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You know what scares the shit out of me, to use your phrasing? The people on that site murdering me or overthrowing the government, so that they seize power and

You know what scares the shit out of me, to use your phrasing? The people on that site murdering me or overthrowing the government, so that they seize power and elections end or become irrelevant. “The free Internet” has value, but it’s not the only thing that has value. When it conflicts with other values, then there has to be a nuanced resolution.

cercatrova 6y ago
This is the paradox of tolerance. We can tolerate having a free internet but if it leads to the intolerant taking over and making everything worse, we need to be intolerant of them now, not later.
- danaliv 6y ago
  Please, can we put this canard to rest? It is an extremely simplistic take that is bordering on cliche at this point. It adds nothing, it illuminates nothing, and it fails to address any of the very real and complex issues by turning everything into a binary of tolerant/intolerant.
- gfodor 6y ago
  A witty saying proves nothing, and in this case it particularly doesn't since you seem you do not know what else was being said when it was written by its author.
- gameman144 6y ago
  Is the irony that this cuts both ways not obvious? Seems very clear; the left thinks the right is intolerant and must be silenced, the right thinks the left is intolerant and must be hobbled. The twist is that both sides are absolutely correct: the other side is intolerant. The Paradox of Tolerance is a great game theory exercise, just like Mutually Assured Destruction, but I'd prefer to live in a society where we don't lean into these strategies with our foot on the gas.
- seppin 6y ago
  Calls to violence were not, and are not, protected speech. It is a false argument to say they should be now.
  - cercatrova 6y ago
    I'm saying calls to violence are what we should be intolerant about.
BitwiseFool 6y ago
Have you ever spent time on the leftist "tankie" / "Chapo trap house" kind of subreddits? Or the Gen Zedong groups that glorify the purge of landlords during the communist revolution in China? If we are really going to go after such people wanting to violently overthrow the government we can't be ignoring the left when they do it.
- eertami 6y ago
  What an absurd turn of whataboutery. There's no way any logical person believes this is relevant. I can only assume you're being intellectually dishonest by making such an argument.
  - BitwiseFool 6y ago
    Call it whataboutism if you wish, but it's relevant to the discussion when it comes to evenly applying the rules.
    - eertami 6y ago
      It unequivocally is in no way relevant. Sure, if these people you mention had invaded the white house with weapons and make-shift bombs then it would be a fair comparison. However that didn't happen, it is a completely false equivalence. I simply don’t know what to say to you except to please re-examine your humanity as well as your critical thinking skills.
      - BitwiseFool 6y ago
        >"I simply don’t know what to say to you except to please re-examine your humanity as well as your critical thinking skills. " If you're worried about logical fallacies like Whataboutism, you've just committed an Ad Hominem. Why go there? Why question my humanity?
        qorrect 6y ago
        He's very angry and wants you to know it. If you don't agree with him, you are an idiot.
gfodor 6y ago
I agree. Why would you think that I thought the free Internet is the only thing that has value? That's a nonsensical position. My point was that if a company shuts this down with an SSL cert hack of some kind, it may be just or even backed by law enforcement, but it exposes a vector for suppression by corporations of the Internet that I had not considered before and we need to understand the high order effects from that.
- PaulDavisThe1st 6y ago
  Just yesterday HN had a link to an article on plaintext HTTP for the modern era. I'm not condoning illegal/dubious attempts to silence dissent, but loss of an SSL cert doesn't really suppress anyone's ability to communicate. Tell me I'm wrong.
  - gfodor 6y ago
    You're wrong to the degree SSL becomes a requirement burned into browsers, which seems highly likely and is partially true already for certain domains. Unless you're going to argue that being forced onto the non-web is not suppressing your ability to communicate, but if so that's a tough argument to dig into here. edit: I should add here the thought exercise is that you are participating in speech that is legal and ethical but are overruled by SSL cert providers and are unable to get a root signed cert from anyone (or whatever other means of preventing SSL.) In that case, even if you are not hard blocked, having your speech be passed around the internet in cleartext also seems like it affects your ability to communicate in a negative way.
    - PaulDavisThe1st 6y ago
      as noted by others, you do not need an SSL cert to be on the web. You need an SSL cert to use https, which is something entirely different.
  - beerandt 6y ago
    1) Browsers no longer let you (easily/ 2-click) override some ssl errors, and the overwhelming trend has been to start treating a lack of https similar to an ssl error, as far as ui goes. 2) Is this practically any different than saying newsgroups, or even bbs(?), still exist, so those avenues for free speech are viable remedies for being otherwise suppressed.
marcosdumay 6y ago
That's why you create some sort of police, have them look at those places, and watch if anything leads to some real world movement. You should also watch it for damaging lies, and have a judiciary system that makes them fix any damage those lies create. What you don't create is a paraestatal censor authority empowered to cut any information it wants out of the internet. (You don't create an estatal one either, but that's not what we are talking about here.)
lldbg 6y ago
"We can guarantee freedom of speech, but not freedom after speech." Idi Amin. This year I have barely spoken more than 30 minutes to someone in real life, per day. If my interactions over the internet were to be as they say curated, I would effectively be silenced. I was a frequent reader of r/dt a few years back, as the top poster was. There was nothing in particular there, no trend, that was any more terrible than what I could find in my bookshelf. Deal with it.
- jakelazaroff 6y ago
  Your bookshelf doesn’t analyze your reading habits and recommend other books specifically to drag you deeper into the rabbit hole of extremism. Your bookshelf doesn’t allow you to instantly connect with thousands of likeminded people to incubate terrorist plots.
  - ng12 6y ago
    > drag you deeper into the rabbit hole of extremism This is what banning /r/the_donald and now /r/donaldtrump did. It doesn't stop the users from believing what they believe, it just further isolates them in an echo changer while simultaneously reinforcing the belief that the liberal media is "out to get them".
    - bra-ket 6y ago
      I'd argue it further isolates users in those liberal echo-chambers from hearing a different opinion. Given the heavy left leaning media bias it leads to free speech being free as long as it doesn't disagree with the 'party line'. I.e. the same dynamics as in communist Soviet Union where 'enemies of the people' were ostracized and persecuted by totalitarian regime.
      - jakelazaroff 6y ago
        Perhaps we should leave up ISIS recruitment videos, so users in liberal echo chambers can hear that differing opinion as well. /s This is not a new or exciting phenomenon. Censorship and “cancel culture” have rich histories on all sides of the American political spectrum.
mudil 6y ago
Trump (and his supporters) has been in possession of the entire federal apparatus, from CIA/NSA to the military, and yet he's been a pretty ineffective in overthrowing anything. It's your fantasies that need to be overthrown.
CyberRabbi 6y ago
Were you scared of the women’s March murdering you after they “stormed” the capitol? https://twitter.com/EgSophie/status/1048634940169048064?s=20 https://twitter.com/EgSophie/status/1048634940169048064?s=20
- jakelazaroff 6y ago
  This is like hearing someone at a bank saying they were scared a masked robber was going to murder them, and responding “were you scared of the customer who came in before them murdering you too?” The terrorists who stormed the capital on Wednesday have a history of violence and connections to various far right extremist and terrorist groups. They came carrying weapons, zip ties and bombs. Don’t pretend there’s no difference between the two groups.
  - Damorian 6y ago
    And the last 6 months of race riots? I'll take a few smashed windows and pictures taken in congress over tens of millions in burned and stolen property, assaults and murders in basically every city in the country. "Only my side's political violence is acceptable." That's what I get from facebook.
    - jakelazaroff 6y ago
      The BLM protests — the overwhelming majority of which were peaceful [1] — stretched over 6 months and involved thousands of events and millions of people. After all that… 19 people died [1]. The terrorist attack yesterday exceeded a quarter of that death toll in a matter of hours. I don't know how to explain that invading our nation's capitol with the intent of capturing and murdering politicians is different than breaking into a Target. [1] https://time.com/5886348/report-peaceful-protests/ https://time.com/5886348/report-peaceful-protests/ [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Violence_and_controversies_during_the_George_Floyd_protests https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Violence_and_controversies_dur...
      - Damorian 6y ago
Covzire 6y ago
I don't read or follow thedonald.win, but I share your general feelings of apprehension for the well being of anyone who consumes CNN, MSNBC or NYT hoping to be accurately informed.
- gfodor 6y ago
  One indisputable lesson of these last few years (which was probably always true, and known by some) is that people largely seem to be able to recognize propaganda from people they disagree with but by and large are very poor at using that to better see the propaganda they are accepting for themselves.
  - Covzire 6y ago
    I won't dispute that. Imagine if there was some AI that could discern "truth" in an unbiased way, I bet it would have many interesting (and enraging) things to say.
- chris11 6y ago
  The MSM can't be compared to QAnon and OANN related media. One has professional standards, the other starts conspiracy theories.
  - Covzire 6y ago
    Iraq WMDs, Russiagate, just to name a couple big ones. MSM is complete and utter trash, any one pretending they're actually informative where it matters has already been deceived. I really don't know where to get good news, the best I've found so far are random Youtube channels who parse all the news and try to cut through the constant flood of BS.
AlexandrB 6y ago
I think part of the problem is that on many issues elections are already irrelevant. If I'm an American and I want the US to withdraw from Afghanistan, who do I vote for?
- gfodor 6y ago
  The relevancy of elections comes not just from how they affect things in the present moment and the choices they bring, but in the ability to assume there is always an open path towards progress for issues you care about, no matter now narrow.
- Uhhrrr 6y ago
  In the last election, Jo Jorgensen.
stale2002 6y ago
> then there has to be a nuanced resolution. The nuanced resolution is our laws and court system. If something is illegal, then our justice system can handled it. Otherwise, it should be allowed to exist on the free internet.
mint2 6y ago
It’s like the libertarian view that everything will work without regulation, it just requires everyone to abide by some unrealistic “do no harm principle” that obviously can’t work.
dang 6y ago
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25687988 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25687988.

cercatrova 6y ago

This is the paradox of tolerance. We can tolerate having a free internet but if it leads to the intolerant taking over and making everything worse, we need to be intolerant of them now, not later.

danaliv 6y ago
Please, can we put this canard to rest? It is an extremely simplistic take that is bordering on cliche at this point. It adds nothing, it illuminates nothing, and it fails to address any of the very real and complex issues by turning everything into a binary of tolerant/intolerant.
gfodor 6y ago
A witty saying proves nothing, and in this case it particularly doesn't since you seem you do not know what else was being said when it was written by its author.
gameman144 6y ago
Is the irony that this cuts both ways not obvious? Seems very clear; the left thinks the right is intolerant and must be silenced, the right thinks the left is intolerant and must be hobbled. The twist is that both sides are absolutely correct: the other side is intolerant. The Paradox of Tolerance is a great game theory exercise, just like Mutually Assured Destruction, but I'd prefer to live in a society where we don't lean into these strategies with our foot on the gas.
seppin 6y ago
Calls to violence were not, and are not, protected speech. It is a false argument to say they should be now.
- cercatrova 6y ago
  I'm saying calls to violence are what we should be intolerant about.

BitwiseFool 6y ago

Have you ever spent time on the leftist "tankie" / "Chapo trap house" kind of subreddits? Or the Gen Zedong groups that glorify the purge of landlords during the communist revolution in China? If we are really going to go after such people wanting to violently overthrow the government we can't be ignoring the left when they do it.

eertami 6y ago
What an absurd turn of whataboutery. There's no way any logical person believes this is relevant. I can only assume you're being intellectually dishonest by making such an argument.
- BitwiseFool 6y ago
  Call it whataboutism if you wish, but it's relevant to the discussion when it comes to evenly applying the rules.
  - eertami 6y ago
    It unequivocally is in no way relevant. Sure, if these people you mention had invaded the white house with weapons and make-shift bombs then it would be a fair comparison. However that didn't happen, it is a completely false equivalence. I simply don’t know what to say to you except to please re-examine your humanity as well as your critical thinking skills.
    - BitwiseFool 6y ago
      >"I simply don’t know what to say to you except to please re-examine your humanity as well as your critical thinking skills. " If you're worried about logical fallacies like Whataboutism, you've just committed an Ad Hominem. Why go there? Why question my humanity?
      - qorrect 6y ago
        He's very angry and wants you to know it. If you don't agree with him, you are an idiot.

gfodor 6y ago

I agree. Why would you think that I thought the free Internet is the only thing that has value? That's a nonsensical position. My point was that if a company shuts this down with an SSL cert hack of some kind, it may be just or even backed by law enforcement, but it exposes a vector for suppression by corporations of the Internet that I had not considered before and we need to understand the high order effects from that.

PaulDavisThe1st 6y ago
Just yesterday HN had a link to an article on plaintext HTTP for the modern era. I'm not condoning illegal/dubious attempts to silence dissent, but loss of an SSL cert doesn't really suppress anyone's ability to communicate. Tell me I'm wrong.
- gfodor 6y ago
  You're wrong to the degree SSL becomes a requirement burned into browsers, which seems highly likely and is partially true already for certain domains. Unless you're going to argue that being forced onto the non-web is not suppressing your ability to communicate, but if so that's a tough argument to dig into here. edit: I should add here the thought exercise is that you are participating in speech that is legal and ethical but are overruled by SSL cert providers and are unable to get a root signed cert from anyone (or whatever other means of preventing SSL.) In that case, even if you are not hard blocked, having your speech be passed around the internet in cleartext also seems like it affects your ability to communicate in a negative way.
  - PaulDavisThe1st 6y ago
    as noted by others, you do not need an SSL cert to be on the web. You need an SSL cert to use https, which is something entirely different.
- beerandt 6y ago
  1) Browsers no longer let you (easily/ 2-click) override some ssl errors, and the overwhelming trend has been to start treating a lack of https similar to an ssl error, as far as ui goes. 2) Is this practically any different than saying newsgroups, or even bbs(?), still exist, so those avenues for free speech are viable remedies for being otherwise suppressed.

marcosdumay 6y ago

That's why you create some sort of police, have them look at those places, and watch if anything leads to some real world movement. You should also watch it for damaging lies, and have a judiciary system that makes them fix any damage those lies create. What you don't create is a paraestatal censor authority empowered to cut any information it wants out of the internet. (You don't create an estatal one either, but that's not what we are talking about here.)

lldbg 6y ago

"We can guarantee freedom of speech, but not freedom after speech." Idi Amin. This year I have barely spoken more than 30 minutes to someone in real life, per day. If my interactions over the internet were to be as they say curated, I would effectively be silenced. I was a frequent reader of r/dt a few years back, as the top poster was. There was nothing in particular there, no trend, that was any more terrible than what I could find in my bookshelf. Deal with it.

jakelazaroff 6y ago
Your bookshelf doesn’t analyze your reading habits and recommend other books specifically to drag you deeper into the rabbit hole of extremism. Your bookshelf doesn’t allow you to instantly connect with thousands of likeminded people to incubate terrorist plots.
- ng12 6y ago
  > drag you deeper into the rabbit hole of extremism This is what banning /r/the_donald and now /r/donaldtrump did. It doesn't stop the users from believing what they believe, it just further isolates them in an echo changer while simultaneously reinforcing the belief that the liberal media is "out to get them".
  - bra-ket 6y ago
    I'd argue it further isolates users in those liberal echo-chambers from hearing a different opinion. Given the heavy left leaning media bias it leads to free speech being free as long as it doesn't disagree with the 'party line'. I.e. the same dynamics as in communist Soviet Union where 'enemies of the people' were ostracized and persecuted by totalitarian regime.
    - jakelazaroff 6y ago
      Perhaps we should leave up ISIS recruitment videos, so users in liberal echo chambers can hear that differing opinion as well. /s This is not a new or exciting phenomenon. Censorship and “cancel culture” have rich histories on all sides of the American political spectrum.

mudil 6y ago

Trump (and his supporters) has been in possession of the entire federal apparatus, from CIA/NSA to the military, and yet he's been a pretty ineffective in overthrowing anything. It's your fantasies that need to be overthrown.

CyberRabbi 6y ago

Were you scared of the women’s March murdering you after they “stormed” the capitol? https://twitter.com/EgSophie/status/1048634940169048064?s=20 https://twitter.com/EgSophie/status/1048634940169048064?s=20

jakelazaroff 6y ago
This is like hearing someone at a bank saying they were scared a masked robber was going to murder them, and responding “were you scared of the customer who came in before them murdering you too?” The terrorists who stormed the capital on Wednesday have a history of violence and connections to various far right extremist and terrorist groups. They came carrying weapons, zip ties and bombs. Don’t pretend there’s no difference between the two groups.
- Damorian 6y ago
  And the last 6 months of race riots? I'll take a few smashed windows and pictures taken in congress over tens of millions in burned and stolen property, assaults and murders in basically every city in the country. "Only my side's political violence is acceptable." That's what I get from facebook.
  - jakelazaroff 6y ago
    The BLM protests — the overwhelming majority of which were peaceful [1] — stretched over 6 months and involved thousands of events and millions of people. After all that… 19 people died [1]. The terrorist attack yesterday exceeded a quarter of that death toll in a matter of hours. I don't know how to explain that invading our nation's capitol with the intent of capturing and murdering politicians is different than breaking into a Target. [1] https://time.com/5886348/report-peaceful-protests/ https://time.com/5886348/report-peaceful-protests/ [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Violence_and_controversies_during_the_George_Floyd_protests https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Violence_and_controversies_dur...
    - Damorian 6y ago

Covzire 6y ago

I don't read or follow thedonald.win, but I share your general feelings of apprehension for the well being of anyone who consumes CNN, MSNBC or NYT hoping to be accurately informed.

gfodor 6y ago
One indisputable lesson of these last few years (which was probably always true, and known by some) is that people largely seem to be able to recognize propaganda from people they disagree with but by and large are very poor at using that to better see the propaganda they are accepting for themselves.
- Covzire 6y ago
  I won't dispute that. Imagine if there was some AI that could discern "truth" in an unbiased way, I bet it would have many interesting (and enraging) things to say.
chris11 6y ago
The MSM can't be compared to QAnon and OANN related media. One has professional standards, the other starts conspiracy theories.
- Covzire 6y ago
  Iraq WMDs, Russiagate, just to name a couple big ones. MSM is complete and utter trash, any one pretending they're actually informative where it matters has already been deceived. I really don't know where to get good news, the best I've found so far are random Youtube channels who parse all the news and try to cut through the constant flood of BS.

AlexandrB 6y ago

I think part of the problem is that on many issues elections are already irrelevant. If I'm an American and I want the US to withdraw from Afghanistan, who do I vote for?

gfodor 6y ago
The relevancy of elections comes not just from how they affect things in the present moment and the choices they bring, but in the ability to assume there is always an open path towards progress for issues you care about, no matter now narrow.
Uhhrrr 6y ago
In the last election, Jo Jorgensen.

stale2002 6y ago

> then there has to be a nuanced resolution. The nuanced resolution is our laws and court system. If something is illegal, then our justice system can handled it. Otherwise, it should be allowed to exist on the free internet.

mint2 6y ago

It’s like the libertarian view that everything will work without regulation, it just requires everyone to abide by some unrealistic “do no harm principle” that obviously can’t work.

dang 6y ago

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25687988 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25687988.