> the blog Zerohedge and video hosting platform Liveleak.
Let's say I get why they'd block 4chan and 8chan, but blocking a blog is just over the top. Liveleak I also half-understand, but I also don't approve of it, for a while it was one of the best online video resources on the atrocities committed by ISIS in Syria and Iraq, just hiding our unwanted images under the rug won't help much.
Later edit: For example videos of the Tikrit massacre [1] are only available on Liveleak (I'm talking of the "mainstream" web), YouTube has nothing on it. It is my very strong opinion that we need these images to remain in the public psyche so that we'll try our best not to make the same mistakes again, and by censoring access to this kind of videos we're not helping with any of that.
You "half understand" liveleak and "you get" 4chan and 8 chan but should that be the basis for law and what thought is acceptable in a free society?
Do we really want some political committee sitting around and arguing the merits of these people's writing? What about weird kink websites? What about radical political blogs that advocate for policy you find dangerous? You may find some of these things abhorrent but there are almost certainly people who would find certain things you believe abhorrent.
Any time you get into individual selection of what is acceptable thought and what isn't you are crossing a very dangerous line. Even if the initial things that are deemed unacceptable seem reasonable.
Edit: Telco monopolies relating to infrastructure are essentially state actors. There is a big difference here between a Telco refusing to route traffic and a bookstore deciding what content to carry.
I'm a fierce fighter for the First Amendment and its free speech protections. But such absolutism around free speech has its drawbacks. Hate speech runs wild. Incivility is given a safe harbor in which to breed. Some really awful sides of humanity can come uncomfortably close to one's day-to-day life. But it's a trade-off our country debated, debates and continues to make.
Australia hasn't made the same trade-off. Australians repeatedly elect representatives who pass into law measures I'd consider draconian if raised in America. But Australia isn't America. And within a band, in which both America and Australia lie, there are multiple optima balancing freedom and stability.
I'm a gay male, but I'm very reluctant to ban 'hate speech' - I'm worried that such laws could be used against other (as yet unknown) marginalized peoples in the future, if such laws, or rather the concept of such laws existed, they could have been used to suppress our struggle for rights. We, for example said some pretty sharp things about religion for example, which in other countries would be prohibited speech, similarly, we were also decidedly uncivil in our struggle for civil rights, so has every successful civil rights movement.
Any law used to defend the now status quo, can be used to prevent that from changing in the future, even to welcome other groups under the tent. Simply put, you got to the top, don't pull up the ladder behind you.
That said, I wouldnt object to broadening what constitutes a call to action to include doxxing and 'encouraging internet vigilantism'.
"I'm a fierce fighter for the First Amendment and its free speech protections. But..." Pretty much everyone who says "but" after a statement like that isn't one, at all.
I would argue that Facebook has many negative features and few positive ones, with the negative features far outweighing the positive ones. The fact that Facebook spends so many resources making sure you can't ignore it speaks volumes. Meanwhile, facebook "news" is mostly garbage, their livestreaming service is full of livestreamed crime, not even touching what they do with your data, and how much they capture that you don't even know about. 4chan, meanwhile, is exactly what you make of it. All you have to do to not get "shot" on 4chan is stick to any board that isn't /b/ or /pol/ and voila you have heavily moderated anonymous imageboards for a ton of topics.
That's an excellent rebuttal, lots of people use it so if you don't agree with them you are wrong. Most people use plastic products as well, please tell me how wrong I am for not liking single-use water bottles or disposable utensils.
Facebook's userbase is dropping steadily, so I would say that more people are realizing it isn't as great a piece of software as when they first made an account. We're not arguing Stackexchange vs 4chan, its one social network vs another anti-social network, one of which treats you like a gold mine, and the other couldn't care less. I know which one I'd rather use.
Facebook took it down. These other forums have not. Please don't pretend that this is a one off event. These forums are home to all kinds of needless, immoral content. Child porn, people being murdered, etc, etc. It is an active recruitment ground for fascists and white supremacists.
The imageboards are ephemeral and probably expired before Facebook took the video down. Child exploitation is regularly reported and removed promptly from the imageboards.
Good. Ban them all. Force everyone with an unpopular opinion off the major platforms.
While we're at it, let's ban political debate and fake news. Ban NPR and ban Breitbart. Ban religious debate too. If it offends someone, get it off the platforms.
Let's make it so every controversial content and comment is forced off YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook.
I am not a free speech absolutist. But with the coming technology, like MaidSAFE and others, it will become possible for people to communicate and say whatever they want, no way to censor. Full stop.
The governments will go back to having moles inside each group they care about, which is more targeted and harder.
For numerous examples of why free speech matters, the other way, look at the latest article on at https://qbix.com/blog
It’s like 3d printed guns, or desktop printers or copiers. Things that governments heavily regulated through gatekeepers now can be produced by anyone.
I will say this... if you add up ALL the mass shootings in the USA they add up to less than 2% of all shootings. And if you add up ALL shootings and killings, including by Boko Haram and so on, we have far less than 100 years ago, 1000 years ago, 5,000 years ago etc.
Steven Pinker was right. We are getting far more peaceful, because of technology. As long as we keep a check on population growth, we may even have enough resources, not too much garbage and sustainable living in every generation.
If anything, Boko Haram (which stands against Western education) is an example of values from hundreds of years ago. They are more violent.
Today’s values are much less violent but they will only survive if we can live sustainably, and that starts with women’s education and having children later.
It's not mentioned in this article but from what I understand (and someone please correct me if I'm wrong), "blocking" is happening at the ISP DNS level, and anyone living in these affected areas can simply use a different DNS service to continue using these websites unimpeded.
That is correct. A decent method of side-stepping ISP DNS is to run Unbound DNS on your home router or a server in your home, if you can.
An example snippet from the configuration in Unbound DNS would look like this:
forward-zone:
name: "."
forward-addr: 1.1.1.1 # CloudFlare
forward-addr: 1.0.0.1 # CloudFlare
forward-addr: 8.8.8.8 # Google
forward-addr: 8.8.4.4 # Google
forward-addr: 208.67.222.222 # OpenDNS
forward-first: no
And you can view it's status with unbound-control:
unbound-control dump_infra | grep 1\.1\.1
1.1.1.1 . ttl 1745 ping 0 var 71 rtt 284 rto 284 tA 0 tAAAA 0 tother 0 ednsknown 1 edns 0 delay 0 lame dnssec 0 rec 0 A 0 other 0
This method of caching can also slightly improve the privacy of the people using your network. You get the bonus of a local low latency cache, and requests are distributed among multiple destinations, slightly reducing the marketing benefits of running those public DNS servers.
You can also enable TCP and TLS for recursive servers that support DoT (DNS over TLS). I prefer this over DoH, as everything in your home can benefit from it, not just your browser. Some of the servers mentioned above listen on TCP 853 for TLS. Just google "Unbound DNS TLS" There are some examples on Calomel as well. [1]
I stare at my iphone and start to wonder where I get to change my dns settings...? So I've just spent five minutes poking around and I haven't found it yet. So I've just googled it, and apparently you need 3rd-party apps to do it...
Now, interestingly, I could imagine kids doing it rote if someone just tells them how to install the an access-4chan app etc. For example, a couple of years ago I watched in horror as a 10yo friend of my kids demonstrated how to download an app (not from the app store) that would create a vpn to stop the app-store from being able to connect and discovering and uninstalling all the pirated games this kid then proceeded to install for my grateful kids! And her hands flew over the screen, tapping away and typing in English, which is a language she didn't speak let alone write in! Amazing rote. And very scary to tidy up after her!
So yeah, kids will probably circumvent this kind of thing even if parents can't.
>I stare at my iphone and start to wonder where I get to change my dns settings...? So I've just spent five minutes poking around and I haven't found it yet. So I've just googled it, and apparently you need 3rd-party apps to do it...
Took me about 30 seconds. Settings -> Wifi -> Tap the info icon for the network you're on -> Configure DNS.
And that's sort of the thing about these bans. They aren't about expunging content from the Internet---that's basically impossible---they're about increasing the activation energy of seeking it out (and, perhaps, making the behavior of the devices used to seek it out different enough from "common traffic" that it's a lot easier for state intelligence agencies to zero in on the participants).
Just found out that Reddit banned /r/watchpeople for the same reason [1]. I believe all these censorship attempts only makes it worse - we're experiencing the Streisand Effect at its best now.
Deplatforming was always a bad idea that puts fundamental freedoms at risk. Now that it has come to telecoms, something has to be done to denounce this trend and stop it. When large privately-owned platforms (e.g. Twitter) or low-level utilities (telecom companies) take action to censor information, it has the same impact and carries the same risks as a government doing it. It stifles expression, exchange of ideas, and imposes personal morality on a broad set of people.
Twitter is the modern day equivalent of a printing press, they can choose to print whatever they'd like, or not - trying to liken them to a common carrier is in my opinion absurdity.
Ridiculous. "Hate speech" didn't kill 50 innocent people, a goddamned lunatic with an automatic rifle did.
As Mark Steyn has remarked on this latest moral panic, "Less speech inevitably means more violence - because, if you can't talk about anything, what's left but to shoot up the joint?"
I find the chans interesting. The back and forth between the clans, whoever they represent, mixed with some curious independent posters gives a small picture of what's lurking out there in the darkness. In the private minds. Mostly it's role playing I think.
Unfortunately, it has become more than roleplaying several too many times to accept that excuse, and the chan owners and mods have made it pretty clear they don't consider regulation of the public squares they serve into existence to be their responsibility.
I think we're about to learn that the 'net may also interpret incitement to violence risk as damage and route around it.
You can't legislate ideas out of existence. Shutting down online venues where certain ideas flourish will do nothing to solve the problem that such an action is presumably trying to solve. Why would you actively push untoward discussion further underground, instead of letting it happen out in the open, on a public website?
Because people vulnerable to radicalization view public websites. The solution of "let it happen in the open" doesn't appear to be working in practice. Underground sites are harder for those unaware of the topic to find (and for policing what goes on on those sites, the US has the FBI and the CIA).
>Because people vulnerable to radicalization view public websites.
Why do you think people should be legally prevented from accessing information? Don't you believe in free will and the idea that everyone should be able to internally decide what is right and wrong for themselves? Or do we want that power to be put in the hands of the state?
Where were the accusations of online radicalization and calls for censorship when that one guy shot those Republicans at a baseball practice in 2017[0]? There's definitely no shortage of hyperbolic anti-Republican sentiment, out in the open, on social media platforms even more mainstream than 4chan. Surely if we're banning access to places where the NZ shooter was (allegedly) "radicalized," then we should prevent people like that shooter from being "radicalized" too, right? What's different about the two situations that warrants completely different rhetoric?
> What's different about the two situations that warrants completely different rhetoric?
They're not particularly different, except we now have many examples of Jewish people being attacked because they're Jewish, or people being attacked because they "look" like Muslims to their attackers, or black people being attacked because they're black, or gay people being attacked becuase they're gay.
We have churches and mosques and synagogues being shot up. We have crowds of people being driven into by cars. We have people being murdered for who they are.
How often does this happen for Republicans?
This point - is violence mostly from the left or right - is tedious, becuase it's unambiguously mostly from the right and it's disingenuous to suggest otherwise.
The more important point is that it is overwhelmingly committed by men. We need to look at why some men resort to violence.
Free will is a fascinating hypothesis that is only partially explanatory of observed human behavior. ;)
To be less glib: in the US the bar is very high, but we do, in fact, have some things that we've removed from the "free will" discussion. Child pornography is the obvious example.
Yes because the process of creating child pornography is harmfully exploitative of a child, and we as a society have decided this one of the worst things anyone could do, so we've made creating, distributing, and accessing child pornography illegal. If someone disagrees with this, they're most assuredly allowed to voice their opinion on it however they see fit, obviously as long as no child pornography is involved.
Drawing a parallel between child pornography and untoward politically incorrect discussion out in the open doesn't seem like a very useful comparison, especially when I provided another recent example of a shooting that one could argue was caused by online "radicalization."
The US bar is very high to curtailing speech as a government action, and it's worth noting that the story we're commenting on is about an Australian telco taking private action. I actually don't know the law in the US around what would happen if, for example, Verizon decided to IP-blackhole 4chan of its own initiative (in general, Americans would probably rake it over the coals for diminishing consumer choice at the very least). It'd be a hell of a show if they tried, and I don't see it coming.
The example you brought up is also from the US and, I hate to say it, was probably treated differently because the US is just desensitized to the amount of violence in its culture these days. The baseball shooting was tragic, but none of the injuries were even as permanent as the ones Gabby Giffords suffered. But the New Zealand shooting was in a country far less tolerant of such intra-civil violence, and Australia already has speech constraints relative to the US (contrast their attitude on videogames to that of the US).
(... but to turn the conversation around: do you think there should have been a conversation about online radicalization after the 2017 shooting? Maybe there should have been. What do you think should have been done differently?)
Yes, Australia and New Zealand are not the US and as such do not share its free speech laws and "free speech culture(/history)." This current situation is interesting though because from what I can tell, there hasn't been any government action yet, just private ISPs taking action with their own infrastructure. This is all sort of uncharted territory and it seems like nobody's sure how to go about solving these complex issues, yet ISPs are taking preemptive action of their own accord. (I agree that if an ISP in the US were to do something like this, it would be one hell of a shitshow, again due to legal and cultural differences.)
With regards to the 2017 Republican baseball practice shooting, I do think there should have been more of a conversation about online radicalization after the fact. I'm not saying legal action should have taken place or ISPs should have started DNS-blocking websites, because a.) again, cultural and legal differences compared to NZ/Australia and b.) because there was no convenient scapegoat to point fingers at. When "right-wing" violence happens, it's very easy to say, "ah see! 4chan and 8ch at it again," because everyone basically agrees that those websites contain "right-wing" hatred. Yet, "left-wing" hatred is and has been, for some reason, allowed to take place on most major social media websites and discussion platforms, largely uncriticized. Plus, it's undeniable that this has dramatically increased in recent years, since about 2015 especially, for obvious reasons.
So you have blatant, largely unimpeded "left-wing" hatred allowed to happen out in the open on most of the Internet, while "right-wing" hatred is forced off mainstream platforms and onto fringe sites like Gab, 4chan, and 8ch... so when "far-right" extremists commit acts of violence, it's easy to say, "See, these fringe websites where all this hatred is being espoused? We should do something about them!," but when "far-left" extremists commit acts of violence, there's no easy targets to place the blame on, because the hatred happens just about everywhere and is for some reason considered to be more or less socially acceptable.
It's hard to argue that "radicalization" due to online information and opinion dissemination is anything but a major cause for concern and something that we should be investigating and having frank discussions about, but in order to do so, the discussions have to be actually frank and encompass the entire situation, something which few if any are willing to actually do. Our physical human forms have not evolved to intuitively grapple with the consequences of the existence of the Internet[0], yet just about everyone uses it every day. We should dig deep and really examine this at some point.
I understand your concern and I'm no fan of terrorist propaganda of any sort, but if you think that hiding some content from the public Internet will prevent these events, you're dreaming. The Columbine shooters weren't "radicalized" by public websites, to our best knowledge. Nor was the perpetrator of the 2012 movie-theater shooting in Colorado.
It's unlikely that making it hard to reach 8chan / 4chan etc. would impact those shootings, no. But it may very well have had impact on the New Zealand shooting. And the Pittsburgh shooting.
In the US, the bar would be pretty high for government action based on this reasoning; a direct link would have to be proven, and either an imminent threat of harm be demonstrated or the media in question be demonstrated to have nothing but illegal activities occuring with it. I don't think 4/8chan raise to this high bar. Other nations? Bar not so high.
>The solution of "let it happen in the open" doesn't appear to be working in practice.
To be more blunt, it in fact has absolutely no evidence. At no point, not once, in this little foray into unrestricted publishing since the dawn of the internet, has "let it die" ever actually worked. It's a techno-libertarian myth that completely ignores human behavior.
Exactly. Occasionally a chan poster will submit that the boards continue to exist because whomever is keeping tabs on the elements is afraid they'll scatter.
Just like the idea goes "if we make it harder to get guns, we may still have tragedies but fewer", the rationale may go for making it harder to find like-minded hate online.
Right now. On your personal computer or through tor, go to 8chan /pol/. It is a cesspool.
Where those cesspools exist, publicly searchable and accessible, hate can breed. I know I /want/ them gone, but I'm not sure if I'm okay with it being done by law, because that's a lot of power over the Internet that governments haven't had.
It's way past that point. It's kind of ridiculous anyone could even entertain the notion that people are just joking around on these forums at this point.
How many more white supremacy terrorist incidents do we need to quell this myth?
Called it three days ago [1]. My prediction is the UK is next and the list of sites will be even longer. This horrible event has become a bittersweet gift to politicians who have been waiting for their chance to coerce ISPs into blocking a few more web sites on their "naughty lists".
From the govts view, they are acting to contain sectarian violence long enough that their society can find a stable equilibrium after a shock.
I don't think appeals to the principle of freedom of speech are meaningful against acts of censorship because it is a tactical response in a perceived crisis and not something that happens under ideal conditions where they can afford to be held to principles.
However, tactical approaches like clumsy censorship signal a deeper weakness that risks exacerbating sectarian resolve in all parties.
Cynically, the solution here may have been to rate limit content they didn't want instead of blocking it outright, which is insidious, but toward the desired outcome of defusing the spread of violence, people who want the content can get it without having to position themselves against the authorities (become outlaws) to do so, while removing it from casual observation. Reddit's quarantines, and Twitter's shadow bans mitigate some of the virality of reactions. Tagging traffic to these sites for slow path processing would have been trivial, and blocking them was an unforced error.
Societies need to respond to events like these by demonstrating unity and strength, which may mean acts of extraordinary tolerance - and not with tactical approaches that make them seem weak and vulnerable to an insurgency.
> I don't think appeals to the principle of freedom of speech are meaningful against acts of censorship because it is a tactical response in a perceived crisis and not something that happens under ideal conditions where they can afford to be held to principles.
This bizarre idea that principles are only relevant under "ideal conditions" is part of the problem. We can't afford not to hold governments to principles, especially under non-ideal conditions.
Ban all the popular toxic websites including facebook, instagram except maybe google and other actually useful sites.
If a website adds no value / negative value to people's lives yet is used by a significant number of people for a significant amount of time every day it should be banned or time limited in my opinion. A bit similar to cigarettes or sugary drinks.
Who decides? The government does based on recommendation by the judiciary. Its their job to legislate
No one is stopping you from registering a new website so please dont argue freedom of speech.
Everyone is okay with restrictions on freedom of speech when it comes to child pornography. But restricting 8chan is suddenly too much?
I'm curious where we draw the line and what the criteria is. It's clear we need a line, since we shouldn't encourage the proliferation of child pornography for example.
But should we tolerate a community that had a "Brent Tratton Appreciation Thread" on the day of the NZ shooting? [1]
It's because there's no situation in which you (I hope) or I could conceivably be accused of being child pornographers. It will never affect us and the people it does affect are the worst of the worst and are identified as such by police.
I have mild conservative sympathies and get accused by idiots of being a "Nazi" depressingly frequently. It's screamingly obvious that the rush to clamp down on "hate speech" is in reality criminalising political dissent. Which is absolutely guaranteed to lead to more violence, not less.
The line is in the little thing only backwards people seem to use these days... the law. In the case of 8chan, the US law. It is within the US law to praise terrorists under the Freedom of Speech law (1st Amendment). If you want to change that fact, you can try to change the law. For example, I'm a Czech citizen and it is illegal for me to praise terrorism or nazism. Anyways, until such time that the law is changed, any calls for mass action against 8chan are little more than mob rule. Also, it doesn't help your case than almost all calls for extreme action like deplatforming come from a fringe minority of society (progressive far left activists) who are typically orange man bad, guns bad, free speech bad, low taxes bad, low regulation bad as it makes it hard to find compromises for such a group of people.
i think cracking down on imagery created from this violent act or other violent acts is a closer equivalence to child pornography. alternatively, you could compare bans on lolicon to the censorship you are advocating.
Who is "they" and why should "they"?
Both websites act in according to US law, should we punish every site that participates in your definition of wrong think?
They and others should permanently block 8chan. TBH if NZ/AUS started DDOSing it I'd be fine with that too but I doubt we're there yet.
The others I don't agree with long term (4chan is 4chan, Zerohedge is moronic but mostly benign, liveleak is concerning but I get why they did it) but 8chan is just cancer.
I get freedom of speech, but there has to be a limit somewhere. Those animals would drop nukes for funsies if they had the opportunity.
The problem is defining those limits. And if you give a regulatory agency the power to do it, odds are they will push too far.
It starts with fringe sites that most people would agree on, but the existence of those regulators depends on there being more things to censor. It's in their own interest to expand the scope of the censoring, and the people attracted to those positions and that "power" will be the ones who have things they wish to silence.
In addition to this, as the scope creeps you risk forcing the later groups into the same channels as the ones first banned (e.g. people who enjoy dark humor being shoved into the same platforms as people who unironically spread hate and violent messages). It seems to me this will be facilitating radicalization rather than help prevent it - an analogy could be made with people arrested for petty crimes being radicalized or made into full blown criminals in prisons.
Before thinking about whether it's actually right or wrong to block access to "problematic opinions" online, I'd like to see satisfying research that government censorship actually works and mitigates these problems, rather than just sweep the mess under the carpet while it keeps building up to an eventual serious problem.
ISPs sell internet access, if you believe this website is infringing some of your local laws, you should start a procedure in your own country, it's not the role of an ISP to filter websites by their own initiative.
Remember when commenting on Hacker News: it's an international community.
Australia doesn't protect freedom of expression in the same way the US does. Indeed, there's a decent chunk of the world that's perfectly rational and sees our relatively laissez-faire attitude on some Bill of Rights content as dangerous to a survivable society.
There are already limits to the free speech (in the USA) in regards to credible threats, fraud, and defamation. I believe your premise is that limiting ugly/racist speech would limit radicalization, and I don't believe there is any evidence to show that.
In general, a formal action by the US government would involve a high-bar "prove harm or imminent risk of harm" test.
... but action of private enterprises to cease to do business with an organization (such as telcos black-holing an IP address in their routing fabric) are another matter, unless regulation states otherwise.
Most of the world is fine with their version of freedom of speech. The extremist version from the US is rare, and causes huge amounts of harm.
US business owners need to wake up to the fact that their products are seen as publishers, not pipes, and that publishers in most of the world are regulated.
In point of fact, US law defined (via the DMCA "Safe Harbor" clause) most communications-media products (fora, video sharing sites, music repositories, etc.) as pipes for this reason. "They're pipes" is how the US regulates them.
In general, yes. SESTA/FOSTA nudged the definition of the safe harbor away from content that facilitated sex trafficking. This has no bearing on whether, say, iTunes is still safe in sharing the subversive, anti-government music of Creedence Clearwater Revival. ;)
The white nationalist rally in Charlottesville was the sort of fascist rally that other countries would categorically refuse a permit to. The US does not, in general, refuse permits under the assumption that a group (even a group with a violent ideology) will turn from a peaceable demonstration to a violent riot. Federal, state, and local law is heavily bent toward assumption of good faith.
Charlottesville had several injuries and one death.
I take it you're contradicting the coroner's report that Heather Heyer died of a blunt-force chest injury? Given that the driver of the car was convicted in her murder, you may want to walk that back.
Sure. And when a "new German" stabs an "old German" in the heart and kills him, he died of "causes unrelated to the injury" to quote one of our coroners, 6 hours (!) after the attack. These things aren't worth the papers they're printed on. A tool in the hand of politics
... probably also worth noting: not unlike the US, crime metrics on immigrants in Germany suggest that as a population, they're less likely to commit crimes than native Germans.
politifact, sure. Last year, there have been 28 rapes or sexual assaults in my city. According to police reports, witness reports and phantom photos, 26 of those are not from Germany. In the end-of-year reports, that number is close to 0. Funny how that works. because double-citizenship, acquittals, people never being caught, unknown identities.. you pick one
The source you've linked to doesn't mention a stabbing, and nothing I've been able to dig up suggests there was a stabbing in the Köthen death. Death from heart condition was unrelated to the injuries sustained from a fall the victim suffered scuffling with the 18-year-old (which, yes, smells fishy, but I think you're casting aspersions on an unrelated coroner who was looking at a woman with a crushed ribcage because of possible malpractice on a local-to-you coroner's part, which is... Well, this is the sort of misinformation-spreading and stereotyping, and the harm it causes, that we're discussing in this thread).
Are you conflating the facts from two situations? Media coverage of the Köthen protests suggests there was a stabbing incident in Chemnitz close in time to Köthen.
All of that having been said: I think your point that Germany has laws discouraging you from casting aspersions on groups due to individual actions of the groups, and America has far fewer such restrictions, stands. Except... Germany's homicide rate is lower than the US. So Germany's clearly doing something right relative to its neighbor 'cross the pond (of course, it may not be this---but given that Germany had to deal with actual Nazis and the US has not yet had that challenge, I'm not in the habit of gainsaying Germany's strategy here regarding laissez-faire freedom of speech).
It wasn't a stabbing, the rest was correct. It was very close after Chemnitz and the following protests, so this case was given close attention. Unwanted attention, so this ridiculous report was put out, and later the details were kept secret as "Ermittlungsgeheimnis".
I'm just using this ridiculous case to make the point that these reports don't mean anything. Both cases had extreme political pressure to make things happen.. and that exact thing was written on the report.
But besides that: I think it's faulty logic to say that as long as Germany's homocide (or whatever) rates are lower than the US, it must be better. You can't compare things like that. A murder used to be something extraordinary. Now it's everyday. According to statistics they're at an all-time low. See the case above and numerous other examples.
Well, no. A murder didn't used to be something extraordinary. Especially not in Germany---with respect, we are still talking about the country that committed genocide as state policy in the '40s. Germany's murder rate has remained basically flat for decades [https://ourworldindata.org/homicides]. What has changed is the population has risen by about 10 million in 50 years, so with a flat rate, you're going to see more murders.
...but more importantly, what has also changed extraordinarily is communication. We see a lot more of the murders, be they local, national, or international (the fact that we, a German and an American, are discussing Australian policy in response to a New Zealand murder spree is indicative of this). Internationally, we're a lot less tolerant of murder than we were because we can see it now. And as a species, we're pretty bad at risk assessment and filtering with this newfound panopticon power. It's a pretty well-documented phenomenon that fear in Germany of crime doesn't align with the hard numbers on incidents. https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2018-05-09/german...
People see what they expect to see all too often.
If I may make an observation... You appear to be ascribing to some conspiracy-theory thinking in the statement that the coroner report aligned with perceived political pressure. Where is that notion coming from?
You think it'S a conspiracy theory to believe that days after Chemnitz, when another German was dead in that part of Germany, a coroner report that was pushed out hours after the attack, stating that although he was attacked and died on the spot, it didn't cause it - that all that is nothing but the truth? Ok yes I gladly accept that label
So no, you were not there. You have sources you trust more than the official reports, reason to believe those reports are bogus based on those sources, and you're using your beliefs about German process in a German autopsy to evaluate practices in an American case.
I don't think we have any more to discuss. I don't trust your unnamed sources. And I have a sinking suspicion they're exactly the sort Australian telco would find it necessary to de-list from DNS.
You're broadening the discussion from freedom of speech to freedom in general, and I don't think the conversation is particularly valuable over-broad. In terms of homicides, looking at London's rate relative to, say, major cities in the US, I strongly suspect the 2nd Amendment in the US plays a lot more role than the 1st. Comparing London to, say, Chicago, it seems that the freedom to run around with untracked firearms isn't doing the US any favors. Maybe it's the cultural difference, but I don't see London's rate as "epic" given that they're a city of 8 million souls and US cities with smaller populations have more murders.
But freedom of speech and freedom to be armed are different freedoms.
A) freedom of speech is the most essential freedom (hence, "first" amendment), so I'm not broadening the discussion too much, am I? (aka, slippery slope argument is not always a fallacy)
B) I'm glad that you brought up Chicago, since it's run by leftists and anti-gun politicians, just like every other high crime city in the US and Europe; in fact, just like pretty much every high crime dump in the world is run by leftists. It used to be easy enough to dismiss such silly arguments by saying "Chicago and the rest of Illinois has some of the toughest gun laws", but leftists have a fallacious argument for everything. Fortunately, the leftists' favorite argument of "Chicago's gun crime is caused by the 2nd amendment and the ability to bring guns across state line, etc." doesn't last very long when you consider that the states with the most gun freedom in the US have some of the lowest crime rates (Idaho, Vermont, etc.). Or, are you prepared to offer a theory (other than "cultural differences" - last I checked murder is not an acceptable "culture", or is that the next wave of leftism?) about why people in Idaho and Vermont aren't murdering people due to their nearly unrestricted access to guns and legal ability to carry them in public?
I think you're reversing causality. Wouldn't higher rates of gun-related homicide induce a locale to enact stricter gun laws? And if those gun laws are only partially effective because the problem they're trying to control is systemic and national, you'd end up with the situation you're observing: places with few gun crimes have few laws because they've not been induced to enact them, and places with more gun crime have more laws (but continue to have more gun crime because places with fewer gun laws facilitate unregulated gun markets and transportation costs within the US are extremely low).
The rest of your comments are basically an angry anti-leftist rant that I'm not interested in engaging in. I have Facebook for dealing with political rants, thank you. ;)
I'm not implying causality at all; in fact, my entire point has been to show the exact opposite, that rights (or objects, like guns, the acquisition of which stems from a right) don't cause behaviors. I have the right to eat dirt and drink toilet water, but I don't do either, because neither would be quite right.
So, in Chicago and London, where the crime has been on the rise, a reasonable person cannot blame the increase in crime on guns (esp in London's case, where it would be easier to get your hands on the Ark of the Covenant than a gun).
So, if not guns, what about other policies (welfare, immigration, maybe even other, less controversial etc.)?
(re: rant) Leftists have good ideas (protect the environment, take care of helpless people, etc.), but most leftist ideas require a bigger government and more taxation, as a means to implement them. As a result, government grows, and, because government is itself not governed by the markets, it is by nature inefficient[1], which means it eventually becomes a bloated mess (which can also lead to rising crime, etc.). Acquisition of power eventually becomes the end (see Stalin's Soviet Union, Moa's China, Castro's Cuba).
I'm not sure how you consider blocking 4chan "tyranny" compared to some of the stuff the US government (or any government, for that matter) gets up to?
A good example that could be considered to be overall harmful would be the anti-vax movement. It has spread by speech over social media through patently inaccurate information.
Does Australia have an enumerated right to free speech? I thought that remains a somewhat novel feature of the American Constitution. (Owing--in large part--to our culture.)
I think the hardest thing for folks is actually arguing that speech X, Y, and Z are hateful, because all people of every political background who log online seem to want to do is legislate others into silence or post innuendo and memes about people's character behind their backs.
There's an essay I found pretty unique, "Reflections on Debating The Right" on Current Affairs, explaining why much more public debates would be helpful... of course, that website could well be blocked soon in Australia for their articles on Palestine, given the precedents now set!
People on the right (the proles, not the rich people making money off the whole affair) don’t want to have honest intellectual discourse. They want to ‘own libruls’ and be smug (despite their choices actively hurting their livelihood and their lives leaving little to be smug about).
There’s nothing to debate, they’re just idiots. Easy to fleece idiots considering how easy it is to make money by throwing out a bunch of controversial statements and then retracting when their audience has moved on.
I hope you're never categorized as a bad actor for a view you develop by your friends or fellow activists. From what I can tell, the bleeding-edge version of the line between honest soul and bad actor is under continuous deployment... it will be crucial to study each set of changelogs! By the way, do you think sex work is liberating, or capitalist exploitation? What do you think, a 2-state solution or not? I wouldn't want to get cancelled by talking to you.
I hope to come back to this debate in a few decades and see that Robinson's pieces on debating the right, along with Mark Fisher's "Exiting the Vampire Castle" and Benjamin Studebaker's "The Left is Not a Church" will be considered important overlooked resources.
That's an understandable reaction! But I won't be unpersoning people, especially those who themselves make a hobby out of looking for more people to unperson.
> They and others should permanently block 8chan ... 4chan is 4chan
What is the difference? Neither one sounds like a place I want to go visit to check out for myself. I used to hear about 4chan for a while is 8chan a worse, more concentrated version of it?
So far nothing I've heard about them sounds inviting to me. It's a bit like saying "browse the dark web" or this other terrible place filled with hate speech.
Let's say I get why they'd block 4chan and 8chan, but blocking a blog is just over the top. Liveleak I also half-understand, but I also don't approve of it, for a while it was one of the best online video resources on the atrocities committed by ISIS in Syria and Iraq, just hiding our unwanted images under the rug won't help much.
Later edit: For example videos of the Tikrit massacre [1] are only available on Liveleak (I'm talking of the "mainstream" web), YouTube has nothing on it. It is my very strong opinion that we need these images to remain in the public psyche so that we'll try our best not to make the same mistakes again, and by censoring access to this kind of videos we're not helping with any of that.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Camp_Speicher_massacre