It's been known for ages of course, there's always been a bogeyman, I like how there's some older articles out there that have predicted which bogeyman it was going to be today.
I've yet to see any proposals from the latter camp whereas I've seen dozens of pieces of legislation successfully passed and attempt to pass from the former.
Are you aware of how the only people in the US to ever be successfully censored from the public internet for political (as opposed to legal) reasons are far-right websites? This literally happened in the last week; domain registrars (the only gateway the public has to critical public DNS infrastructure) decided to voluntarily censor various far-right websites citing "hate speech" as their justification.
There is, evidently, a fairly powerful and far-reaching population of left-leaning people who believe and are willing to act on the idea that the internet should be politically controlled. I've never heard of this being done successfully against, say, a communist website.
I also found this surprising. Cloudflare specifically always took the stance that it's not their place to censor the internet, which is why they permitted extremist/terrorist content[1] that people were pressuring them to remove. It amazes me that they kept that, but deleted the alt-right stuff. Now I think these alt-right websites are disgusting, but worse than ISIS?
ISIS is a bad example. Antifa however? CloudFlare (and domain registrars) should either exile the extremes on either side, or allow either side. The situation right now is stupendously lopsided.
I don't see Antifa mowing down protesters in cars and spewing Nazi hate speech at Nazi rallies they organized though, so I'd say that's a false equivalency.
That's because the media has insanely lopsided coverage of recent attacks. It's a miracle no one's died from antifa attacks yet. Look up Eric Clanton. I also encourage you to watch actual footage of events starting with the Milo protest in berkely; the stuff I've been seeing on my news feed has nothing to do with reality.
Having abundant first-hand experience of such events, I don't think your comment has anything to do with reality either. Poor as the quality of the coverage by the professional news media is, that by the amateur news media is just as bad or worse - framed and edited for maximum sensation with no attempt at fact-checking.
Yes, there has been some violence from the anti-fascist side, such as Eric Clanton being hit with a bicycle lock. But you are overlooking the fact that fight-wing activists have initiated more and more deadly violence in similar contexts: a stabbing at a rally in Sacramento last year; a shooting Washington state earlier this year; and of course the deliberate driving of a car into a crowd at Charlotteville a couple of weeks ago. Screenshots from Discord suggest that particular tactic was discussed in advance by RW activists.
I don't want to go on a Gish gallop or we'd be here all day, but I'd also encourage you to reflect on the fact that while Antifa supporters endorse the idea of punching nazis, popular figures with a public following on the far right have publicly and formally expressed the desire for civil war and even genocide. It's not possible to have a reasonable discussion without addressing that dichotomy.
I haven't seen any Nazis completely ripping up a town like Antifa did to Hamburg, so yes, actually, Antifa is shit and we should be rid of them sooner rather than later.
No where did I say or imply that. No violence is okay. However classing the Antifa bogeyman in the same league as the group that fired guns into protesters and ran down people in a car does a massive disservice to yourself and your country.
Okay, and Antifa have seriously hurt multiple police offers. I seriously don't get how you can ham on the alt-right but defend Antifa, they're both fringe groups that shit over society's rules.
See anigbrowl's comment below for a well thought out response.
I'm also not defending Antifa, I'm commenting on your equivalence between the two groups. Sure, in the broadest of strokes they are the same, but so are all criminals. But one would not say a shoplifter is the same as a murderer.
> I seriously don't get how you can ham on the murderers but defend shoplifters, they're both fringe groups that shit over society's rules.
> Are you aware of how the only people in the US to ever be successfully censored from the public internet for political (as opposed to legal) reasons are far-right websites?
It wasn't the GOVERNMENT that did this. That's the only thing that freedom of speech laws give you freedom from.
And, those sites weren't suppressed because they impacted politics; they were suppressed because they impacted profitability.
It's almost like the right needs some sort of "neutrality" laws that guarantee that internet websites and internet traffic they need can't be restricted.
I'm pretty far left in my politics, and I find the idea that these websites got kicked off quite worrying. However, I also find the centralization of internet services quite worrying.
I'm still old school enough that I run my own servers for exactly this reason.
I agree. I did not claim this is the government's doing.
I agree censorship of political content on private infrastructure is (and should be) legal; I also believe it's plainly immoral and should alarm people. I also believe that, given that the public DNS is government-controlled, it nominally belongs to the public and private entities like cloudflare should not be gatekeepers to it.
Of course, the best solution is for everyone to switch to some sort of crypto-based truly public DNS system like Namecoin, but that's not happening for a while.
I'm under the impression that the Daily Stormer was at least somewhat widely known. Is there a website of similar reach that, say, calls for a Communist revolution or sabotage of power plants in the name of environmentalism?
I get my only news about US politics from HN, so I genuinely have no idea.
Wikileaks is left-wing? I did not know this. The narrative, of late, has been that Assange is a fan of Trump and aided Putin's goal during the election.
Obviously most of the right is against Nazis, but the modern conservative faction seems to draw a much higher ratio of violence and fascist rhetoric than the left.
When something happens, the media gives right-wing fascists the benefit of the doubt; "we don't know who he is", "he doesn't represent the movement", "he was scared", "he was attacked", "he's crazy", and once the proof is out they tend to draw false equivalencies with left.
That doesn't happen as much on the left - it's stigmatized full stop, no excuses. CNN's clickbait news will drag it out
>When something happens, the media gives right-wing fascists the benefit of the doubt; "we don't know who he is", "he doesn't represent the movement", "he was scared", "he was attacked", "he's crazy", and once the proof is out they tend to draw false equivalencies with left.
Does it though? Because I found the majority of the media except niche-oriented ones like FOX and Breibart do not fit that profile.
CNN had no problems attacking with everything they knew, but they avoided excess speculation and treated the Charlottesville attacker the same as Hodgkinson... which was my point.
Don't forget neo-nazi "threat". The entire establishment media/propaganda apparatus coordinated their attack together to institute censorship regime on the internet.
They bind our hands and tape our mouths all under the guise of protecting us.
