1804

Well, apparently, according to RPGCodex best rpgs of 2012-2016 census, Pillars of eternity is shit. so i am not wrong about it, because as we all know the codex is the absolute authority on rpgs, and by extension, i am not wrong about freedom of speech either. LOL.

1805

Marxism leads to fascism far more reliably. Name one communist country that wasn’t an autocratic oppressive shitshow.

1806

Do you have any idea how hard it is to keep these fucking things clean? God, they just soak up the sweat.

1807

It seems the ruling class are promoting the idea that tolerance is only achieved by being intolerant of any non-mainstream point of view. Or at least any point of view that is different from the MSM point of view. What surprises me is that seamingly intelligent people can’t comprehent this simple fact. I don’t believe US leftists are stupid. No one is that stupid. I believe they are being emotionally brainwashed though. They believe that being “a good guy” (or Batman/Superman/Spiderman/Captain America) is more important that being “a democratic guy”. Sometimes good intentions lead to destructive outcomes.

As king Solomon the wise said in the bible " wanting to force people to be good is like a eunoch who wants to have sex with a virgin". You just can’t do that. Some people will be bad. You can’t force them to change, and you shouldn’t.

You have much to lose by destroying liberty, and nothing to gain. Nazis will be nazis no matter what. You can’t change them. What you are changing, is the principle of free speech. Instead of demanding that the internet and social media be free from political discrimination, by making it strictly illegal if need be, you are advocating for the severe censorship of the medium, with good intentions, of course.

Stalin had good intentions when he lead 4 million Ukranians to die of starvation: He wanted to industrialize the economy!

Good intentions don’t mean shit when you destroy freedom.

1808

50,501 votes and 2,322 comments so far on Reddit

I saw this and thought of you
x

1809

Well, it’s been extensively discussed, for one thing. Here’s the first hit on Google:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/africa/3257748.stm

There were multiple failures inside and outside of Rwanda, historic and contemporary that led to what happened there. Yes, the Belgians bred division and hatred in the country. In this particular instance, however, I was thinking more about the fact that human rights groups that routinely monitor and study escalating hate speech as precursor to ethnic violence were throwing up alarms about what was happening in Rwanda. Contrary to what you might believe, I spend a lot of time thinking about these things, since I have long been a close collaborator of a prominent human rights research center.

Admittedly, my thoughts were muddled, however, because I was thinking about the asinine argument that happened in the US about the definition of genocide and our lack of willingness, as a country, to call it that as the crisis was unfolding. But I get worked up about these things since I’ve spent dozens of hours counting dead bodies floating in rivers in satellite imagery of Rwanda – you know, helping estimate the number killed.

I think your points are valid in some cases. The difficulty with these arguments in that there’s a wide rift of moral and ethical grey area between restricting the rights of the few and standing by during the genocide of an ethnic group. We can talk our way around international obligations (refusing to admit genocide) and there’s always a loophole to a law that somebody is willing to exploit either to avoid restricting others rights or to purposefully restrict them. However, when faced with a legal environment that increasingly discriminates, people have to start to make a choice about where to draw the line.

So really – I’m not talking about everybody else here or asking you to generalize. Where do you draw the line? If you say “when something is illegal” then I would have to ask: what if what was illegal yesterday is legal today, in spite of being repugnant, hateful, and inflammatory?

I got into this discussion with somebody regarding Chelsea Manning the other day. The first thing you learn when you work in counterintelligence is that the answer to everything is “it depends.” The person with whom I was arguing claimed that Chelsea should be rotting in prison for all of the harm she caused and people she put at risk. Well, lesson number two when you work in counterintelligence is that it is excruciatingly difficulty to measure crises averted. CI analysts get blamed for doing a bad job when shit goes wrong and never receive credit when shit goes right (most of the time) because the absence of shit going wrong isn’t evidence of shit going right.

So it goes with hate speech, Neo Nazis, and the Internet. You tell me that it’s wrong to remove from a small group of people their ability to speak freely about their hatred on the Internet. I then have to ask you: what if removing that capability prevented a member of their ranks from killing 100 people? You see, we’ll never be able to measure that crisis averted. That’s why we have to draw lines in the sand about what is tolerable and what isn’t and that’s why we have to do it as individual and as a society, both independently and, in good times, in conjunction with the legal frameworks of the government.

1810

I’ll be honest I find the smell of weed loathsome but goddamn if I don’t need to clean my apartment.

1811

Convincing people is only part of democracy. The rest is applying pressure.

Demonstrations, rallies, strikes, and messaging campaigns are not meant to convince anyone of anything. After all, if a slogan doesn’t persuade you the first time you hear it, it won’t do anything the next five hundred times you hear it.

These are all methods to flex political muscle, a way to make a political threat to those who oppose your cause. By your reasoning they are useless or even dangerous. Yet they are essential to a modern democracy.

Social media are private entities, just like mainstream media. If they are forced to allow anyone in, then you should be forced to allow anyone into your private functions. Your daughter’s birthday party is also a platform for communication. Why should you be allowed to choose who gets in?

In the US, there is a red line. Private entities, which includes social media, can exclude political opinions. But the government cannot. So while you may be socially ostracized for your beliefs, you will not be subject to violence.

1812

This is a common lie capitalist media spread in the west.

Communism is essentially democratic. You can’t have communism or any other form of socialism, without democracy. It is impossible. It is in the very definition of it.

Now, in Russia, there never was communism, because there never was democracy. Russia prior to the Bolshevik Revolution was a feudal country, with a king, an agricultural economy with minimal industrialization and pretty uneducated people. Such a society can’t convert to socialism overnight. Democracy, as we know from ancient Greece, demands an electorate of educated and well informed people. There was no such electorate in Russia.

The “communists”, essentially overthrew the Tzar and established a fascist regime of their own, with a communist/socialist charade to curb reactions to it. There was no one to oppose them because the people essentially didn’t have the education, the organization, or the means, to stand up to them. They established their control and began eradicating any opposition.

The only organization in Russia that could pose a threat, was the church. They had nothing else. Which is why they hunted the church so much. Church could organize quite a resistance movement, for example in Greece, a large part of our liberation (from turkish occupation) movement was done in churches lead by priests.

Marx never advocated that communism would be an instant switch. The switch would come through stages of gradual evolution of a society, from feudal, to capitalist, to socialist, to communist. Each step would allow for a more educated and informed people, better oganized, and capable of self-governance.

This never happened in Russia and similar regimes. Those regimes were essentially fascists like Hitler, but they preached they were “the dictatorship of the poor people”, which was bullocks.

1813

  1. There is the fallacy that if freedom of speech was removed from someone, he would be prevented from killing 100 people. You don’t kill 100 people by speech. You are killing them with bullets, bombs, chemicals or with knifes. So whether you remove his freedom of speech or not, you aren’t removing his ability to kill

  2. You need to also consider the possiblity of CAUSING the death of 100 people by antagonizing an opponent. What if by removing the human rights and civil liberties of someone, you are forcing them to act in a lethal manner as a form of protest, or out of desperation/anger? See suicide bombers for example.

  3. By allowing someone access to free speech you can more easily monitor him and even attempt to change his opinion. Someone who is part of the community communication-wise he is part of the grid, he can still be persuaded to change his views or at least minimize his extremism. Someone who is cut off the grid, is left to spiral in madness and is uncontrollable.

And that is without considering the major issues the removal of freedoms pose to our society as a whole.

Any society which sacrifices a little liberty for a little security, deserves neither and will receive lose both.

1814

Be sure to let us know when “real” communism shows up

1815

Native Americans had practiced forms of communism. Before your capitalism exterminated them and stole their wealth, wealth you are enjoying now of course. Too bad communists didn’t steal black powder from the chinese before europeans did and thus commited genocide on the indians, i suppose it was capitalism which was superior.

1816

Of course the violent and terroristic uprising required to move from capitalism to socialism would require purging all wrong-thinkers, otherwise they’d just vote capitalism back in again when you re-establish democracy.

1817

Marx literally advocates imposing an authoritarian state through use of force. It’s literally presented as a necessary step.

But ignoring that, Marx had an obviously flawed theory of value which simply did not work.

But seriously, if you want to really get into a detailed breakdown of all the ways Marx is proveably wrong, make a different thread, because it has nothing to do with Nazis and the alt right.

1818

As I’ve matured I’ve come to see Marx as being somewhat analogous to Aristotle. Aristotle invented the scientific method and logic, yet was basically wrong about everything in specific, even while hitting much closer to the mark than his critics’ contend as long as you see things from a historically context-centered view. Marx is/was basically wrong about all the details, but his development of the concept of “dialectical materialism” changed the way economics and philosophers understand historic processes, even if they don’t actually follow anything Marx said.

1819

Too much wrong in your post

  1. Demonstrations, rallies, strikes, or messagin campaigns, are still methods of convincing people. By demonstrating you are convincing people that your cause has widespread adoption. By strikes you are convincing that you are valuable to the system and should have a say. But removing someone’s ability to speak, is not about convincing someone, it is about destroying your opponents through the use of immoral and potentially illegal force. This is illegal competition in the market of ideas. Instead of your ideas conquering people through their merit, you just eradicate the opposition. There is no democracy if there is only 1 party to vote dude.

  2. Social media are private entities which provide a PUBLIC SERVICE. When you visit the facebook page, there is a huge sign up button that anyone can press. It is open, it is public. Anyone can join facebook. Sure, it is a private company, but a private company can’t override someone’s rights. For example, if i visit Blizzard’s headquarters, does that mean that their devs can hit me and kick me in the nuts for not liking WoW? After all, i will be inside their private property, right? Notice this: They have the right to remove me from their private property, but they have NO RIGHT to initiate force on my person, because it is my right, despite being inside their property. My right trumps their right, because my right to my wellbeing is a human right, while theirs is just a property right. If i refuse to go out of their property, they have no right to force me, only to call the police. They cannot apply force on me, legally, DESPITE BEING INSIDE THEIR PROPERTY. Why am i saying this? To highlight the fact, that just because you own something, doesn’t mean you can trump other people’s human rights. And our freedom of speech and expression are human rights.

  3. To extend no2, let’s answer my daughter’s party. My daughters party is not a business offering a service. It is a private gathering of people in my own home. Obviously, since it is my home and my daughter’s party, i get to choose whom i invite. But a business is not a private home. A business offers services to people in public. Depending on the business, they may choose to be a closed club or be open to everyone. Obviously, a business which is a “closed club” can be selective about its clients. But a wide open business which invites everyone to join, can’t be, unless there is a reason for it. When you go to facebook page, it doesn’t ask you for a password or make a background check in order to make an account. It is not invite only. It is public open and free. This means that the modus operandi of this business is open to all. If some people are banned from this business, and there is no valid reason such as breach of law, then it was because they actively discriminated on those people.

  4. We are running in circles. As i said, if Zuckerberg was a Nazi who hated jews and banned jews from facebook, you would be up in arms. If he was a black hater and banned all blacks, likewise. But political beliefs are fine by you, because it is not illegal. Well let me tell you, it might not be illegal, but it is certainly immoral and undemocratic. And banning black people or jews from services WASN"T ALWAYS ILLEGAL. It is a recent development. Why not make illegal the political discrimination as well?

If you disagree with preventing political discrimination and are “ok” with big megacorps acting like the gestapo of the internet, then when they innevitably destroy your rights, i won’t support you.

1820

I absolutely agree that hate speech is a precursor to genocide, e.g. I’m still not sure why people in power were surprised by Yugoslavia. But I think it’s a reach to argue that without having tolerated hate speech, neither would have happened, or would have been significantly reduced.

Also, I think

During the genocide that followed it broadcast lists of people to be killed and instructed killers on where to find them.

Goes beyond hate speech to being outright illegal.

Regardless of tolerance, Rwanda was always going to result in a civil war with an ever-toothless UN, regional neighbours happy to use Rwanda as a proxy battle, and a stereotypical setup of an elite aristocratic minority and a destitute majority. How many hundreds of thousands would have been saved if Kagame had attacked Kigali rather than taking months to cement his hold over the rest of the country? He chose actions that guaranteed total victory while he was well aware of the thousands dying in Kigali. Indeed, he relied on the distraction that committing the genocide caused for the Government troops.

I’m not a free speech absolutist, I don’t view it from a libertarian perspective. However, I don’t think any group that is neither committing nor planning a crime should be denied access to a public utility (and that is what the internet is now, albeit in spirit rather than in law as yet)

Arguments based around post-hoc fallacies don’t really resonate with me, mass murderers seem to be people looking for an ideology to crucify themselves for, rather than people who find an ideology and as a result of which decide it’s a reasonable thing to go out and murder as many people as they can.

Breivik got run off Stormfront by a moderator after four posts and he killed 77 people. Post-hoc fallacies just fall down when used on a subject with any complexity. Would he have killed more if he hadn’t been run off? Less? How many of the remaining 23 murders wouldn’t have happened if Stormfront had never existed? Would there have been more lonewolf type mass murders? Who knows, and it certainly isn’t a reason to shut down a website after decades.

1821

Why? You ASSUME people want capitalism. But unlike pampered americans whose financial status depends on the exploitation of other people, most people don’t want capitalism. Poor people don’t want capitalism. Only the 1% truly wants capitalism, and perhaps some of their well-off lackeys.

If, after getting rid of the 1% and making the world a better place, people wanted to vote back a system which gives all the land and means of production to the rich just because they have pretty eyes, then fine by me. If they are that stupid, they don’t deserve socialism anyway.

1822

And yet nowhere has communism managed to gain a foothold. Damn the man!

1823

Communism is a higher form of human society organization. Especially as human populations increase, it becomes harder to implement. Only recent technological developments have allowed communism to scale to millions of people. Prior to technologies like printing press or telegraph or even the internet, people couldn’t be educated and informed. Democracy could be implemented in ancient Athens because it was a small town by today’s standards in which only a small subset of men were part of the electorate, thus they could fit inside a building to vote. It took many centuries and technologies for democracy to be viable again.

The reason for this, is that communism is essentially the sharing of resources and true equality of people. But there are greedy people in all societies who want everything for themselves. And if there is no opposition, they greedy people will organize in order to exploit the rest. Thus feudal societies were formed, in which armed gangs led by knights who swore fealty to mob leaders named “kings” owned everything and everyone not in their gang was just a serf. Capitalist societies just exchanged knights and kings with businessmen. Those businessmen still have all the power in capitalist societies and want nothing to change, they want all the wealth for themselves.

That is why communism hasn’t gained a foothold yet. We, as a society, lacked the means up until relatively recently, and after we acquired them the rich have been in an ongoing quest to supress the poor from realizing how the system works and making changes.

Thus we have vyshka and others like him who have been brainwashed into supporting people like Soros having all the money. Just because “communism” is the “boogeyman” and communists will steal your toothbrush.