There's a trend in civil libertarian circles that I like to call "braindead libertarianism". You see, rights are akin to mathematical axioms, except we have a h

There's a trend in civil libertarian circles that I like to call "braindead libertarianism". You see, rights are akin to mathematical axioms, except we have a habit of frequently championing sets of rights that are self-contradictory. In maths, if axioms generate contradictions, we throw them away. But rights aren't as strict as axioms, we can balance them against one another and take half-measures to avoid the contradiction. This is what liberal society normally does. Braindead libertarianism refuses to compromise. It insists, for whatever reason, that A and !A both be made true, that two and two make five. Sometimes there is a good reason to do this; the mathematics behind, say, encryption and computer security are such that you really can't build encryption algorithms that respect valid court decryption orders but refuse the millions of people that really would like to snoop through your texts to stalk you. But just as equally, the braindead libertarian just doesn't want to compromise. They take idiot politicians shouting at us to "NERD HARDER" to mean that we should shout back "WONK HARDER". The spicy packet loss theory of censorship asserts that all Internet censorship is fundamentally the result of network interference. This is the braindead libertarian's approach to free speech. And the response to this - the protection for your free speech rights - is to build a machine to ensure your packets never drop, and insist that society tolerate 100% of it's ills. Even if that means being a bulletproof crimeware hoster for blatantly fraudulent phishing pages. Mathematical axioms that lead to contradictions get dropped because of a fun thing called the Principle of Explosion. Taking both A and !A implies all statements are true, meaning that a theory with such a contradictory set of axioms says literally nothing. Fraud on CloudFlare's network is bad, but the real kicker is DDoS vendors. All of whom reliably use... CloudFlare. DDoS doesn't exactly match the spicy packet loss theory of censorship, but it's close enough to packet loss to be compatible with it. In fact, that's CloudFlare's selling point - that it protects you from DDoS. Which is why DDoS vendors love using it to protect their sales page where you can pay to attack and tear down other people's speech. Literally any other host - aside from actual criminals - would have dropped DDoS vendors the moment they found out what they were selling. It's an obvious abuse pattern. But in CloudFlare's twisted logic, they can't drop the DDoS vendors, because that would make them censors, because they're dropping packets. So they have to tolerate DDoS vendors doing the censorship job anyway, in the world's dumbest trolley problem meme.