Quotulatiousness

February 20, 2019

What to do when you’re suddenly the star of the latest online witch-hunt

Filed under: Business, Liberty, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

At Reason, Nancy Rommelmann gives a handy guide to what you need to know when a social media witch-smeller points at you and the masses start baying for your blood:

I am a pro-choice, aqua-haired, middle-aged liberal living in Portland, Oregon. I probably disagree with Nicholas Sandmann on every major issue. But we have something in common. In the last month we have both endured what is fast becoming an American ritual: our 15 minutes of hate.

Sandmann’s crime was a smirk while wearing a MAGA hat. Mine was a YouTube series I launched in December with another journalist in which we discussed the excesses of the #MeToo movement. This and the show’s name, #MeNeither, inspired an ex-employee of my husband’s coffee company to send an email to staff, characterizing the series as “vile, dangerous and extremely misguided” and adding that it “throws into question the safety of Ristretto Roasters as a workplace.”

She also sent an email to the media.

Within days, a quarter of the Ristretto staff quit and the company lost major accounts. I was repeatedly called a c*nt and was challenged to at least one fist fight. My husband was told to leave his wife or lose his business.

As someone who covers this stuff, I thought I knew how rough it might be to get dragged in public. It’s different when it’s tearing up your life.

If you do not think this can happen to you, you have not been paying attention. Here’s a guide for how to survive it…

January 10, 2019

Patreon’s changing role

Filed under: Business, Liberty, Media, Politics, Technology — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

At Quillette, Uri Harris outlines how Patreon has changed over the last year or so and what those changes mean for both content creators and financial supporters:

On December 6, crowdfunding service Patreon removed the account of popular YouTuber Carl Benjamin, who is better known by his YouTube moniker Sargon of Akkad. In a statement, Patreon explained that Benjamin was removed for exposing hate speech under its community guidelines, which prohibit: “serious attacks, or even negative generalizations, of people based on their race [and] sexual orientation.” The incident in question was an appearance on another YouTube channel where Benjamin used racial and homosexual slurs during an emotional outburst. (The outburst was transcribed and included for reference as part of Patreon’s statement.)

Patreon’s reaction sparked immediate accusations of political bias from many centrists and conservatives, as Benjamin—who identifies as a classical liberal—is a frequent and outspoken critic of contemporary progressivism, receiving hundreds of thousands of views on many of his videos. The fact that Benjamin was removed from Patreon for an outburst on another YouTube channel almost a year ago, when he produces hours of content every week on his own channels and appears regularly on many others, suggested that this was a targeted attempt to remove him due to his politics, either by Patreon employees themselves or as a response to outside pressure.

This belief was bolstered by the fact that Patreon’s CEO Jack Conte had appeared on popular YouTube talk show “The Rubin Report” last year to explain the removal of conservative YouTube personality Lauren Southern, where he seemed to suggest that Patreon’s content policy had three sections and that hate speech was in the first section, meaning that it only applied to content uploaded to Patreon’s own platform. (Southern was removed for off-platform activity because she had “crossed the line between speech and action,” Conte maintained, which he implied was covered by the more severe second and third sections of their content policy.)

There’s nothing unusual about a company revising its content policy, of course, but it seemed suspicious that Benjamin was being removed for a different set of rules than those Patreon’s CEO had previously articulated. In fact, several people pointed out the prevalence of similar slurs on Patreon’s own platform as further indication that Benjamin was specifically targeted for his political views.

January 1, 2019

QotD: The hallmark of civilization

Filed under: Liberty, Quotations — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 01:00

The true mark of the civilized society is not that it defends the rights of people who are loved by the bulk of the population, for those people need no defense. No one, after all, will arrest a popular person for saying or doing popular things. The true mark of the civilized society is that it defends the rights even of those who are universally reviled.

Indeed, in a truly civilized society, there would be no question but that you would defend the rights of people who disgust you provided they do no violence to others.

Our society is not civilized.

Perry Metzger, “On Civilization”, Samizdata, 2017-03-30.

December 31, 2018

7 Things You Should Know About Free Speech in Schools: Free Speech Rules (Episode 1)

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Education, Law, Liberty, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

ReasonTV
Published on 13 Dec 2018

Watch the first episode of Free Speech Rules, a new video series on free speech and the law. The first episode looks at the seven things you should know about how the First Amendment is applied in schools, from black armbands to ‘Bong Hits 4 Jesus.’

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Watch the first episode of Free Speech Rules, a new video series on free speech and the law that’s written by Eugene Volokh, the Gary T. Schwartz Distinguished Professor of Law at UCLA, and the co-founder of the Volokh Conspiracy, which is hosted at Reason.com.

The first episode looks at the seven things you should know about how the First Amendment is applied in schools:

1) Political and religious speech is mostly protected.
Students, from first grade to twelfth, can’t be punished based on their political or religious speech. As the Supreme Court ruled in Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School District: “It can hardly be argued that either students or teachers shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech or expression at the schoolhouse gates.”

2) Disruptive speech is not protected.
Schools can punish speech that “materially disrupts schoolwork” — for instance, because it prompts fights.

3) Vulgar or sexual speech is not protected.
Schools can also punish students for using vulgarities or sexual innuendos.

4) Praising drugs is not protected.
Schools can punish speech that seems to praise drug use, and probably also alcohol use and other crimes, at least when the speech doesn’t seem political.

5) Official school newspapers are the school’s own speech.
Courts see the newspaper as the school’s own speech, even if students are the ones who write it.

6) This only applies to public schools.
Under the so-called “state action doctrine,” the First Amendment doesn’t limit private schools, even those that get tax breaks or government funds.

7) California is different. Some states, like California, have passed laws that provide more protection to students.

Written by Eugene Volokh, a First Amendment law professor at UCLA.
Produced and edited by Austin Bragg, who is not. This is not legal advice.
If this were legal advice, it would be followed by a bill.
Please use responsibly.

December 15, 2018

Twitter cannot hold her back – Titania McGrath speaks!

Filed under: Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Despite the patriarchal oppression of a Twitter permanent suspension, Titania McGrath will be heard:

My name is Titania McGrath. I am a radical intersectionalist poet committed to feminism, social justice, and armed peaceful protest. In April of this year, I decided to become more industrious on social media. I was inspired by other activists who had made use of their online platforms in order to spread their message and explain to people why they are wrong about everything.

This week the powers-that-be at Twitter hit my account with a “permanent suspension” (a semantic contradiction, but then I suppose bigots aren’t known for their grammatical prowess). This was the latest in a series of suspensions, all of which were imposed because I had been too woke. The final straw appeared to be a tweet in which I informed my followers that I would be attending a pro-Brexit march so that I could punch a few UKIP supporters in the name of tolerance.

Don’t get me wrong. I have always supported censorship. Major social media platforms have a responsibility to ensure that we are expressing the correct sort of free speech. Twitter’s decision to suspend Alex Jones, host of American website InfoWars, set the right kind of precedent. I fully supported this action because Jones is known for disseminating fake news and wild conspiracy theories. But the fact that I was also banned makes me think that Twitter were being secretly controlled by InfoWars from the very start.

Indeed, Twitter’s modus operandi appears to involve routinely silencing those who defend social justice and enabling those who spread hate. In my short time on the platform, I have regularly come across hate speech from the sort of unreconstructed bigots who believe that there are only two genders, or that Islam is not a race. It’s got to the point where if someone doesn’t have “anti-fascist” in their bio, it’s safest to assume that they’re a fascist.

The permanent suspension only lasted for a day, but the experience was traumatic and lasting. I now understand how Nelson Mandela felt. If anything, my ordeal was even more damaging. Mandela may have had to endure 27 years of incarceration, but at least his male privilege protected him from ever having to put up with mansplaining, or being subject to wolf-whistling by grubby proles on a building site.

They may have silenced the great Godfrey Elfwick, but thank goodness Titania McGrath can continue to point out the absurdities and inconsistencies of the wider world.

December 7, 2018

The Anti-Authoritarian Politics of Harry Potter

Filed under: Books, Liberty, Media — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Foundation for Economic Education
Published on 6 Dec 2018

JK Rowling’s wizarding world isn’t all wands, charms, and transfigurations. The magical universe inhabited by characters like Harry Potter and Newt Scamander is rife with the dangerous incompetence of adults, unchecked corruption, and appalling abuses of power, and not just by Voldemort or Grindelwald.

_____________
Written & Produced by Sean W. Malone
Edited by Arash Ayrom & Sean W. Malone

November 20, 2018

Remy: The Legend of Stan Lee

Filed under: Government, Liberty, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

ReasonTV
Published on 19 Nov 2018

Remy recalls a time when experts were claiming “Hitler was a beginner compared to the comic-book industry,” and how Stan Lee took a stand.

Written and Performed by Remy
Video Produced by Meredith and Austin Bragg
Music tracks and background vocals by Ben Karlstrom

November 16, 2018

QotD: Defining hate speech

Filed under: Britain, Law, Liberty, Quotations — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Then, of course, there is the question of where hate-speech ends and legitimate commentary starts. It is generally easy to recognise the vilest abuse that is intended only to inflame and not to argue, just as it is easy to recognise pure pornography (I use the word ‘pure’ in its chemical, not its moral sense, of course). But often matters are much more complex than this.

For example, I recently saw the following statistic in a serious article on the internet: that Nigerian immigrants to Switzerland are seven times as likely to be convicted for a crime as Swiss citizens. Surely no one who wrote such a thing could think that it was calculated to create warm feelings in the hearts of the Swiss towards Nigerian immigrants, except those very few of Fabian mentality, who see in serial killers a cry for help (from the killers, of course, not from their victims).

The statistic – let us assume – is true. But then let us ask whether it has been corrected for the different sex and age structures of the two populations, that of the Nigerian immigrants and that of the Swiss population.

If it has not (and the article does not say), it is easily conceivable that a better, or at least different, statistic would be that Nigerian immigrants are only twice or three times as likely to be convicted for a crime as Swiss citizens. And if this were in fact the case, would the man who published the article be guilty of hate-speech, or merely of intellectual error? Is the test of hate-speech to be whether something does in fact bring a group into hatred, ridicule and contempt, or whether it is intended to do so?

It is easy to multiply examples. In this country, young Moslem men far out-fill their quota in prison, while young Hindu and Sikh far underperform where criminal conviction is concerned. Is this an interesting and important sociological fact, or an incitement to hatred, ridicule and contempt, or perhaps both?

A further problem is that of judging how sensitive people actually are or should be to perceived slights and insults. Just as the expression of hatred can be self-reinforcing, so can the sensitivity to slight and injury. The more you are protected from it, the more of it you perceive, until you end up being a psychological egg-shell. The demand for protection becomes self-reinforcing, until a state is reached in which nobody says what he means, and everybody infers what is not meant. Temperatures, or tempers, are raised, not lowered. The disgracefully pusillanimous (and incompetent) Macpherson report into the killing of Stephen Lawrence demonstrated the risks we run: it suggested that a racial incident should be defined as an incident which any witness to it believed to be racial, without there being any need for objective evidence that it was. Where a British judge can be so pusillanimously unattached to the rule of law, we can be sure that one day hate-speech will be defined as any speech that anyone finds hateful.

Theodore Dalrymple, “Hating the Truth”, Salisbury Review, 2011-06.

November 7, 2018

Bonfire Night hate “crime”

Filed under: Britain, Law, Liberty — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

I have to say that I agree with Brendan O’Neill here … it was an offensive, idiotic, and totally tasteless act: but it was not — or at least should not be — a crime:

I cannot be the only person who finds the Metropolitan Police’s promise to investigate the Grenfell Tower bonfire video more chilling than the video itself. Yes, the video is repulsive. But what crime has been committed here? Being a wanker? Being a scumbag? Saying disgusting things in your own back garden? Those are criminal offences now? If they are, then Britain has far greater things to worry about than the fact that a handful of dreadful people decided to burn an effigy of Grenfell Tower for Bonfire Night.

First things first: the video is horrible. I am going to make a wild guess that the people featured in it, laughing and cheering as their cardboard Grenfell Tower goes up in flames, are not very nice. Some of them are probably racist. In the windows of their Grenfell effigy, there are notably non-white paper figures, waving for help. The effigy-burners say ‘This is what you get for not paying your rent!’ as the paper figures are consumed by the bonfire flames. Gross.

But criminal? That would be even more gross. Living in a society that criminalises people for what they say in their own back gardens would be worse, infinitely worse, than living in a society that has small numbers of prejudiced twats who think mocking the Grenfell calamity is funny.

And yet it looks like we live in that society. The commander of Scotland Yard, no less, issued a plea for information about the video, declaring himself ‘appalled by the callous nature’ of the people in it and by their ‘vile’ comments. I’m sorry, but I don’t want the police investigating videos in which no crime has been committed. In which no one’s property has been damaged or stolen and no person has been harmed. In which there is merely an act of expression. That way the police state lies. If we allow speech in one’s own home to become a police matter, we will regret it. Profoundly. What next: telescreens?

The police are upping the ante. This morning it is reported that five men have ‘surrendered’ to the cops and have duly been arrested. Some are saying they committed a public-order offence. In their own private residence? That’s a fascinating, and disturbing, definition of public disorder. Others are saying they committed a hate crime. Even though there were no victims? Even though they did not utter their words to anyone but themselves? Even though – once again for the people at the back – they were speaking among themselves in their own private space?

October 30, 2018

The plight of Gab

Filed under: Business, Law, Liberty, Media — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Unlike other social media platforms that have hosted (and continue to host) legal-but-“hateful” content, Gab has suffered a de-platforming and is currently scrambling to get the service operational with a new service provider (reported to be a non-US site). On Monday, the Gab team posted the following static page in place of their normal UI:

The Z Man explains:

The question that normal people ask is how this is possible. After all, these companies sign contracts and in theory, we still have courts where contracts can be enforced by impartial judges. While that is a laughable fiction now, the reality is these companies are not bound by standard business agreements. They have been allowed to carve out new law for themselves, forcing their vendors and customers to sign off on what is called an adhesion contract. This gives the tech giants absolute power over everyone else.

An adhesion contract or “standard form contract” is a contract drafted by one party and signed by another party. The second party typically does not have the power to negotiate or modify the terms of the contract. Adhesion contracts are commonly used for things like insurance or rental contracts. When you rent a car or purchase car insurance, you just sign the contract, because you have to in order to rent the car or get insured. Every technology service provider is now basing their relationships on these types of contracts.

It used to be that the courts carefully scrutinized these types of arrangements, so the contract had to adhere to some basic principles. The courts would often use the “doctrine of reasonable expectations” to void all or part of these contracts, when there was lack of notice, unequal bargaining power, or blatant and substantive unfairness. The reason for this should be obvious. When a powerful company has the right to dictate the terms of the contract to their customers, they have all the power in the contractual relationship.

In western jurisprudence, a valid contract is one in which both parties freely engage and have equal opportunities to negotiate. When one party imposes the conditions on the other, that’s not a contract. That’s slavery. In a world where a handful of people control the public space, these types of contract give them arbitrary power over public discourse. If they become vexed with what you say, they can claim you have violated their terms of service and remove you from the internet. Again, the terms are dictated, not negotiated.

October 29, 2018

The decline of personal liberty in a social media world

Filed under: Government, Liberty, Media — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Fernando del Pino Calvo-Sotelo on the slowly diminishing personal liberties in western countries and the steady expansion of state power:

… freedom around the world is more and more defined just by one measure, that is, the fact of being able to put one vote (lost among other 24 million votes, in the case of Spain) in an urn every four years. But who cares about all the other, much more relevant, civil rights? Freedom is being able to vote, but it is way more than that. However, democratic power holders have distracted us with political freedom while taking away ever higher degrees of personal freedom – while we turned a blind eye to the fragility of democracies, which soon move away from the utopian “government of the people”. Indeed, as Mill points out, “the people who exercise power are not the same people over whom it is exercised”. As stated by the Iron Law of Oligarchy, regardless of the apparent form of government (republic, monarchy, democracy, dictatorship…), all political power presupposes the power of a very small group over the vast majority of the population. Secondly, “the people can aspire to the oppression of a part of it,” that is, democracy may become the tyranny of the majority over the minority (made up of Jews, blacks, the rich…), a sort of mob rule, as the US Founding Fathers feared. For this reason, Mill recommended keeping democracy constrained by the same controls that prevent the abuse of power typical of the tyranny of an individual.

But the oppression of political power is not the only form of tyranny. As Mill described in 1861 in a remarkably prophetic paragraph, society itself can also exercise the subtlest of tyrannies, “a social tyranny more formidable than that of many models of political oppression, which affects much more details of daily life to the extent of enslaving the soul (…), that is, the tyranny of dominant opinions and feelings that seeks to impose by force its own ideas and practices as a standard of conduct to mold characters according to the preconceived model”. Today, the oppression of political correctness, decided by the global power agenda of noisy, powerful and organized minorities, is trying to stifle the once sacred freedoms of conscience, opinion and expression in an era in which free and truthful journalism is all but gone and in which social networks, the most dangerous societal control weapon ever invented, impose their slogans and release their hordes to lynch the dissident. New totalitarian ideologies want to dominate as new state religions of mandatory belief. Such is the case of the absurd and manifestly unscientific gender ideology (that would just be another stupid fad were it not for its goal of deceiving the youngest in order to “enslave their soul”), or of the ideology of the also unscientific and superstitious climate catastrophism. Not content with controlling our actions and appropriating our money through abusive taxation, the tyrants of today’s democracies seek to control what we believe and what we feel (and particularly, what we fear!).

Possibly never in history has there been such a brutal attempt to steal man’s freedom, and never has man been so blind, so sheepish and so helpless before those who openly wish to enslave him. In fact, we are being ruthlessly pushed towards a society of slaves of the State and of political correctness. Will we break the chains, now that we are still in time, or will we allow our children to be born already slaves wondering why their parents conformed and chose not to fight for their freedom?

H/T to Small Dead Animals for the link.

October 21, 2018

Politicians’ social media accounts

Filed under: Media, Politics, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Stephen Gordon probably has the right of this issue here:

October 14, 2018

Brendan O’Neill: The Tyrannical Idea of “HATE SPEECH”

Filed under: Law, Liberty, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

PhilosophyInsights
Published on 27 Aug 2017

Brendan O’Neill is the editor of Spiked Online and a columnist for The Australian and The Big Issue. This is part of a discussion of hate speech at spiked‘s campus-censorship conference, The New Intolerance on Campus.

You can check out the platform of spiked here: http://www.spiked-online.com/

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This channel aims at extracting central points of presentations into short clips. The topics cover the problems of leftist ideology and the consequences for society. The aim is to move free speech advocates forward and fight against the culture of SJWs.

If you like the content, subscribe to the channel!

October 7, 2018

A measurable positive from the USMCA process

Filed under: Cancon, Law, Liberty — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Michael Geist points out that one of the aspects of the son-of-NAFTA deal will be to help Canadians exercise their freedom of speech online by providing a “Safe Harbour” provision similar to the one that US law provides:

Internet free speech is not typically an issue associated with trade agreements, but a somewhat overlooked provision in the newly-minted U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA) promises to safeguard freedom of expression by encouraging Internet companies to resist pressure to remove content. My Policy Options op-ed notes the USMCA’s Internet safe harbour rule – modelled on U.S. law – remedies a longstanding problem in Canada that left large Internet platforms reluctant to leave third party content such as product reviews, blog posts, and social media commentary online in the face of unsubstantiated complaints.

Once implemented, Internet companies will benefit from assurances they will not face liability for failing to take down third party content or for proactively taking action against content considered harmful or objectionable. While the safe harbour provision does not apply to intellectual property, when combined with the preservation in the deal of the USMCA protects Canada’s notice-and-notice system for copyright, whereby rights holders can file complaints over alleged infringements but there is no takedown procedure for the removal of content. Taken together, the Canadian legal framework will encourage free speech, largely looking to court orders for mandated takedowns of content or good faith efforts by platforms to address harmful content.

The absence of a Canadian safe harbour rule has meant the same companies that require court orders prior to the removal of content for claims originating in the U.S., frequently take down lawful content in Canada based on mere unproven allegations due to fears of legal liability. Further, the absence of safe harbour protections creates a disincentive for both new and established services to use Canada to store data or maintain a local presence.

The Internet safe harbour approach originates from the earliest days of the commercial Internet. In 1996, the United States enacted the Communications Decency Act, legislation designed to address two emerging concerns: the online availability of obscene materials and the liability of Internet services for hosting third party content. The U.S. Supreme Court struck down the obscenity provisions on constitutional grounds, but the safe harbour remained intact and quickly emerged as a cornerstone of U.S. Internet policy.

September 27, 2018

France moves toward the Soviet system of psychological “treatment” for dissidents

Filed under: France, Law, Liberty, Politics — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

You may not agree with much that prominent French nationalist politician Marine Le Pen stands for, but the recent court order that she must undergo a psychological evaluation as part of the investigation of a “hate crime” should worry everyone. Jacob Sullum writes:

Marine Le Pen speaking in Lille during the 2017 French presidential election
Photo by Jérémy-Günther-Heinz Jähnick via Wikimedia Commons

France ranked 12 notches above the United States in this year’s World Press Freedom Index, produced by Reporters Without Borders. But such ratings can be misleading, as illustrated by the prosecution of Marine Le Pen, head of the right-wing National Rally party (formerly the National Front), for posting images of ISIS atrocities on Twitter. Last week Le Pen revealed that she had been ordered to undergo a psychiatric examination as part of the investigation into her speech crime, which added another layer of Soviet-style thought control to the story.

It is inconceivable that an American politician, no matter how extreme his views, would be prosecuted for doing what Le Pen did, because a law like the one she is charged with violating would be clearly inconsistent with the First Amendment. That law, Article 227-24 of the French Criminal Code, makes it a crime, punishable by a fine of €75,000 (about $88,000) and up to three years in prison, to distribute “a message bearing a pornographic or violent character or a character seriously violating human dignity…where the message may be seen or perceived by a minor.” Le Pen allegedly ran afoul of that prohibition in 2015 by posting three pictures of men murdered by ISIS—one beheaded, one burned alive, and one run over by a tank—in response to a Twitter user who likened her party to the terrorist organization. “Daesh [the Arabic acronym for ISIS] is this!” she tweeted.

This case vividly illustrates why Article 227-24 would never pass constitutional muster in the United States. Le Pen’s tweet is indisputably political speech, sitting at the core of the expression protected by the First Amendment. The terms of Article 227-24 (especially the phrase “seriously violating human dignity”) are broad and vague, encouraging self-censorship and inviting politically motivated prosecution of people who irk the powers that be. Le Pen, who unsuccessfully ran against Emmanuel Macron in a presidential runoff last year, was stripped of her parliamentary immunity six months later, leaving her open to prosecution.

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