Of course, but...



Yeah, I was basically saying that they receive money from other corporations, which are often publicly traded as well. So since they are heavily reliant on these external groups, other than just their customers, they have to appease them as well.



Of course but a private business has less vulnerability.



Except in this case we are talking about effectively shutting down peoples ability to exercise their free speech. We can have a discussion about the first amendment and how it doesn't apply here but it also doesn't apply to the states but the Supreme Court rewrote that part of the constitution to make it so. In my opinion we are so extra-constitutional now it's almost dumb to argue about the constitutionality of anything. Unfortunately.



Well, you usually advocate destructive methods to achieve a socialism end so that's how I took your post. It was also sarcasm because I know you're not actually interested in solving a situation where conservatives are ostracized from social media.

Have you listened to Gavin McInnes? I can't imagine how he could be considered a neo-Nazi.

These are private citizens using their freedoms as they will. Since you didn’t answer I will ask again: Whose freedom would you take away to stop this?

I advocate for beneficial tax policies for worker cooperatives, a right-of-first-refusal on the sale of private companies by the employees with support from repayable but dischargeable government funding, and rescinding limitation of liability for non-cooperative corporations. All of these are supremely wonkish and I don’t suspect you are capable of understanding any of them, so I’m not surprised you think my suggestions are destructive. I’d guess you think anything leftward of a totalitarian Republican dictatorship is destructive though.

Gavin McInnes advocates political violence against his adversaries and glorifies violence against leftists in particular, and founded an organization that is expressly neo-fascist (and just “coincidentally” all of their members are also white supremacists). The man is a Nazi and if you can’t recognize that it says an awful lot about your own character.

Sure, I think people should be able to choose to do business with whom they want but we don't live in that world now, do we? You believe Christian bakers that don't want to participate in gay weddings should be put out of business. You posted that before but, of course, in a typically "witty" manner. I hope your not going to pretend you need me to find it. I won't look for it and you're much better at finding things like this than I am anyway. I don't think it's fair for publishers to deplatform it's users especially when they haven't broken the rules of the site they're using. I don't like it when it happens to a leftist either. I've stated here before that I think people should be free to expose themselves.



I've listened to a fair amount of his content and that doesn't sound familiar at all. I know there's the Proud Boys thing but from what I heard that seems completely overblown but, regardless, I'm not really into that so I can't comment too much on that aspect but definitely the sorts of things I've heard McInnes say I wouldn't think would be too unpopular with many here.

Yup I’m super ok with the government enjoining businesses from discriminating against customers and employees on the bases of race, sexual orientation, religious beliefs, political opinions, age, marital status. I’m ok with the government forcing businesses to make reasonable accommodations for disabilities. If individuals and business owners aren’t comfortable with this, I’m also ok if they choose not to provide services to anybody.

See, I’m saying this because that’s my answer to the question I asked you. I’m ok with the government stepping in and taking these kinds of freedoms away from private property owners. Unlike you I’m capable of providing this answer because I’m not a vacuous personal freedoms fundamentalist who’s ideologically incapable of reconciling the reality that, sometimes, freedoms are gonna interfere with each other.

Platforms have finite capacity. The dual of this problem is: if publishers aren’t allowed to deplatform people, then who gets to decide who is platformed in the first place? Why should mainstream liberals and Nazis get a platform? I demand equal time for anarchosynicalism and for market socialism.

yeah I bet you’d admire him.

You misspelled Anarcho-Cynicism but I agree

Also, by the way, all of the right-wingers who’ve been deplatformed so far have ultimately been banned under a terms of service. Mostly for inciting violence. They all should have lost service a long time earlier, but it turns out the so-called biased tech companies hadn’t been enforcing their terms for violent conservatives at all until progressive activists held their feet to the fire. Weird. It’s almost like these radical liberal coastal elites are actually bending over backwards to find excuses to take violent right money even when their own service agreement says they won’t.

Just letting you know that I did spot your hair splitting here, and that I think it’s weak.

But the Christian Baker didn't refuse to serve the lesion couple because of their sexual orientation. They had served them previously. They believed they couldn't participate in the wedding due to their own religious beliefs.

Now, there certainly are all sorts of people that have been kicked off of individual platform due to violating terms of service. I just actually doubt that many of these so-called alt-right personalities legitimately broke any. At least not to a degree that warrants being expunged from various sites.

When I don't answer one of your questions it's not that I can't. It's normally that you haven't earned an answer.

I really don't know how we can apologize for the behavior of the liberal coasts when they de-platform honest and hardworking people who are just trying to put food on the table.

First they came for Milo's Twitter follower count :'-(

Gee I dunno, why don’t you post one that you feel has been unfairly banned?

Naaaah, it’s because you can’t. Nobody believes that. Usually it’s not cognitive dissonance, though, so I’ll understand if you fight thinking about this one a bit more than normal.

Maybe if Yiannopoulos didn’t want to get banned, he shouldn’t have called for people to murder journalists. Or advocate for statutory rape, lol.

Gab is relentlessly hostile and full of teenagers hurling insults, you say??.

Hey Yiannopoulos

Change your name and get a ****ing job, you loser.

Yes, but



Are you really telling me he might have to give up his career as a media troll and start washing dishes? Isn't that unkind?? Why should a right winger be expected to have to work for a living???

I dunno, I’m still waiting for twitter to enforce their rules on president trump.

This sucks.

https://www.vox.com/platform/amp/policy-and-politics/2019/9/9/20750160/liberalism-trump-putin-socialism-reactionary?__twitter_impression=true

And it’s dumb.

Huh. I always thought of identity politics as peak neoliberal Democrat. Never saw attacking it as a defense of liberalism.

Haha uh, what? Just because other societies had some liberal ideas doesn't mean they were necessarily influential on the development of European parliamentarianism, nor are their ideas necessarily any good, or the ideas of 'dead white men' bad.

Right? Even though that’s early on in the piece, you can tell where it’s going to end up from that bit. Trying to justify the claim that liberalism is a universal ideology by claiming that it is reducible to some core tenets, and that those tenets have precedents in non-European societies, and therefore that even non-whites can wholeheartedly embrace liberalism, is quite suspect. It’s as if he thinks he has to counter the view that liberalism is the exclusive cultural patrimony of white people.

Yeah, it’s a weaksauce treatment of Lilla and Chait’s critique, for a few reasons. I mean, the move he makes is effectively to say that, with woke politics, liberalism has already arrived at what it should be. Go figure that he’d be a vigorous supporter of the status quo.

Barf

Liberalism is good because in nature half of the CEOs would be women of colour.

�� EQUAL ���� REPRESENTATION ���� AMONG ���� THE �������� OPPRESSING ���������� CLASS ����

Their section on the left is interesting, because they claim the left is anti-liberal but then say this:



I guess that's pretty true, but I think it's interesting that someone can brand people who champion liberal ideas as anti-liberal. Their specific example was someone who thought the only way to attain liberal institutions was illiberal means.. which is actually kind of true in a way, at least historically, but even then I don't know if it's necessary.

Yeah, there's some deep seated insecurities there. I'm completely fine telling others I think functioning liberal institutions and parliamentary governments are wayyy better than pretty much every other government that has yet to form. Because they are. I don't see why their point should be mentioned at all, other than in the process of trying to convince people to adopt liberal ideas who would otherwise cling to other codes (Islam comes to mind).

If anything, the argument I'd have against liberalism right now is that 'the masses' are too easily subject to (inverse?) demagoguery. Propaganda is more prevalent than ever, but there's no good way to counter it other than your own counter-propaganda. Seems to be a core problem with liberal society that someone with resources and a goal can manipulate public perception on key issues to their advantage. Which, of course, has been happening for decades and is largely responsible for the crazy political beliefs today.

Yeah, especially given that he presents the identity-left/woke-left (whatever you want to call it) as effectively the same thing: critics of liberalism who say that the problem with contemporary liberalism is that it doesn’t live up to its own ideals. But I think he wants to say that identity politics is more liberal than the economic-left, despite their illiberal tactics (which he just wants to scoff off, I suppose).

It also seems totally naive how he distinguishes the left and right wing critics of liberalism. The left is no less concerned with social solidarity and “community” than the reactionary Catholic right and the “national conservatives”, as they call themselves.

Seems to me that the problem is 1. the people who represent the center-left/center-right have been discredited by decades of crises and declining quality of life and 2. they don’t have a compelling vision for the future.

I think it’s quite telling that liberalism, which is generally a forward-looking ideology, is now enraptured by apocalyptic fears of climate change and that the future is something horrific, rather than something to be awaited with hopeful expectation. But I dunno.

A nightmare future that liberalism caused, and is ideologically incapable of preventing.

Alex Jones made a career out of seditious libel. Keep in mind, we used to prosecute that even within the framework of a liberal democracy. What changed isn’t society becoming too liberal, but our justice system switched to an expansionist/fundamentalist interpretation of free speech. Our conservatives and society would be better if we still prosecuted it and otherwise retained reasonable “shouting fire” limitations on speech (especially paid speech).

The argument I’d have against liberalism is that it’s ideologically incapable of prosecuting “seditious business practices”. Creating moral hazards? Commodities speculation or market manipulation? Sounds like you’re hurting your country to enrich yourself. What’s the difference if China pays you to sabotage the national economy or if you pay yourself to do it? Both crimes should be equal.

We should bring back the Comstock Laws! Yaaaay

Is the problem really that the US justice system has shifted to a fundamentalist conception of free speech, or is it that new communication technology has produced a new set of social problems that the law and the principles behind it are ill-equipped to address? This isn't a new issue. We had crazed conspiracy theorists spewing **** on the radio waves in the 60s and 70s, too. It may have had less ability to find a mainstream audience, or have been less consequential, or something (always notable that the 60s and 70s were actually a time of greater instability than the 2010s), but Alex Jones is part of an American tradition that goes back for decades.

just because I can't resist getting super pedantic about it... slander, not libel.

I miss the debates about hate crime laws in the 2000s/2010s. It's kind of like if you took all of today's culture war conflict and made it into a policy debate that could be subject to cost-benefit analysis.

Restraining speech because it’s morally offensive is materially different than restraining malicious lies about what the government is doing, told for the sole purpose of causing mass unrest. Pornography published with the consent of all involved is different from Sandy Hook government libel, and despite your alluded slippery slope argument, you don’t need to prosecute both of them just because you prosecute one of them.

The United States didn’t have laws about seditious libel per se, but inherited the assumption of criminality from Common Law. When it was codified in the late 1700s it was a prohibition on seditious speech (not libel). These laws were almost immediately weakened and effectively ended in the late 1960s, when the expansionist interpretations of the bill of rights took root (not only of the first amendment, but all others).

I don’t know whether the US would have prosecuted Sandy Hook conspiracy theorists before the 1960s. I don’t think it’s especially pertinent what the traditions of the 1960s have to say about what should be done today.

Libel is for any published work, regardless of medium.

Evaluating social problems in a financial framework is neoliberal AF.

Well, I think it’s meaningful that what you’re calling the expansionist interpretation of the first amendment came out of the Warren court, rather than out of conservative jurisprudence. It helps me situate it in an ideological context.

I’m curious if there’s a prominent contemporary center-left or leftist critique of the Warren court’s judicial activism. It seems like it opened up a can of worms by politicizing SCOTUS. (For example, Baker v. Carr, where the issue of judicial restraint on political issues was central.) Sure, judicial activism seems advantageous when you have a majority on the court. But what the GOP has been able to do might not have been worth it.

There was a lot of ambiguity in my remark so I can’t fault you for misinterpreting me, but I wasn’t making a slippery slope argument. I wouldn’t mind a public debate about setting lines on free speech (including obscenity).

Mid-century Democrats were the former champions of politicizing the US courts, for sure. The expansionary interpretation of the commerce clause that made the new deal legal (edit: until it wasn’t) is a pretty solid argument that the US federal government has utterly unlimited powers.