got the boot for “violating the company’s social media rules”. A couple of days or weeks before, GW told a known WH40KK Content creator, crypto white supremacist and alleged harasser of minorities to rebrand or else, citing that “Warhammer” was a trademark that belonged to GW and they did not want to be associated with that piece of trash.
In both cases, yes, they were acting as employeees of their companies, but still.
Re: Re: Re:
The entire point of a boycott is to punish a company in order to get it to change something it’s doing by hitting it where it really hurts, it’s profits. If the reason you don’t want to financially support a company is because they employ someone you don’t want to support indirectly then what else are you supposed to do but tell them ‘So long as you have someone like that on the payroll I refuse to buy any of your products/services’?
Re:
If the government does it, it’s a 1A violation. If it’s private citizens who do it, it’s speech.
Singapore does the former A LOT. America has the latter, but Trump’s little brush with starting an insurrection is creating a ton of chilling effects globally.
Threat is a threat, illegal or not. Try substituting a couple of words in the first quote there. Instead of demanding a person be fired, it’s some other kind of demand. Threatening boycott over, say, influencer discounts, or free ice cream? Maybe someone wants a pony? Simple pay us off or we’ll boycott you? All legal free speech. All dumb asshattery. I’m putting the boycott unless fired threat in the same category of technically legal but morally very questionable. I do not think such extortion should be covered by free speech, but I can’t think of a good way to carve such an exception either.
The second part. Easiest way is to do nothing. Any kind of addressing the issue is just going to be taken as admission of wrongdoing, and will make matters worse. People who are already doubtful of the company / employee will see what they want to see. Even punishing the employee will be seen in a bad light, something along the lines of he wasn’t punished because he did a bad thing, but because he got caught. Like it or not, stonewalling and pretending nothing happened is a very effective PR strategy.
Re:
I missed the thread sorry
Re: Yeah, well.
A threat to steal second base is not the same as a threat to steal your second car.
A threat to boycott your store is not the same as a threat to set it on fire.
You are not very clever on equivocation. But clever enough to bypass the threats faced by those who are doxxed under the umbrella of free speech exercise
Re:
I mean, you get that, for the most part, people are allowed to not buy stuff, right?
Re: Re:
Not if the fifth circuit has their say.
Or.
Students walking out of your prepared presentation/lecture on the appropriate uses of certain nasty words in academia is not a cause for you, the extremely distinguished speaker with actual academic credentials and experience in defending 1A, to pretend you’re the bloody victim. It is speech, and one you basically taught the public that it is valid and something that SHOULD be done to express displeasure.
People banding together to tell your workplace that you are a bad influence to the company, complete with actual evidence and whatnot, outside of work hours, is speech. Assuming the government isn’t manipulating the people to do so.
Writing a bunch of articles that try to explain that a certain term has been expanded to include EVERYONE is speech. Coordinated speechifying is still speech. You being offended by these articles is also speech.
You acting like an asshole? That’s speech too. You getting kicked out of a bar/home/social media site of choice/social group? Congrats, the right to associate is a form of speech too.
Want to know what’s NOT speech? Threats. Harassment. Hacking. Insurrection. And everything that the state considers criminal.
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The Zio/Israel Lobby -- the Greatest Threat to Free Speech Worldwide
A white racist/elitist dummy, who supports discrimination by a social medium platform, never addresses the most serious threat to freedom of speech: The Zio/Israel Lobby —
Arizona lawmakers melt down over movie screening.
Re:
First, I should point out that multiple fact-checkers have rated Mondoweiss (the website linked to) as biased against Israel (among others) and a questionable source. I cannot be certain that this story is actually true in its entirety, nor that it isn’t omitting significant details. Generally, I would take its assertions with a grain of salt.
Nonetheless, having read the article, assuming there isn’t more to the story and everything in the article is true (notwithstanding the earlier observation), I would agree that this certainly appears to be either anti-Palestinian bias and/or an overreaction by pro-Israel people in government and should be condemned.
That said, that doesn’t really justify you calling anyone white, racist, elitist, and/or dumb for not mentioning that specific instance on this specific page, where it’s not that relevant. You are assuming malice where it is completely unjustified to do so.
Furthermore, this site has previously called out and denounced anti-BDS laws (like the ones at issue in the film) quite explicitly, including one not all that long ago about a lawsuit against one of those laws. That they failed to cover that one specific incident means nothing; they can hardly cover every instance something like that happens, and they have made their opinion on the issue as a whole quite well known for quite some time.
Additionally, this one instance is not sufficient to demonstrate the assertion that “The Zio/Israel Lobby” is “the most serious threat to freedom of speech”. People can reasonably disagree on who or what is currently the most serious threat to free speech. Though, if we were to talk about threats to free speech worldwide, I doubt it’d rank all that high considering India, China, Russia, Singapore, Iran, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, North Korea, etc. are all far worse regarding free speech, and none of their threats come from being pro-Israel. (Plus, India and China are the two largest countries population-wise, so they affect a lot of people.) And in Europe, there are also much worse threats to free speech, like the copyright directive and right to be forgotten as well as the rise of fascist regimes.
Finally, TechDirt supports the right of privately owned social media platforms to engage in viewpoint discrimination within their platforms of without government coercion one way or the other, not discrimination by social media platforms in general. This is also irrelevant to your other claims.
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Re: Re: A Zio finds bias and hate in a true statement about Israe.
The depraved ideology of Zios is an ideology of replacement genocide.
White racial supremacist supremacist Zio colonial settlers founded the depraved evil Zio state by genocide after the international community banned genocide and made anti-genocide jus cogens (a peremptory international legal norm) just as anti-slavery is jus cogens.
Until Palestinians return to their homes, property, and villages, the genocide, which started in Dec 1947, has never ended. International law obligates the international community to abolish the Zio state forthwith.
Genocide is a capital crime without statute of limitations both in international law and also in the US federal criminal code. Every Zio must be hunted down:
We know exactly where bhull242’s mind is. Babbling about bias against the Zio state is like babbling
When the white racist/elitist dummy asserts, the following, he lies.
How does punishing a social medium platform for violating common carriage law do anything but uphold US law in a content-neutral way?
A Tech Dirt supporter of discrimination by a social medium platform rejects the rule of law and is anti-American.
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Re: Re: Re: I meant Israel not Israe
I studied at Brisk. My education causes a Freudian slip in typing now and then.
There is no more outrageous fraud than the aggregation of Zio lies and assertions.
Blasphemy of Land of Israel and of State of Israel
Outside of the cultic religious context of Judaism, no one used the phrase the Land of Israel. The reason is evident to anyone that takes Judaism seriously. The two exiles were ordained because the community of Israel sinned, and rights under the patriarchal covenant were abrogated.
The Assyrian Exile has not ended, and only the Messiah can end it because the Assyrian Exile only exists in sacred time and space. Cyrus, who ended the Babylonian Exile, is explicitly identified to be God’s Messiah. The Bible clarifies that Cyrus was purely an instrument of God’s mercy and did not act on his own initiative.
Without explicit evidence, which demonstrates that God has selected a Messiah (e.g., ending the Assyrian Exile), the use of the phrase “Land of Israel” or “King of Israel” outside of a sacred, religious, or cultic context is pure arrogance and arguably blasphemy. The Hasmoneans and Herodians never called themselves kings of Israel.
Isaiah 45:1
כֹּה-אָמַר יְהוָה, לִמְשִׁיחוֹ לְכוֹרֶשׁ אֲשֶׁר-הֶחֱזַקְתִּי בִימִינוֹ לְרַד-לְפָנָיו גּוֹיִם, וּמָתְנֵי מְלָכִים, אֲפַתֵּחַ–לִפְתֹּחַ לְפָנָיו דְּלָתַיִם, וּשְׁעָרִים לֹא יִסָּגֵרוּ
Ezra 1:1
וּבִשְׁנַת אַחַת, לְכוֹרֶשׁ מֶלֶךְ פָּרַס, לִכְלוֹת דְּבַר-יְהוָה, מִפִּי יִרְמְיָה: הֵעִיר יְהוָה, אֶת-רוּחַ כֹּרֶשׁ מֶלֶךְ-פָּרַס, וַיַּעֲבֶר-קוֹל בְּכָל-מַלְכוּתוֹ, וְגַם-בְּמִכְתָּב לֵאמֹר
Final Covenant
Jeremiah 31:30–33 provides the final statement of the Covenant.
ל הִנֵּה יָמִים בָּאִים, נְאֻם-יְהוָה; וְכָרַתִּי, אֶת-בֵּית יִשְׂרָאֵל וְאֶת-בֵּית יְהוּדָה–בְּרִית חֲדָשָׁה
לא לֹא כַבְּרִית, אֲשֶׁר כָּרַתִּי אֶת-אֲבוֹתָם, בְּיוֹם הֶחֱזִיקִי בְיָדָם, לְהוֹצִיאָם מֵאֶרֶץ מִצְרָיִם: אֲשֶׁר-הֵמָּה הֵפֵרוּ אֶת-בְּרִיתִי, וְאָנֹכִי בָּעַלְתִּי בָם–נְאֻם-יְהוָה
לב כִּי זֹאת הַבְּרִית אֲשֶׁר אֶכְרֹת אֶת-בֵּית יִשְׂרָאֵל אַחֲרֵי הַיָּמִים הָהֵם, נְאֻם-יְהוָה, נָתַתִּי אֶת-תּוֹרָתִי בְּקִרְבָּם, וְעַל-לִבָּם אֶכְתְּבֶנָּה; וְהָיִיתִי לָהֶם לֵאלֹהִים, וְהֵמָּה יִהְיוּ-לִי לְעָם
לג וְלֹא יְלַמְּדוּ עוֹד, אִישׁ אֶת-רֵעֵהוּ וְאִישׁ אֶת-אָחִיו לֵאמֹר, דְּעוּ, אֶת-יְהוָה: כִּי-כוּלָּם יֵדְעוּ אוֹתִי לְמִקְּטַנָּם וְעַד-גְּדוֹלָם, נְאֻם-יְהוָה–כִּי אֶסְלַח לַעֲוֺנָם, וּלְחַטָּאתָם לֹא אֶזְכָּר-עוֹד. {ס}
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Re: Re: Re:2 Errant Nonsense of a Zio and his Supporter
My previous comment has caused my suspension at a social medium platform. A Zio hates someone that can quote the Bible knowledgeably. The Zio mobilizes his ilk to mob-report someone like me for hate speech.
Here is another comment that has caused my suspension.
It is as silly to call Palestine the ancestral homeland of Jews as it is to call Palestine the ancestral homeland of Jesus because Jesus lived there.
Here is Babylonia Talmud Sanhedrin 39a-b.
אמר ליה ההוא מינא לרבי אבינא כתיב (שמואל ב ז, כג) מי כעמך כישראל גוי אחד בארץ מאי רבותייהו אתון נמי ערביתו בהדן דכתיב (ישעיהו מ, יז) כל הגוים כאין נגדו אמר ליה מדידכו אסהידו עלן דכתיב
A certain heretic said to Rabbi Avina: It is written: “And who is like Your people, Israel, one nation in the earth” (II Samuel 7:23). The heretic asked: What is your greatness? You are also mixed together with us, as it is written: “All nations before Him are as nothing; they are counted by Him less than nothing and vanity” (Isaiah 40:17). Rabbi Avina said to him: One of yours, the gentile prophet Balaam, has already testified for us, as it is written:
(במדבר כג, ט) ובגוים לא יתחשב
“It is a (voluntarily assembled) throng that shall dwell alone, and shall not be reckoned among the nations” (Numbers 23:9), teaching that where the verse mentions “the nations,” the community of Israel is not included.
When one engages a pre-modern text, one must read between the lines.
The above is not hard to parse out.
Israel is mixed with us because of the massive proselytization that took place in the Greco-Roman period and before. Israel is not counted among the nations because it is a religious spiritual community that has no territorial homeland. The homeland of the community of Israel is the Torah.
Every Zio colonial settler in stolen Palestine is a depraved evil genocidal invader, interloper, thief, and impostor. The human race is under a categorical imperative to hate, to scorn, and to loathe every Zio on the planet.
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Re: Re: Re:3 Ancestral Homeland of Christians
The following contains a typo.
I meant the following.
Of course, Palestine is the ancestral homeland of Palestinian Christians and Palestinian Muslims. Unlike modern Jews, who have no Judean ancestry whatsoever, Palestinians descend from the ancient peoples of Greco-Roman Palestine including Judeans, Samarians, and Galileans (like Jesus).
There was no Roman Expulsion!!!
The Roman Expulsion is a metaphor, myth, or fairy tale that describes the transformation of Judaism from the religion of Judea into a religion that only the descendants of non-Judean converts to Judaism practice.
[Rabbinic Judaism is, in fact, a Mesopotamian religion,
The holy scripture of Rabbinic Judaism is the Babylonian (i.e., Mesopotamian) Talmud. The Hebrew Bible is merely the backstory to the Babylonian Talmud just as the Old Testament is merely the backstory of the New Testament, which is the holy scripture of Christianity. To be honest, the Old Testament is much more important to Christianity than the Hebrew Bible is to Rabbinic Judaism.]
It is important to reiterate the following.
Every colonial settler in stolen Palestine is a depraved evil genocidal invader, interloper, thief, and impostor. The human race is under a categorical imperative to hate, to scorn, and to loathe every supporter of racial supremacist settler colonialism in stolen Palestine.
Re: Re: Re:4
Still ain’t gonna read your manifesto bro.
Re: Re: Re:4
[citation needed]
Like, I’m no fan of what the Israeli government is doing to Palestinians and all, but “a categorical imperative”? Seriously? You better have the verifiable fucking word of God on you to back up that claim, son.
Re: Re: Re:
Those biases do exist, and they still are biases. Moreover, there is a lot of disagreement about Israel and Palestine so that the issue is nowhere near as clear-cut hear and now for an outsider as the Nazi state or the Confederacy.
But, really, I was merely pointing out what I could find from my research. A cursory search about the reliability of this particular source (something I do for literally every other cited source I’m unfamiliar with) indicated it was questionable and is biased on this issue, so I mentioned that. As I pointed out the very next paragraph, it ultimately didn’t change my conclusion much, if at all, so this whole things isn’t that important.
That is literally what Techdirt says, and it is entirely irrelevant to the claims you were making in that post. Whether or not you or even I agree with it and whether or not that is “correct” is irrelevant. As such, that is not remotely a lie on my part.
Also, please provide your evidence that I am racist.
Viewpoint is not a protected class. Nothing you have asserted suggests that you were discriminated against for your race or religion. At best, you were moderated because of your expression of your opinions on Zionists and Israel. That is not a race or a religion. That is a viewpoint. This is entirely based on the evidence you yourself provided
Ib id.
Note the lack of any citation for this assertion. That’s because it’s not actually true.
That is an incorrect summary of the state action doctrine. That an action supports or is supported by the government is insufficient to make it state action. It has to be a joint action by the two or the private entity is acting under government coercion.
A social media platform doesn’t provide common carriage at all, so this is an invalid argument.
Because a social media platform is not a common carrier and so doesn’t fall under the exception for common carriers.
You have yet to demonstrate that a social media platform discriminating as you allege actually violates the law, and the argument is that the law actually means that it cannot violate the law, so “supporting” such discrimination is entirely consistent with the rule of law and is in no way anti-American.
Re:
What the fuck are you jabbering about?
Re:
No on here cares bro.
Freedom of speach
No holding back here lol