Facebook bans Louis Farrakhan, Milo Yiannopoulos, InfoWars and others from its platforms as 'dangero

When the hell did I say that I want to fire people for being gay?

 

Seems rather obvious you support that when asking where you can fire people for being gay. Go cry me a river your idea's about gay people are to the liking of Iran.

 

How in the hell does asking about where you can fire people for being gay make me want to fire gay people? Are you an insane person?

 

Ah... so what was the reason to ask that question? Just being a troll? I think not.

 

So asking any question is being a troll?

 

Wow.

You totally misconstrued and misrepresented that member's argument.

But hey, that is the exact type of belligerent power which Obama fueled the LGBT Movement with; the notion to be proudly-tyrannical.

 

Only government can censor

 

Asking random questions that add nothing to the conversation is indeed trolling.
I am not assuming you're a troll, hence I am taking it you want to fire people for being gay.
Go to Iran for that, buddy. You love the anti gay things they got there.

 

Why do you want to fire Muslims for being gay?

 

suggestive personal attack... for making it clear you're either a troll or love to fire people for being gay.

 

My mistake. I meant why do you want to fire people for being Muslim?

 

If it's a good idea to ban "crazies" from Facebook, we should ask why it's a good idea.

Presumably, it's a good idea because the ideas they propagate on Facebook cause actual harm in the world. Not just hurt feelings, but dead bodies.

So the reasoning would seem to be: if a set of ideas, taken to their logical, or perhaps illogical, conclusion, could reasonably be expected to move certain people to violence, then a platform should not givenvplatform for the propagation of these ideas. (I'm not sure how Alex Jones fits into this, but I suppose a general conspiracy-view of the world could drive an unstable person to try to lash out.) Certainly Farrakhan's genuine hardline Jew-hatred -- which can be expected to meet a sympathetic response in that large fraction of the American Black community which is already anti-Semitic -- could be seen to do that.

I'm not discussing the "right" of the Facebook owners to decide to whom they sell their services, but rather the general proposition that bad ideas, or ideas which can have lethal consequences, should not be allowed to be aired. (To refer to that well-worn analogy, they are a kind of second- or third-order shouting of "Fire!!!" in a crowded theatre [which is not in fact on fire].)

Would anyone disagree with this?

 

Why are you asking me that question?

 

That's your idea isn't it? To fire Muslims?

 

Who specifically in the list of those banned is propagating ideas on Facebook that would "cause actual harm in the world?"

You're going to have to do more than you "suppose" if you want to be taken seriously. No fan of Alex Jones or other conspiracy theorist has ever "lashed out" to my knowledge.

Piece of human waste Farrakhan is literally the only person in the list of those banned who was engaged in hatred against others. I don't think that he should've been banned either, but he was certainly the only one who broke Facebook's anti-hate regulations.

So then you think that the First Amendment should be abolished?

What do you mean "second or third-order?" Also, shouting "fire" isn't an "idea."

 

You go source that. While it stands rather firm you like to fire people for being gay. There is no other reason for you to otherwise question that. Other than you being a troll. Perfectly normal to not assume you're a troll.

 

I think I was not specific enough. Please re-read my post. I take the logic of banning various people from Facebook -- the plausibly-valid reasons behind it -- and then extend it ... if they shouldn't be allowed to present their wicked ideas on Facebook, why should they be allowed to present them at all?

Please note that I don't endorse this idea -- nor do I, in that particular post, oppose it.

I just ask: does anyone agree with this? So far no one has, but perhaps there are those reading this thread who do, who will speak up, and either agree with the idea, or explain why Thoughtcrime should be banned from Facebook but not generally banned. (I can see various arguments for that position, mainly pragmatic ones.)

As for myself, I'm very much against banning people for bad ideas. Facebook, Amazon, Twitter -- in the age of Monopoly Capitalism, these giant corporations are quasi-state corporations -- and just as I not opposed to forcing them by law to do things like pay a minimum wage, overtime, etc., so also I am not opposed to preventing them by law from deciding what I am allowed to read. (Amazon has already started purging authors who are not politically correct on the race issue.)

It's an old question. Should private newspapers be required by law to accept advertisements from the Nazis or KKK or Communist Party? (I'm an [old-style] ACLU fundamentalist on the issue of Free Speech.) Of course, the wonderful irony is that someone who is a principled Libertarian has to accept the right of Facebook-Amazon-Twitter-WhatsApp-Microsoft-Google to effectively shut down all non-progressive views -- or, as will happen in practice, cause people with such views to practice internalized self-censorship, so they remain just within what the progressive Thought Police deem acceptable, which is however a tightening ring.

I understand the distinction between Farrakhan and Alex Jones. The argument then becomes ... it's all right to shut down certain views, like Farrakhan's, but not others. A dangerous path, because between Farrakhan and, say, your local radical leftist BDS supporter, or Old Right Joe-Sobran--type anti-Zionist, there is a smooth continuum. Better to stay off the path altogether.

 

Yeah, I misread it. I understand now.

Such as what?

Would you have applied the same libertarian principle before the Civil Rights Act? Would you have said that widespread discrimination against blacks by businesses was something that government shouldn't have intervened in?

Well according to Facebook's own rules, yes, it is alright to shut down Farrakhan but not Alex Jones. I'm sure that they had reasons to shut down Jones, but he didn't break any of their rules, certainly not surrounding "hate." It is MOST telling that the useless pieces of crap didn't even provide a reason for these bans, although in Farrakhan's case, it was obvious - hate against Jews.

"Joe-Sobran?" "Smooth continuum?"

 

"I just ask: does anyone agree with this? So far no one has, but perhaps there are those reading this thread who do, who will speak up, and either agree with the idea, or explain why Thoughtcrime should be banned from Facebook but not generally banned. (I can see various arguments for that position, mainly pragmatic ones.)"
Such as what?
Such as, Facebook/Twitter/YouTube etc are in fact a thousand times more powerful, in terms allowing people to spread their ideas, than a hard-copy newsletter. So once we've banned the Thoughtcriminals from the web, or this part of the web, in practical terms, they're silenced anyway. So let them get up on soapboxes at a public park, or print the Goebbels Gazette -- or even have their Stormfront website. Few will see it. It's a variant of the legal principle that the Romans called De Minimum non Curat Lex -- the law takes no notice of trivial things.

"Of course, the wonderful irony is that someone who is a principled Libertarian has to accept the right of Facebook-Amazon-Twitter-WhatsApp-Microsoft-Google to effectively shut down all non-progressive views -- or, as will happen in practice, cause people with such views to practice internalized self-censorship, so they remain just within what the progressive Thought Police deem acceptable, which is however a tightening ring."
Would you have applied the same libertarian principle before the Civil Rights Act? Would you have said that widespread discrimination against blacks by businesses was something that government shouldn't have intervened in?
Well, I'm not a Libertarian. And in any case, I don't have an abstract absolutist approach when it comes to 'Rights'. (I don't think anyone really does.) So I'm for the 'right of Free Speech' -- but recognize that there are situations where it must be restricted, even extremely restricted. So, no pro-Japanese or pro-German newspapers during WWII. (I would have allowed principled anti-war publications though -- pacifist or anti-war Marxist, which FDR did not, on the pragmatic grounds that no one would pay any attention to them, whereas German-Americans or Japanese-Americans might have been influenced by the former -- plus people publishing pro-German propaganda would also have been sources of information to the enemy, which their newspapers would perhaps have helped generate.)

Similarly for anti-Black etc economic discrimination. In a perfectly normal situation -- which we more or less live in today in the US with respect to race discrimination -- I think private economic interests in getting the best employees and the most customers will reduce discrimination to not-big proportions, so I would propose repealing those statutes now [for purely private businesses -- not state businesses and not businesses which get subsidies from the state]. But at the time, we were in a non-normal situation, analogous to war. We had to crack the South's racial ethos. Businesses down there couldn't hire Blacks or treat Black customers like white customers, because of the extra-legal sanctions against them -- up to and including Klan violence.

Making it against the law to discriminate gave their owners the excuse they needed to do the right thing. (I was in one of the first sit-in's at Weingarten's Supermarket a big chain in Houston, with its whites-only lunch counters. Note the name of the supermarket owner. He/they were no racists... but without the excuse of "it's the law", the White Citizens' Council would have done serious economic damage to them -- or so they feared, I suspect.)

So it's just pragmatic. (Poor Barry Goldwater, who was ahead of his time in the late 40s in integrating the Arizona National Guard, stuck to his libertarian principles and voted against the Civil Rights Act on principled libertarian grounds. That was the end of him, as a national candidate.)


"Joe-Sobran?" "Smooth continuum?"
Are you asking me who Joe Sobran was? He was someone on the anti-Zionist Right -- a principled man, naive, insensitive to certain things. I suppose at a stretch you could including him at the fringes of the Camp of the Anti-Semites.

For example, I can deplore the efforts of something I can call "the Cuban lobby" in the US, which I believe keeps us from having an effective policy to help Cuba return to free-market democracy. I can use the phrase "the Cuban lobby" knowing that many Cubans in the US, especially younger ones, oppose this lobby. So it's a lazy term, but one of convenience and one whose use does no harm -- no one will be encouraged to think of a shadowy, powerful group of Cubans -- of which every Cuban in America is a member -- motivated not by America's best interests, but by their own.

However, if I use the phrase "the Jewish lobby" or "Jewish power", with respect to pro-Israel sentiment in the US, I WILL be doing harm, since there are plenty of people still around who are all too willing to believe in a shadowy powerful and malign Jewish conspiracy. So I and anyone with any sense should always distinguish between the various Zionist lobbies -- which in fact include most evangelical Christians -- on the one hand, and Jews as such, on the other. Especially since the most articulate anti-Israeli people I know are Jews, and even many pro-Israeli Jews are pretty liberal ... way to the 'left' of AIPAC if you can call it a left/right thing. [My Jewish ex-wife's family was divided, roughly, into Stalnists and Zionists. After 1967 there would be fistfights at family reunions.]

Anyway, poor Joe Sobran didn't understand this. (Pat Buchanan could do with a lesson in it as well -- Bill Buckley went "in search of anti-Semitism" and concluded that Buchanan was one. I'm not sure he was right, but it's true that people who get obsessed with the Israeli question tend to forget how all those Israelis, or their parents and grand-parents, got to Israel in the first place. Not through choice.)

So ... I think there is a spectrum, a smooth continuum, between Der Strumer Nazi-type anti-Semites on one end -- people who argue that there was no Holocaust and it was a good thing it happened -- through various naive cranky academic types who insist on looking into the murky world of Nazi government policy during WWII -- did "send further East" really mean "exterminate"? Why were there schools for young Jews in the camps? Why did the Nazis award three Iron Crosses to known Jews? -- on through the Institute for Historical Review -- all the way out to innocents like Joe Sobran.

Or maybe he wasn't so innocent -- there is a kind of pre-WWII way of talking about all ethnic groups as if each one is an entity in itself which some people don't shake off -- and Sobran (and Buchanan) were/are Roman Catholics, and they probably focussed too much on the prominent role of Jews among the post-war Communist authorities while neglecting the prominent role of Jews in everything to do with ideas, from nuclear physics to medicine to chess ... and including politics.

So my point is just the old 'slippery slope' one. Ban the most obnoxious haters, and automatic spring at the bottom of the stack then bumps up the next-most-obnoxious-haters to the top.

So just don't ban any of them.

But as I said, extraordinary times mean all these nice distinctions get put to one side, and then banning and more may be required.

And I fear we're heading into just such times. But let's put it off as long as we can.

 

What do you mean by "thought criminals?" You seem to be including the Stormfront people in that category. I always thought of "thought criminals" as those whose opinion isn't popular with the left, so basically ANY conservative. I would say that irrelevant racist/white supremacist types being banned on social media isn't exactly much of a loss, because only about 10 people in the country are following them anyway. However, normal conservative/center-right/right wing/libertarian voices certainly WOULD be missed. Even voices such as Alex Jones who while completely crazy, does have an important message to not trust the government in everything. I saw this particularly when the US almost went to war with Syria after the gas attacks based on ZERO public evidence whatsoever, just as there was no evidence that Syria was to blame after the previous gas attacks, as admitted by the Secretary of Defense.

You mean you would repeal the 1964 Civil Rights Act?

What about the name?

So you're open to speech codes to prohibit certain views being expressed?

 

Replying to the previous post.

I don't actually know the details of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, but ... in general, I'm for as few laws as possible. But I don't approach things from a principled stance -- it's always a question of time and place and recognition that what might be necessary for human progress in one time and place, might be inimical to it in another. Oliver Cromwell furthered the cause of liberty in the world but he didn't use liberal methods to do it.

My feeling for the US today -- today, not fifty years ago -- is that private discrimination -- including in employment -- is not a major harm. If you showed me plausible evidence that it is, or would be if the potential discriminators did not fear the law, then I would change my mind.

I believe the people on the Left who want to pass more and more laws compelling behavior they approve of -- which, in general, is just decent polite behavior -- don't really have genuine harms in mind, except perhaps to people's feelings -- they just want the control. For them, if a single Christian fundamentalist baker declines to make a wedding cake for a homosexual couple, that's a major crime. For me, if the couple can go down the street to a baker who's happy to take their money, then nothing bad has happened, and the government should keep its long nose out of it.

Yes, 'Thoughtcrime' is usually used ironically to mean things the Left doesn't like to hear. And most of them are so pig-ignorant that they don't get the reference ... in fact, I've toyed with the idea of trying to introduce this concept as a valid one among them. I'm just using it casually.

As for being open to 'speech codes' etc. ... as I said, I'm a pragmatist. In time of war, yes, I'm not against suppressing the speech that would demoralize our soldiers or demotivate our weapons-makers .. so I'm happy to put pro-Nazis in jail during WWII, but don't think jailing harmless pacifists or Trotskyists was necessary.

I think, in general, that trying to elaborate absolutist codes and laws, applicable without exception for all times and places, is bound to lead one into absurdities. And I'm really really reluctant to concretize things in formal laws, with the power of the state behind them. Just reluctant, not absolutely opposed.

So as for, for instance, fascists. I don't actually disagree with the obnoxious brats of anti-Fa in principle. My quarrel with them is that, for them, 'fascists' means Republican Party grandmothers at a Memorial Day parade. (For these little spoiled brats, most of the young men crawling up Omaha Beach into Nazi machine-gun fire would have been classified as 'fascists'.)

And a secondary, tactical, difference: at the moment, fascists should mainly be ignored or laughed at, while the FBI should send informers into fascist groups that look like they might move towards the propaganda of the deed -- the Feds were very neglectful of their duties over the last few decades in the US, allowing far-Rightists and anti-abortion loonies to carry out most of the lethal politically-motivated violence in the US that we've seen during that period. I think all their informers were in powerless Lefty groups, who had no intention of blowing up anything except hot air, listening to tedious lectures on Mao-Tse-Tung Thought.

But things could change. We may be in a pre-Weimar period. As China rises and we decline, we may face some sort of national humiliation, short of an all-out war, that really puts things on the boil in the US.

We could see the beginnings of a genuine fascist mass movement, centred around racially-purifying the US and regaining national glory. In which case, it might be necessary to move from the weapon of criticism to the criticism of weapons, as Marx put it. (Although I'm comforted by the fact that the official men with guns -- the police and military -- are about a third non-white, and even the US officer corps is now 20% non-white. And any sensible person knows which side to bet on in a confrontation between real soldiers and civilians, no matter how tooled-up the latter think they are.)

But we're not there now, and the anti-Fa mob are a far greater danger to democratic liberties than the pimply little social inadequates in their ridiculous Nazi costumes.

 

You should always make sure to quote my post in your replies so that I receive the alert for it. I only saw this one by chance.

Even though you were in one of the first sit ins?

Yes, conservatives don't believe that widespread discrimination would break out if the Civil Rights Act was abolished. However, there's really no need to remove it. There is however, an argument that certain 'anti-gay' anti-discrimination laws are removed or amended. These laws are almost exclusively enforced against businesses which provide wedding services, as they don't want to participate in same-sex weddings. These laws are a big problem in certain US states and the UK. Of course, these businesses aren't discriminating on the basis of the sexual orientation of the customers, but rather on the basis of the event that the service is for.

I assume that you never agree with their violence no matter who it is against.

I'm not sure what you're talking about. Why would the FBI infiltrate non-criminal groups?

How did the feds ALLOW this?

That's assuming that all of the soldiers don't decide to become civilians.

 

Yes. Just laziness.

I'm sure that at the time I would have supported this legislation ... and as I indicated, even now, I would support it ... retroactively?-- no verb form here for what I want to say -- but with a sunset clause -- force people to do the right thing for 20 years, then let the legislation die and see what happens.

Anyway, I was 17 then. To me, the world was black and white, good and evil. And in fact almost all the people on the Right I came into contact with then were evil, to one degree or another, and the few Leftists I met were good. But live and learn.

Agreed. I think that guy Milo what's-his-name has done great damage to the fight against PC by his insensitive remarks, but I did think he hit the nail on the head when he said how small-minded and vindictive these people who are going after the fundamentalists are. The old Puritan Persecutor personality type, which thrives on both sides of the political barricades. That Christian baker's not-yet-born granddaughter is probably going to be a lesbian.

Hmm... 'their' violence ... no, even 'their' violence, at some point in the future, might be necessary, as I indicated. But then we're talking Germany 1932 and a desperate last-chance struggle. Under normal circumstances in a liberal democracy, no violence. Of course, in the end, all questions of any real importance are settled by violence and by nothing but violence (or the credible threat of its use) ... by blut und eisen, as old Bismarck wisely said. It's just that sometimes we're able to arrange a state of affairs for ourselves in which the coiled-up-violence of the state is used to defend our liberties. So it is in the US today, more often than not.

Well, sometimes there is no clear-cut line between 'criminal' and 'non-criminal'. Say I openly announce that I am forming an organization modelled on the Nazi Party's Sturm Abteilung. Say I openly announce that Jews are evil criminals, who deserve death. Say i announce that, indeed, Holocaust-deniers are wrong ... the Holocaust did happen and a good thing too ... and now we must finish the job. Say I make all these terrible statements, but, with a clever lawyer by my side, always fall just short of legally crossing the line into direct (criminal) advocacy. Mr Farrakhan could give me lessons. And say I start recruiting some of the angry young men we saw at Charlottesville ... and I arrange for them to have firearms training, get a copy of the Anarchists' Cookbook and show what you can do with nitric acid and cotton ... better stop here ... and start study groups about successful assassinations and bombings in the past [NOTE TO NSA AUTOSCANNER: I am outlining a BAD hypothetical situation here, NOT advocating it, just the contrary!] So far I have not broken the law. But for Christ's sake, the police, at every level, had damned well better have my groups stuffed with informers, my emails and phone monitored, Alexa seduced into always-recording mode if I've got one -- wouldn't you agree????

They DIDN'T do that in the 80's and 90's, instead concentrating on eccentrics like that poor fellow at Ruby Ridge and those nutty Adventists at Waco. (Who apparently had an average of three guns apiece in their commune ... two less than the Texas average.) Plus, as I said, harmless Reds who are opposed to individual terrrorism before you have state power. (I was one, so I know. We could always tell -- most of -- the police stoolies, though, because they wouldn't do their Marxist study group reading... just too illiterate to plow their way through Wage-Labour and Capital and engage in disputes about surplus value, or discuss the mistakes of the Spartacus Bund in 1918.)

As a result, we had things like this, in 1984: "Alan Berg, Jewish-American lawyer and talk show host was shot and killed in the driveway of his home on Capitol Hill, Denver, Colorado, by members of a neo-Nazi and white separatist group called The Order led by terrorist David Lane (the creator of the slogan "The Fourteen Words"). Berg had stridently argued with a member of the group on the show earlier who was convicted in his murder." Now according to me, 'The Order' should have had, in every local chapter, as members, two or three recently-released jailbirds on the Federal or other police payroll, informing on them.

It's how the FBI broke the Klan in the South --For example, they caught a Klan member on some sort of silly firearms technicality, credibly threatened him with a long prison sentence, and then were able to prepare an ambush when the Klan tried to carry out their next dynamite bombing of a local Mississippi Jewish liberal. Pretty close to entrapment, and it upset a liberal reporter who learned about it, but generally no one complained -- it put the Klan's best bomber behind bars for most of a decade ... and ... amazingly -- he became a paragon of racial tolerance, for real: read about Thomas Tarrants on the Fundy's Wiki ... an inspiring story and one of the reasons I don't like Christian-bashing. They sometimes reach the parts reason cannot.

There are other, even more hair-raising stories, about how the FBI broke the Klan -- for instance, using a Mafia guy to 'persuade' a Klansman to tell where Cheney, Goodman and Schwerner were buried -- but they may be exaggerations. Anyway, apparently both liberals and conservatives agree that the applicable maxim then was Inter arma enim silent leges.

The whole sordid story of terrorist violence in the US, mainly from the Right I'm sorry to say, can be found here. I'm sorry to say it, but not surprised, because it's our side, or my side, that knows how to use weapons, has been in the military, goes deer-hunting, etc. Lefty college kids are anti-gun, and generally get the lower orders to do mechanical things for them anyway. So when they do try to make a bomb, say to blow up GIs and their dates at Fort Dix, as Obama's advisor Bill Ayer's pals did, they end up blowing themselves up. ("Does the red wire go here, or there?" "Oh, it probably doesn't make any difference -- just DO IT, man!")

True. Any serious revolutionary knows you've got to neutralize the military (the police are not usually much of an obstacle -- they can decide to become civilians, whereas in the military, it's frowned up extremely. I believe it's still the only time your commander can legally shoot you on the spot -- "pusillanimous conduct in the face of the enemy", although maybe that's changed in these enlightened times). That's how the Russian Revolution happened. And of course, just as the main potential fracture line in society is the racial one, so also is it in that concentrated expression of society, the military.

Fortunately, so far, the Hard Left hasn't evolved anyone who looks like an intelligent leader, and even if they do, they're all so full of self-regard and unwillingness to subordinate themselves, that they'll have a hard time coming up with an effective, disciplined organization, with an intelligent strategy to destroy this country. Their instincts are right -- destroy social cohesion in every way possible -- but so far they haven't refined this into much of a strategy.

Fingers crossed.

 

And you accuse me of wanting to fire people for being gay. You go source that.

 

No examples, other than this?