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As the kids say these days: you accidentally said the quiet part out loud :) When it was Margaret Sanger being prosecuted for distributing information about co

As the kids say these days: you accidentally said the quiet part out loud :) When it was Margaret Sanger being prosecuted for distributing information about contraception, well, there's a perfectly reasonable justification for that law! Women can't just go around having sex without consequences! When it was theaters refusing to book touring companies of South Pacific, well, it's Communist to say that interracial marriage is OK! And we're at war with Communism! When it was movie studio associations and comic book publisher associations enforcing "codes" to avoid having formal censorship imposed on them by law, well, topics like sex and drugs are objectionable, and people shouldn't be encouraged to question authority figures! The people complaining today about being "silenced" tend to hold the same types of views as their predecessors who used to do the silencing. And their predecessors didn't stop at just boycotting or otherwise exercising their right of free association (and disassociation). Even if it's not, in the end, held to be fair play, turnabout is a nice source of schadenfreude.

brandonmenc 8y ago
> turnabout is a nice source of schadenfreude The problem with the, "ha! now you're getting yours!" attitude is that the situation will inevitably flip, and "your" side will be on the receiving end. Again. Rinse, repeat. Meanwhile, the power of the tools keeps growing until one day, it will be absolute. Whoever is on the wrong side of the ideological coin flipping when that happens will be in big trouble.
- ubernostrum 8y ago
  It could just as easily be argued that, instead of "flipping", or swinging back and forth like a pendulum, the consistent trend of the past 400 years or so is toward increased tolerance of everything except intolerance. There are people trying to reverse that trend, of course, but the volume at which they're currently screaming that they've been silenced is, I think, a pretty good indicator of the trouble they're having trying to pull it off.
  - brandonmenc 8y ago
    > the consistent trend of the past 400 years or so is toward increased tolerance of everything except intolerance If you don't count Nazi Germany, for example.
- paulcole 8y ago
  >The problem with the, "ha! now you're getting yours!" attitude is that the situation will inevitably flip, and "your" side will be on the receiving end. Again. Rinse, repeat. Yep. Believe it or not, it’s possible for what’s seen as right today to be considered wrong tomorrow and this can be a sign of progress in society. See slavery, bloodletting, alchemy. Although with Bitcoin’s popularity, it seems as though alchemy is back in again.
  - brandonmenc 8y ago
    > Believe it or not, it’s possible for what’s seen as right today to be considered wrong tomorrow and this can be a sign of progress in society. Of course I believe that. I also believe that the tools the world uses to communicate are controlled by a small number of people who may not always share in whatever the prevailing tolerant attitude of the day is.
paulcole 8y ago
I think that Simpsons episode is about 25 years old. Kids today just want to give their allowance to Nazis on Patreon.
- Farradfahren 8y ago
  Sargon of Akkad is a Nazi? The last time i checked he was fiercely rejected by white supremasists? This out-grouping of people is one of the most horrible weapons fired on democracy in recent years. If you label everyone a anti-democrat whose opinion you dont share- after a while they will start believe you. This behaviour is the best advertisement for anti-democratic behaviour anyone could make. To expect the public plaza to be a cozy, cushy plaze, only populatd by a mono-culture of minds, similar to mine- that is a horrifying vision of a world- something only to be found in totalitarian states. I for once find it good you are free to state such opionons, but still the destruction they deal to the infrastructure of society unopposed is appaling.
dx87 8y ago
The fact that you take joy in people being punished because of the horrible behavior done by other people years ago is disgusting.
- ubernostrum 8y ago
  Their "punishment" is that they have to build their own platform because the owners of other platforms are exercising their freedom of (dis)association. Nobody's made it illegal for them to build their own platform, and in fact the folks on the extreme right have been building and promoting their own platforms for years and years. And let's be honest: we're not talking about people who are "being punished because of the horrible behavior done by other people years ago". We're talking about people who are being shunned in the present day precisely because they want to revive all those horrible things and start doing them again. They don't just want a platform where they can lob slurs at Jewish people all day long; they want to re-build the concentration camps and finish what Hitler started. They don't just want a platform where they can use the n-word at will; they want a return to at the very least Jim Crow and the lynching era, if not all the way back to full-on chattel slavery of dark-skinned people. I'm OK with them being told "go build your own forum to talk about how much you want to do that". To be honest, I'd be OK with going beyond that and just rewriting the laws to European-style "no Nazism allowed anymore", so sadly sighing and talking about how disgusting I am for wanting a world without Nazis isn't exactly going to shame me into changing my mind, y'know?
  - throwaway7312 8y ago
    Really what you're saying is "start your own credit card." Hatreon launched as an alternative to Patreon. Know why Hatreon closed down? Visa shut it down. [1] If Visa bans you, no payment processor will work with you. Not PayPal. Not Stripe. Not Braintree. Not Authorize.net. You are cut off. So yes, of course Conte says he "welcomes competition" in the article. Any legitimate competition, that caters to the voices booted by Patreon, gets squashed by Visa. There cannot be any competition. So all anyone actually has to do if he wants to share views the American elites find distasteful is go start his own bank (takes $12 to $20 million and jumping through a load of regulatory hurdles, according to Wikihow [2]), roll out his own credit card, get mass market adoption of that card, create his own payment processor to process the card, found registrars and hosting companies that use that processor, and start a platform. We need a digital Bill of Rights set up before there's nothing left online but the most sanitized, P.C.-friendly content. A place where everyone has to act fake-nice and pay lip service to beliefs he doesn't really hold so no one will think he's guilty of bad-think. That might sound like a utopia to some, but to many of us it sounds like the opposite. > To be honest, I'd be OK with going beyond that and just rewriting the laws to European-style "no Nazism allowed anymore", so sadly sighing and talking about how disgusting I am for wanting a world without Nazis isn't exactly going to shame me into changing my mind, y'know? A simpler way to put this is just "anyone who does not agree with me should go to a reeducation camp, or to jail, or maybe die." People with views like these were behind the French Reign of Terror, the Russian Bolshevik Revolution, and the Nazi concentration camps. In the end, in all cases, the instigators ended up on the receiving end of the same kinds of punishments they put in place for those who disagreed with them. History is filled with examples of policies boomerang'ing back on those responsible for them. Just another way of saying, be careful what you wish for, because few wishes come without a catch. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hatreon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hatreon [2] https://www.wikihow.com/Open-a-Bank https://www.wikihow.com/Open-a-Bank

brandonmenc 8y ago

> turnabout is a nice source of schadenfreude The problem with the, "ha! now you're getting yours!" attitude is that the situation will inevitably flip, and "your" side will be on the receiving end. Again. Rinse, repeat. Meanwhile, the power of the tools keeps growing until one day, it will be absolute. Whoever is on the wrong side of the ideological coin flipping when that happens will be in big trouble.

ubernostrum 8y ago
It could just as easily be argued that, instead of "flipping", or swinging back and forth like a pendulum, the consistent trend of the past 400 years or so is toward increased tolerance of everything except intolerance. There are people trying to reverse that trend, of course, but the volume at which they're currently screaming that they've been silenced is, I think, a pretty good indicator of the trouble they're having trying to pull it off.
- brandonmenc 8y ago
  > the consistent trend of the past 400 years or so is toward increased tolerance of everything except intolerance If you don't count Nazi Germany, for example.
paulcole 8y ago
>The problem with the, "ha! now you're getting yours!" attitude is that the situation will inevitably flip, and "your" side will be on the receiving end. Again. Rinse, repeat. Yep. Believe it or not, it’s possible for what’s seen as right today to be considered wrong tomorrow and this can be a sign of progress in society. See slavery, bloodletting, alchemy. Although with Bitcoin’s popularity, it seems as though alchemy is back in again.
- brandonmenc 8y ago
  > Believe it or not, it’s possible for what’s seen as right today to be considered wrong tomorrow and this can be a sign of progress in society. Of course I believe that. I also believe that the tools the world uses to communicate are controlled by a small number of people who may not always share in whatever the prevailing tolerant attitude of the day is.

paulcole 8y ago

I think that Simpsons episode is about 25 years old. Kids today just want to give their allowance to Nazis on Patreon.

Farradfahren 8y ago
Sargon of Akkad is a Nazi? The last time i checked he was fiercely rejected by white supremasists? This out-grouping of people is one of the most horrible weapons fired on democracy in recent years. If you label everyone a anti-democrat whose opinion you dont share- after a while they will start believe you. This behaviour is the best advertisement for anti-democratic behaviour anyone could make. To expect the public plaza to be a cozy, cushy plaze, only populatd by a mono-culture of minds, similar to mine- that is a horrifying vision of a world- something only to be found in totalitarian states. I for once find it good you are free to state such opionons, but still the destruction they deal to the infrastructure of society unopposed is appaling.

dx87 8y ago

The fact that you take joy in people being punished because of the horrible behavior done by other people years ago is disgusting.

ubernostrum 8y ago
Their "punishment" is that they have to build their own platform because the owners of other platforms are exercising their freedom of (dis)association. Nobody's made it illegal for them to build their own platform, and in fact the folks on the extreme right have been building and promoting their own platforms for years and years. And let's be honest: we're not talking about people who are "being punished because of the horrible behavior done by other people years ago". We're talking about people who are being shunned in the present day precisely because they want to revive all those horrible things and start doing them again. They don't just want a platform where they can lob slurs at Jewish people all day long; they want to re-build the concentration camps and finish what Hitler started. They don't just want a platform where they can use the n-word at will; they want a return to at the very least Jim Crow and the lynching era, if not all the way back to full-on chattel slavery of dark-skinned people. I'm OK with them being told "go build your own forum to talk about how much you want to do that". To be honest, I'd be OK with going beyond that and just rewriting the laws to European-style "no Nazism allowed anymore", so sadly sighing and talking about how disgusting I am for wanting a world without Nazis isn't exactly going to shame me into changing my mind, y'know?
- throwaway7312 8y ago
  Really what you're saying is "start your own credit card." Hatreon launched as an alternative to Patreon. Know why Hatreon closed down? Visa shut it down. [1] If Visa bans you, no payment processor will work with you. Not PayPal. Not Stripe. Not Braintree. Not Authorize.net. You are cut off. So yes, of course Conte says he "welcomes competition" in the article. Any legitimate competition, that caters to the voices booted by Patreon, gets squashed by Visa. There cannot be any competition. So all anyone actually has to do if he wants to share views the American elites find distasteful is go start his own bank (takes $12 to $20 million and jumping through a load of regulatory hurdles, according to Wikihow [2]), roll out his own credit card, get mass market adoption of that card, create his own payment processor to process the card, found registrars and hosting companies that use that processor, and start a platform. We need a digital Bill of Rights set up before there's nothing left online but the most sanitized, P.C.-friendly content. A place where everyone has to act fake-nice and pay lip service to beliefs he doesn't really hold so no one will think he's guilty of bad-think. That might sound like a utopia to some, but to many of us it sounds like the opposite. > To be honest, I'd be OK with going beyond that and just rewriting the laws to European-style "no Nazism allowed anymore", so sadly sighing and talking about how disgusting I am for wanting a world without Nazis isn't exactly going to shame me into changing my mind, y'know? A simpler way to put this is just "anyone who does not agree with me should go to a reeducation camp, or to jail, or maybe die." People with views like these were behind the French Reign of Terror, the Russian Bolshevik Revolution, and the Nazi concentration camps. In the end, in all cases, the instigators ended up on the receiving end of the same kinds of punishments they put in place for those who disagreed with them. History is filled with examples of policies boomerang'ing back on those responsible for them. Just another way of saying, be careful what you wish for, because few wishes come without a catch. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hatreon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hatreon [2] https://www.wikihow.com/Open-a-Bank https://www.wikihow.com/Open-a-Bank