Substack Turns On Its ‘Nazis Welcome!’ Sign
from the your-reputation-is-what-you-allow dept
Back in April Substack founder/CEO Chris Best gave an interview to Nilay Patel in which he refused to answer some fairly basic questions about how the company planned to handle trust & safety issues on their new Substack Notes microblogging service. As I noted at the time, Best seemed somewhat confused about how all this worked, and by refusing to be explicit in their policies he was implicitly saying that Substack welcomed Nazis. As we noted, this was the classic “Nazi bar” scenario: if you’re not kicking out Nazis, you get the reputation as “the Nazi bar” even if you, yourself, don’t like Nazis.
What I tried to make clear in that post (which some people misread) was that the main issue I had was Best trying to act as if his refusal to make a statement wasn’t a statement. As I noted, if you’re going to welcome Nazis to a private platform, don’t pretend you’re not doing that. Be explicit about it. Here’s what I said at the time:
If you’re not going to moderate, and you don’t care that the biggest draws on your platform are pure nonsense peddlers preying on the most gullible people to get their subscriptions, fucking own it, Chris.
Say it. Say that you’re the Nazi bar and you’re proud of it.
Say “we believe that writers on our platform can publish anything they want, no matter how ridiculous, or hateful, or wrong.” Don’t hide from the question. You claim you’re enabling free speech, so own it. Don’t hide behind some lofty goals about “freedom of the press” when you’re really enabling “freedom of the grifters.”
You have every right to allow that on your platform. But the whole point of everyone eventually coming to terms with the content moderation learning curve, and the fact that private businesses are private and not the government, is that what you allow on your platform is what sticks to you. It’s your reputation at play.
And your reputation when you refuse to moderate is not “the grand enabler of free speech.” Because it’s the internet itself that is the grand enabler of free speech. When you’re a private centralized company and you don’t deal with hateful content on your site, you’re the Nazi bar.
Most companies that want to get large enough recognize that playing to the grifters and the nonsense peddlers works for a limited amount of time, before you get the Nazi bar reputation, and your growth is limited. And, in the US, you’re legally allowed to become the Nazi bar, but you should at least embrace that, and not pretend you have some grand principled strategy.
The key point: your reputation as a private site is what you allow. If you allow garbage, you’re a garbage site. If you allow Nazis, you’re a Nazi site. You’re absolutely allowed to do that, but you shouldn’t pretend to be something that you’re not. You should own it, and say “these are our policies, and we realize what our reputation is.”
Substack has finally, sorta, done that. But, again, in the dumbest way possible.
A few weeks back, the Atlantic ran an article by Jonathan Katz with the headline Substack Has a Nazi Problem. In what should be no surprise given what happened earlier this year with Best’s interview, the Nazis very quickly realized that Substack was a welcome home for them:
An informal search of the Substack website and of extremist Telegram channels that circulate Substack posts turns up scores of white-supremacist, neo-Confederate, and explicitly Nazi newsletters on Substack—many of them apparently started in the past year. These are, to be sure, a tiny fraction of the newsletters on a site that had more than 17,000 paid writers as of March, according to Axios, and has many other writers who do not charge for their work. But to overlook white-nationalist newsletters on Substack as marginal or harmless would be a mistake.
At least 16 of the newsletters that I reviewed have overt Nazi symbols, including the swastika and the sonnenrad, in their logos or in prominent graphics. Andkon’s Reich Press, for example, calls itself “a National Socialist newsletter”; its logo shows Nazi banners on Berlin’s Brandenburg Gate, and one recent post features a racist caricature of a Chinese person. A Substack called White-Papers, bearing the tagline “Your pro-White policy destination,” is one of several that openly promote the “Great Replacement” conspiracy theory that inspired deadly mass shootings at a Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, synagogue; two Christchurch, New Zealand, mosques; an El Paso, Texas, Walmart; and a Buffalo, New York, supermarket. Other newsletters make prominent references to the “Jewish Question.” Several are run by nationally prominent white nationalists; at least four are run by organizers of the 2017 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia—including the rally’s most notorious organizer, Richard Spencer.
Some Substack newsletters by Nazis and white nationalists have thousands or tens of thousands of subscribers, making the platform a new and valuable tool for creating mailing lists for the far right. And many accept paid subscriptions through Substack, seemingly flouting terms of service that ban attempts to “publish content or fund initiatives that incite violence based on protected classes.” Several, including Spencer’s, sport official Substack “bestseller” badges, indicating that they have at a minimum hundreds of paying subscribers. A subscription to the newsletter that Spencer edits and writes for costs $9 a month or $90 a year, which suggests that he and his co-writers are grossing at least $9,000 a year and potentially many times that. Substack, which takes a 10 percent cut of subscription revenue, makes money when readers pay for Nazi newsletters.
Again, none of this should be surprising. If you signal publicly that you allow Nazis (and allow them to make money), don’t be surprised when the Nazis arrive. In droves. Your reputation is what you allow.
And, of course, once that happens some other users might realize they don’t want to support the platform that supports Nazis. So a bunch of Substackers got together and sent a group letter saying they didn’t want to be on a site supporting Nazis and wanted to know what the Substack founders had to say for themselves.
From our perspective as Substack publishers, it is unfathomable that someone with a swastika avatar, who writes about “The Jewish question,” or who promotes Great Replacement Theory, could be given the tools to succeed on your platform. And yet you’ve been unable to adequately explain your position.
In the past you have defended your decision to platform bigotry by saying you “make decisions based on principles not PR” and “will stick to our hands-off approach to content moderation.” But there’s a difference between a hands-off approach and putting your thumb on the scale. We know you moderate some content, including spam sites and newsletters written by sex workers. Why do you choose to promote and allow the monetization of sites that traffic in white nationalism?
Eventually, the Substack founders had to respond. They couldn’t stare off into the distance like Best did during the Nilay Patel interview in April. So another founder, Hamish McKenzie, finally published a Note saying “yes, we allow Nazis and we’re not going to stop.” Of course, as is too often the case on these things, he tried to couch it as a principled stance:
I just want to make it clear that we don’t like Nazis either—we wish no-one held those views. But some people do hold those and other extreme views. Given that, we don’t think that censorship (including through demonetizing publications) makes the problem go away—in fact, it makes it worse.
We believe that supporting individual rights and civil liberties while subjecting ideas to open discourse is the best way to strip bad ideas of their power. We are committed to upholding and protecting freedom of expression, even when it hurts. As @Ted Gioia has noted, history shows that censorship is most potently used by the powerful to silence the powerless. (Ted’s note: substack.com/profile/4937458-ted-gioia/…)
Our content guidelines do have narrowly defined proscriptions, including a clause that prohibits incitements to violence. We will continue to actively enforce those rules while offering tools that let readers curate their own experiences and opt in to their preferred communities. Beyond that, we will stick to our decentralized approach to content moderation, which gives power to readers and writers.
So this is, more or less, what I had asked them to do back in April. If you’re going to host Nazis just say “yes, we host Nazis.” And, I even think it’s fair to say that you’re doing that because you don’t think that moderation does anything valuable, and certainly doesn’t stop people from being Nazis. And, furthermore, I also think Substack is correct that its platform is slightly more decentralized than systems like ExTwitter or Facebook, where content mixes around and gets promoted. Since most of Substack is individual newsletters and their underlying communities, it’s more equivalent to Reddit, where the “moderation” questions are pushed further to the edges: you have some moderation that is centralized from the company, some that is just handled by people deciding whether or not to subscribe to certain Substacks (or subreddits), and some that is decided by the owner of each Substack (or moderators of each subreddit).
And Hamish and crew are also not wrong that censorship is frequently used by the powerful to silence the powerless. This is why we are constantly fighting for free speech rights here, and against attempts to change that, because we know how frequently those rights are abused.
But the Substack team is mixing up “free speech rights” — which involve what the government can limit — with their own expressive rights and their own reputation. I don’t support laws that stop Nazis from saying what they want to say, but that doesn’t mean I allow Nazis to put signs on my front lawn. This is the key fundamental issue anyone discussing free speech has to understand. There is a vast and important difference between (1) the government passing laws that stifle speech and (2) private property owners deciding whether or not they wish to help others, including terrible people, speak.
Because, as private property owners, you have your own free speech rights in the rights of association. So while I support the rights of Nazis to speak, that does not mean I’m going to assist them in using my property to speak, or assist them in making money.
Substack has chosen otherwise. They are saying that they will not just allow Nazis to use their property, but they will help fund those Nazis.
That’s a choice. And it’s a choice that should impact Substack’s own reputation.
Ken “Popehat” White explained it well in his own (yes, Substack) post on all of this.
First, McKenzie’s post consistently blurs the roles and functions of the state and the individual. For instance, he pushes the hoary trope that censoring Nazis just drives them underground where they are more dangerous: “But some people do hold those and other extreme views. Given that, we don’t think that censorship (including through demonetizing publications) makes the problem go away—in fact, it makes it worse.” That may be true for the state, but is it really true for private actors? Do I make the Nazi problem worse by blocking Nazis who appear in my comments? Does a particular social media platform make Nazis worse by deciding that they, personally, are not going to host Nazis? How do you argue that, when there are a vast array of places for Nazis to post on the internet? Has Gab fallen? Is Truth Social no more?
McKenzie continues the blurring by suggesting that being platformed by private actors is a civil right: “We believe that supporting individual rights and civil liberties while subjecting ideas to open discourse is the best way to strip bad ideas of their power. We are committed to upholding and protecting freedom of expression, even when it hurts.” That’s fine, but nobody has the individual right, civil liberty, or freedom of expression to be on Substack if Substack doesn’t want them there. In fact that’s part of Substack’s freedom of expression and civil liberties — to build the type of community it wants, that expresses its values. If Substack’s values is “we publish everybody” (sort of, as noted below) that’s their right, but a different approach doesn’t reflect a lack of support for freedom of expression. McKenzie is begging the question — assuming his premise that support of freedom of expression requires Substack to accept Nazis, not just for the government to refrain from suppressing Nazis.
As Ken further notes, Substack’s own terms of service and the moderation they already do does already block plenty of 1st Amendment protected speech, including hate speech, sexually explicit content, doxxing, and spam. There are good reasons that a site might block any of that speech, but it then stands out when you decide to say “but, whoa whoa whoa, Nazis, that’s a step too far, and an offense to free speech.” It’s all about choices.
Your reputation is what you allow. And Substack has decided that its reputation is “sex is bad, but Nazis are great.”
Or, as White notes:
My point is not that any of these policies is objectionable. But, like the old joke goes, we’ve established what Substack is, now we’re just haggling over the price. Substack is engaging in transparent puffery when it brands itself as permitting offensive speech because the best way to handle offensive speech is to put it all out there to discuss. It’s simply not true. Substack has made a series of value judgments about which speech to permit and which speech not to permit. Substack would like you to believe that making judgments about content “for the sole purpose of sexual gratification,” or content promoting anorexia, is different than making judgment about Nazi content. In fact, that’s not a neutral, value-free choice. It’s a valued judgment by a platform that brands itself as not making valued judgments. Substack has decided that Nazis are okay and porn and doxxing isn’t. The fact that Substack is engaging in a common form of free-speech puffery offered by platforms doesn’t make it true.
And this is exactly the argument that we keep trying to make and have been trying to make for years about content moderation questions. Supporting free speech has to mean supporting free speech against government attempts at suppression and also supporting the right of private platforms to make their own decisions about to allow and what not to allow. Because if you say that private platforms must allow all speech, then you don’t actually get more speech. You get a lot less. Because most platforms will decide they don’t want to be enabling Nazis, and only the ones who eagerly cater to Nazis survive. That leaves fewer places to speak, and fewer people willing to speak in places adjacent to Nazis.
Substack has every right to make the choices it has made, but it shouldn’t pretend that it’s standing up for civil rights or freedoms, because it’s not. It’s making value judgments that everyone can see, and its value judgment is “Nazis are welcome, sex workers aren’t.”
Your reputation is what you allow. Substack has hung out its shingle saying “Nazis welcome.”
Everyone else who uses the platform now gets to decide whether or not they wish to support the site that facilitates the funding of Nazis. Some will. Some will find the tradeoffs acceptable. But others won’t. I’ve already seen a few prominent Substack writers announce that they have moved or that they’re intending to do so.
These are all free speech decisions as well. Substack has made its decision. Substack has declared what its reputation is going to be. I support the company’s free speech rights to make that choice. But that does not mean I need to support the platform personally.
Your reputation is what you allow and Substack has chosen to support Nazis.
Filed Under: chris best, content moderation, free speech, hamish mckenzie, hate speech, nazi bar, nazis, reputation, trust and safety
Companies: substack
Comments on “Substack Turns On Its ‘Nazis Welcome!’ Sign”
One of the few people whose work I follow on Substack, A.R. Moxon, announced his intent to leave Substack by dropping a few questions for Substack (Hamish McKenzie in particular) about the not-pro-Nazi-but-actually-pro-Nazi policy.
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The sportswriter Craig Calceterra is also leaving Substack, and his Substack newsletter is his entire income.
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I like him. I hope he can find another medium for support.
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That’s unfortunate to hear. Moxon’s The Reframe is engaging and thought-provoking in the best ways possible, especially as more and more Americans are thirsting for fascism.
He has done other platforms, like Medium, so he won’t fade off into the silence. But damn.
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Re: KarenMAXXING
It’s funny that you think that everyone who disagrees with you is a nazi, which is retarded because rarely does anyone on the right actually support “national socialism”, because socialism is not right wing and right wingers dont care about “Volkish equality”
And Unironically the magic sky daddy believers are more dangerous than the “so called nazis”, and are actually committing a genocide right now in Israel, and according to the UNSC is in violation of international law, and they have nuclear weapons. Yet the people you think need to be deplatformed are right wingers and not the jihadists or talmudists with nuclear bombs.
Yet, when I deal with these deranged schizophrenic magic sky daddy believers, I don’t think that I need to deplatform them when I can just out fedora them, and ask them if they also believe the world is flat, or if they believe in slavery, or the other insane shit that these ancient cave dwellers came up with.
The reason why leftists need to deplatform people instead of engage in the Bill Nye vs Ken Ham sort of exchange of ideas, is that leftists can’t defend their ideas because they are just as religiously or emotionally driven as the sky daddy believers, who are the same ones who think we need “deplatform” the “church of satan” and other such “demonic” or “nazi” figures.
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Nobody ever says that everyone who disagrees with them is a nazi. But what you’re missing is that those of us who you accuse of this absurdity will disagree with every fascist. And there are plenty of people who aren’t fascists that we agree and disagree with. This tactic is an attempt to water down a specific term that actually means something.
First, “national socialism” isn’t left wing because it’s not socialist despite the term. That was a PR move by Hitler and company to get early support. They later purged anyone who was left of psychopathic. That you’re ignorant of history or political science is not surprising. Fascism involves right wing, jingoist, authoritarianism that targets societal outsiders (whether they’re Jewish, or Muslim, or Middle Eastern, or black, or gay, or trans…) in order to unify the party with hatred and violence. This is literally what the Republicans have been doing.
A lot of fascists are Christofascists and Christian nationalists. You’re drawing a distinction that doesn’t exist for many of them. All right wing militant religious fundamentalists are a threat to a tolerant and humanitarian society.
Except leftists defend their ideas all the time and at length. Deplatforming isn’t something mandated by law or enforced by the government. It’s the actions of a private party deciding not to give a platform to a bad actor who doesn’t actually believe in the rights of others. At a certain point, you can’t debate fascism because fascism doesn’t believe in authentic debate. They believe in power and force. They will use the guise of being “free speech absolutists” to reduce the free speech of others. You’re pretending it’s possible to be reasonable with unreasonable people, to play by the rules with people who aren’t playing the same game as you. And as studies have concluded: deplatforming works.
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They use Nazi imagery and call themselves white supremacists. Some also explicitly call themselves “Nazis”. This is just calling a spade a spade.
Nazism isn’t socialism, despite the name, so who cares that socialism is not rightwing? It’s nationalism, which is rightwing.
Oh, and to pre-empt those fine people who will inevitably come to tell us that the only solution is to not look for Nazi content…
We did.
It led to a Trump presidency and eventually Jan 6.
Chew on that.
If that’s what you fine folk want…
The leopards WILL get you once we’re all dead.
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This is a bizzare nonsensical comment.
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The point of the comment is clear: Ignoring Nazis and their ilk won’t make them go away. One must actively fight against them—whether that means deplatforming their asses whenever they pop up or committing actual physical violence against them—to make them go away.
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Exactly this.
We figured “It couldn’t REALLY happen here” (myself included, to my regret), and we got “HITLER 4 DUMMYS, riten bi Donald J. Trump!” I’m not making the same mistake twice….
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DID YOU KNOW THAT NAZIS CAN OWN TELEPHONES!!!!
DID YOU KNOW THAT NAZIS CAN USE THE MAIL!!!!
MORAL PANIC, WE MUST DEPLATFORM THEM!!!!
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As the Palestinian terrorists discovered on October 8, choosing violence doesn’t mean that the other side hands you a victory. More likely, the other side hands you a bullet in the head. If you choose violence, you also have to win by violence.
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Sorry, I’ve been reading some of the comments on Ken White’s article on the matter.
There are some… pro-Substack goons who have espoused that notion.
Dave Karpf has also said his piece on the matter, and he’s one of the two hundred who have signed that letter.
It is not pretty, and those goons have said some rather nasty things.
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Just because you don’t understand something, doesn’t make it “nonsensical.”
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No U.
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Funny how all of those woke ideologues bemoaning the forthcoming death of democracy are doing their best to make sure that the people of America don’t get the opportunity to vote for the person they want to be president. It is only democracy if the right people win.
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You think you’ve made a good point, but the irony is that your point only reflects poorly on Trump and conservatives.
The problem is that Trump doesn’t respect democracy or the electoral system or the peaceful transfer of power. He actively tried to remain in power via multiple failed lawsuits, pressuring elections officials, and one failed insurrection. If you don’t believe in the system, you don’t get to lead the system. Conservatives liked democracy when they were winning elections. They gerrymander, disenfranchise, claim election fraud without evidence, and disrupt the certification of votes when they don’t.
“If conservatives become convinced that they cannot win democratically, they will not abandon conservatism. They will reject democracy.”
It’s the same reasons why fascists aren’t to be afforded the benefit of the doubt when they pretend they care about free speech. They have no problem silencing others.
If you use performance enhancers to cheat, you don’t get to cry when you’re disqualified from the race. “I thought you cared about who could run the fastest!”
No, we care about who legitimately wins without cheating. We care about who will actually protect and uphold the Constitution as per their oath of office.
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…hallucinated nobody mentally competent, ever.
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Losing Control
Remember, anyone who the left doesn’t like is a Nazi. But it sounds like Substack understands that they are a platform, and not a publisher, so attempts at viewpoint moderation IS censorship. Substack isn’t going to give the internet hall monitors the power to censor on their site.
Cancel culture is losing its grip. Learn to compete in the free market of ideas.
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No, just every republican since they support, defend and hang out with literal nazis.
Also. See you hate censorship can I paint Jesus was a leftist on your house?
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…says only the strawman you brain-deadedly project.
Your delusion is the converse of how it actually wotks in reality: the only ones the Left doesn’t like are those who have made themselves into Nazis.
Has nothing to do at all with kicking Nazis out, no how much the mentally ill deliberately lie that that’s “censorship”
A “Free market” only exists when there’s the freedom to not buy the ideas the Nazis are selling. The freedom that you right-wing fascists keep working to infringe upon by forcing platforms to associate with those they have a Constitutional free speech right not to.
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free market of ideas.
This only exists until the Nazis “win”, then we get hobnailed boots in our faces.
Re: Re: History says ...
A reminder that Nazism didn’t lose in the marketplace of ideas. Nazism lost in Stalingrad. Dresden. Normandy. Berlin. Nazism proved unpersuasive when it kept racking up L’s.
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Tell that to the 11 million Holocaust victims.
Pretty heck of an “L” if they could still murder 11 million people!
Re: Re: 'The marketplace of ideas is free to say it agrees with ME.'
A “Free market” only exists when there’s the freedom to not buy the ideas the Nazis are selling. The freedom that you right-wing fascists keep working to infringe upon by forcing platforms to associate with those they have a Constitutional free speech right not to.
It’s particularly ironic for republicans/conservatives to hold up the ‘free marketplace of ideas’ as some ideal to strive for given how much they clearly loathe it, as demonstrated by their book bans and attempts to use state power to silence those they don’t like.
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You show your own hypocrisy given a major cornerstone of Nazi ideology is effectively Cancel culture applied to the existence of entire groups of people.
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The left “cancels” people only by exercising their Constitutional free speech rights of criticism and association.
Compare that to how conservatives “Canceled” Martin Luther King.
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If that is true, which it isn’t, is censorship when you and your friends turn a site so toxic that only Nazis remain on the site?
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I’mma quote from that A.R. Moxon article I linked above:
And now I’m gonna ask you to answer the questions he posed to Hamish McKenzie:
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Are you claiming that the “National Socialist newsletter” that uses literal Nazi iconography is just “leftists” overreacting?
Do I think that some people are too quick to call others Nazis? Sure. But this isn’t a case of that. This is literal Nazis, Koby.
Again, it’s clear you haven’t read the article. Substack DOES moderate for things like sexual content, doxxing, and hate speech. So, even if you wrongly call that “censorship,” Substack already does it.
So you can’t just say they’re choosing not to do moderation. They are. They’re just saying that Nazis are okay, but sex isn’t.
Except, they do. When it’s sexual content. Or some of the other content that they don’t allow.
That’s the point of the whole fucking article, Koby.
Did you not read it?
Funny that I don’t see you complaining about attempts to “cancel” LGBTQ content.
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Koby, Hyman, and their “free speech defender” ilk never complain about that because they’re fine with that kind of censorship. For them, the defense of free speech is less a binding principle and more a position of convenience that they can abandon at will and pick back up later.
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The trans delusion is a false belief about reality. Therefore it should not be taught as true in public schools and normal people should not be forced to affirm the delusions of the insane. But people who believe in this insanity should be allowed to proclaim their beliefs without being silenced.
As always, you make up illusory versions of me who say whatever you want them to say so you can win arguments with yourself.
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Yes, yes, you’re the kind of person who would gladly censor pro-transgender content under the guise of “serving the public good” but whine about Nazis getting deplatformed as “an affront to free speech”. You got anything other than bigotry to defend here, Hyman Rosen, or are you just going to keep repeating the same bullshit over and over and over again like (you think) you’re handing down an edict from God?
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Re: Re: Re:3
As always, you make up illusory versions of me who say whatever you want them to say. Every time you do, I will tell you that you’re wrong, so yes, I will very likely be needing to repeat myself over and over and over again.
I neither want to censor speech supporting the trans delusion nor that of Nazis. I want criticism of people who are wrong and dangerous to be loud and frequent, and I support people who choose not to have themselves or their institutions associate with them, provided those people are not in a position where they should be supporting the free speech of their institution’s participants.
Large private generic speech platforms should not be censoring opinions based on viewpoint. Universities should not be censoring students, professors, or speakers based on viewpoint. If universities honor a commitment to free speech equitably (as they currently do not), donors should not withhold money in order to influence the behavior of the university.
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If moderation is censorship, so is what you propose, because being loud and personalty you can silence some of the voices that support trans people, and you know that, so stop pretending you are against censorship and cancel culture.
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Re: Re: Re:5
Moderation is not censorship. Moderation silences speech based on spam, topicality, and decorum. Censorship silences speech based on viewpoint.
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Is this all you have—empty catchphrases with no actual tangible arguments to back them up? Even I can put an argument to all the usual copypastas I could break out (and that’s assuming they don’t already have an argument in them). Insisting on your own correctness like you’re God handing down the Ten Commandments is like huffing your own wet farts: You might think your shit smells like roses, but everyone else smells shit.
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“The emperor is naked” does not need to be accompanied by a treatise on tailoring. If you don’t like what I say or how I say it, so much the better.
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You still have to prove the emperor is naked. If the best justification you can come up with for your argument is “I’m right because I said I’m right”, you don’t have an argument—you have a delusion of godhood.
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You want me to provide “evidence” that moderation is not censorship? Or that censorship is censorship even if the government isn’t the one doing it?
It’s the ordinary meaning of those words, just like “man” and “woman”. If you want to use 1984 as a manual instead of a warning and newspeak English into oblivion, that’s your business, but I feel no obligation to affirm your delusions. Just the opposite, in fact.
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Yes, Hyman.
To BOTH claims.
You still ahve to tangle with the whole “private property rights” issue which is for ALL PEOPLE.
It’s basic debate rules, you know? If you don’t like them, you can still leave.
Otherwise, I will assume the worst and thet you’re here, at bare minimum, to harass us.
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Re: Re: Re:11
Moderation, before it was applied to internet speech, meant someone appointed to guide a panel, facilitating the discussion, suggesting topics, and making sure that everyone got a chance to speak and that the panel stayed on track. It didn’t mean preventing panelists from speaking.
Here is a discussion of censorship from the Free Speech Center at Middle Tennessee State University:
Private property rights are irrelevant because, despite the illusory beings who inhabit what passes for your mind and whisper to you, I am not suggesting that anyone be forced to carry content that they don’t want, only that large generic speech platforms be urged, shamed, or bought so as not to deprive their users of the ability to speak freely. Including Amazon refusing to sell WHen Harry Became Sally, a book skeptical of the trans delusion.
Of course none of this will help. The site owner and you love the left-wing censorship that the large generic speech platforms provided, and, except for X, still do. You want the censorship ad you don’t want it to be called censorship, because you treat 1984 as a manual and not a warning. You will keep on endlessly sealioning, and hallucinating, and screeching, and I will be here to tell you that you’re wrong
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Why do you keep repeating this lie, despite my pointing out how it was false?
We regularly criticized the old Twitter for their heavy handed moderation choices, and pointed out better approaches (including things like moving to an open protocol so that they wouldn’t need to be a final arbiter for moderation). But, of course, you simply seem allergic to the truth, and HAVE TO insist that I support “censorship” or the suppression of speech on “ideological grounds” because you are too dumb and too foolish to understand that your position is incoherent.
You wish that an arbitrary set of platforms, whose definition “large generic speech platforms” is a meaningless term that only you get to decide, should not enforce their rules against harassment, SIMPLY BECAUSE YOU want to harass children about what genitals they have.
I do not understand your weird perversion over the genitals other people have. Nor do I understand your desire to harass people over their genitals. But unlike you, I have a consistent and coherent view of free speech, which is that private property owners must have their rights of association respected, or fewer sites would ever be willing to host any speech.
Because, under your definition, sites will get overrun by idiots like you obsessing over who has what genitals. And that will drive people away and there will be fewer places to speak online. And, since I actually support free speech in a coherent way, it means I recognize that private sites get to set their own rules, and those rules could include things like “STOP FUCKING HARASSING PEOPLE OVER YOUR PERVERTED OBSESSION WITH THEIR GENITALS.”
But, because you obsess over genitals, you don’t want anyone to tell you to stop harassing people, and thus you make up some nonsense that my support for free speech rights and private property rights is somehow support of censorship.
Because you are an idiot.
Now, once again, please go fuck off.
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Re: Re: Re:13
People the world over have social, cultural, and religious taboos regarding the mixing of sexes in certain contexts. Woke gender ideologues have decided that people must be forced to abandon those taboos so as to affirm the delusions of a tiny number of mentally ill people who believe they are a sex different from their bodies. Those ideologues have also decided that people must be prevented from pointing out that humans come in exactly two sexes, that there is no such thing as gender apart from sex, and that people can only ever be the sex of their bodies. Instead, they must be fed a stream of lies in their education and in their fictional stories and must never look at the world as it is, only at the scrim that the woke would put over it. The woke ideologues wrap their force-feeding of lies in the mantle of preventing harassment as they seek to put male rapists in women’s prisons, male athletes in women’s sports, and naked men in with naked women in bathrooms and locker rooms.
This is why it is important not to ignore genitals. The left wants to use 1984 as a manual rather than a warning. It demands that people ignore the evidence of their own eyes. It twists language so that words are to no longer mean what everyone knows they mean and then tries to punish people who stick to the old meanings. And now, of course, it has vitiated every claim it ever made about “microaggressions” and “speech is violence” and “harassment” by turning and cheering for the murder, rape, and kidnapping of Jews.
Wokeness is poison. Wokeness is death.
Re: Re: Re:14
Hold up hold up hold up.
First off, I have not seen anyone trying to “force” anyone to abandon taboos. Just to show a basic level of respect for other humans.
Second, I love that after months of you insisting that you just need to tell “truth” to people dedicated to (in your mind) telling “lies,” you now admit that some of the rationale for that is the fairy tales and myths known as “religion.”
So, you’re allow to use made up stories to justify not respecting someone else in the name of truth?
You truly are more despicably stupid than I originally thought.
Thank you for finally admitting that you have a perverted obsession with other people’s genitals. Generally speaking, other people’s genitals should never be your concern unless you and they consensually are agreeing to share them with each other. Otherwise, it’s none of your fucking business.
In all seriousness, your obsession with what’s in other people’s pants is something that you should get help with. It’s none of your fucking business.
Lol. This “left” that you keep talking about. Are they in the room right now?
Because they appear to be a figment of your imagination or some fever dream Fox News has repeated so many times that your feeble brain thinks is true.
Hilarious that you say this in the very comment where you insist religious beliefs must be respected.
Wokeness is a figment of your imagination. What you’re really mad about is that people want you to stop obsessing over other people’s genitals and you’re too obsessed to understand why, and so you blame others for your own disease.
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Re: Re: Re:15
I can’t believe that you are actually more stupid than Stone.
Religion is false and gods don’t exist. But no one has the right to force other people to give up their religious beliefs and practices. The US is not France. You don’t like some religious belief or practice? Too bad. No one is asking you. You might recall that the Supreme Court ruled in Church of the Lukumi Babalu Aye v. City of Hialeah that even animal sacrifice for religious purposes can’t be banned by the government.
Furthermore, the fact that men can never be women is a physical fact of reality, not a religious belief. The religious belief is just to keep sexes separate for certain activities. Catholic priests and Orthodox rabbis can only be men, for example, not women posing as men.
Woke gender ideologues want to force women to accept men into women’s prisons, sports teams, bathrooms, and locker rooms. Now that the woke have made it acceptable for men to lie about being women and seek to enter spaces for which their bodies disqualify them, their genitals have absolutely become everybody’s business. It’s similar to the requirements that were added for employers to check the eligibility status for prospective employees once illegal aliens were allowed into the country en masse, or employers reporting salaried income to the government to keep people from cheating on their taxes, or the police stopping and frisking people on the street in high-crime neighborhoods. Dishonesty leads to preventative measures.
Re: Re: Re:16
A question for you, how would you react to an attractive woman walking into a mans locker room? How would you reaction change if they claimed to be a man?
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Re: Re: Re:17
I wouldn’t care one way or the other. If the person is a man, then he belongs in the men’s locker room. If there person is a woman, I would join with others asking management to bar them so that the men who do care won’t feel isolated. In the case of bathrooms, it’s not too unusual for women to use the men’s bathroom when the line at their own is long. Most men don’t seem to care. If they did, I would support them.
Re: Re: Re:16
…like, say, having your account effectively locked out of commenting here because of your gross dishonesty, your continual refusal to abandon bad faith arguments, and your creepy-ass obsession with the genitals of people who aren’t you (including children’s genitals, you sick fuck)?
Re: Re: Re:16
Godwin’s Second Law: “Anyone who uses “woke” as pejorative will turn out to be a fuckhead.”
Re: Re: Re:16
How is it that “religious beliefs and practices”, which you admit are “false”, somehow more sacred than… respecting the name by which someone wishes to be called?
I mean, if we interpret your dimwitted nonsense correctly, what you are saying is “if trans people formed a religion, and part of its sacraments included all gender restrooms” then suddenly everything is cool?
Seriously, there is no principled difference here other than that one belief is tied to a longer historical tradition than the other.
Your lack of consistency and your underlying ignorance and bias is showing, dude.
Re: Re: Re:17
I wonder how he’d feel about members of The Satanic Temple claiming that abortion rights are tied to at least one of TST’s Seven Fundamental Tenets and therefore any denial of such rights is akin to religious discrimination.
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Re: Re: Re:18
I favor abortion rights without apology and on demand, including for women who want to abort fetuses because they would prefer to have a child of a different sex.
That said, freedom of religion doesn’t work that way. The government is not permitted to adjudicate the validity of religious principles, and arbitrary religious claims cannot be used to override facially neutral laws. See https://www.law.cornell.edu/constitution-conan/amendment-1/facially-neutral-laws-and-current-doctrine
Re: Re: Re:17
He doesn’t grasp that his anti-trans delusions are also a false religion.
Re: Re: Re:10
Other way around, dipshit: If you want your whole “CeNsOrShIp Is ThE aCt Of ThE cEnSoR” schtick to be taken seriously here, you have to provide an actual argument that isn’t “I said it’s right so therefore it’s right”. You want to act like you’re God by saying that you’re right without having to prove that you’re right; I’m challenging your claim to godhood and asking you to back up your bullshit with an actual argument instead of “I’m right because I’m right”.
Most people would understand, if you explained it to them, that losing access to a privilege is not the same thing as being denied the use of a civil right. You don’t seem to be one of those people.
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Re: Re: Re:11 Censorship
Not that it will help, because you are an idiot, but here is the obituary of Tom Smothers in the New York Times, referring to censors at CBS: Tom Smothers, Comic Half of the Smothers Brothers, Dies at 86
Censorship is the act of the censor, silencing opinions based on viewpoint on platforms the censor controls. The fact that the vendor has the right to silence whomever they want and the silenced did not have a right to speak on those platforms is irrelevant.
Re: Re: Re:12
Can you provide an actual argument as to why those facts are irrelevant, or is this another “I’m right because I said so” delusion?
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Re: Re: Re:13
Because censorship is the act of the censor, silencing opinions based on viewpoint on platforms the censor controls. The Smothers Brothers did not have a right to speak on CBS. But the actions of CBS were nevertheless acts of censorship by private censors, as the obituary states.
You want viewpoints you dislike to be censored, and you don’t want that censorship to be called censorship because you know that people regard censorship as wrong. Too bad.
Re: Re: Re:14
Every accusation, a confession. In this case, you’re confessing that you want content moderation to be considered censorship “because you know that people regard censorship as wrong” and will thus look down on content moderation as an evil that must be stopped.
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Re: Re: Re:15
Yes, that’s right. “Content moderation”, as opposed to actual moderation, is censorship. Good job! You have actually made a true statement about what I say. Moderation silences speech based on spam, topicality, and decorum. Censorship silences speech based on viewpoint.
Re: Re: Re:16
All moderation is content moderation. If I owned a social media service and banned someone for saying a racial slur, that’s no different than someone getting banned for saying racist bullshit in a way that doesn’t use racial slurs. You can split hairs about “decorum” and whatnot all you want, but that’s you wanting to be able to say “some moderation isn’t censorship” while still saying “moderation is censorship because it silences people and all censorship is evil, therefore moderation is evil”. You don’t get to have it both ways here, Hyman Rosen—you forget that spam, racial slurs, and whatnot are all legally protected speech, which you yourself has said platforms like Twitter and Facebook have an absolute moral obligation to host even if the owners of those platforms would otherwise refuse to host it. You must either admit that the loss of a privilege is not a denial of a civil right (and therefore isn’t censorship) or admit that you’re eager and willing to stan for the idea that Twitter should be morally (if not legally) obligated to host racial slurs and spam.
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Re: Re: Re:17
As usual, you argue with illusory versions of me who say what you want them to say. I do not want large private generic speech platforms to allow allow all legal speech, because that just causes chaos. They should moderate for spam, topicality, and decorum (the parameters of which they decide for themselves), but they should not censor opinions based on viewpoint and should feel that they have a moral obligation to avoid such censorship.
Censorship is the act of the censor, silencing opinions based on viewpoint on platforms the censor controls. Censorship is in the act, regardless of whether the silenced people have a right to speak on those platforms or not, and regardless of whether they may speak elsewhere.
Re: Re: Re:18
You keep going on and on and on about how those platforms should allow all legal speech—about how those platforms have an obligation (moral, if not legal) to host everyone’s speech. You can’t have it both ways: Either those platforms do or do not have a right to decide what speech they’ll host regardless of how you feel about the kinds of speech being moderated on those platforms.
“I think the Jews had the Holocaust coming” is an opinion, heinous thought it may be, and it is expressed without any racial slurs or other “offensive” speech. The same goes for “Blacks were better off being slaves”. Do you truly believe a platform shouldn’t suspend or ban someone who expresses those opinions if that platform’s owner doesn’t want to host that speech?
okay but why though
You keep saying that shit like it’s a dictate from God, but until you can provide objective proof that it’s a dictate from God, it’s an opinion that you’re not willing to justify with anything but “I’m right because I say I’m right”. I’m willing to defend and justify my opinions; why are you so fucking afraid to do the same?
Re: Re: Re:18
You keep repeating this without acknowledging that when you say sites get to decide for themselves what counts as “spam, topicality, and decorum,” you fail to recognize THAT IS EXACTLY WHAT SITES DO, and many sites have decided that when you harass people over their genitals, that violates their rules regarding decorum.
So we get to the crux of your argument: you believe sites have every right to moderate however they want, EXCEPT if it happens to be stopping you from harassing people over what genitals they have.
Glad that’s settled.
Now, please, go seek mental help. You badly need help.
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Re: Re: Re:19
Is Stone your sock puppet? You too argue with illusory versions of me who say what you want them to say so that you can win arguments with yourself.
Private sites have the right to do whatever they want, including banning me or censoring things I say. If they want to prevent people from saying that transwomen are men, they can do that. None of what I say is about rights. As you say, the 1st Amendment grants private owners the free speech right to moderate and censor as they please.
What you miss is that in a country that has free speech as a foundational value, owners of large private generic speech platforms have a moral obligation to uphold that value. So while they have a right to censor, they should make a better choice and not do that. It is entirely their choice. I don’t have a right to force them to behave the way I want, but I do have the right to criticize them if they don’t, just as you criticize Musk for taking away the left-wing censorship you so dearly love.
Once again, you have so internalized the lies of woke gender ideology that you are willing to burn down everything that the founders of the nation held sacred for the sake of forcing male rapists into women’s prisons. The person who badly needs mental help is you.
Re: Re: Re:20
Shit, man, I wish I was.
Your entire argument about censorship rests on the idea that the loss of a privilege is the denial of a civil right—i.e., that losing a spot on Twitter for violating its TOS is no different than being SLAPP-ed into silence. You’re only now raising the idea of “moral obligations” and suddenly respecting the idea of private property rights because other people here have spent months hammering you on your “platforms should host all legal speech” bit and you’re finally realizing that it won’t survive any kind of logical scrutiny. To wit:
Where does this moral obligation come from? Because it doesn’t come from the law. In the U.S., the law grants services like Twitter the right to ban basically whatever legally protected speech its owner wants banned. And in terms of morality, allowing Nazi rhetoric to take over a platform and chase off everyone who isn’t a Nazi seems like a greater moral failing than telling people espousing that rhetoric to fuck off.
okay but why though
Seriously, why should they host Nazi rhetoric as if the tenets of Nazism (e.g., “the Jews should be erased from existence for the good of mankind”) deserve a debate on their merits?
You’re the one who’s been adamant about enforcing the idea of “moderation is censorship” so that content moderation on social media is seen as an inherent evil and fought against so that Nazis, queerphobes, and other bigots with unwashed asses can find a home on social media services that would otherwise ban them. You’re the one who’s made such a big deal about privately owned platforms being “obligated” to host all legally protected speech even when the viewpoints expressed by that speech are so heinous that no platform worth a good god’s damn would ever want to be associated with that speech. If anyone here is an enemy of free speech, it’s you—because you’re the guy who thinks your speech should be carried by every platform that’s already told you to fuck off because you say it should.
…says the guy who routinely obsesses over other people’s genitals (including children’s genitals, you sick fuck) and what they’re doing with them—to the point where you so fear the idea of “someone who doesn’t look like they should have a dick might have a dick” that you’ve made yourself into someone willing to harass trans people out of public life.
Shit, man, you’re on the side of people who think Russian torture camps for queer people are a good idea. Scratch even one millimeter beneath the surface and you’ll find that you’re on the side of people who helped craft Uganda’s “kill the gays” laws. I know you’re so afraid of the existence of trans people that you obsess over them to a degree that most people would call “creepy”, Hyman, but how badly do you want to be on the side of those who think state-sponsored execution (with or without a trial) for someone who merely exists as transgender is a good idea?
Re: Re: Re:20
I think you’re replying to the wrong post, and as such not addressing the point I made.
I was simply noting that YOU ADMIT that sites should moderate for decorum AND that sites get to decide what counts as decorum.
Thus, your ONLY complaint is that you do not like that they recognize your harassment (in your perverted obsessions with other people’s genitals) harms decorum, and thus you claim it’s somehow immoral and against free speech.
It is not. They are saying that you are violating their rules on decorum. It’s got fuck all to do with free speech, beyond that the “principles of free speech” include that they get to decide the rules to exist in their spaces.
Separately, I find it funny that in a comment where you claim I am arguing with an illusory you, you make up some utter nonsense about prisons that I have never advocated for, and insist that this is somehow a key part of my ideology?
Fucking hell, dude. Get fucking help now.
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Re: Re: Re:21
Aside from banning critics of woke gender ideology, they also banned a former president of the United States from speaking. That is an extraordinary level of censorship.
The Soviet Union used to throw critics of Communism into mental institutions because they were obviously insane. Yes, every site gets to decide for itself what constitutes harassment, but as I’ve said before, if that includes the simple statements that transwomen are men and that people should not be allowed into single-sex spaces for which their bodies disqualify them, that is just plain censorship. You don’t have to agree, and then we’re off to the culture wars.
Re: Re: Re:22
Wow, Twitter banning Donald Trump from Twitter stopped him from speaking any- and everywhere else? 🙃
It would be if Trump didn’t have other avenues of speaking—including meatspace events like press conferences, campaign rallies, and one-on-one interviews—after being banned from Twitter.
Twitter banning someone for being a bigoted shithead is not the same thing as a government jailing its critics. To even imply the comparison is to make an incredibly bad faith argument that goes well beyond even your usual bad faith arguments.
Oh, look, you opened a “but” and a bunch of shit fell out. Who could’ve seen that coming.
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Re: Re: Re:23
Centro is the act of the censor, silencing opinions based on viewpoint on platforms the censor controls. The ability of the silenced to speak elsewhere is irrelevant.
Using incorrect definitions of insanity and harassment are both the same thing; they are means to impose censorship while disingenuously claiming that the silencing is for other reasons.
Re: Re: Re:24
Quick question, shithead: How was Donald Trump, who was literally the President of the United States (and therefore one of the most powerful people in the world) when Twitter banned him, silenced by that ban in a way that directly attacked the right to free speech promised by the Constitution? Remember, the right to free reach is not promised in any law, and your argument for a “moral obligation” to host Trump’s speech would require platforms he doesn’t own to give up their own legal rights (willingly or otherwise).
Re: Re: Re:22
See? Again, you totally misrepresent reality to push your own perverted obsessions.
They banned people, like you, who HARASSED people about what genitals they have. This is a reasonable thing to do if you are trying to keep decorum. They did not ban anyone merely for criticizing what it is that you falsely label as “woke gender ideology.” They banned people who were deliberately harassing others based on a weird sick obsession with their genitals.
Those bans were clearly for decorum, to prevent the abuse and harassment of others on the platform.
They banned Trump not for ideological reasons, but again for decorum. In the wake of January 6th, there was legitimate concern that he was seeking to encourage further attacks on democracy up to and including the possibility that he would refuse to transition out of the White House. As has been detailed multiple times over, the Twitter team felt that in the interests of not letting him use their private property to inspire a further insurrection, they would close his account.
That was not for ideological reasons. If they wanted to ban him for ideological reasons, they would have done so years earlier.
Again, it was for decorum, and as you yourself admit, the “moral” decision of a platform is to moderate for decorum, and that the “moral” way of deciding is that the platform gets to decide for themselves.
You lie and pretend that these decorum based decisions were for ideological reasons because you cannot come to terms with the fact that you are mentally ill, and have a perverse obsession with other people’s genitals, and refuse to get help over it. And then you wish to harass and abuse others because of your obsession.
Get fucking help.
Re: Re: Re:23
To wit: J.K. Rowling is still on Twitter, and she hates trans people so much that—like Graham Linehan before her—she burned her reputation to the ground so she could attack trans people without remorse and receive the praise of TERFs and bigots. If anything, Elon probably appreciates and respects Rowling more than his own transgender child.
Re: Re: Re:16
Again, people keep banning you from forums not because of “ideology.” But because of decorum. Your insistence on attacking, abusing, harassing trans people because of your unwanted obsession with what genitals they have is creepy, harassing and abusive.
No one gives a shit what you believe or what your “viewpoint” is. They want you to STOP HARASSING PEOPLE to justify your own perversion.
That you interpret moderation over decorum as “viewpoint censorship” really says a lot more about your own perverted mind than anything that matters.
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Re: Re: Re:17
Men can never be women. If you insist that there is no way of saying that that is not an attack, abuse, or harassment, then you are saying that a truth about the physical universe must be silenced. Too bad. The physical universe does not care what you say or believe about it, and you can get the whole world swearing that men can be women, and yet they never will be. You are Lysenkoist to your core. Too bad. But your wheat isn’t going to grow in the wrong season, no matter how many people you throw into your gulag.
Re: Re: Re:18
You’re free to believe whatever you want about trans people. But the right to hold that belief doesn’t give you the right to endlessly harass trans people (or their allies) in either cyber- or meatspace. It also doesn’t give you the right to espouse that belief on someone else’s private property (including interactive web services). That you believe otherwise is a failing on your part.
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Re: Re: Re:19
As always, you argue with illusory versions of me who say what you want them to say so that you can win arguments with yourself.
I do not, nor have I ever, claimed a right to speak on anyone’s private property. Owners of large private generic speech platforms should feel a moral obligation not to censor opinions based on viewpoint, but they are free to choose to ignore that.
Re: Re: Re:20
An obligation that someone can ignore isn’t really an obligation, then, is it.
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Re: Re: Re:21
Yes, it is. An obligation is a duty to do something. People shirk obligations all the time.
Re: Re: Re:22
But the obligation of which you speak has no formal consequences. Hell, adhering to that obligation would probably have more consequences than not adhering to it. To wit: Twitter would likely lose more users (and more advertisers) than it already is if it were to openly accept and embrace Nazi rhetoric like Substack has done (and like you think Twitter should).
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Re: Re: Re:23
Yes, obligations, especially moral ones, often come with no formal consequences. People have a moral obligation to be faithful to their spouses. If they choose to use the services of a prostitute while on a business trip, they have failed to meet that obligation. Very likely, with sufficient discretion, nothing will come of that failure.
Re: Re: Re:24
Then why, other than self-serving “my speech isn’t allowed on this platform and that needs to change” reasons, should any social media service live up to the obligation you seek to thrust upon them?
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Re: Re: Re:25
For the same reason people should be faithful to their spouses. Because they have a moral obligation to behave properly.
Re: Re: Re:26
“Because I say so” isn’t an answer—it’s self-serving bullshit. Try again.
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Re: Re: Re:27
I see – you have no idea what a moral obligation is, which I guess shouldn’t be a surprise.
The simple answer is that this nation’s founders believed that freedom of speech (and religion, and the press, and association, and petition, and so on) were important values and enshrined them in the Constitution. To the extent that we are the same country, we should feel a moral obligation to honor those same freedoms.
You and the site owner’s focus on the legalisms of the 1st Amendment are the same as people who set up tax shelters in the Cayman Islands – technically legal, but seen by most as a shady dodge to avoid properly contributing to the society in which they live.
Re: Re: Re:28
Your argument is about people giving up those freedoms—willingly or not—so other people can enjoy a privilege to which the law doesn’t entitle them. Don’t hand me this shit about “moral obligations to freedom of speech” when you can’t name the principle of free speech that says “everyone with a platform must let everyone else use that platform no matter what”.
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Re: Re: Re:29
The principle of freedom of speech says that people should be allowed to state their opinions regardless of viewpoint. A platform that is true to that principle will allow its users to do that.
I seem to recall that a founder of a major world religion eschewed blind legalism for a moralistic framework, for pretty much the same reasons – people taking advantage of the laws to behave badly.
Re: Re: Re:30
Does it say anything about people who own platforms having an obligation to host those speakers or their opinions? Does it say anything about speakers having a right to commandeer private property they don’t own to use as a platform for their speech? Does it say anything about speakers having a right to access an audience through someone else’s private property, even if the potential audience doesn’t want to listen to a given speaker’s bullshit? If the answers to those questions are all “no” (and they are), your whining about a “moral obligation” to “the principles of freedom of speech” is, was, and always will be both irrelevant and meaningless.
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Re: Re: Re:31
Speakers have no rights to speak on others’ private property. Owners of large generic speech platforms have a moral obligation to honor the principles of free speech and not censor their users’ opinions based on viewpoint.
It works like charity. No charitable organization or penurious individual has the right to the money of those who have it. Those with money have a moral obligation to help those in need.
Sometimes people don’t like their moral obligations. You want to silence (and probably murder) people who speak out against the lies you believe. I want crazed, drug-addled, stinking, possibly dangerous bums swept from the streets. So it goes.
Re: Re: Re:32
And, as you readily admit that “moral obligation” includes moderating for the sake of decorum, else you end up with a garbage dump and less free speech.
Your problem comes down to one single factor: you remain too stupid to understand that no site moderates for “viewpoint,” and they only moderate for decorum. Your problem, beyond being fucking stupid, is that you refuse to recognize that your obsession with other peoples’ genitals makes you and abusive harasser, and thus you get moderated for decorum.
Since your pea brain cannot recognize that you get moderated for decorum, you insist — falsely — that it must be because people disagree with your viewpoint. It ain’t that, dude.
You’re disruptive and fucking abusive.
They are living up to whatever “moral obligation” you insist they have. It’s just that they recognize that you’re a fucking disaster, and you’re too stupid to come to terms with it.
Re: Re: Re:32
And yet…
…you insist that social media services give someone (willingly or otherwise) the right to speak on property that person doesn’t own.
And yet, we still have billionaires.
“So much for the tolerant left!” People like you want queer people like me dead; I want you to fuck off. If tolerating your ass means you and your ilk can plot my extinction without a word, fuck tolerance. Shit, man, you won’t even let trans people use a toilet without demanding the right to inspect their genitals.
Yes, yes, we’re all aware than you think every single homeless person ever is/was a drug addict and the only good homeless person is a corpse being buried in a potter’s field. Do you get a hard-on when you hear reports of homeless people being assaulted/killed, or is that your natural response to any kind of violence against the marginalized?
Re: Re: Re:20
Your argument comes down to you are free to ignore my desires, but I will keep on harassing you unless you agree to them.
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Re: Re: Re:21
I’m a way. If I believe you are behaving badly, I will keep on telling you that. It doesn’t matter to me that you would prefer not to be told that you are behaving badly, and your calling it harassment doesn’t change that. It’s no different from repeatedly pointing out that Trump is a moronic piece of filth as long as so many people still like him.
Re: Re: Re:18
Dead naming, not using the pronoun that the person wants used etc is harassment, and that is what you have admitted to practicing. Also bringing up the same stale statements on every thread, even when they are off topic is is spam..
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Re: Re: Re:19
Former names are no less real than current ones, and they do not get erased from history regardless of what the person who once bore them prefers. When the person was notable under a former name, that is ample reason to use it in context. Bruce Jenner won Olympic medals, not Caitlyn Jenner. Ellen Page starred in Juno, not Eliot Page. Some male rapists claim to be female after they are convicted, and change their names.
If the site owner wishes to regard my posts as spam, that is his option.
Re: Re: Re:20
Do you address women who have taken their Husbands name by their maiden name, or are you inconsistent and only do
Re: Re: Re:21
He entirely consistent in being a bigot, because he sees no problem in using someone’s married name while blatantly going out of his way to deadname someone while complaining that it’s unfair that social media dings him for the latter.
This specific argument came up when he first came to TD and starting shitting all over the forum. He went downhill from that and now he is just the creepy and bigoted sociopath with a special interest in peoples genitals whining about how it’s censorship when he can’t follow the basic rules in a TOS.
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Re: Re: Re:21
When it comes to referring to people as they are now, I use their current name. For example, even though Dr. Rachel Levine is a man, I do not refer to him by his original name. I do not even know what that name is. The actor now appearing in some TV shows is Eliot Page. The former Olympic metal winner is now Caitlyn Jenner.
Re: Re: Re:4
And yet, of the two, you only seem concerned with defending the speech that supports Nazis.
Remove the “private” (since you didn’t start adding that until the idea that platforms like Twitter are privately owned didn’t crack through your skull until a few weeks ago at best), then define that phrase in clear and objective terms that go beyond “I want my rules to apply to Twitter”. And in case you get any shitty ideas: I’m not asking you to define each word of “large generic speech platform”—I’m asking you to define the phrase as a whole.
For what reason shouldn’t a platform like Twitter have every right to tell Nazis “your shit doesn’t deserve a platform here” and make them fuck off? Because the use of should in that sentence implies that Twitter has an obligation to host Nazi speech.
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Re: Re: Re:5
There aren’t really any large public generic speech platforms, so the “private” is mostly redundant.
A large private generic speech platform really is just the combination of its individual words. It is a corporate-owned site on the Internet at which millions of people gather to offer their opinions on any topic they choose to discuss.
“Should” implies a moral obligation. Everyone has the right to disregard their moral obligations, but it’s better when they don’t. As always, you want to construe suasion as coercion so that you can hide behind the 1st Amendment.
Re: Re: Re:6
You have left out something important: which is that every one of these sites has terms of service that forbid certain things. So, no, it cannot be “on any topic they choose,” because every site sets the boundaries.
Your only real complaint is that some set the boundary in a way that cut off your ability to obsess about what genitals other people have.
Hell, you regularly admit that you think sites (including mine) should be more aggressive in stopping any kind of speech you dislike, which apparently includes speech with cursewords, but that you should be free to harass people about their own genitals.
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Re: Re: Re:7
Sites should moderate for spam, topicality, and decorum in order to facilitate people discussing any topic they choose.
The fact that large private genetic speech platforms permit themselves to censor in the fine print of their terms of service isn’t exactly a shocker. Neither is the fact that no user reads the fine print. People come to X, Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok because millions of other people are there, all chattering away on any topic that they like. Those platforms, despite being privately owned, are effectively the public square because those are the places where people come to speak and be heard. When those platforms deny someone the ability to speak because of their viewpoint, they are depriving that person of the freedom of speech, even though the person has no right to free speech in that platform and even though the platform does have a free-speech right to silence them.
As always, you wrap your hatred of people speaking opinions you don’t like in the mantle of the 1st Amendment so that you can pretend that denying people the ability to speak their viewpoints is virtuous. It’s not. It’s a denial of a foundational value of this country.
Re: Re: Re:8
And if sites don’t want their users to discuss certain topics—like, say, the merits of the Holocaust and the Nazi ideology—why shouldn’t they have the right to bar those topics from being discussed? Why must those sites absolutely and without question allow those topics to be discussed? Your whole schtick has been about how platforms have an obligation to allow those topics to be discussed, so let’s see you defend that Nazi speech right here and now.
And that is irrelevant to the fact that they have no obligation whatsoever to host anyone’s speech. Being banned from Twitter or Facebook and thus losing the privilege of posting there is not, has not ever been, and will never be the exact same situation as being denied the right to speak on any platform by someone using the law, violence, or threats thereof to silence your speech. Quit falling for the “I have been silenced” fallacy.
How, exactly, does the loss of a privilege equate to the denial of a civil right? You’ve never really explained that notion despite it being part of your entire schtick, so now would be one hell of a time to explain your bullshit belief.
Twitter banning someone for espousing Nazi rhetoric doesn’t block the ability or the legal right of that person to express their Nazi ideas anywhere else. Tell me when I’m telling lies.
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Re: Re: Re:9
Censorship is the act of the censor, silencing opinions based on viewpoint on platforms the censor controls. The ability of the silenced to speak elsewhere is irrelevant.
Private platforms have the right to ban any person and any content they want. As always, you argue with illusory versions of me who say whatever you want then to say so that you can win arguments with yourself. Large private generic speech platforms have a moral obligation to uphold the foundational values of their society, so they should choose not to censor opinions based on viewpoint, even though they have the right to do so.
Re: Re: Re:10
No. No, they do not.
Re: Re: Re:11
Even if they did that wouldn’t help them/their buddies as I rather suspect most of society is probably just fine seeing nazis/bigots/other forms of scum having their privilege of the use of another’s private property revoked, resulting in them being shown the door so doing such would be ‘upholding the values of their society’ and therefore perfectly acceptable under their standard.
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Re: Re: Re:12
That’s why we need visionary billionaires running tech companies. All that money insulates them from having to succumb to public pressure to behave badly. (Of course they may behave badly of their own accord, but when they don’t, everyone benefits.)
Re: Re: Re:13
Yeah, pretty sure the world could do with less rich, hypocritical idiots taking ownership over already existing platforms because they know that if they tried to make their own(something they could easily do with but a fraction of their money) it would implode immediately for the same reason all the other ‘alternative’ social media platforms have.
Re: Re: Re:8
Does that mean pubs and pubs are also part of the public square, because that is where in the real world people go to talk o each other. Also, why are you so desperate to get on platforms where you are not welcome, it wouldn’t be to exercise the hecklers charter, and by you persistent and aggressive attacks, silence people would it. You certainly seem to follow the fascist playbook of aggressively bullying people into compliance with your politics.
Re: Re: Re:8
That’s literally all they do. Your problem is you think that YOUR obsession with other people’s genitals is not harassment. But it is. So you get removed from forums not for “viewpoints” but for decorum. Because you are harassing people about something that is none of your fucking business.
Literally none of that makes sense. Even if read generously, it makes you sound beyond dimwitted. You’re saying that because YOU insist that they MUST allow all speech — something they have never promised or offered to do — it’s somehow offensive that they don’t allow YOUR KIND OF ABUSE, even as you admit that moderating for decorum is just fine.
Your problem, again, is that you cannot come to terms with the fact that your perverted obsession with the genitals of other people, and the need to publicly whine about that kind of information is abusive and harassing and people remove you from their private spaces because no one likes to be harassed by a perverted creep in need of serious mental health help.
I have no hatred of anyone speaking any opinions. You are free to say whatever you wish. What you do not have the right to do is commandeer someone else’s private property to abuse and harass others outside of the rules of those spaces.
That you choose to continue to do so is not a defense of speech. It is the opposite. It is a defense of seizing others property for your own purposes. I find it hilarious that you complain about “the woke” and “leftists” while advocating the “wokest/leftist” position there is, that it’s okay to commandeer others property for your own perversions.
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Re: Re: Re:9
You argue with illusory versions of me who say what you what then to say so that you can win arguments with yourself.
Urging people to behave in a certain way is not commandeering their property.
I do not argue that large private generic speech sites have a moral obligation to host all speech, just all opinions. The government cannot control how people express their opinions. Private sites can.
I have no idea why you believe that the terms of service of a site have anything to do with freedom of speech. Freedom of speech is the ability to express opinions freely. If a site does not allow that, it is depriving its users of freedom of speech, even though it is the site’s own right to freedom of speech that allows it to do that. But supporting freedom of speech means supporting it for all people, and that means criticizing people who use their own freedom of speech rights to silence other people. Hiding behind the legalities of the 1st Amendment to support private censorship is the opposite of that.
Re: Re: Re:10
Your whole schtick is about begging social media services to accept all legal speech because you want those services to host your speech again. Tell me how it’s not about commandeering their property for your own selfish gain and I’ll tell you that you’re telling lies.
People express opinions through speech—which means that to host all opinions, services have to host all speech. After all, “white people should be allowed to say ‘n⸻r’ ” (only with the racial slur uncensored) is an opinion.
Also: “The Jews had the Holocaust coming” is an opinion. For what reason should every social media service, including any services owned by Jewish people, want to host that opinion as if it deserves a debate on the merits?
You’re the one who’s been arguing that a site’s TOS should align with “the principles of freedom of speech”; you shouldn’t have drawn your weapon and demanded a fight if you didn’t want a skirmish on that battlefield.
That’s only true if the site has a legal obligation to host all legal speech. But you can’t show me a social media service that has such an obligation. You really should stop falling for the “I have been silenced” fallacy, Hyman Rosen.
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Re: Re: Re:11
To commandeer something is to use force to take it. Convincing someone to do something is the exact opposite.
You really are an idiot, aren’t you?
People should want to host all opinions because they should want to uphold the principle of free speech.
The terms of service of a platform may support free speech, or they may not. You and the site owner seem to believe that speech being contrary to terms of service somehow renders that speech intelligible for freedom. It does not. It merely shows that the site does not respect free speech, if those terms ban opinions based on their viewpoint.
Re: Re: Re:12
Largely a distinction without a difference in the case of your argument about platforms having an obligation to host all legal speech.
If I run a social media service, why in God’s name should I want to host speech such as “the Holocaust didn’t kill nearly enough Jews” or “we should enslave Black people again because they had it better back then”? Go ahead, explain how such speech is worth hosting on every social media service—especially the ones that would refuse to host it—and tell me what should make me feel compelled to host that speech myself other than your subjective idea of my “moral obligations” to free speech.
No, I don’t. Those two opinions I mentioned above are perfectly legal speech in the United States; that shouldn’t ever change. What I’ve been pointing out to you is that no social media service has any kind of obligation—ethical, moral, and especially legal—to host those opinions or the people who would espouse them. Your entire argument rests on the idea that the freedom of services like Twitter to make its own decisions about what speech it will and will not host should be given up (willingly or otherwise) for no other reason than an appeal to some objective form of morality about “free speech” that doesn’t really exist.
Re: Re: Re:6
People who own social media services may feel that they have a moral obligation to make sure Nazis don’t feel welcome on those services. For what reason, then, do you believe their moral obligation is bullshit compared to your idea of what their moral obligations should be?
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Re: Re: Re:7
It’s not. Punching Nazis is a noble goal. But the primary function from the user’s point of view of large private generic speech platforms is speech, so that should be the moral aspect that comes to the fore. The fact that you believe that Nazis should be silenced and also that people who believe that men can never be women should be silenced should be telling you that silencing never stops with those whom most people would describe as objectively evil.
Re: Re: Re:8
And yet, nobody except the people who own those platforms has a protected legal right to post their speech on those platforms, which can choose what speech (and whose speech) they will and will not host.
Tell me the exact and specific point, in clear terms and objective measurements, that a social media service turns into a public square—at which point its owners should be disallowed from deciding what speech is and isn’t acceptable on that service because “public square” and “morals” and a whole bunch of other shit that never applied to the service before the exact and specific point you named.
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Re: Re: Re:9
That’s why large private generic speech platforms cannot be disallowed to stop censoring opinions based on viewing, they can only be urged, convinced, criticized, or bought to get them to change.
There is no exact point where a speech platform becomes subject to the moral obligation not to censor. That is a function of its users and its critics, and will become a part of the usual culture wars.
Re: Re: Re:10
Neither Twitter nor Facebook were the social media juggernauts they are today back when they first launched. If you can’t name the point where they became subject to a moral obligation that has no legal consequences and would actually infringe upon their First Amendment–protected association rights if it were upheld in a court of law, your argument that such a moral obligation exists is a heaping load of bullshit.
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Re: Re: Re:11
Not even slightly. No one is legally required to give charity, for example, but many people feel that there is a moral obligation for themselves and others to do so, and no one feels that there is some specific level of income where that kicks into effect.
Asking for a specific point where platforms should feel a moral obligation to support free speech is the same legalism as hiding behind the 1st Amendment. It is a way of being lawful evil. In the world of large private generic speech platforms, they should instead aspire to be chaotic good.
Re: Re: Re:12
And plenty of other people don’t feel that obligation. For what reason should they be compelled to give to charity in the same way you believe social media service owners should be compelled to host bigoted speech?
You’re the one who keeps using the phrase “large generic speech platform” as if that means something to anyone but you. I’m asking you to define the moment where a social media service becomes a “large generic speech platform” and therefore becomes obligated to host all legal speech—a condition that you don’t seem all that concerned about placing upon social media services that don’t fit the “large generic speech platform” designation. You wanted this fight, so don’t whine when I throw a left hook that you can’t block.
Re: Re: Re:4
Funny how you will never show a single example of that ever happening.
Re: Re: Re:3
And the horror is that the Nazis went overboard in cancelling any gender issue that wasn’t heteronormal and didn’t involve women being breeding stock. The gays were amongst the very first in the concentration camps.
Re: Re: Re:4
And it’s also a historical fact that the Nazis went after Magnus Hirschfield’s Institut für Sexualwissenschaft, which was one of the premier organizations for sexology research and LGBTQ topics in the world, in 1933. They raided the institute, and burned its library, including many irreplaceable manuscripts. It may have set back research into these topics by decades.
The fact that our modern-day Nazis are doing much the same thing here in the U.S. should be a major cause for concern.
Re: Re: Re:2
I find it amusing that you clearly support censorship of speech you insist is untrue or “delusional,” but at the same time insist that it would be horrifying for private websites to choose not to host nazi content.
I wonder why that is?
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Re: Re: Re:3
The explanation is very simple – you don’t understand what I’m saying, and the fool laughs at things he doesn’t understand that are said by his brothers.
You have perhaps been taking lessons from Stone and making up illusory versions of me that say what you want them to say so that you can win arguments with yourself.
I do not support censorship of speech that is untrue or delusional. But public school curriculum is not a forum for public speech. It is the speech of the government, which must decide what should be taught and what should not be. And as such, the curriculum should not be teaching lies and decisions as truth. When it comes to controversial public issues such as the trans delusion or the support for murdering, raping, and kidnapping Jews, the curriculum should include a discussion just as it does with religion – that many people believe one thing, and many people believe the opposite, and that this is currently the subject of social dispute all over the world.
Re: Re: Re:4
And yet, I don’t see you shitting all over the book bans in public libraries. Whenever you show up on stories like those, all you talk about is how the banners are in the right for “not tolerating the trans delusion” or some shit. But when Nazi speech is being talked about, you leap at the chance to defend it against “viewpoint discrimination”.
Like more than a few people here, I support the actual in-the-law right of Nazi pricks to speak their mind without government interference. I’ll even stand up to say that the ACLU sticking up for the Nazis in Skokie was the right thing to do from a free speech perspective. But that doesn’t mean I believe in the right to free reach: Any privately owned platform that wants to ban Nazi speech should and must have the unassailable legal right to do exactly that. Neither Twitter nor Substack nor any other platform should be forced by law to carry Nazi speech; anyone who believes those platforms should have any kind of obligation to host that speech—be it ethical, moral, or legal—is all but demanding subservience to the Nazis. FUCK. THAT. NOISE.
Also: The fact that you think support for the genocide of Jewish people should be a point of debate in a classroom instead of a sign that someone is a goddamn Nazi tells me you’re closer to being a Nazi than you want us to believe…and maybe even closer than you’re willing to admit to yourself.
Re: Re: Re:5 If they're not flying a swastika it's not for lack of support of the ideals
Also: The fact that you think support for the genocide of Jewish people should be a point of debate in a classroom instead of a sign that someone is a goddamn Nazi tells me you’re closer to being a Nazi than you want us to believe…and maybe even closer than you’re willing to admit to yourself.
… I can’t believe I didn’t catch it the first time but by their own argument as to why they are fine silencing pro-trans speech but object to silencing pro-nazi speech they’ve admitted that they believe that the nazi claims and arguments are correct, since their own standard would compel them to be fine moderating nazis into oblivion if they thought pro-nazi people were pushing an ‘untrue or delusional’ ideology.
Re: Re: Re:6
I noticed it precisely because of those A.R. Moxon questions. Only someone who actually supports Nazism would think one of its primary tenets should be a subject for debate in a classroom setting rather than—like blatant queerphobia—a lesson in what hate can drive people to do to those labelled as “undesirables”.
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Re: Re: Re:7
There’s no such thing as “queerphobia,” Stone. What there is is opposing demon-like degenerates who seek to undermine the nuclear family and western civilization.
Re: Re: Re:8
This is sad even by 8chan standards.
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Re: Re: Re:9
What’s sad is that you admitted here to being mentally-ill, Stone, and then you act sad when people rightfully mock you for it and discount your posts as the ramblings of a crazy man.
Re: Re: Re:10
ok hyman
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Re: Re: Re:6
Of course they’re correct! Noble and admirable, even!!
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Re: Re: Re:5
You don’t usually see me commenting about library book bans because the articles here don’t support them. I am against removing books from public libraries or school libraries, unless those libraries have been curated by woke ideologues or their opposites so that only one side of controversial social issues is presented. In that case, those curators should be replaced by evenhanded ones.
As always, you construe urging private platforms not to censor as forcing them not to censor, so that you can hide behind the 1st Amendment. And no matter how despicable some viewpoints might be, a large private generic speech platform should respect the foundational free speech values of our society and not censor those viewpoints, even when they’re allowed to.
Pointing out as part of curricula that certain things are or were believed by large enough population segments is what teaching is about. Teaching should teach the truth, including the fact that some people hold beliefs that are antithetical to the beliefs of the teacher. It is no different than teaching the beliefs of Communism, along with the fact that Communists were responsible for the deaths of tens of millions of people.
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Re: Re: Re:3
Mike, like Ken White, you’ve gone off the rails and are now exactly what you previously claimed to hate. At least Ken admits that he’s mentally ill, however.
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Re: Re: Re:4
Your ideas are intriguing to me, and would like to subscribe to your newsletter.
Re: Re: Re:2
I challenge you again to point to something necessarily believed or claimed by transgender people that is demonstrably, objectively false, along with evidence for why it is objectively false.
“Gender identities exist” and “some people who identify as trans get treatment to make their physical bodies match their gender identities better” are objectively true statements even if (without conceding that) non-cis gender identities are delusions and both sex and gender are strictly binary rather than bimodal mosaics—as you claim. As far as what public schools teach goes, that’s about as far as teaching on transgender people goes the vast majority of the time.
Given that you constantly do the same with regards to people on this website and transgender people in general, you probably shouldn’t be throwing stones here.
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Re: Re: Re:3
“Transwomen are women” is an objectively false statement that is heard ubiquitously from woke gender ideologues. But transwomen are men. And despite your apparent human appearance, you are a sealion.
Re: Re: Re:4
ok hyman
Re: Re: Re:4
Not under the definition of “women” they use. That you don’t agree with their definition doesn’t render the statement—as it was intended—false.
And despite your human appearance, you are a troll. Despite your appearance of intelligence, you couldn’t identify a sea lion if it was barking right in front of you.
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Re: Re: Re:5
Right. Because they’re insane. And they’ve redefined “women” to include biological males. Which is deranged.
Re: Re: Re:6
Language changes over time. This doesn’t disprove anything they say.
Re: Re: Re:6
[Projectcts facts contrary to extensive evidence]
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Re: Re: Re:5
And then they want that supposed new definition of “woman” (which is a non-definition) to apply to spaces that were labeled for women under the old definition. That is, they want to force their way into single-sex spaces for which their bodies disqualify them, by trying to compulsorily change the meaning of words against the wishes of the people who are using the original meaning.
Transwomen are men. People can only ever be the sex of their bodies. People may have delusions about themselves, but no one else is obliged to affirm those delusions. None of your sealioning is going to change that. Your emperor is naked.
Re: Re: Re:6
Nothing in the first paragraph says anything that would mean that transgender people are delusional. It only shows that they’re just trying to change current social norms.
As such, there isn’t anything to respond to here. You still haven’t established anything said by transgender people that is demonstrably objectively wrong, which is the point I was making.
I could point out the very real safety issues with forcing trans women to use men’s restrooms, but I’d prefer to focus on one issue at a time:
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Re: Re: Re:5
Exactly. If I put on a dress I expect to be treated as a woman, enter their spaces and compete against them. If they have a problem with the fact that I have a cock and balls between my legs, I am entitled to call them bigots and win the argument. Fuck yeah!
Re: Re: Re:6
You have just demonstrated that you have no idea of what a trans person is, and you are attacking them because you think they are playing at being the other sex.
Re: Re: Re:2
If you really think that, then you must think that the Rabbis who wrote the Talmud in antiquity were deluded, because in the Talmud, there are not two, but eight genders. Non-Binary gender is not a new concept (though to be fair, the eight genders is on a binary axis, similar to how there are four blood types but on a binary axis as well: A & B).
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Re: Re: Re:3
Of course they were deluded. They believed in a god, after all. The Talmud is something like two thousand years old. It also has claims about witches and demons and voices from heaven. It bases its beliefs about the existence of things on proof texts from the Bible.
And naturally, it’s not as if the trans delusion was invented by people this century. The Bible itself contains a prohibition on cross-dressing. The trans delusion is a part of the human condition and has likely been around as long as people have. The only difference now is the people who insist that the delusion must be affirmed.
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Re: Re: Re:3
You’re talking about the religion which began when a man heard voices in his head to kill his first born son, and then instead to only mutilate his genitals. Which then dovetailed into god telling them to genocide everyone else in the area.
But at least you have correctly identified that transgenderism is purely a metaphysical / religious phenomena
Re: Re: Re:4
How’s that revenge porn conviction been treatin’ ya, Benji?
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Re: Re: Re:5
What are you a Talmud Defender now? Everything you claim to fear about nazis, can be found in the “holy” books of the talmud / quran, and moreover their believers even have nuclear weapons!
Why not “deplatform” Judiasm and Islam and their followers, do I really need to quote their own scriptures to you, or do you already know what evil shit is in there? Homophobia, murder, genocide, incest, pedophilia, all under the name of god!
Or is it that its so unmistakable that they are literally bullshit, and to be fair everyone has known this since admitting the world is round and not 5000 years old, and the reason why the “nazis” need to be deplatformed is that you cant defeat their beliefs.
And of course your typical, “everyone to the right of bill clinton is a nazi” rhetoric.
Re: Re: Re:6
Well, somebody seems upset that I brought up their conviction on revenge porn charges.
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Re: Re: Re:7
Weren’t you admitting that you like criminality, you want to assault “nazi’s”, who is the real upset one here? I made porn with my wife for money 10 years ago, you assault people when you get upset, and sperg out when someone disagrees with you.
Pathetic really.
Re: Re: Re:8
And yet, I’m not the one with a revenge porn conviction. 😃
Re: Re: Re:8
You tried to use copyright law to HARASS your ex.
And you even got chewed out for it by a bunch of doxxing bastards.
You have no grasp on reality AND the law.
Re: Re: Re:2
Keep going, you left out your support for all the the LGBQ(Not T)folks who are being silenced by book removals, legal attacks on retailers with pride merch, criminalization of activity, and more there…
And then we can start on the multitudinous subjects the right doesn’t want to be out there in the marketplace of ideas, like discussions of how racism is deeply ingrained in our society.
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Re: Re: Re:3
I live in NYC. When I walk through Hell’s Kitchen, every restaurant and bar is displaying a Progressive Pride flag. Nearly every novel I borrow from NYPL (science-fiction and fantasy, because that’s what I read) has weirdly gendered characters. New York State has rules preventing schools from reporting children’s insanity to their parents. So maybe I’m sheltered here, but those silenced people are being silent very loudly.
Re: Re: Re:4
Congratulations, you live in a place that is relatively accepting of queer people! Now imagine living in a place that isn’t.
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Re: Re: Re:5
Well, the woke filth has come out in NYC to openly cheer for the murder, rape, and kidnapping of Jews. Posters of the kidnapped Israelis are routinely torn down from lamp posts. So I don’t have to imagine all that hard.
Re: Re: Re:6
Have you any proof of the political allegiance of those tearing down the posters, or are you automatically blaming the other party?
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Re: Re: Re:7
Yes, in fact. Many of them have been doxxed. They’re all woke filth.
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Re: Re:
Camel nose under the tent. They are quick to accuse. After the precedent is established, that’s when the cancel mob swings into effect.
None of those are based on political viewpoint.
I’ve never seen any such content cancelled on an internet platform. Generously interpreted, you might be referring to content in kids libraries or grade schools, but those aren’t speech platforms.
Re: Re: Re:
They’re literally using Nazi iconography, you idiot.
He’s also referring to public libraries choosing to yank books with queer content/by queer authors based on the complaints of a few dipshit conservatives—which you’d know if you actually cared about censorship instead of the imagined right of free reach.
Re: Re: Re:
So are you saying that Substack not allowing sexually explicit content, doxxing, and spam, are also “camel nose under the tent.” Are they enabling the “cancel mob”?
Koby, can I paint on the front of your house that you’re an ignorant motherfucker? Or not?
And supporting the genocide of Jews is a “political viewpoint”?
Because you live in a fucking bubble. LGBTQ content is frequently removed from social media.
I mean, I wasn’t, but if you want to go there, sure, let’s do that too.
First, what makes you think that a library is not a “speech platform”? Libraries are like the original speech platform, my dude.
Second, what in that ignorant little brain of yours, thinks that being a “speech platform” (a term that has no clear definition” means that you lose your own free speech rights?
Be specific, please, because I want to see just how fucking stupid you really are.
Re: Re: Re:2
Hell, plenty of queer people will tell you that whenever a platform institutes a ban on sexual content, LGBTQ content will almost always be the first to go because such content is either seen as inherently sexual or reportbombed as sexual content by dipshit conservatives.
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Re: Re: Re:2
These are significantly more objective categories, so no they’re not.
The front of my house isn’t a platform. I’ve never offered a public license for anyone to do so.
It’s not. Death threats are an objective prosecutable crime, and are not protected by the first amendment.
It’s never been removed from the major platforms. Rather, it’s celebrated, with special rainbow flags, and much corporate pandering.
Offering a public license would be a great start. Libraries don’t do that. Folks used to get kicked out of libraries for talking too loudly. It’s unquestionably not a place for open speech.
Re: Re: Re:3
It’s privately owned property, same as Twitter. For what reason should Twitter’s owner be obliged to host Nazi content on his property but you shouldn’t be obliged to host insults directed at you on your property?
I can think of a few people who would disagree with you. Unfortunately for you, they’re all Nazis.
You’d be surprised how often queer users are dinged by the major platforms for demonetization, content deletion, or account bans over content that, were it wrapped in a heterosexual package, would likely be far more acceptable to those platforms. Hell, so far as I know, YouTube still demonetizes (or at least decreases the reach of) queer content based on certain keywords showing up in titles and descriptions.
Libraries can, and often do, offer space to the general public for events like book readings (drag queens optional). And that’s on top of being a place for people to find books of all kinds—including the ones that piss them off. (The best libraries offend everybody.) How does that make them anything but a platform for speech?
That would be kicking someone out for violating the decorum of the library, which is perfectly fine under the First Amendment. Public libraries are free to see content-agnostic rules such as “no shouting or you’re outta here”.
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Re: Re: Re:4
The answer to your question is that X is a large generic speech platform and someone’s house is not. Note that “obliged” means “should”, not “must”. In a country that has free speech as a foundational value, a large private generic speech platform should respect the free speech of its users and not censor opinions based on viewpoint. They don’t have to do that, but they should. And if they don’t, they should be criticized, shamed, or bought to try to get them to change. If they do not change, then that’s that; you cannot always have what you want.
Re: Re: Re:5
Irrelevant. Twitter and your house are both privately owned property. Your whole schtick is about saying Twitter has an obligation to host Nazi speech; for what reason does that only apply to one kind of privately owned property (Twitter) but not to another kind (your house)? You can’t have it both ways here, Hyman: Either Twitter has no obligation—ethical, moral, or legal—to host Nazi speech or you have an obligation to host Nazi speech on your front door.
Again: Your whole argument is that Twitter should host all legal speech, which means it should be obliged—bound by the law, even!—to do that. Trying to argue otherwise now because you realize how shit your argument is after months of people like me telling you that your argument sucks isn’t really helping your cause, fuckboi.
Other than “whining like a child”, you still haven’t explained how you’re going to make Twitter live up to its supposed obligation of hosting all legally protected speech—or why it should have that obligation in the first place.
Your whole schtick revolves around the idea that Twitter has an obligation to host Nazi speech or else it’s a filthy fucking censor. I don’t buy for a second that you’d ever accept Twitter being able to ban Nazi speech—especially since you’ve spent more time than I care to count railing against moderation of that kind of speech as “censorship” even when the people who speak it can go speak it elsewhere.
When you have an argument that I can’t tear apart by pointing to a simple webcomic and explaining how the right to free reach isn’t a thing, you offer it up. Until then? Shut the fuck when grown folks are talking, you petulant loudmouthed brat.
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Re: Re: Re:6
Sir, this is a Wendy’s.
Private homes are not speech platforms. The moral obligation not to censor does not give the censored the right to speak. Censorship is the act of the censor, whether governmental or private.
Re: Re: Re:7
Irrelevant. Social media services and private homes are both privately owned property. What makes only one of them a platform for speech that is, for some reason, obliged to host third-party speech?
Your entire argument about “censorship” rests on the idea that this “moral obligation” of which you speak does, in fact, give someone the right to speak on a platform that otherwise wouldn’t host that person’s speech. Also, where does that “moral obligation” come from? Don’t say “it’s in the law” because it’s not, and don’t say “it’s objectively correct” because all morality is ultimately subjective.
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Re: Re: Re:8
Because speech platforms have set themselves up as platforms for speech and private homes have not.
You really are an idiot, aren’t you?
Re: Re: Re:9
Social media services and private homes are both forms of private property. All other facts are irrelevant.
…wow, it’s really easy to argue like you if I just ignore facts and declare them irrelevant without explaining why. But I intentionally made a shitty argument here; if you lack the inability to reflect on how shitty your arguments are by having one of yours thrown back in your face, that’s on you.
Re: Re: Re:9
… with rules. Why do you always ignore that part?
Homes set themselves up for speech with rules as well.
They are identical. Both involve private property and the property owner gets to determine how that property is used for speech.
And they all have rules. If they did not, then the speech would be overrun by abusive ignorant fools like you.
Re: Re: Re:3
In which you prove that you have no clue what you’re talking about and have never, not once, had any position of responsibility in your life.
They are not more objective categories, significantly or not. They are all judgment calls. But, thanks for making it clear that you’re even more ignorant than I previously believed.
So you admit that, as a private property owner, you have rights over who can speak on your property. Why do you seek to remove that right from others?
Also, are you saying that if a private property owner allows, say, a political sign, or the sign of a lawncare company on their yard (as I see frequently) that they should then allow all speech?
You are so disconnected from reality it’s embarrassing.
First off, as point of fact, many death threats are, indeed, protected by the 1st Amendment. They only become prosecutable under the 1st Amendment if they are deemed to be “true threats” or likely to cause imminent lawless action. Many death threats get nowhere near that.
But, also, I did not ask about death threats. I asked about supporting, in general, genocide of Jews, which is a key part of the Nazi platform. You have claimed it’s a political viewpoint. I want to make clear that’s what you’re saying.
You ignorant summer child. It has, and continues to be, regularly removed from every major platform.
No. Just because some sites post rainbows and stuff does not mean that their policies do not frequently target LGBTQ speech.
Look, Koby, I know you’re so deep in a Trumpist/Fox News echo chamber that you have NO FUCKING CLUE how the real world works, but, LGBTQ content is way more regularly taken down than GOP content. Way, way, way more.
Do you support that?
A what now? A “public license”? For what? To do what? On what basis?
A “public license” means nothing here and suggests, again, you have no clue what you’re talking about.
So you admit that it’s okay for libraries (again, they absolutely were the original “speech platform”) to remove people for violating their rules? Yet, you seem to claim that websites cannot do that?
Why?
And don’t say “a public license.” That is a meaningless term that means nothing.
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Re: Re: Re:4
Public License.
Social media companies are offering a public license for usage of a speech platform, in exchange for them being able to track your behavior and market products to you. It’s a non-monetary consideration that forms a contract. This is what separates platforms from publishers, and allows for general access.
Re: Re: Re:5
“Public license” means nothing in this context. Try again, you sweet summer fetus.
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Re: Re: Re:6
Please stop. Goading trolls on like this only exacerbates the issue and makes Techdirt a worse place to come to for news and discussion on tech policy. This current feeding frenzy for Koby has already reached nearly 60 comments. I have no idea why Mike doesn’t just ban them, but you and others’ nonstop replies are not helping.
Re: Re: Re:7
Then, my man, go back to the Republic of Letters.
After Trump got elected and Jan 6, you can’t stop these Nazi assholes from going whereever they please, to harass whoever they feel like harassing.
Best we can do is fucking fight them where we are.
They’ve been doing this since way before Mike got his MBA. Through email lists first, and even before then, via analog means like the Ku Klux Klan.
Worse still, they’ve managed to export theirn hateful bullshit to other countries.
Again, moderation is but one tool, but hell, the Nazis managed to get into the SOMETHIGNAWFUL FORUMS and on email lists.
Again, what you want for these people are police protection orders, 2A and a TON of self-defense training. Oh, and access to a lawyer.
Because you sure as fuck ain’t keeping them out even with an ARMY of moderators.
Re: Re: Re:5
they also present you with terms of service when you sign up, and that forms part of the contract, and that contract trumps the public license you imagine to exist.
Re: Re: Re:5
Lol. Wait. You mean the terms of service that you sign? That’s what you mean by “public license”? Because that same “public license,” also includes other rules regarding things like hate and harassment, which is all they are enforcing.
So… please, Koby, explain to me why this “public license” only some of the terms of the license apply?
Re: Re: Re:3
More objective than “no Nazi imagery”? And no, “sexually explicit material”, doxxing, and spam are not objective.
Wouldn’t matter if you had. Offering limited use of the front of your house as a platform to the public doesn’t mean they have unfettered use of it.
Then you should be opposed to the stance being made here, because that’s literally what we’re talking about! Granted, not a prosecutable form since it’s not an imminent threat, but then you’re just wrong on how broad the exception for death threats is.
Let me be absolutely clear here: We are talking about people who call themselves Nazis, use Nazi imagery, and explicitly call for the eradication of Jewish people. This isn’t something being inferred here. It’s their own words. Those people are being allowed on Substack.
Yes, it absolutely has.
They do. Anyone can say pretty much anything there, donate any book (even one you wrote), and check out any book.
Yeah. Like with many platforms, there are still rules.
Yeah, no, it is.
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Who’s trying to “cancel LGBTQ content,” Mike?
What we’re advocating for is sending the proponents of radical gender ideology to death camps.
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Facebook, for one. Also, you’re literally suggesting sending people to death camps for espousing pro-LGBT views, which is LGBT content. Your form of cancellation is just more extreme.
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Except that we’re talking about self-identified white supremacists who use swastikas in their letterheads. Or did you not actually read the article?
No, they’re still a publisher. They are making content available to the public. That’s literally what publishing is.
Also, they are engaging in viewpoint moderation with regards to sex and anorexia. There is no material difference there.
Tolerance has that annoying paradox that always comes back to bite: if you tolerate the intolerant the end result will be spread of intolerance.
My view of free speech is kind of similar. There is speech with the sole purpose of promoting death and eugenics, which is the whole base of nazism and white supremacy. For me it stops being free speech when it advocates the extermination of others because of their differences (be it gender, cultural, genetics or whatever). We have enough historic distancing now to clearly label those types of ideology as racist death cults. They should be banned from society altogether. You don’t advocate for the extermination of whoever.
Sure there can be abuses but the alternative is the current raise of the far-right extremism with huge doses of nazism and white supremacy. Maybe we should discuss how to curb abuses without letting the nazi apples rot the rest of the basket.
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Alternatively: Preaching tolerance of the intolerant is preaching subservience to them.
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Tolerance is less paradoxical if you view it as a social contract: I’ll accept your existence and leave you alone if you accept mine and leave me alone. The intolerant expressly reject that contract, so they don’t get to claim it’s protection and demand that I abide by it when dealing with them.
Re: Re:
See also: “Tolerance is not a moral precept.”
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Transgenderism is a homophobic death cult, but you support it?
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A death cult kills other people or lead to a mass suicide. Transgender and other queer people do not promote deat, are sometimes driven to suicide. Also they do not usually have children, but then neither do all hetero couples have children.
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Transgender people are neither homophobic (there are gay transgender people, straight transgender people, and bi transgender people, just like with cisgender people) nor a death cult.
Meanwhile, others on Substack are downplaying the importance of T&S altogether.
Oh shit! Why didn’t anybody ever think of just banning the bad stuff and keeping the good stuff? T&S must be so simple!
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This site tolerates Nazis. What are you crying about, Mike?
Well, except if you deny everything bad that you allow, then sue the medias that don’t agree with the reputation you want.
Why is it always “nazis are fine, porn isn’t” and never the other way around?
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Techbros don’t want to piss off the payment processors, who are more than happy to trade in “controversial speech” but draw the line at “female-presenting” tits.
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backpage wasn’t worried about payment processors….
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And I’m sure you weren’t worried about being convicted for revenge porn.
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Those payment processors, by the way, are committing censorship.
Substack is a honeypot
catching all the flies. The FBI has all that info by now.
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As always, the site owner wants to pretend to be a supporter of free speech while actually wanting to censor and silence viewpoints he hates. As always, he hides behind the legalities of the 1st Amendment.
If you engage in your legal right to deprive people of free speech, you are depriving people of free speech. If you urge private platforms to deprive people of the ability to speak there, you are not a supporter of free speech, you are an enemy of free speech. The government is not allowed to deprive people of free speech and private platforms are allowed to do that, but that doesn’t make the actions of the private platforms right.
Free speech is not synonymous with the 1st Amendment. The 1st Amendment simply prevents the government from taking it away from the people. You cheering when private actors do it is the rankest hypocrisy and cognitive dissonance.
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If I run a social media service and I tell a Nazi to fuck off, I’m not depriving the Nazi of their right to free speech—I’m denying them the privilege of using my service as their platform. You keep falling for the “I have been silenced” fallacy and believing in the imaginary right of free reach, and it’s painfully obvious that you want the rest of us to be as pig-ignorant as you so you can keep demanding that we be subservient to the intolerant and the hateful. It’d be kind of funny if it weren’t so goddamned pathetic.
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Censorship is the act of the censor, silencing opinions based on viewpoint on platforms the censor controls. The ability of the silenced to speak elsewhere is irrelevant.
As always, you argue with illusory versions of me who say what you want them to say so that you can win arguments with yourself. I never speak of anyone’s right to use a private platform, because they have no such right. “Denying someone the privilege of using a service as a platform” is known as censorship, and it is censorship even when the censor has the legal right to do so. In a society that has freedom of speech as a foundational value, large private generic speech platforms should not be denying people the privilege of using those platforms based on viewpoint.
Re: Re: Re:
So.
Would you like to give up your right to private property?
Specifically, the right to kick anyone out for no reason whatsoever?
Because the thing you are advocating for means I get to come into your home and scream at you for being a white supremacist.
And if you pull a gun on me, I get the right to self-defense. And manslaughter at least for you.
That is what you are fucking doing right now.
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Re: Re: Re:2
If I were running a large generic speech platform, I would choose not to censor opinions based on viewpoint (and the site owner here would probably watch in glee as I too did a speedrun on discovering how difficult such a thing is).
Very few pieces of private property are generic speech platforms. Those which are not are not going to permit arbitrary people to come in and speak. Those which are should not censor opinions based on viewpoint. This is not them giving up a right to private property, this is them recognizing that as members of a society that has free speech as a founding principle, they have a moral obligation not to censor opinions based on viewpoint. They should do that of their own will, not through legal requirement, because the law and the constitution permit them not to do that.
Re: Re: Re:3
Again, you have this made up definition of “large generic speech platform,” which is, by itself, a totally arbitrary thing in which only you seem to decide what counts.
But, EVERY speech platform, whether “large,” “generic,” “small,” or “not generic,” has terms of service.
What you are REALLY saying is you don’t like obeying the rules of EVERY SITE that asks you to leave because you want to harass people about what genitals they have. Once you realize that is the sole reason that you get upset, then we can get to the point. It is not about “censorship.” It is not about “large generic speech platforms.” It is about you wanting to harass people who have no interest in you at all over what genitals they have. It’s weird, it’s creepy, and I have asked you not to harass people on my site, yet you seem to think it’s your right to continue to do so.
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Re: Re: Re:4
What you are really saying is that you support people speaking freely only when they say things you like.
Freedom of speech is not supposed to be a necessary evil that can be worked around through private censorship so that the wrongthinkers don’t get to pollute poor innocent minds. Freedom of speech is supposed to be a value that we cherish and uphold, even for speakers with whom we disagree.
You have become indoctrinated with a falsehood as evil and pernicious as Lysenkoism, and despite your pretensions of supporting free speech, you want people who know that men can never be women to never be allowed to speak that truth. You cheered when large private generic speech platforms censored such people, and when Twitter was bought and no longer provided that censorship, you started writing endless numbers of articles disparaging the new owner.
Re: Re: Re:5
I support the right of a Nazi to espouse Nazi speech whenever and wherever they want. I also support the right of anyone who doesn’t want to host that Nazi and their speech to make that Nazi fuck off. Removing the Nazi from property they don’t own and have no right to use as a platform doesn’t remove the Nazi’s right to speak on any other platform willing to host that Nazi and their speech.
Translation: “I believe Nazis should be allowed to overrun a platform even if that means they chase off everyone else.”
A platform owner who says “we don’t host Nazi speech here” is practicing their own freedom of speech and their own right of association. For what reason should their rights be cancelled out by someone looking to espouse Nazi speech on the privately owned property of the platform owner?
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Re: Re: Re:6
As usual, you argue with illusory versions of me who say whatever you want them to say so that you can win arguments with yourself.
No one’s rights should be cancelled. Generic speech platforms should choose of their own volition not to censor opinions based on viewpoint.
Re: Re: Re:7
Dude, your entire argument rests on the idea that the owners of those platforms have an obligation to cancel their own rights by allowing the speech of Nazis and bigots, which would otherwise be moderated off those platforms, to stay on those platforms.
Re: Re: Re:5
No. People are free to say what they want. I have never suggested that any platform moderate anyone in particular. I have pointed out that they have the freedom to decide how to moderate and I support those free speech rights.
I have separately pointed out, factually, that if you allow certain content (say Nazi content) that it will stick to your reputation, and that may lead to other challenges in your business.
But even then I have never said that websites must moderate such content. It is there right to do as they wish, and I can simply point out that there may be consequences in the marketplace of ideas for them doing so.
Why you continue to falsely say I support the removal of such content is beyond me. I have never said that.
I can only assume that you realize that your argument only sounds noble if you falsely pretend that I support the removal of content on ideological grounds. I do not support that and have never said anything along those lines.
And I support the free speech of those I disagree with. And that includes the free speech rights of association, meaning that private actors get to choose which speech they host and which speech they don’t.
Unlike you I do not shit on free speech rights of association.
While I find your personal perversions and obsessions disgusting, you remain free to say whatever obvious nonsense you want. But that does not mean that any private property owner must give up their property for you to scream madly about your perversions.
That is not a condemnation of free speech, but rather in support of it.
Because if every private property owner had to give up their association rights, you’d have nowhere at all to speak, because the property owners would bar all speech, to avoid sickos like you harassing and abusing people over their genitals all the fucking time.
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Re: Re: Re:6
You mad, bro’?
Re: Re: Re:7
I see that witticism took you some time to come up with. Perhaps use ChatGPT next time.
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Re: Re: Re:6
You are arguing with illusory versions of me who say what you want then to say so that you can’t win arguments with yourself.
I have never suggested that anyone be forced to give up their right of association. Platforms are free to censor as they choose. But we are also free to call out that censorship, and to point out that a platform that chooses to censor opinions based on viewpoint is denying its users the ability to speak freely. In a nation that has freedom of speech as a foundationally value they ought not to do that.
You keep on insisting that you are supporting free speech by defending platforms that censor rather than the people who are silenced by them. That’s fine when you’re arguing against the government trying to force the platforms to behave differently, but it’s not fine when you support those censorship policies themselves. And it was Musk taking away that censorship on X that has driven you into a frenzy.
Re: Re: Re:7
Yeah, you’ve argued that people should willingly give up that right so Nazis and bigots can overrun platforms owned by the people who are supposed to give up that right.
A platform you don’t own isn’t a democracy—it’s a dictatorship. You follow the rules or you get the boot, and getting the boot isn’t, hasn’t ever been, and won’t ever be the same thing as being silenced on every other platform (including any platform you happen to own) by lawsuits, violence, or threats thereof.
For what reason is Twitter hosting someone who posts “the Nazis should’ve killed more queers in the Holocaust” so important that Twitter should willingly give up its right to kick out someone who actually posts that on Twitter?
You keep insisting that you’re supporting free speech when you argue that platforms should allow themselves to become cesspools of bigoted bullshit that will eventually chase off everyone but the bigots and therefore reduce the amount of platforms that people consider “useful” and “good”, which will also reduce the number of options for those people to express themselves without having bigotry shoved in their faces.
Re: Re: Re:7
No, it is you who are arguing with an illusory version of me. You keep insisting (1) that Musk took away moderation (which you falsely call censorship) when he did not. He simply changed who he applied it to. (2) You believe that I somehow am mad about Musk’s changes. I am not. He is free to change whatever he wants. It’s his platform. Yet I am also free to point out why his changes are hypocritical and his arguments for why what he’s doing are silly (and also that he is still moderating, just with less in the way of principles). (3) You believe, falsely, that I supported Twitter’s moderation when I regularly criticized it, and even wrote a whole fucking paper that caused Jack Dorsey to re-evaluate how they moderate and fund a new system that would enable more speech.
Why is it that you so constantly lie?
You have regularly suggested they have a moral obligation to do so.
In this thread.
I wasn’t born yesterday. Your stupid rhetorical tricks aren’t fooling anyone.
No, it is the very freedom of speech foundations that enable them to make their own rules.
And, again, as I have explained repeatedly (and you have ignored repeatedly), if EVERY “large” platform had to follow your “moral obligations” which include allowing you to harass children over their genitals, then you’d end up with A LOT LESS SPEECH.
Because, dude, let me explain something fairly basic that seems to be too difficult for you to understand. Most folks DO NOT WANT TO HANG OUT WITH YOU, A PERVERT WHO IS OBSESSED WITH HARASSING CHILDREN to find out what their genitals are. So people will not use those platforms. It’s why every platform that puts in place the policies you want seems to fail. They all turn into garbage dumps of harassment, abuse, and truly the dumbest fucking people.
And anyone with any self-respect leaves and goes elsewhere. To a place that actually enables conversation without the assholes and perverts like you.
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By that self serving logic, you are justifying you desire to be able to bully everybody else into acquiescence with your speech. It show just how intolerant you are of differing opinions, by you demanding the right to directly attack anyone you disagree with.
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Cool, so I guess you won’t mind me spraypainting a swastika on your front door. You can’t stop me or else you’re a filthy fucking censor who’s out to destroy my First Amendment rights!
And yet, your whole schtick requires that an act of moderation infringe upon someone’s civil rights to actually work. You’re falling for the “I have been silenced” and “free reach” fallacies while trying to deny that you’re falling for them, and it’s frankly sad that you refuse to explore the cognitive dissonance.
Fox News could deny me the privilege of using its TV time as a platform. That doesn’t mean they’re censoring me. Censorship is about attacking the right of free speech; moderation doesn’t attack that right. If you had a solid argument that it does, you would’ve presented it by now, but you offer no reasoning for your claim beyond “I say I’m right so you have to say I’m right”—and that attempt to claim godhood isn’t going to cut it here, son.
Two things.
Re: Re: Re:2
Cool, so I guess you won’t mind me spraypainting a swastika on your front door. You can’t stop me or else you’re a filthy fucking censor who’s out to destroy my First Amendment rights!
While I agree with your point in general here it might be more impactful if you chose an example of speech they didn’t agree with, perhaps ‘trans rights are human rights’ instead.
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Should I be forced to host user-generated Holocaust denial content in the comments section of my video games blog?
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Given that the Holocaust never happened, but regardless the Jews had it coming, and what Hamas is doing isn’t the worst violence against Jews since the alleged-Holocaust but simply “decolonization,” … yes.
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Remember the Rule of Goats. People might get the wrong idea about you.
… or perhaps the right one.
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You are a fucking cunt. A racist piece of shit who fucks his mother. There’s your free speech you lowlife
Re: Re: Re:
That’s funny.
Decolonization is a big and varied topic, and just how various “colonized” countries got their freedom varies according to country.
Even I hesitate to call what happened to Palestine “colonization”. Especially when the correct term is “illegal occupation” as per the ICJ ruling of 1967, the ones opposing said occupation is funded by a bunch of anti-Israel states (like… SAUDI ARABIA) and superpowers hedging their bets, and there’s a legitimate “slave revolt” that’s happening in… Myanmar.
And while it’s one thing to milk the Holocaust for Zionist goals (which is despicable, but hey, how’s Alan Dershowitz doing IN JAIL), it’s another to deny the Holocaust altogether and is very telling of where you stand.
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Re: Re: Re:2
I mean, I call what is going on, Genocide and Ethnic Cleansing.
Just read their holy books, the Talmud literally tells them to commit genocide.
I personally propose a UN mandate, with 1 million Chinese peacekeepers, do install a social credit / surveillance state / mass psychiatric anti-schizophrenia medicine in the water supply.
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You cannot be forced to do that, because you have a 1st Amendment right to censor your platform’s content as you like.
Also, moderating for topicality is not censorship. You can insist that comments on a video game blog be germane to video games and remove comments that are not. (Of course, given the usual discourse within video game chats, it’s hard to argue that Nazi-like material is not germane, but that’s a separate discussion.)
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So.
Would you like to give up your right to private property?
Specifically, the right to kick anyone out for no reason whatsoever?
Because the thing you are advocating for means I get to come into your home and scream at you for being a white supremacist.
And if you pull a gun on me, I get the right to self-defense. And manslaughter at least for you.
That is what you are fucking doing right now.
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Can I paint on your house that you are a pedo?
Re:
As always, this commenter wants to pretend to be a supporter of free speech while actually wanting to deny private property owners their free speech rights of association. As always, he hides behind a made up definition of free speech that only he supports, and which is logically incoherent.
I mean, this is incoherent nonsense. You have told me that you will not allow me to spray paint your house with speech calling out your weird obsession with the genitals of children. So, by your own definition, you too are depriving me of my free speech.
You then come up with a nonsense qualification which shows just how shallow your thinking is by saying this rule that you have come up with only applies to “large generic speech platforms,” of which only one person in the world, you, is allowed to determine who qualifies.
But I’ll note that you did not offer up this qualification in calming that engaging in your free speech rights not to associate with someone “you are depriving people of free speech.”
I mean, here it is laid bare, dude. You are claiming that people engaging in their own free speech rights in the marketplace of ideas are somehow anti-free speech.
That is why your theory of free speech is incoherent. You care claiming that engaging in free speech is inherently anti-free speech.
That’s fucking stupid.
Well, see, here you’ve introduced a normative qualification about what is “right” and what is “wrong.” But that’s just like, your opinion, man. You have an incoherent theory of what is right and what is wrong.
And your incoherent theory leads you to claim that what is right (nazism, for example) is okay to speak about, but what is wrong (anything that supports LGBTQ people) is somehow “wrong.”
You’re not just ignorant, and incoherent, but self-contradictory.
No, dude. Free speech and the 1st Amendment are different, but the rank hypocrisy and cognitive dissonance comes only from you, because your theory of free speech cannot exist. The only way it is possible is if you ignore the free speech rights of some in favor of the free speech rights you choose to favor.
I support the free speech rights of all, not just those I choose to favor. And that’s why I support Substack’s right to out themselves as Nazi supporters, but I don’t have to support Substack itself.
You, on the other hand, have made it clear that you support censorship of LGTBQ content because, in your head, that’s “wrong.” You also made it clear today that it is “wrong” to argue in the marketplace of ideas that helping fund Nazis is not good.
You are telling on yourself dude.
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Re: Re:
His beliefs are not unreasonable, its your “private property” maximalism which is unreasonable, a telephone company is “private property”, the electricity is “private property”, but these companies should not be allowed to turn off the electricity if you are a “nazi”, merely justified based on their perceived reputational harm from doing business from nazi’s.
Google is a private company… who
A) OWNS MY PHONE NUMBER
B) OWNS MY PASSWORDS/ACCESS CODES
C) PROVIDES MY CELLPHONE
D) LOST SEVERAL ANTITRUST SUITS
why should they not be a common carrier?
Re: Re: Re:
You forgot…
E) LINKS TO STORIES ABOUT MY REVENGE PORN CONVICTION
Also:
With the sole exception of Google Fiber, nothing Google does could be considered a public utility.
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Re: Re: Re:2
Google DNS,
Google domains
Google fi wireless
Google Fiber
These are already regulated as public utilities, but they leverage their public utility status, i.e. very fast and very subsidized network, in a legally decided anti-competitive way, and so public utility regulation or breakup is what should happen to them.
Re: Re: Re:
Well the electricity company sell an intangible product, power, and that cannot be seen as directly supporting or opposing any political position. The phone companies provide two way communication between parties, and are not supposed to be listening to the conversations that they enable. Further they are not publishing peoples words.
The nearest analogues to social media are various notice boards, which most definitely can remove objectionable notices, and the old letters to the editor published by newspapers, which were selected, and often edited before publication. Further pubs, clubs and Cafes etc. could through people out if they were annoying other customers by what they were saying.
Besidew which what has moderation by private entities got to do with freedom of speech, that is
Which only states that the government will not stop you speaking, or publishing you words, if you can find a venue or publisher where you can exercise you right to free speech. The venue of last resort being a soap box in a public place. Nowhere in the idea of free speech is their the concept that you are entitled to an audience, or any aid or support from anybody else.
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Not letting people speak freely on a platform you own deprives those people of their free speech on your platform. That’s just simple fact.
That doesn’t mean that everyone is required to let people speak freely on platforms they own. Private people have a 1st Amendment right to control their own property as they wish, and to control who may speak there. But if they don’t let certain viewpoints be stated, they are committing censorship.
The reason to distinguish large private generic speech platforms from other sites is that the large platforms have set themselves up, very deliberately, as places for everyone to come and offer opinions on every subject imaginable.
For those platforms to then silence opinions based on viewpoint is especially pernicious and a violation of people’s ability to speak freely. The platforms are allowed to do that, but in a society where freedom of speech is a foundational value, they should choose not to do that.
As always, you very conveniently dodge the fact that a platform choosing to exercise its own free speech rights can by so doing deprive its users of the ability to speak freely. You think that supporting a platform’s free speech right to censor its users means that you support free speech, but exactly the opposite is true. You hate free speech when that speech expresses viewpoints with which you disagree, you are happy when such speech is censored, you hide behind the 1st Amendment to claim that such censorship is freedom (shades of 1984), and you willfully fail to understand that you are an enemy of freedom.
Men can never be women. When you support silencing such statements, you are an enemy of freedom and an enemy of truth.
Re: Re: Re:
Within the limits of their terms of service.
Why is it that you always ignore that point? Hmm?
I dodged nothing. I have expounded on this point, in great detail, for years.
That you wish to misrepresent it and my position is your own problem, dude.
Again, contrary to your ignorant claim, no platform presents themselves the way you falsely claim they represent themselves. They all have terms of service and can remove people for violating those terms, such as obsessively demanding that they reveal their genitals to you.
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Re: Re: Re:2
The reason I ignore the terms of service is that everyone ignores the terms of service. Every web site presents pages and pages of fine prints with respect to terms of service, privacy, arbitration, recourse, and other legalese, and no one ever bothers to read them. Instead, the large private generic speech platforms are treated by their users as places where they may speak freely.
When it comes to issues other than censoring speech you hate, you understand this: https://www.techdirt.com/2023/12/05/you-still-dont-own-what-you-bought-purchased-tv-shows-from-ps-store-go-bye-bye/
I’m certain Sony’s terms of service allows them to remove not-really-purchased content, but you correctly perceive that purchasers nevertheless think and expect that they should be able to have the content in perpetuity, and you criticize Sony for doing otherwise, even though they’re allowed to, and their terms of service say so.
Re: Re: Re:3
Your idea of what Twitter’s TOS should be doesn’t override its actual TOS regardless of how much you beg whatever deity you believe in to change that fact.
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Re: Re: Re:4
That’s correct. To the extent that Twitter used their terms of service to censor opinions based on viewpoint, they should not have done that, and they were indeed criticized, shamed, and finally bought to get them to stop doing that.
Re: Re: Re:5
What amazes me is that anyone out there still actually believes that Elon “stopped” Twitter from “censoring based on viewpoint.” He did not. He literally bought the platform to ban and block those whose viewpoints he disagrees with, and does so much more aggressively than old Twitter did.
You only like it because he now lets people with your particular perversion to harass people you like to harass.
Re: Re: Re:3
OMG. You truly are dumber than I thought.
Your entire argument boils down to: if some users of private property believe that the site should allow abuse and harassment by people like you, we should ignore that many more users don’t want that, and you must allow it.
Because morality.
Fuck man. That’s stupid.
More users want places that don’t allow abuse and harassment from folks like you. They vote with their feet. That’s the marketplace of ideas. I’m sorry you lost, but it does not make your perverted obsessions moral.
Get serious help.
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Re: Re: Re:4
This is beyond hilarious, or perhaps beyond tragic. When a lot of people say that they don’t want sexually explicit books or books with LGB✂️TQ content in public school libraries, do you agree that those books should be banned? Of course you don’t.
Freedom of speech and the other freedoms that the Constitution guarantees that the government will not take away shouldn’t be subject to majority vote, or to whatever will make the shareholders of the large private generic speech platforms happiest. As long as those companies are situated in the United States, they should honor the founding values of our country and not censor opinions based on viewpoint even if that costs them users and money. That’s what moral actors do; they do what’s right, not what’s expedient or most profitable.
You want viewpoints you hate to be censored. You are not a defender of free speech. You are an enemy of free speech.
Re: Re: Re:5
Books with sexually explicit passages shouldn’t be in elementary school libraries, but I think high schoolers could be mature enough to handle them. Also, if you want to get rid of books with such passages in them, start with the Bible—that fucker’s got all manner of depravities in it.
As for books with queer content: If you can’t explain two people of the same sex being in love without turning it into something sexual, that sounds like a skill issue on your part. Queer people are no more inherently sexual than straight people; that you think of queer people (including children!) only in terms of sex and genitalia is your problem, and I suggest seeking therapy—real therapy, not some religious “counseling” bullshit—to solve it.
And yet, you have no problem with majority votes being used to dictate what books everyone will and will not be able to access from a school or public library based on the complaint of a single person.
In that case, should those companies have slaves? Because if you want to go by the founding values of the United States, many of the Founding Fathers owned slaves. Go ahead, Hyman Rosen: Make that argument and see where it gets you.
…says the asshole who thinks people who run social media services should give up their First Amendment–protected right of association (willingly or otherwise) and host speech on those services that those people would otherwise refuse to host, and all because you believe a social media service shouldn’t exist unless it’s willing to host a debate on the merits of the Holocaust.
Re: Re: Re:6
That would be suicide for many social media companies, and you would would insist that wherever reasonable people went for a conversation, you would be able to join in and derail the conversation, until that platform was destroyed as well.
That approach supports the Nazi dream, as they would rapidly become the majority voices online, and then dominate the majority whose opinions they have silenced by their aggression.
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Re: Re: Re:6
You really are an idiot, aren’t you?
I was pointing out that when it comes to speech that the site owner (and you) like and that other people hate, you don’t want it removed. When it comes to speech the site owner (and you) hate, only then does it rise to the level of “harassment”.
The Constitution did not treat slavery as an enshrined right, even before it took it away in the post-Civil War amendments. In fact, it partially acted against slavery by refusing to count slaves as full people for purposes of apportionment, when the Southern states wanted that so that they could have higher representation in the House, (without, of course, granting slaves the right to vote).
Re: Re: Re:7
I mean, you can believe that all you want, but that doesn’t make it true. J.K. Rowling is a dumb asshole who says lots of horrible things about trans people, but it doesn’t really rise to the level of what I’d consider harassment. Is her anti-trans rhetoric abusive, bigoted, and inflammatory? Absolutely. But is it harassment? In general, no.
Six of one, it still enshrined Black people as “lesser beings” into the law of the land from the get-go of the country’s existence.
Meanwhile, I can’t find a single goddamn thing that says the Founding Fathers wanted people who owned printing presses to print anything that anyone wanted printed—even if the press owners didn’t want to print certain kinds of speech or speech from certain people—so they could live up to a “moral obligation” to the First Amendment and the principles of free speech. Can you show me where that was ever a founding value of the United States of America, or where the Founding Fathers said anything about printing press owners being morally obligated to print all speech?
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Re: Re: Re:8
If you have NYPL or other access to JSTOR, there’s The Philadelphia Printer: A Study of an Eighteenth-Century Businessman
Early printers in the colonies and then the US printed stuff. There’s no indication, at least in this study, that they refused work on ideological grounds.
Shortly after independence, of course, the Alien and Sedition Acts betrayed freedom of speech and of the press, so the politicians in those days were as guilty of demanding censorship based on viewpoint as people are now. But widespread unhappiness led to them being struck down.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Early_American_publishers_and_printers
Re: Re: Re:9
There you go again, mixing two things, government censorship and the printers freedom to choose what to print and by that choice being selective about what they printed. A government saying you cant publish that is censorship, a publisher or platform saying I won’t publish that is freedom of choice.
Re: Re: Re:9
You didn’t answer my question. I’ll ask again:
Can you show me where the notion of “privately owned platforms for speech have an obligation to carry all speech” was ever a founding value of the United States of America, such that the Founding Fathers said anything at all about printing press owners being morally obligated to print all speech?
Re: Re: Re:5
I do not understand why you keep lying about this when I have corrected you dozens of times, including in this fucking thread.
I do not wish any viewpoints censored. I support websites choosing what they wish to platform and what they don’t wish to, based on their rights. But that does not mean that I support any particular choice they make with those rights, and I may (and often do) criticize how they exercise those rights.
I am merely pointing out the inconsistency in your own arguments, which is that you want them to moderate for decorum, but refuse to recognize that your complaints are all actually about decorum.
As for libraries, having a book in a library is not abusive. It is not showing up in people’s hands without them requesting it. It is not encouraging others to harass people. There is no “decorum” problem with having a book in a library.
How are you this fucking stupid?
Re: Re: Re:
…on that platform and only that platform. You keep falling for the “I have been silenced” fallacy, Hyman Rosen, and it’s pathetic that you still can’t grasp the idea that the loss of a privilege is not a denial of one’s civil rights.
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Re: Re: Re:2
Being deprived of the ability to speak freely on a platform is censorship on the part of the people doing that. The ability to speak elsewhere is irrelevant. You don’t want it called censorship, and so you claim that only the government can censor, but that’s because you’re an idiot. Censorship is the act of the censor, silencing opinions based on viewpoint on platforms the censor controls.
Re: Re: Re:3
“Being deprived of the ability to speak freely on a platform is censorship on the part of the people doing that.”
Such a load of cobblers. It’s as much censorship as me slamming the door in the face of people coming to my house to convert me to their cult.
Re: Re: Re:3
Only if you believe that a social privilege is a civil right.
Please explain how it is irrelevant.
Yes, I don’t want moderation referred to as censorship because of the clear “moderation must be evil and therefore must be stopped” implication in that idea. No, I don’t claim that only the government can censor; anyone with the resources to file lawsuits or use violence (or reasonably threaten people with lawsuits or violence) can scare someone into shutting up, which is an act of censorship.
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Re: Re: Re:4
Censorship is the act of the censor, different opinions based on viewing in platforms the censor controls. The ability of the silenced to speak elsewhere is irrelevant because it is the act of silencing that is the nexus of censorship. The lack of a right to speak on the platform the censor controls is irrelevant because it is the act of silencing that is the nexus of censorship. You want to censor the people who speak unpalatable truths to you and you don’t want that silencing to be called censorship because you know that people react badly to being censored, do you trust the meaning of the word to claim that only the government can censor. But that’s not what the word means any more than your twisted definitions of man and woman can change what those words mean.
Moderation is not censorship. Moderation silences speech based on spam, topicality, and decorum. Censorship silences speech based on viewpoint.
Re: Re: Re:5
The “I have been silenced” comic I keep linking you to shows that someone who’s been “silenced” on a single platform and claims to have been “censored” as a result can go to literally any and every other platform possible—including national television, if they have that kind of pull—to say they were “silenced”. But they’re not really “silenced” (read: censored) if they can go to another platform and talk about how they were “silenced” and espouse the same speech that got them “silenced”. Therein lies core of the “I have been silenced” fallacy, Hyman Rosen: To be censored, someone has to lose (or give up out of fear) the use of their civil right to express themselves freely—and being banned from Twitter doesn’t do that, hasn’t done that, and won’t ever be able to do that.
And that might mean something if you could prove that the loss of a privilege equals the denial of a civil right. But you can’t. So it doesn’t.
People who believe anti-queer bullshit, antisemitic bullshit, and so forth can believe it all they want and espouse it wherever doing so is acceptable. But if I were to own a social media service, that shit would be banned on sight, and that’s specifically because I have neither an obligation nor a desire to host that kind of speech. My choice to ban that speech from my platform wouldn’t stop those assholes from going to, say, Substack and spreading their bullshit there. Your entire argument about censorship rests on the idea that not only should people be obliged (morally, if not legally) to host your bullshit, but that you should be legally able to harass people into hosting—and hearing—your bullshit. It’s a self-serving argument with self-serving logic, and nobody here but you is willing to back it.
I believe in the right of Nazis, queerphobes, and other such pathetic piece of human garbage to speak their minds no matter how offensive their speech is to me. But they have no right to force their speech onto platforms they don’t own, and a platform’s refusal to host that speech is not censorship.
And yet, if we’re talking about “large generic speech platforms”, there is no way for those platforms to moderate speech based on topicality because—as your own phrase points out!—those platforms don’t have set topics of discussion. Any moderation would absolutely be based on viewpoint, even if you think you could make the excuse that the moderation is about “decorum”. After all, someone can make racist remarks without being openly rude or demeaning; if they get banned for those remarks, how could it be a ban for “decorum” if they were as polite as they could be?
Re: Re: Re:5
Bro, you lack decorum. If you are smart enough, you may infer other peoples reaction and action on that fact.
Shoutout to the organizer
I just wanted to shout out Marisa Kabas of The Handbasket, who did the work of organizing the Substackers Against Nazis protest, and who doesn’t get mentioned enough in the stories about it.
There’s a saying I heard once, which is, “If you have 5 Nazis and 5 people who do nothing, you have 10 Nazis.”
Re:
This, by the way, should serve as an explanation to those commenters here who keep wondering why we stay and correct people on a “site we hate”.
Probably going to get myself banned but I have to point this out
Mike, all of what you’ve said, what Popehat said, A.R. Moxon said, is absolutely true.
Which is why I don’t understand why you simply refuse to deal with your own Nazi/fascist problem right here. You have a very small number of utterly revolting, bigoted, transphobic, homophobic, and Nazi-worshipping pigs who ovrrun every comment section on your posts, and a larger number of non-Nazis regular commenters who decide the steaming pile of garbage the first group drops must be spread into the antique Persian rugs as widely and thoroughly as possible by repeatedly responding to the pigs, and quoting them at length in their replies.
This means even blocking anonymous commenters doesn’t spare blog readers from seeing this venomous content, and any value from your smarter commenters is lost in an ocean of pure dreck.
Based on your sound logic in response to Substack, I can only conclude that if these people have been allowed to comment here for so many years, and your regulars are not officially asked to stop engaging with them in a manner which amplifies the trolling, that you are happy to host this garbage.
It’s left to us to conclude that the damage the pigs cause to your readers, and your reputation, is less important than taking the time and effort it would take to get this crap under control. You should put that in an official notice, and tell people visiting here that they will absolutely see Nazis and bigots running wild here, and to stop reading this blog if they find that offensive or harmful.
I have to wonder why you bother writing a blog with comments enabled at all, if moderating it is too much trouble, and you don’t mind what an unmoderated comment section makes you look like.
Re:
How can he deal with the problem and still allow anonymous commenters? Even forcing all commenters to have an account will not cure the problem, unless he requires some proof of identity, such as a credit card, to create an account. Just having easily created accounts leads to a lot of whack a mole, as shown by the use of accounts to post speam.
Re: Re:
“How can he deal with the problem and still allow anonymous commenters?”
Marcy Wheller’s blog allows people use fake email addresses, but enforces them to use the same email address and user name each time they comment. You can’t comment there if you don’t use at least one unique, even if fake, address.
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That leaves open a hole you can drive a bus through, sideways. It is trivial to generate a new false email account and a name and create a new account, trapping the moderator into a game of whack a mole.
Re: Re: Re:2
No, you just force all new commenters into a moderation queue, and then you can delete their drivel before it ever gets to the front end.
You can also block by IP address.
It slows down the conversation, but it also bores the trolls so some of them go away.
Re: Re: Re:3
Are you going to pay for the moderators, or is a many hour wait acceptable in an online conversation.
Re: Re: Re:2
Emptywheel catches most of the people who attempt that. NOT trivial to generate a new IP and user string…
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Re: Re: Re:3
According to Pulitzer prize winning journalist Glenn Greenwald, Emptywheel is mentally ill. Weird person to cite as a good example of anything other than instability!
Re: Re: Re:4
I don’t think very highly of Mr. Greenwald, nor am I impressed by Pulitzer prizes.* But if you do, and you are, more power to you.
*Henry Kissinger won a Nobel Peace Prize. Shall I value anything he said or did? (Hint: no.)
Re: Re: Re:4
Greewald is a fascist supporting homocon. His word on any subject is worthless.
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Re: Re: Re:5
In what way is glenn greenwald….. the guy who was working against the “defense” industry, a fascist?
Re:
I think what does help is the invisible norm that most Techdirt commenters are anti-Nazi.
We have the little flag button that does contain some of the most odious trolls and shitposters. And like 99.999999% of the time the “This comment has been flagged by the community” warning works as intended. Like clicking through and seeing the comment for yourself reveals it for the garbage fart it is.
It’s seldom that you’d ever cross a comment like that and steelman it to say it deserves our attention and merits consideration.
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“It’s seldom that you’d ever cross a comment like that and steelman it to say it deserves our attention and merits consideration.”
What happens is that people extensively quote the pigs in order to mock or rebut them. But that means that as usual, dancing with the pigs gets shit all over both of you, and readers desperate to avoid the garbage gets splattered regardless.
On other blogs, garbage comments get removed, as do any replies, and commenters are told not to engage with trolls. Here, the shit spills from the back yard to the nearest highway 🙁
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Cry harder, pro-transgender neo-Marxist dork.
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Re:
It’s because he cosplays someone who believes in free speech,
Re:
Agreed. Seeing the troll-feeding frenzies on articles like these and more, via commenters who can’t help themselves and should know better just shoveling everything into the troll’s mouths, is baffling and disheartening at the same time.
I’d legit be fine with doing away with anonymous comments and being forced to make an account if it meant that it made the comments sections more productive and less like the nightmare walls of text that one could see if they stumbled into a reason.com comment section…
Re: Re:
Hey now!
Not all of my comments are walls of text!
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Re: Re: Re:
You can play it off like this with humor all you want in a bid to act cool, but you have fed Koby quite a lot in this comments section here, and many others. Your lack of self control is apparent.
Re: Re: Re:2
It’s only a lack of self-control if I wasn’t being deliberate. As I see it, trolls don’t go away by starving them, either.
Re: Re: Re:3
If they don’t go away by starving them, and they don’t go away when you feed them by endlessly replying to them in good faith, then that means that it’s up to Techdirt to enact proper content moderation; thing such as starting to hand out real bans or changing how commenting works.
As it stands, Techdirt has a “Nazi Trolls Welcome!” sign lit up and has had one lit up for years, with the promise of “community moderation” which simply means that comment sections are by and large useless messes.
Re: Re: Re:4
There’s sadly no easy or effective way to maintain anonymous commenting and a good moderationo policy/plan without infringing on everyone’s rights.
Plus, closing the comments section gives the Nazi Brigade what they want: Silencing voices they don’t like to hear.
Unless you want to start taking this to meatsapce, with court-mandated Protection Orders and whatnot.
Re: Re: Re:5
Shouldn’t that be silence voices they do not want others to hear?
Re: Re: Re:2
Joke’s on you, asshole: I’ve never been cool in my entire life! 🤣
Re: Re: Re:3
You’re using self-deprecation to deflect from your willing and conscious contribution to one of the biggest issues that plagues Techdirt. Please stop feeding trolls like Koby, Matthew Bennett, and others.
Re: Re: Re:4
Could you phrase that in the form of a question to which I can say “no”?
Re: Re:
First of all, these white supremacist brownshirts aren’t your average “trolls”. Ignoring them would be to our folly.
Secondly, yes, having to stand up to the brownshirts is tiring.
Lastly, I resent that. I can feed myself when there’s no attention to be got, you know.
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Re: Re:
Note that the only reason I am anonymous is that my posts get sent to moderation when I am logged in, and sometimes do not appear for days. This is the site owner trying to claim support for free speech while practicing low-key harassment to try to get me to leave. All the regulars here can recognize my posts from their tone and syntax, so the harassment is useless, and it just causes confusion when some other writers make comments that are too similar to mine.
So I don’t know that removing anonymity is going to change the tone of the comments here. This site is dead anyway. There are about five articles that keep getting recycled. Masnick will complain about Musk and about IP. Bode will complain about telecom and about corporate short-term thinking. Cushing will complain about the police.
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I don’t see how telling you to leave is “harassment” since he’s not following you to whatever Nazi shitpits you frequent and telling you to leave Techdirt there, but hey, you believe losing a privilege is censorship, so who the fuck knows how your mind works.
And yet, you keep coming back to keep the comments sections busy. 🤔
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Re: Re: Re:2
The only difference between my posting signed-in and posting anonymously is the length of time it takes my posts to appear. So it’s harassment in the plain meaning of the word, that is, a deliberate attempt to annoy.
Having the same small set of people here to correct is like shooting the mooks in a video game. You learn their behaviors and then the response is nearly automatic. It’s fun for the people who like that sort of thing.
Re: Re: Re:3
You’re the one coming here against the wishes of the site’s owner, so if anyone is doing any harassing here, Hyman Rosen, it’s you.
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Re: Re: Re:4
The site owner chooses to let my comments appear (eventually) even when I’m signed in. I like to think of myself as the means by which he reassures himself that he really does support free speech, even though he does not.
Re: Re: Re:5
You’re wrong.
Re:
Unfortunately, some of us do live in countries where even leaving a name would be enough to get the authorities do do a little digging.
Though I do share a lot of your sentiments…
Re:
First off, there is something extremely different about a social media site enabling others to have a home to post all the content they want, and a blog, where we produce the main content, and then enable replies. That you have some idiots showing up does not suggest, in any way, that we are encouraging nazis.
As others have noted, our goal here is to enable anonymous commenting, and doing so comes with some challenges. But this site does not celebrate or endorse or embrace the awful content, and, indeed, most of it is minimized and or debunked. So it is not as if anyone reading the comments here believes that such content is celebrated or endorsed, quite the contrary.
And this is a necessary result of enabling truly anonymous commenting, which we do still feel is a worthy goal. We get many great anonymous commenters, and a few awful ones.
I know that you prefer Marcy’s method of handling this issue, and Marcy and I occasionally compare notes on how we handle comments. There are reasons we choose not to go with her method, which includes that it removes the true anonymity we allow, which is important, given the times we’ve had law enforcement send us demands for user info.
Finally, as I have noted many times, these comments have been valuable to me, because the small group of idiot commenters regularly expose the kind of nonsense thinking and talking points from the nonsense-sphere early on, enabling us to see what’s coming up and what we should be expecting down the road, and how to counter those messages. Indeed, arguing with the trolls here in the comments has been amazingly useful practice for me, that I have had come in handy when arguing with actual elected officials, judges, and the like.
I have sometimes referred to it as batting practice. Whether or not we like what these idiots have to say, they’re getting their ignorant talking points from the same group that is now influencing some pretty powerful people. And it helps to be able to know what their talking points are and how to counter them. And, for that, the comments and engagement with the trolls here is very useful.
None of that is true with Substack or ExTwitter, where those sites are literally taking that content and raising it up to suggest that it has equal value to actual thoughtful, reasoned commentary.
Re: Re:
Allowing Nazis and nazi-adjacent pigs to post their drivel in your space without fear of being moderated off or that content deleted, absolutely encourages them. It also discourages non-Nazi content discussion. Look at the shitshow the comments on this very post has become.
Allowing this content here without removal is enough to make this site hostile and unsafe and generally horrible to read for normal people.
There is nothing stopping you putting all anonymous comments into a moderation queue and filtering them once or twice a day
I don’t prefer Marcy’s method, which is itself a pain in the arse for all concerned. I put it forward as one way to allow anonymous comments. I’ve suggested another one, which is to send all anon comments to a moderation queue first.
Are you honestly suggesting these repetitive and frankly banally evil comments cannot be viewed on your site’s backend for your private enjoyment, rather than in the front end where the majority of people who don’t want to see them at all?
So why not put an official notice on the blog that trolls are welcome here for that reason, and the rest of us can get fucked?
So now we know that you like having an extremely high noise to content ratio, and why, that does suggest that the drivel spewed by trolls has a higher value for you than “actual thoughtful, reasoned commentary”. Given you responded multiple times to the abusive tripe posted by the same small group of pigs, before you responded to me, I don’t think I’m mischaracterising your approach.
Re: Re: Re:
I’m not fully agreeing or disagreeing with you on what you’ve said. But I will say this: I’ve improved my own rhetoric and my own arguments thanks to people (including myself) responding to the trolls with more than mere one-liner insults. Yes, I recognize my role in the shifting of the Overton Window in these comments sections, and I’m not here to say I’m proud of that. (Hell, I may end up taking a signficant break from commenting here after the end of this year. I gotta get my shit together in more than a few ways.) But I refuse to say that tearing down asinine ideas like the ones spewed by our typical troll brigade hasn’t been helpful to me in some way.
That said: Yes, stopping asshat trolls before they take over a comments section isn’t a horrible idea—and even if Mike doesn’t want to ban/slow down all the trolls, the dipshits who pull the “I’m a hyper-leftist who wants to rape every straight person into being gay and kill them if they say no” and the “I’m a hyper-bigot who wants to genocide every person of color and every non-Christian” schticks (assuming they’re two separate people and not sockpuppets for one of the usual trolls) should be the first ones to go.
Re: Re: Re:
It’s simply incorrect to claim such content is never moderated or deleted. Please do not misrepresent what happens here.
Almost none of that content shows for very long due to the community moderation features, and a ton of shit is caught by our existing spam filters.
Your demand is for removal over minimization. We have experimented with that and IT SUCKED. The conversations sucked. The user experience sucked. It just sucked.
I’m sorry, but it did.
Yes. We could. And what a fucking pain that would be. If I had to babysit the comments like that, I’d never have time to write.
It’s not about me reading them. It’s about me (and others) getting practice actually responding to them and seeing what nonsense they come back with.
And there is no evidence that “the majority of people don’t want to see them at all.” If that is the concern, those people can choose not to read the comments.
If you read my comment that way, that’s on you. It is not what I said at all. We continue to modify the comment section in all sorts of ways, mostly small experiments, but have discussed larger ones as well.
But just because YOU think you know what everyone here wants, that is not an accurate portrayal of what we’ve seen.
So now we know that you are willing to lie and misrepresent what I’ve said.
Look, you’re a thoughtful voice in our comments, but you are making a lot of false assumptions and repeatedly misrepresenting what I have said here.
Re: Re: Re:2
I never said it’s never moderated or deleted. However, the volume you are allowing through is clearly sufficiently high that it’s proving no impediment to the pigs who are drowning your comment section.
Your spam filters aren’t rigorous enough then. LOOK AT THE VOLUME OF CRAP THAT MADE IT THROUGH ON THIS POST, MIKE
I believe you
Yes, I appreciate that. But then you have two other possible choices – remove comments completely, or hire/ask for volunteers to help moderate.
Mike, I’ve been reading this site on and off for years. The content of the troll content changes only slightly from year to year. I doubt you are so slow that you need yet another run at the “trans women are really men/you just want kids to see porn/moderation of rightwingers is a First Amendment violation/Twitter is the town square so you can’t moderate content/etc/etc/etc” trip by Koby and Hyman and Matthew and their alter egos
Yes, that’s an option. I was hoping you would give a damn about the experience of those readers who don’t, strangely, come to your blog to see a few people who absolutely should know better, wasting brain cells smashing the garbage spewed by pigs against a wall, which only amuses the pigs and bores/distresses almost everyone else.
You literally said, in your reply right here, “It’s about me (and others) getting practice actually responding to them and seeing what nonsense they come back with.”
You literally said that trolls comments have value for this reason. This is value that is worth more than your normal readers’ experience on this site.
Glad to hear it. But maybe you should ask your readers how they would like things to be?
I don’t KNOW what everyone wants, but I do know I’m not alone in wanting you to control the troll influx better and limiting the descent of the comment section on every troll-triggering post into a morass of “[bigoted drivel]”/”[pseudoclever rebuttal of drivel]”/”[pure personal abuse]”/[pure personal abuse]/”[pure personal abuse]”/[pure personal abuse]/etc, often seasoned heavily with homophobia and graphic sexual imagery
I have done no such thing. If I have misunderstood you, then you have yet to point out where I have done that. But I have not told any deliberate untruth, and you resorting to that claim is well beneath you.
I’ve tried to read your comments and post carefully, but you appear to be assuming my motives are malign. They are not. I am frustrated by being forced to rely on a gerryrigged Javascript which I am inexperienced with and your exceedingly minimal user tools to hide the offensive nonsense, but which also means I am missing out on actually useful discussion. This Substack situation, the Twitter decline, are both topics of intense interest to me, but I can’t come to Techdirt for a decent dissection of your posts because two or three trolls end up turning it into a repetitive festival of rehashed grievances.
If your regular commenters actually want that, and that’s who you want to serve, then you should say so.
Re: Re: Re:3
re you prepared to pay the wages of at least 5 people, that being the minimum to almost guarantee 24/7/365 coverage. I say almost as that only allows for one person to be sick or on holiday at the same time. It also means that often there is an extra person in the rotation, assigned to day shift, when nobody is sick or on holiday.
Re: Re: Re:2
And they keep responding in predictable ways.
Practice is good and all, but even you are going to need a break.
These Nazis (using Ken White’s definition for Nazis here) are not interested in debate. They are here to harass. And while there’s something about learning about how to deal with idiots who keep throwing themselves into your line fo fire, it is extremely tiring to keep ti up day after day.
You may have the mental fortitude, but some of us don’t, and the Nazis don’t seem to care because forcing you to shut up is the goal of this harassment campaign.
And…
if you’ve been reading the Substack comments on Ken’s and Dave’s posts on the matter, the same Nazis also use this shitty argument.
I know you don’t promote these comments and you also respond fiercely to their lies and disinformation. That’s a good thing. Unfortunately, what we’re publicly seeing is that these threats to humanity and democracy are unfazed by polite telling off, and I suspect even death threats, beacause they all are itching to murder us all dead. Even you.
True, but what it publicly shows is that current moderation measures are inadequate. I know you can’t stop a determined attacker unless you physically disable them or worse, but still, look at Hyman.
He’s determined to harass us despite everything you’ve done.
And no, not feeding these threats isn’t gonna work for very long. And siloing them off hasn’t worked even when lowtax tried it.
We know you’re doing your best. Unfortunately, Trump and Jan 6 happened, and there’s a non-zero chance of Trump being reelected.
And those Nazis will be even stronger than ever.
We hope you manage to figure out something that aligns with your ideals, but the clock’s ticking.
This isn’t a threat, but an observation from the ground.
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Re: Re: Re:3
You don’t have to worry about me. I’m Jewish, so the woke filth will be murdering me before too long.
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Re: Re: Re:
This is laughable. You should seek help for your mental illness if you feel “unsafe” reading a tech blog.
Re: Re: Re:2
Fortunately for me, I only have to take one inexpensive pill a day to keep me sane and happy.
Unfortunately for you, there isn’t a drug on the planet which could make you into a decent human being.
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Re: Re: Re:3
Well, perhaps consider speaking with your psychiatrist about increasing the dosage, since you just said that you feel “unsafe” and threatened by reading “hostile” words you’ve sought out online. You’re clearly not well.
Re: Re: Re:4
“you feel “unsafe” and threatened by reading “hostile” words”
Remind me which political bent is so threatened by the mere existence of pronouns that they have to expends vast amounts of political will, money, and legislative time to banning them? And on seeking out and banning library and school books which acknowledge the mere existence of LGBT people? All lest they be offended in some very slight manner ill-befitting their incredibly privileged lives?
Tell me, which was the side which demanded that university officials be forced to resign for imperfect words defending the protection of First Amendment rights for students?
Which side is throwing an absolute shit fit right here over the suggestion that their disgusting, bigoted, ignorant, and unforgiveably dull commentary on LGBT people, Elon Musk, cops, and the rights of private site owners to do as they bloody well please with the server space they have paid for, are not in fact welcome everywhere they go and worse still, that no one else can be forced to read them?
I’ll give you a hint. It’s the same side that thinks Substack must host literal Nazis but – while screaming about their own First Amendment rights – insist it’s fine for Substack to ban completely legal adult content and creators
Don’t try to diagnose people on the internet, sweetie. It makes you look like a simpleton.
Re: Re: Re:2
You first.
It’s pretty clear you also need to seek help if you feel like you need to harass people to live your life.
Unfortunately, I don’t think any sort of psychological or psychiatric help would suffice.
The medicine you need needs to be directed injected into your body, you see…
Re: Re:
There’s also the nontrivial difference that Substack is monetizing nazis, allowing the nazis a forum to make money and taking a cut for themselves.
That said: while I think Anathema’s missing some important differences, I tend to agree that the trolls overwhelm the comments here and it’s not a pleasant experience as a member of the community. I’d have noped out a long time ago if I hadn’t worked out a way to hide their posts and the replies to them. How many people do you suppose have noped out?
(I count ten posts in this comment section. The count at the bottom of the page says there are 204. Those numbers sure suggest the nazis are controlling the conversation here. Again.)
Re: Re: Re:
“Anathema’s missing some important differences”
No, I’m not. I know Mike isn’t monetising the Nazis. I acknowledge the difference between hosting their posts and hosting their comments, but I also consider this a distinction without a difference in effect.
What this blog doesn’t offer, which one using Disqus does is that Disqus – which I acknowledge is a privacy hell hole etc – allows me to collapse conversations and block users. If Mike won’t moderate from the backend, and the front end user tools are absolute shit even with a javascript plugin which doesn’t do what really needs to be done, then turning comments off would be preferable to the garbage dump fire the comments on this particular post amply demonstrate.
Re: Re: Re:
Less controlling, more harassing.
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Popehat supports Nazis
I have no real problem with Substack supporting Nazis, because everyone on Substack who doesn’t support Nazis is free to leave and host their content somewhere else. Hell, they could spend the hour or so it takes to make their own Substack-like website and self-host.
At this point, to take the tortured “Nazi bar” analogy to its logical next step, Ken “Popehat” White chooses to hang out in a Nazi bar, and is therefore either a Nazi, or someone who’s okay supporting Nazis by spending their money at the same bar.
I don’t get why all these people who are happily hanging out in a Nazi bar don’t just choose to support a different establishment. It’s not like Substack is all that wonderful of a platform or CMS to begin with.
If Popehat were advertising on Xitter, this site would be calling for him to cut it out. So why is Mike okay with Popehat continuing to give money to Substack?
Re:
And if they do, who manages the payment system, including tracking who is subscribed, and limiting access to subscribers. There is quite a bit of administration, and support software in the background of Substack.
Re: To torture the tortured analogy
The problem with the tortured “Substack as a Nazi bar” analogy is that Substack is the wrong agent to bear ultimate blame for Nazis.
Substack is more like a county rather than a bar. A county has residents, businesses, their interactions, and services to facilitate them.
A county inevitably house a Nazi bar. Does that make the county itself, and by extension everyone, Nazi by virtue of taint by association? No.
That’s because There Will Always Be Nazis. A county could have an outlaw Nazi bar that decides to come to town, put its symbols everywhere, and attract skeevy characters to patronize it. The county cannot stop the Nazi bar by free association alone, but it can use the pretext of not paying taxes or obtaining the proper licenses to shut it down. The denial of free association is a consequence of other laws, and the First Amendment is not a shield against criminal conduct or administrative compliance.
The successful Nazi bar is the problem because the proprietor will go out of their way to be above board in the law and in social custom. They’ll pull all the right permits, disguise their symbolism and code-switch, and they’ll be sure to make friends in the right places. They’ll give free drinks to cops and military veterans, they’ll pal around with the elected officials and the town burghers, they’ll donate to charity to prove they’re not so bad after all.
At their cores, the outlaw and the nice Nazi bar are in the end Nazis. The nice ones take the garden path to get to their desired outcome.
Re: Re:
“That’s because There Will Always Be Nazis.”
Yes, but you don’t have to offer them service of any kind. Substack is not a ‘county’. It’s just another business like a corner shop, petrol station, or bar. If you let people into any business while wearing Nazi identifiers, that makes Nazis feel welcome, and normal people feel unwelcome.
Lots of pubs in Britain forbid wearing football colours. It’s not that they hate football, they just hate fights between football supporters. Businesses can do that for any reason they like. Nazis and football players and trolls are not protected classes, and anyone regardless of protection class status can be removed for being utter dicks to staff and other customers. This is not a difficult concept to understand or explain, unless your income or political beliefs insist on pretending it is difficult.
Re: Re: Re:
Substack as an institution then runs into the Nice Nazi Bar problem.
Substack knows it has Nazis on its platform, profits off of them by taking its vig, and seemingly generally delegates the responsibility of censorship or moderation on individual publishers and their comment community.
Substack knows it can also go away by explicitly banning Nazis in its TOS, or bow to public pressure by turfing objectionable figures.
You’ll still have Nice Nazis. They are the ones who’ll read the rules closely and test how far they can bend the rules before breaking them. They are the ones who’ll make tendentious appeals and form alliances of convenience with Hill Martyrs and Principled Standers. It’s this group where the lines get blurred, and by decentering Nazism and recentering around first principles of free speech and civil liberties, you’ve already normalized Nazism by making them deserving of consideration and debate.
Re: Re: Re:2
You’ll still have Nice Nazis. They are the ones who’ll read the rules closely and test how far they can bend the rules before breaking them. They are the ones who’ll make tendentious appeals and form alliances of convenience with Hill Martyrs and Principled Standers. It’s this group where the lines get blurred, and by decentering Nazism and recentering around first principles of free speech and civil liberties, you’ve already normalized Nazism by making them deserving of consideration and debate.
And by not banning them at all the site still has those people, but what it also has is multiples examples that pro-nazi users and posters don’t have to even pretend to be ‘nice’, making clear that the more overt nazis are welcome and helping to normalize them and their behavior as a result.
‘You can act as civil as you want but as soon as you start pushing nazi ideology your ass is out the door’ is absolutely an option they could, but have chosen not to, take. Just because a platform might not be able to immediately spot them all isn’t an excuse to ignore the ones they are aware of.
Re: Re: Re:3
There is a practical problem with this approach when it becomes a policy. How can it be applied consistently and fairly?
Do we explicitly limit Nazi ideology to a list of red lines that need to be crossed to get banned? Don’t cross this line and everything is cool. Or can it be Nazi ideology by implication, to cover any sort of eliminationist ideology by concealing intent, like through leading questions, JAQing off, etc.?
An overly broad sanction is also prone to abuse. Like, it would be a practical impossibility to have such a policy in place without having to shut down all communication about, say, the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza right now. You’d need a Trust & Safety team as large as a midsize state to handle every point of data that’s flagged and appealed. Even trying to enforce the policy and being scrupulous about it ends up coming down on one side or the other, and it could change the trajectory of a literal war.
Either with a precise or broad interpretation on what constitutes Nazi ideology to warrant a ban, there is always going to be a number of them who will survive a policy change and inherit the followers of a turfed Nazi. Followers are a problem because they have agency and their lurid curiosity leads them to seek out the remaining stock of Nazi ideologues.
Re: Re: Re:4
No content moderation policy can be applied 100% consitently and fairly, especially at a large scale. Moderators will always find edge cases where the letter and the spirit of the “law” are in conflict; humanity is messy and fucked up like that. The best anyone can do is to set down rules that are strict enough to catch the most obvious offenders but loose enough to handle edge cases without being wholly inconsistent or hypocritical, then enforce the rules as evenly as possible.
Re: Re:
Several problems with your counter-analyogy:
1) Substack does have rules and they are enforcing them, the problem is they’re doing so selectively and inconsistently, which makes the fact that they are willing to put in the effort to ban sexual content but not bringing the hammer down on nazi content telling about what exceptions to their own rules they’re willing to accept.
2) As noted in the article the nazis here are being anything but subtle, and are most certainly not ‘disguising their symbolism’. They are overtly using nazi symbolism and language which makes the idea that the platform has no way to spot them outright impossible to buy once people are pointing them out.
Re: Re: Re:
To Point 1, Substack is a fictitious entity and any rules enforced by it must ultimately track to a chain of custody or command. You’d have to do the legal legwork to see if a key decision-maker, like an executive or trust and safety manager, gives the green light to platform certain content and give an explanation why.
I doubt that Substack has thrown this decision to an AI, but even then, the go/no-go decision has a human brain behind it.
Substack enforces the ban on sexual content because of the legal threat they pose. The U.S. cracks down hard on adult material, whether it’s legitimate or not. CSAM purveyors and traffickers exploit norms and laws over free speech just like Nazis exploit norms and laws over political speech. Fights over sex are a lot harder to win when on the defensive.
Re: Re: Re:2
“Substack is a fictitious entity”
What on earth are you smoking?
Re: Re: Re:3
Fictitious in the corporate-legal sense, not in the sense that it not existing.
Substack is a corporation, not a flesh-and-blood person. When Substack was established, there was a document called a fictitious business name that gave its identity as a company.
Re: Re: Re:2
… you did read the article, right? The one that includes a quote from the company that they are absolutely aware that they are platforming nazis, making money from nazis, but decided that they wouldn’t give the boot to the nazis because they think their ‘ideas’ should be discussed and debated.
This isn’t something that’s going on without their knowledge or consent, the company knows full well what’s happening and who they have on their platform and has given it’s stamp of approval. They are no longer the bar owner who might have unknowingly let some nazis in because he/she didn’t see the swastika patches on the customers’ jackets, they’re the bar owner who let those people in after seeing the swastika patches.
As for why I brought up sexual content it was to point out that they can and do have rules against certain content that can and will encompass legal content along with illegal content, and yet they are not willing to enforce their own rules when it comes to nazi content despite apparently having a ‘no hatespeech’ clause in their TOS.
Re: Re: Re:3
Yes I did read the article. I still don’t know Hamish McKenzie’s mens rea behind his justification.
I don’t know if he’s gone full Elmo — he identifies with Nazis and wants to use his powers to boost their signal. I don’t know if it’s a strategy credit — eyeing profitability and brand hegemony by couching his action in principle. I don’t know if he’s carrying the bags of Peter Thiel or other Silicon Valley overlords who are fashoid but also at the center of power in technology.
It’s up to us anti-Nazis to finish the job Substack is ill-capable of.
Re: Re: Re:4
Most likely is my gut feel here.
Substack has been rumored to be boosting and funding the Nazis in their midst for quite a while.
And well, Stripe (and by extension, Visa and the SWIFT Gatekeepers) are the ones calling the shots here.
Re: Re: Re:5
Until there’s some evidence that someone within Substack is boosting and funding Nazis — there would be a document, email, screenshot, or whistleblower leak — block, ban and avoid Nazis.
I did have my own Substack Nazi problem. You might have had this too. This one account, posing as a Nordic, would follow my comments and reply with some Protocols of the Elders of Zion shit in English and Spanish and link to their Substack.
They followed me to the George Lakoff Framelab Substack and that’s where the community swarmed upon them. It warranted enough attention that the hosts had to write an apology letter to readers (now deleted), and I was able to copy the letter link to all of the Substacks they posted to and got them deleted and banned.
I don’t know whether Substack has completely banned the account from the platform.
'Two consenting adults going at it is a threat to society! Nazi's though... eh...'
Substack: Willing to make clear via moderation that sexual content is not welcome.
Also Substack: Willing to make clear via lack of moderation that nazi’s and similar scum very much are.
Funny, pretty sure of the two one of those has shown itself to result in much more damage and death and it’s not the sex one…
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And how many of you people bitching about this...
…support Ukraine – which is full of Nazis.
How many of you are Canadian? Because Canada is full of Nazis. They even had a former Ukrainian SS officer in Parliament and gave him a standing ovation.
This is hypocrisy. Nazis don’t win by publishing crap on Substack or Twitter or anywhere else.
They win when they get $200 billion from the US and Europe to kill Russians because Americans and Europeans are too pussy to confront Russians directly (and a good thing, too, because the Russians can kick both your asses.)
Oh, wait – they didn’t win there, either, did they? The Russians have killed half a million of them and wounded another half million more. And if you keep pushing the Russians, they’ll kill you, too.
Because your attitude is the attitude of Nazis.
Re:
Dude, you should really seek out a mental health professional.
Re:
Firstly, Russia has NUKES. Have you heard of Mutually Assured Destruction? Might want to rethink your entire strategy when your opponents are capable of raining nuclear hellfire on you.
Secondly, Russia has already “denazifed” the country of all Nazis that aren’t under their employ. Turns out that even the Ukrainians weren’t all that fond of their own, ANTI-RUSSIAN NAZIS. To the point where the Ukranian forces friendly-fired on them before Russian forces dealt the blow. Unless you have compelling evidence that the Wagner Group isn’t Putin’s paid brownshirt army.
Thirdly, Welcome to the Balkans. Where everyone hates one another and the only thing that unites them is Russian murder since NATO has forbidden them to start waging war on one another. (It is extremely cold-blooded to say that, yes, but again, it’s the Balkans.)
Lastly, Mein Kampf was indeed published. While Hitler was in jail. For trying to commit a coup. Hey, at least he got off way, way better than the Communist Rosa Luxemburg (who was executed, btw).
The blatant Putin apologia is tiring.
Re:
You are stupid.
Re:
Only the ones shipped over there by your buddy Putin.
The platforms that support nazi speech have a long track record of being failures. Gab, Truth Social, and several others were started to be so-called “havens” for speech, yet all allowed hate to overflow their networks. They all had one thing in common: they were all failures. It was always the same timeline: right wingers started up the platform claiming they are free speech havens, hate filled stains of humanity flooded the platforms, no one wanted to be a part of it, and they collapsed under their own weight.
Elon Musk changed things up with his really silly hostile takeover of Twitter, taking over one of the larger platforms for himself and turning it into another right wing echo chamber. Now, it is overrun by, ironically, porn bots and botnets to the point where virtually anything that “trends” is the product of right wing networks gaming the system. Advertising dollars have been fleeing in droves for years and moderation on there has been significantly knee-capped. Now, everyone is just waiting for the whole platform to collapse as well and get added to the list of projects that self-described free speech “absolutist” right wingers tried to set, but ultimately failed.
I suspect Substack will eventually share the same fate. History is filled with the corpses of platforms that tried to cozy up to right wing extremism, thinking they could easily cash in and just weather whatever storm that comes their way. History hasn’t been too kind to anyone taking that approach, though.
Re: Free-speech as hostage taking
The collateral damage of all this is that the rightwing gained legitimacy for fashoid ideas by learning to take free speech hostage.
Gab, Truth Social and all other failed e-klaverns never gained traction with a critical mass or even as central to the zeitgeist as Facebook and Twitter had been and TikTok is now. What the rightwing figured out was to claim “free speech” as its personal brand because it required no intellect or courage to actually defend the substance of Nazi ideas. It also frame-flips Actual F’n Nazis as censorship victims.
It’s hostage-taking. The rightwing basically forces you to concede what it wants: Either you have to let them control the conversation on their terms, or basically force you into censoring them to shut them up (letting them kill the hostage and being responsible for the victim’s death).
Re: Re:
At times like this I legitimately have to “admire” (with a ton of horror) the Russian approach to dealing with situations like these…
Which is to just damn the hostages and take everyone out.
Again, this isn’t an endorsement of Russian hostage rescue methods. They are legitimately inhumane and terrifying.
It’s just… sometimes, you really, really wish you had other means of solving the problem that does not involve harming the hostages…
Re: Re: Only the foolish or desperate lets the enemy pick the battlefield
It’s hostage-taking. The rightwing basically forces you to concede what it wants: Either you have to let them control the conversation on their terms, or basically force you into censoring them to shut them up (letting them kill the hostage and being responsible for the victim’s death).
It’s only a hostage situation if you let them set the rules as there’s always option C: Refuse to let them dictate terms and redefine words to suit their goals(Getting booted from private property for slinging slurs isn’t censorship it’s the owner exercising their free speech), hit them with the greatest bane of liars everywhere that is [Citation Needed], point out exactly what sort of content tends to flourish when they get to make the rules regarding ‘free speech’ and call them on their hypocrisy when it comes to speech they don’t agree with and the government’s role regarding it.
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Re: Re: Re:
Heh. Look who’s complaining about redefining words.
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Re: Re: Re:
cen·sorship
/ˈsensərˌSHip/
noun
1.
the suppression or prohibition of any parts of books, films, news, etc. that are considered obscene, politically unacceptable, or a threat to security.
Re: Re: Re:2
Now show us how content moderation does any of that—and do it without falling for the “I have been silenced” and “free reach” fallacies.
Re: Re: Re: Space roaching
This.
You have to be aware of the semantic battlefield when engaging in rightwing conversation.
There’s a tactic practiced by them called Space Roaching. Once you see it, you notice it everywhere.
Take a word with a commonly understood dictionary definition — freedom, elite, liberty, family for instance — hollow out the commonly understood meaning with a completely different meaning and use it in conversation as if nothing was ever changed. That’s Space Roaching.
It comes from 1997’s “Men in Black”, where the archvillain was a roachlike alien that crash lands on Earth. A bigoted, abusive farmer comes out to confront the intruder, and the Space Roach devours the farmer from the inside out but wears his skin like a costume.
The dark humor in the film was that the roach and the farmer were so alike in demeanor no one could tell the difference. As the skin started to sag and decompose, people suspected the farmer was sick and lot a literal monster in disguise.
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Like “man” and “woman”, say?
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Lotta cope here.
The reality is, of course, that half of American voters would prefer a fascist-adjacent administration to a degenerate neo-Marxist one. Sorry.
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Your warped view of reality proves how ABSOLUTELY HILARIOUS it is that some large and powerful factions in the Democratic party have spent a great deal of effort consolidating power within the party using various bad (though legal!) tactics only to be easily labeled as the same, when years of information campaigning is turned back at them.
Here, this is also amusing since the conclusion is that even actual Marxists want you in charge due to the whole incompetence stemming from living in a fantasy world problem.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/08/us/manuel-rocha-cuba-spy-agent.html
“More recently, Mr. Rocha surprised friends and former colleagues by signaling fervent support for former President Donald J. Trump. The charging document quotes Mr. Rocha telling an undercover F.B.I. official who posed as a Cuban spy that his right-wing politics were part of a cover story.”
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you’re saying
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I said it’s hostage-taking.
I never said what’s after “you’re saying,” and upon a word search no one else did either. False attribution. Flagged.
It’s a little weird that so many people (or maybe they are bots – who knows these days) are insistent on individual platforms being able to host whatever they want, but get upset when individual platforms actually try to host whatever they want (within legal bounds). This goes for both “sides”. Don’t complain about your ideology not being catered to by a private entity who may or may not agree with you. On the other side of things though, turning around and trying to purge another ideology from a private entity that allows those ideas to exist is also fairly petty. Within the United States, censorship is the elimination and suppression of speech and expression by a government or government backed entity. If it’s done privately on private property, it’s simply the execution of property rights.
This is not a right to take lightly. The right to chose what you do on and/or with your own property is essential to the freedom of our nation and the freedom of expression. To argue against this for any reason is not only against everyone’s best interest, but also gives the government more power in an extremely dangerous way – if laws were to be enacted that make private property of any sort a public place/ forum – that sets the precedent that any and all property can be indiscriminately legislated upon.
If half the “people” in this comment section actually gave a rats ass about the drivel they’re spewing about freeze peach, they’d be working towards forming their own networks to sidestep this mess in the first place.
TL;DR: If you’re Natsoc in this comment section, stop being a self destructive retard. Actually put something together yourself and think a few more steps ahead.
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It’s a little weird that so many people (or maybe they are bots – who knows these days) are insistent on individual platforms being able to host whatever they want, but get upset when individual platforms actually try to host whatever they want (within legal bounds).
I can support the right of a member of the KKK to be a racist asshole but I’m still going to call them out for being one.
Support for privately-owned platforms to host or not host content of their choosing is not granting them immunity from criticism for how they choose to act upon that. Substack absolutely has the right to become the internet’s nazi bar/publisher, but they don’t get to escape the label for doing so.
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?If you’re Natsoc in this comment section, stop being a self destructive retard. Actually put something together yourself
They rarely build their own platforms,as that means they cannot obey the imperative command of being a fascist, and that is attack those who disagree with you, because they are your enemies.
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Weird.
I usually think of Substack as the Communist/Marxist bar. The vile bullshit written by those evil bastards is breathtaking.
To which I say, good for Substack!
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[Asserts facts not in evidence]
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Jesus fuck, "Nazi"means nothing.
I haven’t been paying attention this week (it being semi vacation) but damn am I here to pile on. You’re just letting your freak flag fly, now, huh?
Nevermind that “Free speech” and also just plain normal civil discourse (“civi” here doesn’t mean “polite”, ladies) means that actual fucking nazis should be allowed to speak (spoiler, there basically are none, they’re all dead of old age) you just want to to silence dissent.
“Nazi” just means literally anyone you disagree with. An when you’re not excusing actual government attempts to silence those people you sure are advocating for naming and shaming everyone who doesn’t believe in being as censorious as you.
You’re just a partisan asshat, hopelessly far-left, hoping to use either big government, big platforms, or just straight peer pressure to silence any dissent.
Every website, with any integrity should have a big banner “Yes, we host nazis”, just to tell you and your kind to fuck off. (whether they choose to host actual nazis, should any still be breathing is up to them but they should post that message regardless)
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Thing is, I actually agree with you that people throw around the word “nazi” way too easily, and I actually don’t do that. But this is a dumb fucking point for you to claim here when we are talking about LITERAL NAZIs.
The underlying issue was LITERAL NAZIS using Substack. Not just some people who are being called Nazis for effect. But those literally embracing naziism, and Nazi symbols.
So, your point is fucking stupid and shows how you jumped in here all hot and bothered without understanding a fucking thing. Like you usually do.
And again, as I make clear (despite you being too stupid to understand this), that was exactly what I was suggesting Substack should do. They have every right to, and I am not telling them not to. I’m not telling them not to host Nazis. It’s their call.
I’m merely pointing out that doing so is part of that marketplace of ideas, and considering that many people (not you, clearly, but many people) think that Nazis have already lost in the marketplace of ideas, may choose to take their business elsewhere. As is happening.
Speech has consequences.
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We’ve done absolutely everything we could to tell YOU and YOUR kind to fuck off. And you just keep slithering back.
Fuck off, Matthew.
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Yes, Nazis should have the right to speak their minds, no matter how odious their speech. Now tell me why they should have the right to free reach.
No, it doesn’t. I rarely see anyone here use the term “Nazi” that way, and I personally do my damnedest to avoid using it that way. (I may slip up here and there, but nobody’s perfect.) And for my money, a Nazi is someone who openly and sincerely believes in Nazi ideas. Per A.R. Moxon: “ ‘Nazi ideas’ are: first, that people Nazis consider part of their ethnic and philosophical in-group represent pure paragons of humanity; second, that all other human beings are corrupted and corrupting threats poisoning their bloodstream both literally and metaphorically; and third, that all other human beings therefore should be subjugated, then expelled, then exterminated, so that true humanity can finally thrive. They have other ideas as well, but those make up the core.”
Please show us the Techdirt article that explicitly does what you’re talking about there.
Nazis have the right to speak their mind. What sucks for them, for you, and for those who willingly host their speech? So does everyone else.
Two things.
1.) How can he be “hopelessly far-left” and a believer in using “big government”?
2.) Dissent from what—the idea that Jewish people deserve to live in peace?
Their funeral.
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Nope. Some people misuse it, sure. That doesn’t mean it means nothing anymore.
And in this case, we’re talking about people who call themselves Nazis.
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Will the real nazis please stand up
Chris is not trying to “stare down” Nilay, he is speechless and dumbfounded because he does not know how to respond to being called a fascist by a fascist who does not believe in the first amendment. It’s not the dress-up play-nazis that you need to worry about… it’s the ones in your state & federal legislature who really mean business, and regard you as government property, for example:
https://www.techdirt.com/2023/12/28/every-major-pharmacy-chain-is-giving-the-government-warrantless-access-to-medical-records/
You cannot purchase medicine or medical diagnostics without permission – and that permission requires a bribe for the prescription? This is the definition of fascism. Fascism is racketeering. And thanks to the unconstitutional P.A.T.R.I.O.T. act you now have zero privacy in any of your travels, personal affairs and communications.
The Democrat & Republican parties created a secret government with secret budgets and unconstitutional agencies like the CIA (which was modeled after and staffed by the gestapo – literal nazis that armed & funded the Medellin cartel with U.S. taxpayer funds in exchange for a share of the profits.) These gangsters are still running the country behind the scenes, conducting political & industrial espionage at your expense, and selectively enforcing the law in their favor. The CIA is even allowed to operate for-profit front corporations that dont give their profits back to the national treasury.
Mussolini said that fascism is the merger of corporate & state power. We certainly witnessed this in the “Twittergate” censorship scandal. Sixty percent of the defense budget cannot be accounted for because it was stolen. The price of allowing a secret government is to be ruled by an invisible crime syndicate. Every time you pay taxes to a government with secret agencies and secret budgets you are funding fascism… but the only threat you can see is the misfit with the tattoo in the bar who is harmless by comparison. It’s a total inversion of reality (and just how this government likes it.)
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Substack and Nazis
Thanks for the information and thoughtful analysis.