I don't like 8chan as a website, but I'm still not a fan of this move. Feels like no one online wants to just provide a 'dumb pipe', and always want to act like a pseudo publisher trying to dictate what's allowed and what isn't.
Imagine if real life utilities did this. If because someone used your property for offensive purposes, the water company cut off the water supply, or the electricity company refused to provide electricity, or your phone provider cut off service or what not. That would be ridiculous, yet it's exactly the situation we're in with internet services. No one wants to just be a utility.
I believe online service providers in at least some markets should be regulated like utilities. Maybe Cloudflare, definitely domain name registrars, perhaps cloud services and CDNs in general. Because at the moment, it seems any controversy at all means losing access to anything internet related.
You don't have to imagine it. Literally all of these things happen. Examples:
- Utilities restricting or even cutting off crypto miners (eg [1])
- Your phone service has prohibited uses that will get your service disconnected (eg see Section 8, Use of the Service in [2]).
- Getting water cut off is more difficult but not impossible, I imagine. Some places will cut you off for not paying your bill. Many don't as it's an essential service. I imagine if you resold a residential water supply for commercial purposes, you may well get cut off.
Sure, but none of those have anything to do with the ideological beliefs of the person or organization they're providing service to. Those are all reasonable restrictions designed to prevent one customer from negatively impacting the quality of service the company provides to their other customers. What Cloudflare is doing here is a different thing entirely.
The issue in [1] in a lot of cases was that the region had such cheap electricity because they were buying a defined amount of electricity from a cheap source but had a very expensive rate for going over that amount so the BTC miners were coming in and massively inflating everyone's rates but not otherwise really contributing to the region economically, unlike the Alcoa plant that originally got them that low rate a BTC miner barely employees anyone locally.
Something tells me online Antifa resources won't be affected just because one of their members committed a horrible atrocity in Dayton, OH shortly after El Paso.
Don't know where you're getting this from. All sources i could find talk about a twitter account that _could_ belong to the Dayton, OH shooter, on which he _follows_ Antifa members. You gotta admit that's pretty far from the relation of 8chan to the El Paso shooter...
My point is that no matter how an insane person is affiliated, I don't agree with using them to win political points. As much as I believe Antifa is a dangerous (see Andy Ngo), and how dangerous it is for people like Shaun King to be trying to incite violence, I don't agree with using tragedy that way.
It's all but verified that the Dayton shooter was a fan of Elizabeth Warren, and active with Antifa. But the media isn't going to talk about how divisive it is declare the opposing side is running concentration camps, and basically modern Nazi. I'm actually glad they don't, but coming from the other direction it's non-stop.
EDIT
The downvote isn't supposed to be for a comment you disagree with, but for something that doesn't add to the conversation. Try writing a response instead.
> Imagine if real life utilities did this. If because someone used your property for offensive purposes, the water company cut off the water supply, or the electricity company refused to provide electricity, or your phone provider cut off service or what not. That would be ridiculous, yet it's exactly the situation we're in with internet services. No one wants to just be a utility.
These are flawed comparisons, because water and electricity flow from the utility towards the consumer. If water worked like the internet, and the utility was just a "dumb pipe" that would mean you could pee in my drinking water - I would hope they would disconnect you. And you can be sure that if you mess with the power coming to your house they will disconnect you, too.
If we use the example of a distributed water supply, Cloudpipe would be the company that said:
> yeah sure someone shit in the drinking water coming from my pipes, but I'm not going to tell them to stop, nor tell you who did it so you can tell them yourself.
No, that's exactly the point. If water distribution worked in the way that utility companies just laid the pipes, connected them to those of other utilites, and otherwise did not care about what sort of water anybody pumped into them, water quality would drop pretty fast.
But agreed, I am stretching this example very far now to make "water as a utility" conform to "Internet as a utility" - which maybe goes to show that they are not quite the same and might benefit from not treating them the same.
I still don't understand your analogy. How is 8Chan affecting "water quality" in this analogy? They were not harming the quality of service Cloudflare provides to their customers in any way, were they? The same goes for the water company providing service to 8Chan's owner; providing service to 8Chan doesn't affect the quality of service to their other customers.
It doesn't matter. Cloudflare is a private company, and as a private company, they have a right to discontinue any service with anyone as long as it isn't some sort of discriminatory act based on a protected class.
Considering that 8chan has a proclivity to be a haven for mass shooters, the site needs to be excessively curtailed regardless of whether they're affecting the businesses services directly or not just for the sole fact that they don't seem to police the people or content that are on the site.
For example, do you think a business shouldn't fire an individual after he committed a murder of some person who isn't affiliated with the company?
>Considering that 8chan has a proclivity to be a haven for mass shooters, the site needs to be excessively curtailed regardless of whether they're affecting the businesses services directly or not just for the sole fact that they don't seem to police the people or content that are on the site.
I'll bet more mass shooters spend time on facebook than 8chan. When are they getting shut down?
> because someone used your property for offensive purposes, the water company cut off the water supply
This actually happens in Europe, typically when authorities decide squatters should not be tolerated.
TBH, services like Cloudflare should be free to operate as they please. A publisher is simply not entitled to a CDN. If there is a demand for specific niches, a supply will eventually emerge, like it has for porn.
> TBH, services like Cloudflare should be free to operate as they please. A publisher is simply not entitled to a CDN
If a CDN is necessary to support the site being a public platform that's not a given. This whole "A private company should be able to act like it pleases" that Cloudflare mirrors in their news is an ideological standpoint, not an absolute truth. It's certainly possible to see it differently: If a company becomes a public platform important for the public discourse or for the function of journalism, regulation and laws can limit what a company can do. Like Germany does with Facebook.
Edit: Thinking about this a bit more, I'm really frustrated with Cloudflare about this. With the announcement they are causing the political discourse after the massacre to be about free speech, while the one thing important here is gun control. This stuff happens in the US because the easy access to guns allows murderers to act like this. It does not matter whether 8chan falls now or whether it survives or whether the US limits their extreme stance on free speech as long the US society continues to accept that those massacres happen in favor of having guns available to everyone.
> If a company becomes a public platform important for the public discourse or for the function of journalism, regulation and laws can limit what a company can do.
Only if there are good arguments for this to be necessary. You didn't mention any. Just being "big" is no reason to get rid of the "free market". Are they abusing their market dominance? Is this a natural monopoly? Are strong network effects in play, as with Facebook? The best argument for a market failure I can think of is high initial investment. Yeah, I'm not convinced gov needs to write rules for Cloudflare specifically.
> With the announcmenet they are causing the political discourse after the massacre to be about free speech
As it should. Simplified, slaughtering = hate guns*. There is no way to get rid of guns in the US any time soon, so most talk about it is a wasted opportunity cost. The hateful and divisive rhetoric, on the other hand, seems to be sharply on the rise, with even the president making it permissible and using it to his one's ends. This seems like a way more promising attempt to stop the probably upcoming civil war.
I genuinely do not believe the access to the guns are the issue here. There are plenty of ways to accomplish something like this without a gun, so removing the guns from the picture would just change the method. It's lazy to just say that "gun control will fix this" because you're ignoring solving the actual problem of why people are doing this.
On the contrary, its lazy to assume that gun control won't fix the issue, because it implicitly assumes the massive difference between the US and other nations in violent murders is due to some other, vague, unexplained societal malady that somehow is only a problem in the US and not in other first world countries. Occam's razor would assume that the unique extent to which firearms are readily available in the US probably has a major connection to the unique extent to which mass shootings and gun violence occurs. Even if you were to make the argument that the underlying issues, whatever those may be, would persist, it is absolutely progress to have mass murderers be forced to utilize something like a knife than head on down the street and pick up an automatic/semi-automatic weapon.
> There is one developed country—and only one—in which it is not only legal, but easy and convenient, to amass a private arsenal of mass slaughter. That country also happens to be the one—and the only one—regularly afflicted by mass slaughters perpetrated by aggrieved individuals.
> You would not think that this is a complicated problem to puzzle out. Yet even as the casualties from gunfire mount, Americans express befuddlement, and compete to devise ever more far-fetched answers.
> A village has been built in the deepest gully of a floodplain.
> At regular intervals, flash floods wipe away houses, killing all inside. Less dramatic—but more lethal—is the steady toll as individual villagers slip and drown in the marshes around them.
> After especially deadly events, the villagers solemnly discuss what they might do to protect themselves. Perhaps they might raise their homes on stilts? But a powerful faction among the villagers is always at hand to explain why these ideas won’t work. “No law can keep our village safe! The answer is that our people must learn to be better swimmers - and oh by the way, you said ‘stilts’ when the proper term is ‘piles,’ so why should anybody listen to you?”
> You would not think that this is a complicated problem to puzzle out.
Sure, “the unique access to guns is a significant cause of the unique problem” is an obvious conclusion. Others are plausible, however, the most obvious alternative being that the two are effects of a common cause rather than cause and effect: that is, that America is uniquely heavily populated by violent maniacs, which produces the access to guns as a political result (both of the maniacs seeking arms to commit violence and others seeking access in fear to the maniacs) and the mass slaughter as a more direct result.
In that case, cutting off access to the guns might not have as much result as one might hope.
Does the AUM cult in Japan not disprove most of his main argument? They didn't have easy access to guns but still found it relatively easy to commit mass murder. More recently it took little more than some gasoline to murder 33 animators in Kyoto. Guns are an easy method of mass murder but hardly exclusive. Is there any reason to believe these murderers wouldn't switch methods? The attacks in Japan show that it's still easy to commit mass murder without guns.
Organized mass killing efforts are unstoppable, but emotion driven ones are amplified by the lethality of easily available weapons and people's experience with them. Meaning that all this culture of having guns, playing with them, knowing how to use them is the reason mass shootings can happen. You can't shoot lots of people with a kitchen knife if you suddenly get passionate and emotional about killing people.
Except Americans have ALWAYS had extensive access to firearms, but frequent massacres by emotional hotheads are a fairly recent problem. In the 1920s you could buy a fully automatic Thompson sub-machine gun via mail order. People weren't shooting up schools regularly, and the worst massacre in the 1920s was done with explosives. Access to weapons hasn't really changed, so what has changed about the American PEOPLE?
My guess is - it was naturally suppressed in the past since there was only top down, centralized, slow and spotty in reaching audiences mass media and recently internet freed it. Everyone with a smartphone became its own little mass media, able to easily find like minded people, supercharge hateful propaganda through feedback loops. Who is spreading that propaganda and why is another question though. Anyone from politicians, foreign, local state actors to gun manufacturers.
If you compare the US to only developed countries, it is an extreme outlier with regard to violence, and that violence correlates strongly with the number of guns [1]. Gun violence in the US is rising, not declining [2].
The logic that they have different social conditions that place different incentives on people's behaviour. For example, Venezuela banned private gun ownership, but that is not the reason for firearm deaths falling. The reason for that is because of the economic meltdown is so bad that bullets are too expensive for even criminals:
The thing is that with easy access to powerful weapons, it is easier to implement such impulses in the US compared to other industrialized countries.
The US is not some hell hole where people have nothing to lose: for the most part it is a nice place to live (though, as with any place, it has better and worse areas). I think a lot of these incidents could be curtailed with better social conditions.
However, having a lot of weapons easily available is like having a lot of dry brush in the country: all it takes is one person's spark for things to catch on fire. Furthering the analogy, it's not that other countries don't have people who can be lit off, it's just the surrounding environment has reduced (though not eliminated) the chances of a large conflagration.
This is an answer to every single tricky political problem. If people resort to something those in power don't like - then they didn't provide good enough conditions for people to be happy and not do that.
However there's a lot more violent crime; see point one (ibid).
> it's about average, and far better than our neighbors to the south.
And yet as someone who lives in Canada, your neighbour to the north, we have a lot less gun crime. The difference is that we have good social services and decent filters on gun ownership. I don't know all the nitty-gritty details, but it seems that Canada's laws are roughly in line with what Massachusetts has:
But I think adding some filters or speed bumps to ownership (and especially CCW) will weed out the hot heads and incompetents that cause so much low-level carnage:
Both you and Vox are trying to limit the discussion to gun crime, as if knife crime or acid attacks or bombings or mass vehicular homicides don't matter. That's misleading and borderline dishonest. It's the violence that matters, not the weapon.
In December 2012, a crazed man entered an elementary school and attacked several staff members and students. He used a kitchen knife and while there were 24 injuries, there were zero deaths:
A little while later, another crazed man entered a second elementary school and also attacked staff and students. He used an XM15 and Glock 20SF; there were 2 injuries and 28 deaths:
I'm guessing you have never read Marshal McLuhan. The tools (communication or otherwise) that humans have available shape society and our perception of the world. There are daily examples (both negligent and purposeful) of people acting in a way that they probably would not have if they only had knives or just their fists:
The effects of different tools are... different. The "Garlic shooter" was able to kill 3 people and injure many more before he was taken out in under 60 seconds:
And the effort required to kill a number of people with a gun is significantly less--like, to the point where the "but but what about that?" verges on ludicrous--than knife crime or acid attacks. Gun violence requires less specialized knowledge and provides fewer opportunities to catch a criminal before their plan goes off than bombings. And vehicles have overwhelmingly more legitimate use than guns that present a meaningful and socially valid argument against their restriction where guns have no such value.
Which is why this is low-hanging fruit to deal with and long past due.
The vast majority of killers aren't aiming to kill a lot of people. Just one, usually. You're focusing on the dramatic mass killings instead of the significant majority of murderers, who could switch to knives and acid.
And then there are the mass killers, but since vehicles won't be banned because they have "overwhelmingly more legitimate use", they would remain available for mass killings. As would bombs, though that does require more skill than the other weapons.
And guns would remain available too. Gun control does very little to prevent criminals from obtaining guns, as the gun crime rate in Chicago shows.
> And then there are the mass killers, but since vehicles won't be banned because they have "overwhelmingly more legitimate use", they would remain available for mass killings.
Yet curiously, almost all mass murders are committed with guns, not vehicles.
You say political agenda, but your own source lists the most recent vehicle attack as occurring last year, and no casualties occurred. Multiple mass shootings have claimed tens of lives in the past few days alone.
I think we all agree American murderers prefer to use guns rather than vehicles or acid. That's our culture. But it's not worse than other cultures where murderers prefer to use acid or knives or vehicles or bombs.
Only the US has a religious mythology of personal gun use. Guns aren't just weapons, they're practically symbols of inspired personal expression.
So it's not just easy access to guns. It's the surrounding culture of gun play, gun heroism, gun rhetoric, gun rights, gun "freedom", gun permissiveness, guns-make-you-a-real-person-who-matters - and so on.
Other countries don't have anything like the same culture to anything like the same extent. Which is why you can have equivalent levels of gun ownership without the same problems.
It's important to Americans because it's been sold to us as a fictitious part of a national identity. The gun industry has very successfully crafted this narrative, to the point where so many people take it for granted now, but it wasn't always this way; this is a thing that developed in (depending on age) some of our lifetimes.
Here's a book that takes a closer look at how guns took on this sort of mythic role -- more special than other tools and appliances -- in American identity:
No, and until 2008's Heller vs DC decision, private gun ownership was not considered an established right. America's status as a gun-loving nation is a relatively modern invention, and entirely one devised by gun manufacturers. It's working, too (and with somewhat predictable results).
Just take a look at the pop culture. Music is full of guns and showing violence can be hip. This horrible culture is now in exported to others countries too but nevertheless only in America people would dismiss it as ohh it's just showbusiness.
TV too. Living in Japan I find Japanese TV overwhelmingly boring, lots of shows of minor celebrities reacting to things (uncomfortable situations, food, travel)....with almost the exact same expression, every time. That, or drama shows with terrible acting.
Then I come back to the States and I'm honestly shocked at how macabre American TV is in comparison. It's non-stop crime shows, murder investigations, action, and militarism, with a shootout key to the resolution of almost any episode.
Is it any surprise that Americans reach for their weapons to solve problems with increasing regularity? I blame American's Puritanical streak.....we can't have nice, pleasant things like topless women on TV like they do in Europe.
I remember seeing a picture of a somewhat old gun (WW2 era) repainted in bright colours and the amount of hate the poster got from people left and right.
This doesn't fit in the 'a gun is a tool' mindset, it's fetishism, pure and simple.
>>>Occam's razor would assume that the unique extent to which firearms are readily available in the US probably has a major connection to the unique extent to which mass shootings and gun violence occurs.
Well let's look at just the United States, over time, rather than the US compared to other countries. In the US, a proliferation of firearms has been a constant throughout our history. But it is only recently (really starting with Columbine) that we've had REGULAR outbursts, almost always by men under 30. I would hypothesize that the elephants in the room are a)prescription psychotropic drugs and their side-effects b)constant negative media about males/toxic masculinity c)overall ineffective child-rearing practices and extended adolescence, some of which stems from a reduction in two-parent households.
These are vague partly because so few people will take a deep dive into these subjects when so much money flows from these influences (pharmaceuticals, media, etc...).
But why aren't we looking at the variables, instead of the constant?
>>>it is absolutely progress to have mass murderers be forced to utilize something like a knife than head on down the street and pick up an automatic/semi-automatic weapon.
1. You can't "head on down the street" and pick up an automatic weapon in the US. You need a Federal Firearms License for that. And historically, FFL holders are some of the most law-abiding citizens in the country. Even if there were a ban on semi-auto weapons, the market would adapt. I've already brainstormed on how to optimize a bolt-action rifle for rapid, sustained fire and I'm not even a firearms designer.
2. Tightening the gun proliferation sounds great...in theory. How do you actually accomplish it in practice? There are 300 million+ firearms spread across the country in about 40% of households. This is a land area greater than that occupied by the Germans on the Eastern Front, with a greater number of potential "partisans", and the Germans never even came CLOSE to securing their rear areas. That anyone expects widespread gun confiscations to NOT turn into a bloodbath is naive IMO, and if the objective is saving lives than it would also be counter-productive.
3. Maybe the mass murders will switch to homemade explosives instead of knives, which would be a significantly WORSE outcome? Ever think of that? Maybe they'll get guidance from jihadis. Hell, explosives already gave us one of the worst school massacres in American history: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bath_School_disaster
I believe you that it's genuine. But no. Look at other countries. Look at the history of gun control laws in Germany or other countries and their effect. Shootings like this are 100% caused by the easy access to guns.
If someone does not have access to guns, it's harder to do something like this. It gives time to think again. Organizing different attacks gives law enforcement a chance to catch someone planning it beforehand.
HN is not the right forum to discuss this in detail, so I won't go further into this. But it's better to think about this than to follow Cloudflares lead.
Gun control is necessary to avoid a lot of the smaller scale problems - accidental gun deaths, suicide, violent revenge, robberies, etc.
But for anything serious like terrorist attacks, it won't make much of a difference. Guns come in through criminal networks anyway (as in Europe). Norway has gun control laws, yet Breivik was still able to kill nearly 80 people regardless. Vehicles have proven to be decent weapons to kill many people with. 9/11 used airplanes and improvised knives to kill thousands.
Gun control will not fix the underlying issues behind mass shootings and while discussing it has to be done, it won't make the problems causing things like this to happen stop.
>Gun control will not fix the underlying issues behind mass shootings and while discussing it has to be done, it won't make the problems causing things like this to happen stop.
France has pretty strict gun controls laws which have not proven to be much of a protection against terrorism, who used AK47, explosives or simply trucks to cause mass casualties.
We don’t know how different the situation would be if France didn’t have the current regulations, but I personally think the death toll would be higher. For sure you cannot completely remove the risk of mass killing, but you can make it more expensive/difficult for attackers to do a lot of victims.
> There are plenty of ways to accomplish something like this without a gun, so removing the guns from the picture would just change the method.
The numbers don't seem to bear this out. There seems to be a fairly proportional relationship between gun ownership and per capita gun deaths; see point two:
> It's lazy to just say that "gun control will fix this" because you're ignoring solving the actual problem of why people are doing this.
While the desire to do certain things may remain, it may be possible to limit the practical ways that desire may be implemented. These extreme cases will probably be the hardest to stop, but there's a lot of low-level carnage that could be reduced:
>> There are plenty of ways to accomplish something like this without a gun, so removing the guns from the picture would just change the method.
>The numbers don't seem to bear this out. There seems to be a fairly proportional relationship between gun ownership and per capita gun deaths
The latter does nothing to refute the former. The first is claiming gun control can reduces deaths by gun, but only by shifting deaths to a different category. The latter claims that in the category of people dying by gun, number of guns and deaths is correlated.
Which can be reduced by restricting access to guns:
> The use of firearms is a common means of suicide. We examined the effect of a policy change in the Israeli Defense Forces reducing adolescents’ access to firearms on rates of suicide. Following the policy change, suicide rates decreased significantly by 40%. Most of this decrease was due to decrease in suicide using firearms over the weekend. There were no significant changes in rates of suicide during weekdays. Decreasing access to firearms significantly decreases rates of suicide among adolescents. The results of this study illustrate the ability of a rela- tively simple change in policy to have a major impact on suicide rates.
> In 1995, Connecticut established a "permit to purchase" law, which required a background check and eight hours of safety training for those seeking to buy a handgun.
> Missouri used to have a law like that, too, but repealed it in 2007.
> New research shows what happened afterward. Firearm suicide rates fell 15.4 percent in Connecticut — but rose 16.1 percent in Missouri. The study, published in the journal Preventive Medicine, only confirms what other papers have found: Making it harder to access guns correlates with fewer suicides.
>New research shows what happened afterward. Firearm suicide rates fell 15.4 percent in Connecticut — but rose 16.1 percent in Missouri. The study, published in the journal Preventive Medicine, only confirms what other papers have found: Making it harder to access guns correlates with fewer suicides.
That's a misread of the study - making it harder to access guns does not correlate with fewer suicides - it correlates with fewer Firearm suicides. Further, reading the studies referenced, you will find that they simply show correlation without examining other risk factors. I'm pretty comfortable with the idea that less guns=less shooting, personally, though I know some people disagree with that for some reason. I don't know about less guns=less violence in general, though.
That study of the IDF is interesting, especially how they ignore the fact that there was not actually a 40% drop in gun related suicides; there was a 70% drop in suicide by gun, from 10 to 3, and a more general drop from 28 to 16.5 with another 4.5 per capita coming from non-gun related suicide. Despite this, they claim the entire 40% drop was driven by the gun change. This is interesting because it was not the only significant policy change the IDF put in place between 2005 and 2007 in order to address suicide, so it's pretty difficult to claim a direct causal relationship which is what they did.
Based on that, you would expect countries with lower rates of gun ownership to have lower adolescent suicide rates, and those with higher rates of gun ownership to have higher adolescent suicide rates. According to the WHO, though, that is not the case. The US, for example, had a below average adolescent suicide rate in 2000, whereas New Zealand, Luxembourg, Ireland, norway, Austria and others had higher than average rates.
That'd completely be an upside, if the data showed that happened. I don't know that it does. The US has a lower suicide rate than some other developed countries even with guns, and the Americas in general are significantly under Europe in crude rate per capita numbers.
IIRC, there's also the factor that attempts with guns tend to be more successful - other methods like pills tend to take longer, be easier to mess up, and offer the ability to renege or have someone intervene in a way guns tend not to.
Those are interesting. Unfortunately, the only definitive bit shows that CAD laws are likely to lower general suicide rates by about 8% among people age 14-17. That's important, and those laws should probably be enacted in order to make that happen.
Unfortunately, laws about the age at which it is legal to purchase or possess a gun show no effect. Basically, if you are allowed to own a gun or not as a child, there's no relationship. The decrease only happens when there is a gun in the home and it is stored properly, where children can't get at it easily.
The message I get from that is make guns more difficult to get in times of mental crisis and it will lower the firearm related suicide rate, but not necessarily the general suicide rate outside of that 14-17 age group.
Also, the relationship with suicide attempts is likewise sticky, because a lot of suicide attempts are not really a driven attempt to die. Many take a number of pills, for example, then purposefully leave out the pill bottle or tell people prior to the attempt. It's a difficult thing to track in terms of metrics.
> The numbers don't seem to bear this out. There seems to be a fairly proportional relationship between gun ownership and per capita gun deaths; see point two:
That's highly misleading. The tweet conflates gun ownership with gun counts. The chart largely illustrates the tiny percentage of gun hoarders expanding their collections.
> Rates of personal and household gun ownership appear to have declined over the past decades – roughly two-thirds of Americans today say they live in a gun-free household. By contrast, in the late 1970s, the majority of Americans said they lived in a household with guns.
> But America’s gun super-owners, have amassed huge collections. Just 3% of American adults own a collective 133m firearms – half of America’s total gun stock. These owners have collections that range from eight to 140 guns, the 2015 study found. Their average collection: 17 guns each.
(See also the chart showing a couple percent increase in female gun ownership, but a fairly hefty decrease amongst men.)
True, but it is still false to say that more guns necessarily means more gun crime. I don't think this chart proves anything, it just shows another perspective of the data.
Another point of interest is the number of CCW issued (estimated to be around 17 million now) and the liberalization of carry in general since the 1980s.
I think there is a point in diminishing returns--some gun control measure are more effective than others--but many places in the US have not even plucked the low-hanging fruit.
I have guns in my home. My wife hates guns and she has a home defense weapon. That's my intro because I don't want to be mistaken for anti-gun. I like guns and I like shooting.
How would you accomplish this without a firearm? Do you think you could accomplish this with a bat or a knife? The attack happened at a Walmart. They sell hard objects. This couldn't have gotten far. I can't imagine a location or situation where you could be so effective in harming so many without a weapon that gives you so much distance from your victim.
Do you have kids? I have one. Every day I look at my toddler and have to think about how to keep her safe (statistics are in my favor but they were in every parents' favor). Then I have to look at my wife and assure her that our baby will be able to live a long life.
I'll relinquish my second amendment rights, if I never again ahave to live through a year where there are more mass shootings than days. For now, we're just moving out of Texas.
The three most deadly mass killing in the US where not done by guns, two where by bombs and the other one was done by jets. One was done with diesel fuel and fertilizer and it leveled half of a 10 story building. 4 to 10 bags of fertilizer would have done some serious damage to that Walmart, as well as most likely killed and maimed a lot more people. That amount would not put him on any radar (we do monitor ammonium nitrate purchases in bulk after Oklahoma City)
Personally I think there is a link in A-moral violent video games as well as violent music that glorifies killing. Now in saying that please don't construe it with me being an advocate for censorship. I am not, but I think there is a link.
Further if you couple that with young males who have little prospects in this brave new world, fresh out of school or getting ready to graduate, no real direction and probably a hand full of romantic rejections due to being awkward you have a powder keg waiting to happen.
Funny enough in the case of the Texas shooter, after reading his manifesto, I was surprised he did not use explosives. His reasoning where more like Timothy Mcveigh's than many of the other shooters. He does not fit the typical profile.
The science on the matter disagrees with your personal opinion's about the impact of video games. There have been more than a handful of studies around this.
I don't couple that with young males having little prospects because they still have more than their counterparts. Why aren't young black women shooting up Walmarts? Why not Mexican men? I'm a white male. I didn't graduate from a college. I was awkward. I haven't killed anyone and I know a lot of others that fit that mold. You're ignoring the poison being put into their heads by people using your exact talking points. That creates the powder keg.
Bombs don't get you the praise from the gutter. The alt-right incels like the glory. You're right, we could see a rise in bombings but we also might not. What we'll definitely see (and already do) is nothing changing by doing nothing.
and most of them have led to the conclusion of increased aggression, so it's not really a personal opinion (as I tend to hold opinions fairly loosely):
As well just because someone fit's a profile does not mean they are predisposed to commit acts of violence. That being said, when there is a pattern, there is a pattern. There are many young white males, of similar experience who do not pick up a gun and start killing people. That being said, there is a definitive pattern of behavior and interest among these white males that do, rejection, isolation and immersion in video games (almost always violent) are certainly some of those patterns.
Also please stop trying to pin it on alt-right (or left for that matter), these guys are popping up all over the political spectrum.
I'm not pinning this on any group (although if we look at the rhetoric from major events in the past few years, it clearly supports doing so) but I am saying your talking points come straight from the alt-right playbook. Hate fueled rhetoric, plus making the world the bogie man for the sad displaced white boy is literally the alt-right SOP. Let's not stop pointing fingers at them as part of the problem.
For the record, I do not consider myself to be right, I may lean to the right on some issues but as a supporter of Universal-Basic-Income and Universal Healthcare, environmental science etc. I would say many of my view lean left of center. It total I consider myself a centrist.
Where I don't waver from the alt-right on is on constitutional rights, so while my talking points may seem to you to come out of a playbook they are my views on the world and I tend to form those views based of my experiences and reasoning.
I do not believe I am making the world a boggy man for anyone. Just calling the numbers as I see them. I believe these young men are cowards as evident in the Texas shooters manifesto where he explicitly states that he targeted Walmart as he would not meet armed resistance.
I think you misunderstand the things I'm saying are talking points. The sad white boy having no place in the world and sexual rejection being a new and uniue problem that justifies disproportionate response, is what I'm talking about. That's the alt-right bogeyman. That's the fuel for a lot of this fire.
The Ohio shooter described himself as a left wing Satanist. Most of the school shooters had little to no political ideology. A few have been hard left leaning and some have been alt-right. It is disingenuous to state that they are motivated by political ideology as the overwhelming majority have has little to no interest in politics given their age. I don't dispute that some of the mass killings have been done out of ultra-radicalized political ideologies but the majority are not committed for that reason.
> It is disingenuous to state that they are motivated by political ideology as the overwhelming majority
No it is not. You provided one or two examples that do not eliminate a pattern, and as you yourself said- "A pattern is a pattern."
There are three problems here: mental illness, (far right) radicalization, and guns. I don't have any solutions to propose for this but saying videogames are somehow the cause of this is absurd.
Why not see it as a bigger culture rot? Guns and violence is glorified by games, music, tv. It might a sign, not a cause. Also, a lot of these shooters talk about high score (kill count), a lot of these extremists (right wing) and tied to gaming communities etc. So it's a lot to think about, people like to nitpick things they like and say it doesn't have anything to do with it because it does not affect me.
I don't disagree, that is why I choose the term link as opposed to causation, it could very well be that they are choosing to immerse themselves in violent content because they have a predisposed desire for it.
It is also why I am anti-censorship, as I believe it is the opposite side of the same coin as blaming the gun for mass murders.
Just as guns are linked to these issues as the tool of choice, we find back linking to excessive immersion in violent media.
I just find is strange the cognitive dissonance people make when wanting to ban the one but not the other when they are both clearly linked. They want law abiding people to give up their guns but find all kinds of reasons to deny the link with violent content.
Violent video games seems to be the talking point du jour coming out of the gun rights/white supremacist media machine... Was weirdly all over fox news yesterday. Is it a genuine concern, or just a trial balloon, looking for the best way to derail the conversation this time around? You be the judge!
While I don't doubt the right is using it as a talking point, ignoring one link because one likes it (games) while demonizing another link (guns) is not the answer to actually solving the issue and is a form of filter bubbling.
So then let's go back to stuffing our heads in the sand and doing nothing instead.
Show a link between games and hate crime fueled mass shooting by sad white boys and we can put it on the list of things to worry about. Until then, perhaps making it harder to get guns could help...
Mass shootings are a meme in the United States, like a sort of cultural epidemic. You fight epidemics with techniques like quarantines to stop the spread, medicine to help those that are already infected, and inoculations for people who haven’t been.
I think the quarantine is for information in this case. Instead of breathless, stop-the-world coverage of these events, treat them like traffic accidents: “22 people were murdered by a white supremacist terrorist in an El Paso Wal-Mart this afternoon. Now here’s Bob with the weather.”
Gun buyback programs are 1 kind of medicine. Some people won’t take it, but we should try. Maybe we can institute some kind of guns-for-Medicare program (only sorta joking).
Gun control legislation is the inoculation. I don’t think we can get to full-on prohibition in the US without repealing the 2nd amendment, but we can implement licensing and registration requirements and longer waiting periods.
I agree with your first two points. Point 3 I have sort of fussy disagreements with (firearms have value, buybacks tend to short change this value, and overarching tend to target already poor folks).
4. What good does registration do? Like, awesome, now you have a database with all the gun owners in it.. but for the purpose of stopping mass shooters how does that help you? Likewise, what licensing requirement do you foresee which will help with (1)?
I’d argue that 3 is an implementation detail. If we’re serious about getting guns off the streets, then we need to make it worthwhile to trade them in.
As to 4 and 5, I’ll just say that not all shooting are “mass shootings” like we saw in El Paso. Chicago alone has something like 1500 shootings each year, many of which go unsolved. The article I linked says that the ATF gets 1000 gun trace requests per day and it takes an average of 4-7 days to compete one of them. That seems a bit slow to me, but I honestly can’t say what effect speeding that up would have on our ability to prosecute perpetrators of gun violence.
It's strange that everyone brings up symptoms of poor education and healthcare. Racism, violence, shootings, these are all symptoms of lacking infrastructure. I feel like banning 8chan, instituting stricter gun policy, it's all bandages on a deeper wound.
If the ATF has a gun registry with names of owners, it would be in violation of the law. There are only a couple of ways that it can be done: first by capturing and retaining information called in for NCIS check (against the law) for form 4473, and the other by sending people out to photocopy and enter data into registry of firearm sales log at gun store (I believe this is also illegal).
We require licenses to prove people are competent to operate a motor vehicle and we require most motor vehicles to be registered. Yet, car confiscation isn’t a huge issue in this country.
No one is saying its coincidence. But is Europe without those same issues? No depression? No political polarization or social isolation? No news, no social media? The problems you describe aren't unique to the US. What is unique is the ease of access to firearms. Conversely, you are the one who is assuming that the vast difference in access to guns correlating to the vast difference in gun violence is simply a coincidence around the world today.
I think it isn't absurd today that poor mental health, social isolation, and digital media consumption is making certain segments of the population more likely to violently lash out, and for the countries which afford these people easy access to firearms, the cost will be orders of magnitude higher.
You can have more than one problem. Think of it like a post mortem. Don't just look for root cause hut also think about mitigating factors. Solve for as many as possible.
Even if you don't accept easy access to firearms as the root cause, it's definitely a factor. You don't kill 21 people with rocks and sticks.
In 2014, 29 people were killed in an attack with knives (multiple attackers). In 1927, 38 children were killed in a school bombing in Michigan. There was a sarin gas attack in Japan that killed many. There are also numerous examples where many have been killed by fire.
It's naive and wrong to assume that there would be no mass killings without guns. There would likely be less, but it wouldn't be 0. Before anyone counters me with "we should prohibit all guns because it will prevent some mass killings", we still have 2nd amendment.
Then why don't they? It's just as easy, right? Just as effective, if not more so? You're making a supposition that the perpetrators would switch but in order for that to be considered in our post mortem, you need to provide evidence to support the argument
More important, as it's not a factor in the current incident, it's irrelevant.
Do you remember the anime studio attack less than a month ago that killed more people than these last two killers put together? That was done with only a gas tank and lighter
> More important, as it's not a factor in the current incident, it's irrelevant.
Well now that seems like a bad faith kind of argument. Since none of us have a time machine, surely our intent is to solve potential future issues and not go back and change the past?
That's not how a post mortem works. You want to identify the root cause of an incident and any factors that increased the impact or prolong the incident. Solving for every possible scenario is how you end up solving for nothing. Playing the "what if?" game leads to an infinite set of potential problems and time, being finite, means you can never succeed
When we've solved for the current problem, we can address the next worst thing. We won't know what that is until it happens.
We could also solve for knife and sword attacks because there was that one time in Japan where someone murdered a bunch of kids or chainsaws because of that other one time that guy had a chainsaw but we do more by staying focused.
This isn't a service we can restart and try again on. Unlike software issues, you can't assign attacks into single-fault instances and go case-by-case. One attack does not indicate another, nor is it a template. We're dealing with a hydra, not a dragon - "fixing" one attack doesn't alter future ones just as preventing a single incidence of cancer doesn't fix cancer.
Historically bombings and arsons have always been a major problem, eg the Bath School Bombing. Car attacks are new-ish but rising. Shootings are an American phenomenon, but massacres are not.
We should not solve for shootings, we're just pouring the acid into a different jar. We should solve for massacres.
So if you can't solve for everything, you can't solve for anything? Gun massacres, in this country are on the rise. What else is and at what rate? You're arguing assumptions when we have facts and we can try to do something about facts.
You're right, we can't restart this service. These people are dead. They were shot. To death. We can never solve their problem but if we don't learn from it and try _something_ then we can't avoid the same thing from happening again. And again. And again. And again. (Repeat a few hundred times.)
But don't let me stop you. Solve for allthethings and let us know when you're done. In the meantime, a bunch of us are going to fight to solve for this current problem.
I feel like you're taking the wrong conclusion here. Perhaps modern society and guns being widely accessible don't mix. Other countries took measures when the problem became apparent, the US didn't.
> other countries don't have 2nd amendment in constitution
Changes to the constitution can and do happen. And it's kind of beside the point anyway because a degree of gun control already exists in the US without being in conflict with the constitution.
> US doesn't pretend to be the same as all the other countries
Clearly. You're also the only one where this is such a problem.
You're 100% correct - changes to the constitution can happen (and have happened). It's not beside the point because any additional controls have to be weighed in the context of the 2nd amendment (as it is written and interpreted today).
The United States has more individual freedoms than most (if not all) countries. The downside of those freedoms is when individuals use their free will for evil purposes.
A Thompson was sold for around $225 in 1925, so adjusted for inflation that's roughly $3300. A good AR-15 style rifle will be around 1/3 of that, and an AK style rifle around $500.
I'm pretty sure those $225 Thompsons were fully automatic. You're not getting a full-auto AK for anywhere close to $500. Most full-auto weapons today are also in the $2000+ range.
I’d strongly suggest watching John Oliver’s Aussi gun control sequel. It’s hilarious and educating (surely he’s a biased source, but at min you’ll get a good laugh)
The Internet, at least in the US and probably the world, is not a public utility. It's run by a conglomerate of private corporations that have just as much rights as an individual, at least according to US law.
Cloudflare is a CDN just like many ISP's. And ISP's have had the right to control traffic how they like for decades (within reason of course based on a stipulated contract). They do not provide journalistic services, or speech services, or editorial services. They provide infrastructure. So it's not like Facebook or Twitter which are discussion areas.
It would be far more concerning to me if Cloudflare used this moment to express a business opinion on gun control rather than a freedom of speech/association argument to permit them to cease doing business with a group they revile.
Do I need to know Cloudflare’s opinion on gun control, religion, abortion, or any number of other irrelevant topics? Nope. Do I appreciate that they terminated 8chan? 95% yes and 5% reluctant yes. In conjunction with that, so I want to know their policy stance on freedom of content on their platform? 100% yes.
cloudflare isn't in the gun business, arguably it's in the speech business. why are you disappointed that they took action over part of the problem they have control over?
Because they just influenced public discourse in a negative way. They shouldn't have taken any action now. In two month would still be time to act on this if it's still deemed the right choice then.
In two months there will have been another mass shooting. Are they then supposed to wait another 2 months before acting? Given the current state of the US, Cloudflare will never have a window where it is appropriate to do anything according to your standard.
So yes, let's all sit on our hands say there's nothing we can do and now isn't the right time to have this discussion and wonder why these tragedies continue to happen.
Freedom of speech is not unlimited. Different countries set it in different places. In the US there aren't many limits, beyond the old "shouting 'fire!' in a crowded theater" thing. But in Germany you can't deny the holocaust, for instance.
Maybe we as a society need to decide that some things are just beyond the pale. Trying to indoctrinate young people into ideologies of hatred doesn't promote free and open discourse, it shuts it down. Let's just take sites like his off the Internet - nothing of value will be lost.
I'm genuinely curious in which countries squatting is not illegal.
On the other hand cutting off utility service to squatters seems like somewhat different case and another thing I'm curious about is how the squatters managed to get the service itself in the first place as that usually requires either consent and active participation of previous user at the same address or proving that you have legal right to use the property.
In the modern era in developed countries squatting is now largely just trespassing, which is illegal, but there have been periods where that wasn't the case.
Most notably, following the two World Wars you had a large number of young men (primarily) that died overseas with corresponding effects like their family might move as a result and so on. So you had a large number of vacant properties with no clear idea if the owner was still alive or not. So squatting became a way of "solving" that problem. A squatter could get the rights to a place if they occupied it for some long period of time (typically over 10 years) if no one showed up earlier to claim ownership.
In the computerized records era, and with no mass casualties from war in developed countries, this is now relegated to an historical anachronism.
> that usually requires either consent and active participation of previous user at the same address or proving that you have legal right to use the property.
That's the key. Where I live, it only takes online applications to sign up with power companies and telcos, if infrastructure is already in place (cables laid, power meters installed, etc) and it's not associated with any active contract. After sign-up, services are remotely turned on and kept on as long as bills are being paid.
It's not up to service providers to police property rights. They own or have rights to infrastructure leading up to the final junction box and what happens downstream is not their business.
In the countries I've lived in (IT, GB), utilities are not routinely shut off when somebody leaves the premises, nor does the utility company know (or care about) who is or is not the rightful owner of a given property. As the last occupier, you just tell the company you're leaving on day X and that's it. Squatters come in and just keep using pipes, or even take out new contracts in their names.
By this definition, any law destroys freedom. Every nation on the planet already operates on the premise that certain personal freedoms are regulated or restricted for the sake of societal harmony and progress. The "slippery slope" arguments either ignore the fact that we already make the same compromises all the time, or assumes all such compromise is wrong, which is a viewpoint that is so unrealistic or extreme that, at best, will never ever have support from more than a sliver of the population and will never be realized.
Well, we also don't have the freedom to murder or steal (and numerous others besides, like letting our dog crap all over the street, employ child labor, even if "consensual", and so on) So there's that.
> If because someone used your property for offensive purposes, the water company cut off the water supply, or the electricity company refused to provide electricity, or your phone provider cut off service or what not.
I think it's key that in this case cloudflare are actively between you and 8chan. The phone provider is the most reasonable comparison, were you able to switch provider. I wouldn't be hugely shocked if one phone company out of several options (which when you call the line occasionally puts their branding in your face) dropped you if you were running a line that read out terrorist manifestos. I'd be surprised if something similar hasn't happened.
> Because at the moment, it seems any controversy at all means losing access to anything internet related.
This is, what, the second time cloudflare have done this? That's a far cry from any controversy.
What’s wrong with hosting a manifesto? It should be blindingly obvious: when they spread extremism and terrorism like a virus, there’s plenty wrong.
It might make the tiniest bit of sense if we were collectively able to do something preventative about mass murders before they happened by using that “insight”. That certainly does not seem to be happening.
No, I think the time is coming where white supremacist manifestos and the like should be actively stamped out by society.
>What’s wrong with hosting a manifesto? It should be blindingly obvious: when they spread extremism and terrorism like a virus, there’s plenty wrong.
Yeah, a state that is constantly in war(s), paints the target countries du jour as the enemy building racism against their citizens, tolerates torture and police shootings (letting officers that do that shit free), and is obsessed with violence and gun ownership, suddenly is worried about "spreading extremism".
Surely there is a name for this kind of logical fallacy? That a country is flawed because of "X" means that they can't be correct about "Y"? It also assumes a homogeneity among the population about all of those issues, which clearly isn't the case.
I guess that's sarcasm, since I don't see anybody doing any kind of job (much less a bang-up one) of fixing those "way worse systemic things".
In light of this, worse than band-aids like "let's close the internet forums they frequent" is the new blaming heavy metal and computer games for mass shootings...
So are you in favour of hunting down every copy of Mein Kampf and burning them? What about all the other things said by Hitler?
What about Stalin?
What about non-white supremacist manifestos? They do exist, you know.
How much history would you erase due to your belief that words are capable of 'infecting' (presumably) lesser minds?
There's no evidence that manifestos spread "extremism and terrorism like a virus". Words are not able to infect people against their will. There are only ideas, and they can only be fought with reflection, more words and more ideas.
In the end, white supremacists and other kinds of supremacists existed before the internet. By supporting China-style censorship you're not actually eliminating those ideas, or even stopping their spread.
> In the end, white supremacists and other kinds of supremacists existed before the internet. By supporting China-style censorship you're not actually eliminating those ideas, or even stopping their spread.
They existed before the internet, but the internet has given them a tool to organize that they didn't have before. And by censoring them online effectively, you take this tool away from them.
Which is exactly what happens in China. I am sure Chinese officials know ideas and philosophies spread on the mainland, but as long as the people who believe in those ideas and philosophies can't organize effectively then they can be controlled.
Yes, let's be more like China! I'm looking forward to requiring loyalty oaths from our many religious groups. Where do you think we should put the reeducation camps?
Edit: in a less sarcastic way, a government can accomplish quite a bit if it has no concern for the rights of its citizens. There is a reason we don't do this kind of thing in the West; it's a good reason and it's one that China will eventually learn the hard way.
The idea that words can control people's minds against their will is the stuff of sci-fi and fantasy stories, not reality. As observed in a reply, it's literally the Jedi Mind Trick. Where did you get the idea it's real?
You can probably mitigate their spread. However, as the poster does seem to want Chinese-style authoritarianism, I can only conclude they have limited experience of what that looks like in reality.
As an aside, I've defended certain versions of democratic socialism (though I'm not a fan of it) to some of my friends that are recent immigrants from China (having worked grown up there and worked in the corporate world). All of them think capitalism and Western democracy is the greatest thing since sliced bread.
If that's your goal you need to put it in context, like what museums and libraries do. When mixed inbetween memes, there's no context. It's just vitriol being spread
Maybe to you and me, but we're not its target audience. Its target audience is other 8chan users, some of which might be just a step away from committing such atrocities themselves.
It's not just the manifesto. Places like 8chan are positive feedback generators for this kind of extremism. Every time one of these events happen it fuels the sort of unofficial contest to see who can be the next one, to be the next hero/martyr of the community. Easy access to guns is certainly a problem, but easy access to these radicalization factories is also a significant component that needs to be addressed.
Where did I claim it's the only thing needed to stop a person like that?
You gotta start somewhere. This is a nice and easy way to do that's completely within the reach of the tech community. There are no laws requiring that, just a sign of a good will.
If it were up to me, Cloudflare would block at least 30 other websites, starting with Gab. Unfortunately, it takes a shooting or two for them to realize that they have a problem with a client of theirs.
As a private company, as long as they are not a monopoly or a quasi monopoly(), they can do what they want, no restriction.
() My personnal definition is a minimum of 4-6 participant in any market with at least 5%-10% share each (Exemple : France has some of the lowest mobile telephony fares in the world, because there are 4 "biggish" providers (one is over 50%), and they are often trying to merge "to regain pricing power", luckilly they have so far failed. 3 can somewhat manage a cartel, 4 seems to be much harder.).
The dumb pipe is DNS + ip routing. No one wants to share or sell their smart pipes (CDN, analytics, cloud platform, etc.) into a powder keg.
> Imagine if real life utilities did this
TV & Radio platforms have declined to provide amplification to numerous fringe ideas / platforms over the years. As a direct "knowledge/information utility" that corollary carries the most weight for me.
But again, DNS is the real "utility" or "road" to me here -- Cloudflare et al are hotels along the road, and private property holders have declined to house people since the inception of private property. There's nothing to prevent 8chan from delivering it's message; but they may have to be careful with their biz. relationships, which is a lesson they should have been learning for years.
Why is a CDN a "smart pipe" but DNS is not? That seems like a rather arbitrary distinction to me.
Is the internet not a "knowledge/information utility"? Do CDNs not provide critical protection against DDOS attacks? How then does denying service not "prevent 8chan from delivering it's message"?
CDNs are not the only way to provide protection against DDOS, they're a packaged offering combining multiple technologies but there's nothing preventing you from running geolocated servers, on multiple providers, with ddos mitigation you buy/build yourself. Blocking at the DNS layer (through multi-party action I guess) is going to be an insurmountable hurdle. Wanting cloudflare or any other company to offer you prerolled infrastructure as a right is ludicrous. This distinction is anything but arbitrary.
Maybe not strictly insurmountable. But building your own massively distributed infrastructure capable of resisting DDOS attacks is expensive. Perhaps prohibitively so, depending on the size of your budget.
You could just as easily argue that since DNS blocks can technically be overcome by directing users to a specific IP address, or by using an alternate name server infrastructure like Namecoin, that DNS isn't critical.
I always find the utility comparison an interesting one. If the water supply was poisoned, would you expect the utility company to cut your supply until it could be cleaned? If they could cut it off closer to the source of the poison so you weren't affected, would you prefer that?
You don't expect 1000V from your electricity company. You don't expect arsenic from your water utility. You expect the fcc no-call list to be honored. Very few utilities are truly dumb pipes.
(Not trying to draw the obvious comparison between 8chan & arsenic. Just that I think when we're holding "dumb pipes" up as a holy grail, it'd be worth remembering that the holy grail is a myth.)
I don't understand how any of that relates to what Cloudflare is doing here. 8Chan isn't poisoning the water supply or back-feeding 1000V into the electrical grid; they're just making normal use of Cloudflare's service just like any other customer.
Are you implying that ISPs are sending arsenic down my pipes when they service my request to load a web page from 8Chan? In that case, I'd argue that the websites I choose to visit are entirely my decision, and my ISP denying my request to connect to 8Chan would not improve their quality of service to me in any way.
I was more aiming at the dumb pipe analogy than this specific instance. Kinda "be careful what you wish for". When people say they want the internet to be a Utility, they overlook a lot of what they're asking for. They're not dumb pipes, they're heavily controlled, regulated, measured & metered infrastructure. Making the internet a utility would have far, far more effect than adding consumer protections to the last mile.
> Feels like no one online wants to just provide a 'dumb pipe', and always want to act like a pseudo publisher trying to dictate what's allowed and what isn't.
Sites like 8chan, Hacker news, etc are publishers, and I think it's reasonable if the service providers that disagree with their content don't want to do business with them.
A proper analogy (IMO), would be if a newspaper was printing hate speech and the company that prints the newspaper refused to do business with them. That would be perfectly acceptable, and has nothing to do with the government protected free speech. People aren't robots (or dumb pipes) after all, and if they don't want to enable/support what they see as a morally reprehensible enterprise with their work that is their right.
> any controversy at all means losing access to anything internet related
Giving a platform for manifestos that are propagating violence and mass shootings should not be dismissed as "any controversy at all." It feels like you are trying to minimize what happened here.
Instead of making me imagine the entire premise of your argument, maybe reason for why Cloudflare's services should be regulated as a utility, and convince me that it is at all comparable to drinking water and electricity.
Personally, on a list representing my hierarchy of needs, CDNs and clean drinking water end up on the opposite far ends.
Agreed. The sort of radicalization that's going on at 8chan and the like serve no legitimate public interest. Think I'm wrong? Then explain to me why this sort of online domestic terrorism academy is good for the public. Explain how any single person improves the world by participating in it.
It seems like having a known honeypot to capture conversations of would be evil doers would be much better than to further force them underground into the likes of Tor. Who is going to be able to mine conversations for advanced warnings once they are there?
Also, the silencing of dissidents seems like the wrong move in general for all internet companies. The truth can tolerate being harassed, bashed and unliked. What it does not seem to do so well with is a regime that does not tolerate the free flow of ideas.
I'm okay with the very worst people posting on youtube and twitter. Those platforms can require an extra login to determine who is so interested in these videos. The removal of videos on the basis of dislike does not seem to be the solution. I'm not even certain that demonetizing them is the right answer, because even that can create a money trail for police and detectives to follow.
No, but it will be harder for the children to see it. Because a lot of those people there are children (under 18). By increasing the friction, you reduce the audience.
I understand the point you are making. However lets take a look at the following:
Cloudflare is U.S. corporation providing services to other people and companies. You have to be a member in order to use their services, so you are tied to their terms. This basically a "private" club you are joining
Cloudflare is not beholden to uphold the Constitution of the USA. They are beholden to their shareholders and the laws of the USA in order to operate as a Corporation.
Cloudflare can do what ever it wants. People and Companies do not have to use cloudflare. Boycott them, do not recommend them ever.
Now if the USA had some kind of non-profit, Nationwide Municipal ISP (fibre), for instance, the US Public Library system could be a good choice. They could offer some basic services and at the same time be the location that would protect speech/text (based on the Constitution). It's not perfect, but it's something to consider & you wouldn't be kicked off because somebody doesn't like what you are saying/producing.
Or there should be a law in the USA, stating that companies doing business in the USA cannot refuse service if they find the clients content to be offense and protected under the Constitution of the USA
I think slippery-slope-type arguments are they, themselves a slippery slope. What if nobody ever again acts on their moral courage because they’re afraid of hypothetical bad actors abusing that precedent? Oh My! [clutches pearls] Not everything is relative, you’re not smart or ethical because you can make up hypotheticals to oppose any action. You’re just a nihilist with no grounding in reality and no value system. It’s ok to say something is bad, and then act against that bad thing. /rant
Edit: and when you do fall into that relativist trap, the bad guys win because they don’t care about any of it. They don’t worry about slippery slopes, or unintended consequences. Overthinking and other various mental masturbation by good people let’s bad people win.
Online services are not utilities, it's not like an ISP without competition in their area was to refuse them service. There are plenty of alternatives to CloudFlare, they're just usually not as cheap or easy to use.
I believe it's alright as long as the product isn't necessary and just value-added. In the case of Cloudflare, that's pretty clear that it's just value-added.
In the case of water supply, electricity, phone, internet service, etc... it's not just value-added, you can't function without those, there's no alternative.
But Voltaire didn't go on to say "I also think private companies have an obligation to transmit what you say to the wider world even if they think it's bollocks."
Exactly. It’s trivially easy to defend speech that we like. The difficult thing is defending the right to make speech the content of which we dislike or disagree with.
Particularly given that a large part of the left and of the medias uses the term "racist", "alt-right" or "facist" very liberally. Worrying about slippery slope isn't rhetorical, we can see people actively oiling up that slope right now.
I think most people can see that there's a huge gulf between "everything is lawful" and "the government regulates ideas and risks doing so in their favor".
Most people accept that you cannot say "how unfortunate it would be for him if Jack ate seafood tonight" to your Mafia henchmen. Nor can you say "we will storm parliament at dawn using these weapons" if you are part of a plot to replace the state with a capitalist anarchy.
And in the same manner, it seems that there are plenty of laws in place already against saying "if white people are to defend ourselves and survive as a race, our immune system must go to work" in an 8chan manifesto.
But that's different than saying "Jack has betrayed me", "representative democracy is defective and must be replaced by capitalist anarchy" or "the white race is superior; non-whites are traitors and should be dealt with harshly; vote for me".
(Whether a text advocates violence cannot necessarily be reduced to a few words, as I hope my first example demonstrates. The context in which the words are uttered and the interpretation the speaker can reasonably intend are relevant. Fortunately, no legal system has been replaced by a computer program, but are generally interpreted by intelligent human beings.)
Free speech absolutism was never intended by the Voltaire or the American founding fathers - as can be seen by their other actions. It is a recent populist view without warrant of careful analysis. I support free speech; but I do not support free speech absolutism.
I think it’s more like a black-list. Nazis? White supremacy? Pretty obviously black-list.
Is nazizm fine if the political winds change a bit? No, of course not.
And I’m not saying “blanket censor an understanding of these things in historical context”. That would be insane. But I am saying - just maybe, consider stopping giving free, entirely unregulated platforms for black-list extremists and terrorists to spread their message.
That shooter didn't post a manifesto to 8chan, and therefore didn't contribute to Cloudflare terminating their service, and therefore is entirely irrelevant to what is being discussed.
Aside from that, there's an important difference between expressing an opinion, and creating an atmosphere and culture of hate and/or violence.
There are things you're not allowed to say because they endanger lives, like threatening people, blackmailing people, or slandering people. Spreading intolerance and hatred directed at specific demographic groups has also been shown to endanger those people, so banning that is absolutely defensible.
>Because Voltaire's age was so peaceful and didn't have those things?
Voltaire wasn't a youth bullying youth to the point that they killed themselves.
Voltaire wasn't a man sitting in his living room sexually harassing and shaming women in an organized effort after they are selected as a target by some random person online for blocking them after receiving dick pics.
Voltaire wasn't encouraging anonymous strangers on the internet to make death threats to high profile persons.
And I think it’s fair to ask if those ideas, expressed hundreds of years ago, are still “100%-blanket-statement-correct”, or if they should ever be modified based on changing societal conditions.
Blind faith in a political figure from several centuries ago is, to me, as ridiculous as blind faith in an imaginary magic sky deity.
Its probably problematic to be religiously dogmatic about applying quotes from historical figures from nearly three centuries ago about every possible modern context.
Then you know more than I do. Because he was in prison for things he said multiple times if I remember correctly. But to the topic at hand, being sanctioned because of something you said is not what I would describe as a negligent threat.
Unfortunately they have the right to say what they will. They second they stop being just words and turn in to physical actions is when there is a problem.
"any controversy at all means losing access to anything internet related"
No, no, no. Let's not put this in the box of "any controversy". This is not that.
This is people using an online forum to breed their hatred of a race of human being which led to more than one mass-shooting event and one of the providers who played a part in supporting them said enough was enough.
White supremacists/Nazis are bad. There isn't a subjective measurement of "badness" when it comes to white supremacy. It is bad. They have proven themselves to be bad. Society needs to stop being so tolerant of intolerance.
Imagine if real life utilities did this. If because someone used your property for offensive purposes, the water company cut off the water supply, or the electricity company refused to provide electricity, or your phone provider cut off service or what not. That would be ridiculous, yet it's exactly the situation we're in with internet services. No one wants to just be a utility.
I believe online service providers in at least some markets should be regulated like utilities. Maybe Cloudflare, definitely domain name registrars, perhaps cloud services and CDNs in general. Because at the moment, it seems any controversy at all means losing access to anything internet related.