NY Times Op-Ed Blasts Cloudflare for Daily Stormer Terror

[jim bell]

    On Thursday, September 14, 2017, 11:34:08 AM PDT, Marina Brown <catskillmarina at gmail.com> wrote:  
 
 On 09/14/2017 03:44 AM, jim bell wrote:

>> You say that as if we must all already agree that:   There are
>> significant numbers of people 'starting planning on murdering whole
>> groups of people...'    Give us a few actual examples.  
>  

>Thankfully it is not significant numbers of people planning genocide. Ifthere were we would be in much more trouble than we are.

You seem to be backing away from your original position.  That's progress. 


>Groups like ironmarch, atomwaffen and many on Daily stormer certainly
appear to be planning genocide. One does not tag their publication "the
most genocidal republican website" if one is not interested in promoting
genocide.


People could "plan genocide" by email, Twitter, IRC,  Plain Old Telephone System, Fax, Telex (?), TWX (?) smoke signals, semaphore, tin-cans-and-a-string, message-in-a-bottle, or the U.S. mail if they aren't allowed to have websites.


>...But of course that will be for a judge to decide. Not me.


But I think you were talking about DNS and website registration.  What does prosecuting people for "planning genocide" have to do with registering websites?   Remember, if you are trying to justify CURRENT censorship of "everybody", you'd better do more than point to a very small number of people who, you claim, may eventually carry out what would be a tiny number of comparatively minor attacks.  


> And what is your definition of "significant numbers'?   If we are
> talking murdered bodies, even one might be called a "significant
> number".  But somehow, to worry most people, you need to show how big
> the figure is compared with, say, the population of America.  Are the
> number of people that will be killed greater, or less than, the number
> of people who die yearly falling down stairs at home, by accident?   For
> the year 2000, it was 1307.   If it's only 1/10th that number, say 131,
> it's going to be hard to get people excited.



I>'m not trying to get people excited. I'm just stating the legal fact
that conspiracy to commit genocide, ethnic cleansing and to deny human
rights is not free speech. It's a crime.


Okay, then STOP STOP STOP trying to justify censorship in DNS registration, or advocating that Cloudflare refuse their services to ONE customer,  based on the mere future possibility of a crime occurring.    Especially when it cannot be shown that a specific website, or a specific customer, is definitely going to be engaging in a crime.



> And remember all the people murdered in Chicago yearly.  761 in 2016.  
>  https://www.dnainfo.com/chicago/2016-chicago-murders



>Nonsequitur. One dead is too many.


But you can't properly justify an improper action (censorship) without a very close arguable connection between the thing you claim to want to prevent, and the thing you claim should be done to prevent it.  You haven't done that.  Not even close.  Not even a large distance away, in fact.  Ever heard of this:    "Think of the children!!!"     People use various rhetorical tricks to justify things like censorship.  You've done that, I think.  Go back and re-think what you think must be done, and why.  No doubt during eras, and places, where censorship reigns, people develop various justifications for it, illogical ones.  
                       Jim Bell


  
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