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Genocide has been and still is a political tool. It is extreme, but ultimately something that people consider and carry out as part of political processes, not
by the8472 7y ago
Genocide has been and still is a political tool. It is extreme, but ultimately something that people consider and carry out as part of political processes, not a special category of its own. And realpolitik is to continue dealing with countries that practice genocide. Consider Burma or China.
Cloudflare simply has the luxury of choosing which politically disagreeable parties they do not want to associate with because they are insignificant customers.
Pretending that this is not due to differences in politics and moral judgment is semantic smoke and mirrors.
Anyway, the point is that they are not a neutral carrier/providers. Unlike banks or telecoms which are required by regulation to accept any legal business. CF styles itself as neutral infrastructure, until they decide they are not.
The risk of getting deplatformed due to someone's moral judgment is quite real, even for an entity such as Wikipedia. For example they were blocked in the UK because the Virgin Killer album cover landed it on a block list used by major ISP.
- wwright 7y agoI didn’t say it wasn’t political, but it’s not just undesirable for immediate political reasons — it’s undesirable for nearly universally-agreed moral and ethical reasons. So implying it’s only inconvenient for politics is, in my opinion, misleading.
- the8472 7y agoThe political tends to encompass or at least subsume the moral and ethical aspects, as I tried to allude to with the realpolitik aspect. But again, this is just a tangent. The core argument is that it is best not to rely on providers that have the freedom to make political/moral decisions who they deal with because that freedom makes them susceptible to moral denial of service attacks. You are one moral outrage away from being deplatformed.
- wwright 7y agoI can see that mentality, but what I’m saying is that, personally, if I become a Nazi, I think I should be deplatformed.
- whenchamenia 7y agoThen who decides what is a Nazi? Deplatforming someone for their speech makes them one in my book. How far down do we go?