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The last sentence is the main reason why the world is so fucked up today. "Unless you agree with my radical leftist agenda you are a nazi/racist/<some_imaginary

by illuminati1911 9y ago

The last sentence is the main reason why the world is so fucked up today. "Unless you agree with my radical leftist agenda you are a nazi/racist/<some_imaginary_word>"-mentality and the complete unreasonability of the left is the reason why normal people are fed up with all this crap and are voting for Trump, Brexit etc. No matter how evil some group is (may they be pedophiles, satan worshippers, nazis, whatever...) silencing them and assaulting them is a crime and is against freedom of expession. The problem with making these exceptions like "Let's have freedom of speech but not for these and these people...yadayadayada" is we can never be sure where to draw the line. (Neo-)Nazis are sure dumb as hell but as long as they have peaceful protest and they don't harm anybody physically (unlike their counter-protesters) it doesn't matter. And don't even start with the car-thing. An individual psycho does not compare to organized widely accepted violence. If we were to ban nazis and far-right organizations because they are racist and apparently a "threat" then what about anarchists? They also are extremely violent and want to overthrow the government. (and in the US officially categorized as terrorist threat) What about BLM which is openly racist and violent (July 2016 anti-white/police sniper attack, riots, assaults, highway blockings etc.) If we start going down this slippery slope will have shitloads of organizations and ideas to ban.

jrimbault 9y ago
Anarchists and communists have long been banned from entering the US. And I've noticed a strong push back against most of the more mild socialists ideas. The US have not been "the land of the free" for a long time. And I will argue that communism is fundamentally a good ideology. While fascism has never leaned on the good side of human nature. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communist_Control_Act_of_1954 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communist_Control_Act_of_1954 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ideological_restrictions_on_naturalization_in_U.S._law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ideological_restrictions_on_na... PS: statues of Lenin and Stalin were removed without much second thought, only USians would keep statues of their (war criminals)|(rebels) for 150 years. And political bronzes are not art, they are at best political camping and grandiloquence.
- aaron-lebo 9y ago
  To be fair, anarchists didn't exactly make anyone their friends from the late 1800s forward. There was an incredible amount of political violence at the time. Russia saw tens of millions murdered because the anarchists and communists (of that day) got exactly what they wanted in the overthrow of the old regime. It's weird how communism and fascism seem to appear out of the ether together and fight with each other. How many states were destabilized by that combo in the last 100 years? Russia, Germany, Spain, at least, South American countries, etc. Fascists and communists are like pb & j. There must have been a lot of normal people who just wanted to live normal lives but saw them destroyed by extremists who knew the right way to live.
  - vidarh 9y ago
    The anarchists in Russia, and a substantial proportion of the communists fought against the Bolshevik coup, and most of them ended up murdered or in exile for it. Or both. Trying to paint them all with one brush is ignorant.
    - aaron-lebo 9y ago
      Well yeah, but they made a deal with the devil. The anarchists in Russia were murdering thousands of people a year from 1904 forward. They killed one of the few liberalish emperors in 1881. Russia could have been a very different place in 1915 without their action. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narodnaya_Volya https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narodnaya_Volya Here's a long list of the infamous actions of the anarchists: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaganda_of_the_deed#Notable_actions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaganda_of_the_deed#Notable... The sailors on Kronstadt who supported Lenin during the July Days and were one of his strongest bases of support ended up getting put down and executed when they rebelled after the revolution. Guess it suggests that making friends with violent people is a bad idea, regardless of convenience or agreement.
      - vidarh 9y ago
        The idea of treating anarchists of all people as one singular, cohesive unit, when even the elitist, strictly organised Bolsheviks with their high party discipline took many years to manage to fully purge/murder even the opposition within their own party, is beyond ridiculous. The Russian left was deeply divided to start with, and split further as the Bolsheviks intentions became clearer, leading to a number of uprisings against them from the left as well [1]. Frankly, it is deeply offensive to the memories of the many thousands of them who ended up laying down their lives to try to stop the Bolsheviks that you're lumping them all together and trying to assign them blame for things they fought to the bitter end. Some of them had at some point made the fault of trusting Lenin, at a time when the Bolsheviks had not yet demonstrated much willingness to oppress, but most had not. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Left-wing_uprisings_against_the_Bolsheviks https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Left-wing_uprisings_against_th... (with the caveat that the page contains a number of statements about specifics that to me seem overly biased in favour of the Bolsheviks, but the specifics of which groups opposed them looks reasonably correct)
Deestan 9y ago
> radical leftist agenda Being anti-nazi is "radical leftist" now?
- Akujin 9y ago
  Yea. Holy shit what the fuck is wrong with people.
  - mozumder 9y ago
    Libertarian nerds. You see this a lot in engineering circles. Too much hope, idealism and theory, not enough real-world socialization. We have to identify and solve the problem of libertarianism wherever it pops up. There's something wrong with these unsocialized libertarians. The result is Nazi marches.
    - orf 9y ago
      Taxation is slavery!! But who pays for the roads? The invisible hand of the market or something I dunno. TAXATION IS...
  - OnLookAStar 9y ago
    No, the "radical leftist part" is that anyone who disagrees with what cloudflare has done is a "nazi sympathizer", I have Jewish parents, biracial, queer, and a communist. I'm about as a far from a "nazi sympathizer" as you can get. Yet I still think that what cloudlfare has done is wrong because the same social norms that lead to such behavior, would have in the past lead to people stifling the communications of things I am very much for (civil rights, gay rights etc...) Sure, Nazi's are obviously evil. But so what? In the past lots of things we think of today as "good" were in the past "obviously evil" and it took a great deal of hard work to turn those tides around. There is a cost to letting people we hate have easy communications. But there is also a cost to making it hard for people we hate to share their ideas. The cost is that when we as a society hate wrongly, as we have done in the past with respect to people of various races, sexuality, and gender, if the people we hate have a difficult time communicating, we will not be able to progress as a society. So yeah. I think the kind of thought that leads to what cloudflare has done, is dangerous because it makes it will make it difficult for society to have moral progress. And according to you that makes me a "nazi sympathizer". So yeah. That is what people are condemning for, and rightly so. Not for being "against nazis", for saying that anyone who disagrees with what cloud flare has done is a nazi sympathyzer.
Akujin 9y ago
The first sentence is the main reason we are so fucked. There's literally nothing radical or leftist in what I said. Nazism is literally responsible for hundreds of millions of deaths world wide. Fact. You know how I know you're actually a shill? > And don't even start with the car-thing. An individual psycho does not compare to organized widely accepted violence. Whataboutism in literally the next paragraph: > What about BLM which is openly racist and violent (July 2016 anti-white/police sniper attack, riots, assaults, highway blockings etc.) 99.99% of all people who have ever been to a BLM protest are peaceful. Blocking cars is called Civil Disobedience. It is literally what the Nazis are doing when they demonstrate in a liberal town in which they don't even live. It's just as annoying when they close down the center of a town for Nazis as it is when BLM blocks a street in Baltimore. You are literally equating Nazis to people who want universal healthcare, equal pay for equal work, and to not get shot at by police for the color of their skin. We're only talking about Nazis. Not the right wing. The Nazis claim they are "alt-right" or whatever but someone who is advocating for lower taxes and a decrease in government spending and for abortion to be illegal isn't the enemy. Nazis are the enemy. Stop conflating Nazis with the legitimate right wing of the nation.
- seikilos 9y ago
  > Nazism is literally responsible for hundreds of millions of deaths world wide. Fact. Not to defend Nazism but the death toll of WWII was between 50 and 80 million.
  - matt4077 9y ago
    If you add the lives lost in the slave trade, you'll get pretty close to a 100 million: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlantic_slave_trade#Human_toll https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlantic_slave_trade#Human_tol...
    - seikilos 9y ago
      I'm fairly certain that most 19th century slavers weren't German national socialists.
    - 9y ago
_Tev 9y ago
Problem is - we need the line. If someone is openly calling for someone else's death, is it ok? And neo nazis - just by embracing the historical association - seem to be ok with crossing any line. Of course it brings other problems, as any regulation ever (e.g. calling nazi anyone you disagree with), but society needs to set at least some limits. Enforcing them will be always subject to debate, as is natural and (imo) good in democracy.
ajuc 9y ago
> "Unless you agree with my radical leftist agenda you are a nazi/racist/<some_imaginary_word>" Calling for persecution of literal inciting of violence is hardly a "extremist left" idea. In fact it's not even left-or-right issue.
- Houshalter 9y ago
  Inciting violence is already illegal and no one is defending it.
  - thinkfurther 9y ago
    Just like the right to free speech is useless without a spirit of tolerance in the population, the same goes for inciting violence being illegal. http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/charlottesville-latest-daily-stormer-editor-death-threats-heather-heyer-blog-viral-andrew-anglin-a7895611.html http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/charlottesv... Why does this story about CF dropping the Daily Stormer have not simply one comment saying "Good."? Why is there even a discussion? No one is defending it explicitly, but many do implicitly.
    - edraferi 9y ago
      Because you can't operate systems as big as the internet on a case by case basis. People are concerned that this action could lead to other, more noble, speech being suppressed by corporations like cloudflare. I'm happy they're offline for the moment, but I wish it was because of a court order focused on specific actions (eg incitement of specific violence) rather than a single person's disapproval of their (really quite terrible) message.
      - thinkfurther 9y ago
        Fair enough. I agree in that I think it's lame it had to happen this way, but I'm still glad it happened this way rather than not at all.
      - ajuc 9y ago
mozumder 9y ago
It seems people have no idea that Nazis are actually extremely violent people. I'm not talking about your average racist, but people that identify with the Nazi party. Violence is central to their philosophy. If you actually met any modern-day Nazis, you would know this. It took me about two days of hanging out with Nazis before they literally tried to blow me up. This isn't some free-speech issue where you debate politely and sip iced water and other frippery.. this is actual people killing other people. This is how the the real world actually operates, instead of libertarian-nerd theory world. And you know Nazis would be extremely violent people because no rational person would self identify with that group, so already they're batshit insane, which means they're likely to be extremely violent. And sure enough, when hundreds of Nazis gathered this weekend in Charlottesville, you actually ended up with an event measured in terms of "death toll". We have to treat these people like armed and dangerous criminals, like you would ISIS or any active shooter. And we all need to understand that government limits speech in many, many ways, not just the "fire in the theatre" example, but with things like sedition and other criminal conspiracies to more mundane things like copyrights and libel. People forget that we went to war against these people and used to kill Nazis wholesale less than 80 years ago, because the Nazi party went to war against America. Identifying with them means you've actually declared war against the US. Not sure how much clearer you could be in declaring yourself to be a violent and dangerous criminal than that. Just ban them. Arrest their members. Don't be the socially inept libertarian nerd that thinks only in terms of theory without any real-world experience. It's perfectly fine to limit rights and freedoms in the real world. You can do it!
- pitay 9y ago
  A couple of things: 1. I was watching the news and in a picture I noticed one of the counter protesters using some sort of spray can as a flamethrower. I also saw the counter protesters beating up a spokesman for the protesters before the police saved him. So violence goes all around. 2. Arresting people just because someone like the parent here calls them violent is a really bad idea. As in, it's horrendous. If all someone has to do is call you violent to have you arrested, then boy can it be used to silence people that say things inconvenient to whoever wants to silence them. Saying "arrest their member" about a political group is extreme, ignores any legal precepts of innocent until proven guilty, and can be used by the most authoritarian groups to silence anyone they choose. That said I do find protesters very unlikable. The counter protesters I have found a little bit more likeable but still unlikable, because they seem somewhat hypocritical and dishonest, given they have been somewhat violent as well, and have said that it doesn't matter that they were violent as well.
rmc 9y ago
There is always a line. Nearly everyone, every company, has a line. Heck, this website itself asks that you don't be mean in comments.
salvar 9y ago
Would you say the same about a takedown of an ISIS website?
- Houshalter 9y ago
  Most ISIS content is already illegal for things like inciting violence. If the Daily Stormer is breaking the law by inciting violence, then it should be dealt with the same way. There is an existing legal process and it doesn't require the discretion of Cloudflare's CEO.
- anc84 9y ago
  Would you argue the same for the takedown of a marihuana promoting enthusiast website?
camillomiller 9y ago
The right to your own ideas is not an absolute. It's a pact you have to respect and it involves respecting other people rights first. Neonazi and white supremacist are betraying this social pact by furthering the idea of a superior race and the extermination of the different, that's why they're walking a really thin line when it comes to their right to First Amendment protection. You just resorted to what I call "the bad child argument". The bad rich child who already has everything wants an icecream. Mom, for once, says no. The child throws a fit and blames mom for it: if you gave me the ice cream I wouldn't have thrown a fit.
- icebraining 9y ago
  The First Amendment was instituted by literal slave holders. When did this requirement to (intellectually) respect the rights of others appear?
  - yakcyll 9y ago
    It's bloody common sense. If you don't respect my rights, there will come a time, as history has shown time and again, when I will gather enough power to be able to not respect yours. And so, slavery was abolished.
    - icebraining 9y ago
      So not respecting rights leads to the abolishment of slavery? That sounds pretty good.
  - empressplay 9y ago
    LOL This statement really frightens me. But doesn't surprise me. Which frightens me even more.
    - icebraining 9y ago
      Careful about assuming opinions I didn't actually express :)
vidarh 9y ago
As a "radical leftist", it's certainly not on my agenda, and in fact I hold views that they'd likely denounce.
eyko 9y ago
Isn't perjury a crime? What about death threats? It's all speech, and it's the type of speech hate groups use - the type that is already a crime and we want to protect under some strange interpretation of the first amendment to your constitution. If a group is threatening the security of non-white people, some even going to the extent of carrying guns (as is their right) whilst they make said threats and spread lies, I don't know what else you need to shut them down.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
rootlocus 9y ago
> The problem with making these exceptions like "Let's have freedom of speech but not for these and these people...yadayadayada" is we can never be sure where to draw the line. There's no problem here. You have freedom as long as you don't hurt other people. Different nuances of what "hurt" means which are not covered directly by law are decided in courts of law by judges.

jrimbault 9y ago

Anarchists and communists have long been banned from entering the US. And I've noticed a strong push back against most of the more mild socialists ideas. The US have not been "the land of the free" for a long time. And I will argue that communism is fundamentally a good ideology. While fascism has never leaned on the good side of human nature. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communist_Control_Act_of_1954 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communist_Control_Act_of_1954 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ideological_restrictions_on_naturalization_in_U.S._law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ideological_restrictions_on_na... PS: statues of Lenin and Stalin were removed without much second thought, only USians would keep statues of their (war criminals)|(rebels) for 150 years. And political bronzes are not art, they are at best political camping and grandiloquence.

aaron-lebo 9y ago
To be fair, anarchists didn't exactly make anyone their friends from the late 1800s forward. There was an incredible amount of political violence at the time. Russia saw tens of millions murdered because the anarchists and communists (of that day) got exactly what they wanted in the overthrow of the old regime. It's weird how communism and fascism seem to appear out of the ether together and fight with each other. How many states were destabilized by that combo in the last 100 years? Russia, Germany, Spain, at least, South American countries, etc. Fascists and communists are like pb & j. There must have been a lot of normal people who just wanted to live normal lives but saw them destroyed by extremists who knew the right way to live.
- vidarh 9y ago
  The anarchists in Russia, and a substantial proportion of the communists fought against the Bolshevik coup, and most of them ended up murdered or in exile for it. Or both. Trying to paint them all with one brush is ignorant.
  - aaron-lebo 9y ago
    Well yeah, but they made a deal with the devil. The anarchists in Russia were murdering thousands of people a year from 1904 forward. They killed one of the few liberalish emperors in 1881. Russia could have been a very different place in 1915 without their action. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narodnaya_Volya https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narodnaya_Volya Here's a long list of the infamous actions of the anarchists: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaganda_of_the_deed#Notable_actions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaganda_of_the_deed#Notable... The sailors on Kronstadt who supported Lenin during the July Days and were one of his strongest bases of support ended up getting put down and executed when they rebelled after the revolution. Guess it suggests that making friends with violent people is a bad idea, regardless of convenience or agreement.
    - vidarh 9y ago
      The idea of treating anarchists of all people as one singular, cohesive unit, when even the elitist, strictly organised Bolsheviks with their high party discipline took many years to manage to fully purge/murder even the opposition within their own party, is beyond ridiculous. The Russian left was deeply divided to start with, and split further as the Bolsheviks intentions became clearer, leading to a number of uprisings against them from the left as well [1]. Frankly, it is deeply offensive to the memories of the many thousands of them who ended up laying down their lives to try to stop the Bolsheviks that you're lumping them all together and trying to assign them blame for things they fought to the bitter end. Some of them had at some point made the fault of trusting Lenin, at a time when the Bolsheviks had not yet demonstrated much willingness to oppress, but most had not. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Left-wing_uprisings_against_the_Bolsheviks https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Left-wing_uprisings_against_th... (with the caveat that the page contains a number of statements about specifics that to me seem overly biased in favour of the Bolsheviks, but the specifics of which groups opposed them looks reasonably correct)

Deestan 9y ago

> radical leftist agenda Being anti-nazi is "radical leftist" now?

Akujin 9y ago
Yea. Holy shit what the fuck is wrong with people.
- mozumder 9y ago
  Libertarian nerds. You see this a lot in engineering circles. Too much hope, idealism and theory, not enough real-world socialization. We have to identify and solve the problem of libertarianism wherever it pops up. There's something wrong with these unsocialized libertarians. The result is Nazi marches.
  - orf 9y ago
    Taxation is slavery!! But who pays for the roads? The invisible hand of the market or something I dunno. TAXATION IS...
- OnLookAStar 9y ago
  No, the "radical leftist part" is that anyone who disagrees with what cloudflare has done is a "nazi sympathizer", I have Jewish parents, biracial, queer, and a communist. I'm about as a far from a "nazi sympathizer" as you can get. Yet I still think that what cloudlfare has done is wrong because the same social norms that lead to such behavior, would have in the past lead to people stifling the communications of things I am very much for (civil rights, gay rights etc...) Sure, Nazi's are obviously evil. But so what? In the past lots of things we think of today as "good" were in the past "obviously evil" and it took a great deal of hard work to turn those tides around. There is a cost to letting people we hate have easy communications. But there is also a cost to making it hard for people we hate to share their ideas. The cost is that when we as a society hate wrongly, as we have done in the past with respect to people of various races, sexuality, and gender, if the people we hate have a difficult time communicating, we will not be able to progress as a society. So yeah. I think the kind of thought that leads to what cloudflare has done, is dangerous because it makes it will make it difficult for society to have moral progress. And according to you that makes me a "nazi sympathizer". So yeah. That is what people are condemning for, and rightly so. Not for being "against nazis", for saying that anyone who disagrees with what cloud flare has done is a nazi sympathyzer.

Akujin 9y ago

The first sentence is the main reason we are so fucked. There's literally nothing radical or leftist in what I said. Nazism is literally responsible for hundreds of millions of deaths world wide. Fact. You know how I know you're actually a shill? > And don't even start with the car-thing. An individual psycho does not compare to organized widely accepted violence. Whataboutism in literally the next paragraph: > What about BLM which is openly racist and violent (July 2016 anti-white/police sniper attack, riots, assaults, highway blockings etc.) 99.99% of all people who have ever been to a BLM protest are peaceful. Blocking cars is called Civil Disobedience. It is literally what the Nazis are doing when they demonstrate in a liberal town in which they don't even live. It's just as annoying when they close down the center of a town for Nazis as it is when BLM blocks a street in Baltimore. You are literally equating Nazis to people who want universal healthcare, equal pay for equal work, and to not get shot at by police for the color of their skin. We're only talking about Nazis. Not the right wing. The Nazis claim they are "alt-right" or whatever but someone who is advocating for lower taxes and a decrease in government spending and for abortion to be illegal isn't the enemy. Nazis are the enemy. Stop conflating Nazis with the legitimate right wing of the nation.

seikilos 9y ago
> Nazism is literally responsible for hundreds of millions of deaths world wide. Fact. Not to defend Nazism but the death toll of WWII was between 50 and 80 million.
- matt4077 9y ago
  If you add the lives lost in the slave trade, you'll get pretty close to a 100 million: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlantic_slave_trade#Human_toll https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlantic_slave_trade#Human_tol...
  - seikilos 9y ago
    I'm fairly certain that most 19th century slavers weren't German national socialists.
  - 9y ago

_Tev 9y ago

Problem is - we need the line. If someone is openly calling for someone else's death, is it ok? And neo nazis - just by embracing the historical association - seem to be ok with crossing any line. Of course it brings other problems, as any regulation ever (e.g. calling nazi anyone you disagree with), but society needs to set at least some limits. Enforcing them will be always subject to debate, as is natural and (imo) good in democracy.

ajuc 9y ago

> "Unless you agree with my radical leftist agenda you are a nazi/racist/<some_imaginary_word>" Calling for persecution of literal inciting of violence is hardly a "extremist left" idea. In fact it's not even left-or-right issue.

Houshalter 9y ago
Inciting violence is already illegal and no one is defending it.
- thinkfurther 9y ago
  Just like the right to free speech is useless without a spirit of tolerance in the population, the same goes for inciting violence being illegal. http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/charlottesville-latest-daily-stormer-editor-death-threats-heather-heyer-blog-viral-andrew-anglin-a7895611.html http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/charlottesv... Why does this story about CF dropping the Daily Stormer have not simply one comment saying "Good."? Why is there even a discussion? No one is defending it explicitly, but many do implicitly.
  - edraferi 9y ago
    Because you can't operate systems as big as the internet on a case by case basis. People are concerned that this action could lead to other, more noble, speech being suppressed by corporations like cloudflare. I'm happy they're offline for the moment, but I wish it was because of a court order focused on specific actions (eg incitement of specific violence) rather than a single person's disapproval of their (really quite terrible) message.
    - thinkfurther 9y ago
      Fair enough. I agree in that I think it's lame it had to happen this way, but I'm still glad it happened this way rather than not at all.
    - ajuc 9y ago

mozumder 9y ago

It seems people have no idea that Nazis are actually extremely violent people. I'm not talking about your average racist, but people that identify with the Nazi party. Violence is central to their philosophy. If you actually met any modern-day Nazis, you would know this. It took me about two days of hanging out with Nazis before they literally tried to blow me up. This isn't some free-speech issue where you debate politely and sip iced water and other frippery.. this is actual people killing other people. This is how the the real world actually operates, instead of libertarian-nerd theory world. And you know Nazis would be extremely violent people because no rational person would self identify with that group, so already they're batshit insane, which means they're likely to be extremely violent. And sure enough, when hundreds of Nazis gathered this weekend in Charlottesville, you actually ended up with an event measured in terms of "death toll". We have to treat these people like armed and dangerous criminals, like you would ISIS or any active shooter. And we all need to understand that government limits speech in many, many ways, not just the "fire in the theatre" example, but with things like sedition and other criminal conspiracies to more mundane things like copyrights and libel. People forget that we went to war against these people and used to kill Nazis wholesale less than 80 years ago, because the Nazi party went to war against America. Identifying with them means you've actually declared war against the US. Not sure how much clearer you could be in declaring yourself to be a violent and dangerous criminal than that. Just ban them. Arrest their members. Don't be the socially inept libertarian nerd that thinks only in terms of theory without any real-world experience. It's perfectly fine to limit rights and freedoms in the real world. You can do it!

pitay 9y ago
A couple of things: 1. I was watching the news and in a picture I noticed one of the counter protesters using some sort of spray can as a flamethrower. I also saw the counter protesters beating up a spokesman for the protesters before the police saved him. So violence goes all around. 2. Arresting people just because someone like the parent here calls them violent is a really bad idea. As in, it's horrendous. If all someone has to do is call you violent to have you arrested, then boy can it be used to silence people that say things inconvenient to whoever wants to silence them. Saying "arrest their member" about a political group is extreme, ignores any legal precepts of innocent until proven guilty, and can be used by the most authoritarian groups to silence anyone they choose. That said I do find protesters very unlikable. The counter protesters I have found a little bit more likeable but still unlikable, because they seem somewhat hypocritical and dishonest, given they have been somewhat violent as well, and have said that it doesn't matter that they were violent as well.

rmc 9y ago

There is always a line. Nearly everyone, every company, has a line. Heck, this website itself asks that you don't be mean in comments.

salvar 9y ago

Would you say the same about a takedown of an ISIS website?

Houshalter 9y ago
Most ISIS content is already illegal for things like inciting violence. If the Daily Stormer is breaking the law by inciting violence, then it should be dealt with the same way. There is an existing legal process and it doesn't require the discretion of Cloudflare's CEO.
anc84 9y ago
Would you argue the same for the takedown of a marihuana promoting enthusiast website?

camillomiller 9y ago

The right to your own ideas is not an absolute. It's a pact you have to respect and it involves respecting other people rights first. Neonazi and white supremacist are betraying this social pact by furthering the idea of a superior race and the extermination of the different, that's why they're walking a really thin line when it comes to their right to First Amendment protection. You just resorted to what I call "the bad child argument". The bad rich child who already has everything wants an icecream. Mom, for once, says no. The child throws a fit and blames mom for it: if you gave me the ice cream I wouldn't have thrown a fit.

icebraining 9y ago
The First Amendment was instituted by literal slave holders. When did this requirement to (intellectually) respect the rights of others appear?
- yakcyll 9y ago
  It's bloody common sense. If you don't respect my rights, there will come a time, as history has shown time and again, when I will gather enough power to be able to not respect yours. And so, slavery was abolished.
  - icebraining 9y ago
    So not respecting rights leads to the abolishment of slavery? That sounds pretty good.
- empressplay 9y ago
  LOL This statement really frightens me. But doesn't surprise me. Which frightens me even more.
  - icebraining 9y ago
    Careful about assuming opinions I didn't actually express :)

vidarh 9y ago

As a "radical leftist", it's certainly not on my agenda, and in fact I hold views that they'd likely denounce.

eyko 9y ago

Isn't perjury a crime? What about death threats? It's all speech, and it's the type of speech hate groups use - the type that is already a crime and we want to protect under some strange interpretation of the first amendment to your constitution. If a group is threatening the security of non-white people, some even going to the extent of carrying guns (as is their right) whilst they make said threats and spread lies, I don't know what else you need to shut them down.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

rootlocus 9y ago

> The problem with making these exceptions like "Let's have freedom of speech but not for these and these people...yadayadayada" is we can never be sure where to draw the line. There's no problem here. You have freedom as long as you don't hurt other people. Different nuances of what "hurt" means which are not covered directly by law are decided in courts of law by judges.