Do Nazis deserve electricity?
I'm reading about the latest Gitlab shakeup, about (not?) filtering customers on moral grounds. Yesterday, it was Github's decision to continue to support ICE. There's Twitter's decision to allow politicians to (somewhat?) violate its own rules about threats and harrassment. Blizzard banned a star video game player for speaking out about the Hong Kong protests.
I'm on Mastodon, and while it's faded from the headlines a bit, the Gab-war still rages there, with the Tusky-v-Fediverse debate over apps blocking domains, and instances blocking other instances over their support for yet other instances.
Yada.
I'm thinking a lot these days about the "slippery slope". Mastodon, Twitter, Facebook, Github/lab, etc ... these are all business(-like) entities, privately controlled, which are nonetheless approaching the status of public infrastructure ... at least, sort of.
PG&E intentionally shut off power to millions of Californians last week, to prevent hypothetical fires. You see where I'm going with this.
When/As smart capabilities for power grid, ISP, etc emerge, do racists, white supremacists, get Internet? Electricity? Hospital/Ambulance service? Where is that line?
Is reverse discrimination appropriate? "We don't rent to racists..."?
Not sure what I'm expecting here. Just starting the thread, see where it goes.
ETA: A really interesting, thoughtful 2-minute excerpt from a Rogan podcast
Edit #2: The Hacker News thread that prompted me to start this thread.
The line ends when you stop viewing them as human beings. I view healthcare, human welfare, education, and housing to be core human rights in our day and age. No matter what those people are and how much I may disagree with them, they are still just as much like you and me, as we are to each other.
Internet service?
In this day and age, very much so.
Our entire world is interconnected around us through multiple personal devices. Over the next 30 years, the internet will become more ingrained in the minutiae of our life that we will look back nostalgically on the way we use it today.
Also one of the only ways to deprogram Nazis is to ensure they have access to education that allows their deprogramming.
If you cut them off from what is the largest avenue of education, then you're all but ensuring they will radicalize more, not less. You're encouraging their existing persecution complex unnecessarily.
This entire conversation is being framed really weirdly. It's not a "slippery slope", and very few people would agree with Nazis not having electricity, or Internet, or water (the only response here that says they shouldn't kind of hand-waves the issues or nuance away).
Is it a utility (or something people widely consider a utility, like Internet)? Then why should they be blocked from having it?
Right - I had posted and subsequently deleted something because I really didn't want to get too involved in the "Nazis!" part of this discussion on second thought. But that aside, for some reason people are treating "slippery slope" like a valid argument standing on its own when it's typically considered a fallacy.
"Who decides where the line is?" We do! As a society, as people, we decide collectively according to our values. Our institutions and the people in them are not dumb rules machines, they can evolve and change and make decisions in special cases. If something is "technically consistent" with a rule due to some logical quirk, but not consistent with the spirit of the rule or the value behind it, then we can deal with that.
The point of a rule or guideline is to attempt to come to a collective agreement on what we will tolerate in our interactions with each other. It is not a line of code we slap onto a Rules Computer and hope that society comes out on the other side. The moral and ethical measure of ideals and values should not be a contest of whose are the most internally consistent.
Basically "where is the line?" is a tedious point to approach just about anything from. In my experience it's mostly used to "JAQ off". I wish this had been framed differently.
Yep, the line is constantly moving. In fact, having a static line is a great way for people to exploit static rules for their own personal gain.
Liberals especially like to believe that government is just one big justice machine that will eventually work for the righteousness of the people. The fact is that if we don't actively give a shit towards advancing justice on a personal level, any static rule can be exploited.
This entire discussion and OPs question seems framed in a purposeful way to attract a certain kind of response, I agree.
While I would agree that taking the internet away from a Nazi is probably going too far, I don't think this reasoning really works because people are biased towards what they already believe.
Let's say you take this hypothetical Nazi to the library and tell them that they can choose any book to be the basis of their philosophy. What is stopping them from picking up Mein Kampf? Keep in mind that the library will have this book surrounded by others that talk about how bad Nazi's are, but the internet has much more Nazi propaganda and they can be very isolated from other viewpoints. Furthermore, the internet acts as a communications channel, allowing this Nazi to keep talking to his Nazi friends who will just reinforce those beliefs even more powerfully than his own research.
Yes, but there are so many examples of people going down the alt-right pipeline only to run into a fact that didn't jive, doing research on it, then realizing that a lot of everything else they had accepted as fact was simply false or incomplete.
https://www.reddit.com/r/BreadTube/comments/cdjhx1/i_used_to_be_altright/
https://www.reddit.com/r/chomsky/comments/cm00kd/i_used_to_be_a_trumpist_my_experience_with_the/
There are tons of examples of this all over reddit. Hell, I too was part of the KotakuInAction shit surrounding GamerGate, and absolutely believed their lies about it being about "ethics in gaming journalism", excusing the farther-right elements because "what can you do about them". But when it began to slip into bullshit surrounding outright sexism, racism, and other alt-right nonsense, I realized, holy shit, this was all one giant set-up to get people into this pipeline and quickly noped the fuck out.
But your solution ensures that the person will never have the possibility of reaching that conclusion. They will be effectively cut off, forever operating on their existing biases and bigotry.
For the record, it is not my solution. I am merely playing devil's advocate.
Well put. Cutting off internet for "undesirable" sections of the population is the social engineering equivalent of shoving your mess under your bed to clean your room. It doesn't actually get rid of the problem.
Not the parent, but: yes, internet service. The internet should be a free and open platform. Any given service or website is free to deny them access to that specific service or website.
If they use their internet for illegal things, then a given internet service provider who is affected by that is free to deny them service.
But no one should be denied access to basic human services based on their own personal beliefs.
EDIT: and being blocked from a given service should comprise solely not being able to put content on that service. If a social media website is available for everyone to read (something like tildes or reddit), then perhaps nazis will be banned from posting there, but they should still be allowed to read it.
EDIT 2: it would not be moral for a website to ban a user just for being a nazi; they should only ban them for expressing nazist (or whatever) views on the site. However, I still recognize the right of a website to ban a user for any reason.
If Alex Jones registered an account here I would have absolutely no problem with him being banned immediately. Why? Because even if he doesn't express his vile views here, he will still be able to earn trust (if/when that system is in place) giving him more privileges on the site (which he can potentially abuse), and his mere presence will draw more like-minded lunatics to the site, including anyone he invites himself. Just because the problem of allowing such figures on the site isn't immediately apparent doesn't mean it won't lead to serious issues down the line.
Because they are increasingly good at hiding their power level and playing by the rules while simultaneously pushing dogwhistles that are readily deniable.
If someone is actually interested in participating and changing, they could just not make it known who they are. It's just a Tildes account, it is neither difficult to get nor important to be tied to who you are (at least if you are trying to change who you are).
I think a there is a fundamental difference here between, say, twitter and electricity.
Taking away a nazi's electricity is mostly just punishing them for being a nazi. Maybe you will prevent them from spreading hate indirectly, but it is a tenuous link.
Twitter on the other hand, is more like a traditional publisher or TV channel choosing to release nazi propaganda. It has nothing really to do with a person being punished or rewarded, it is about enabling the spread of harmful ideologies.
In other words, I think it is appropriate to punish behaviour rather than people. If a person is a nazi, but keeps their beliefs off their twitter account, then they shouldn't be punished. If they are using their twitter account to call for violence, then they should have their account banned.
I don't think that example does the discussion any favors. It's a totally unrelated issue, comparable to firefighters evacuating a house or the police shutting down a road because of an accident.
Also it's a difference between a utility and a private service. Even though PG&E is a private service, electricity, in most people's minds, should be a utility, like water.
I am pretty sure that PG&E is a private company that contracts with the government to be a utility. They still have all the same rules and regulations as a utility. It's similar to how land-line phone providers are classified as a utility, so there are the same regulations on them whether they are private or municipal.
It's this. In my state, I have power from Xcel (another massive privately-owned utility company), whereas my folks' area is served by a customer-owned power co-op, and there are cities with municipal electricity service here as well-- but both have to get things like rate increases cleared by the state PUC despite very different ownership structures. And one of the PUC's requirements is universal service within their operating areas-- neither the coop nor Xcel nor the cities that run their utilities are allowed to not connect structures and provide service. Same with shutoffs-- all providers are only allowed to do so for limited reasons (maintenance, safety, or non-payment, and the last is season-dependent).
Yep, so therefore they should not be able to deny anyone service based on speech.
No, I absolutely do not support such a thing. Anything bad enough to warrant such an action should be dealt with via the legal system. Your service providers should not be the arbitrators of morality.
I think its a different case when your product is enabling such an action. I would not want to be working somewhere developing software designed to kill people for example. I think gitlab gets off here since their software is no more helpful to evil users as it is to good. If gitlab had built in a feature specifically and only for evil use cases then I think that would be crossing the line.
Yeah... none of those options are real options. Killing someone because they're racist makes you worse than a racist. I'd take a racist over a murderer any day. Imprisoning someone, or segregating them for their beliefs isn't much better.
Education is obviously the only real option out of the ones you presented.
Wait, he was talking specifically about Nazis. And I'm pretty sure killing Nazis didn't make people during WWII "worse than a Nazi".
The problem with this is that the Nazis rose to power precisely because we didn't do enough to stop them before they moved beyond the "just saying things" stage.
Please disengage when you've recognized that a conversation is no longer productive, instead of keeping it going twice as long by trying to get the last word.
How does this scale with Tildes? Shall bad faith actors always have the last word?
I know people who believe "Kill them all, they deserve it for being awful". But the fact of matter is that method is unrealistic, and would have a real, awful, human cost. Of course, a lot of people completely dehumanize racists, which I to a degree can sympathize with. But ultimately to fix society we most likely will have to take more examples from denazification than from the gulags.
Hold up, public ISPs? You're fine with government violating the Constitution? Because, let's face it, until we amend it to forbid hate speech, then you're going to run up against some very hard legal cases.
In addition, giving this power away is something that isn't easily taken back. That is something that must be heavily considered.
But that's a different situation. You own the property. You are providing a service: access to that property. That is a private entity not wishing to associate with another private entity.
Denying internet, especially via a public utility, is a completely different ballgame.
I see.
But you recognize that this needs a constitutional amendment, right?
What makes them approach the status of public infrastructure is their market power.
In addition to this slippery slope, there is another slippery slope dimension: if racists, then what about sexual offenders? … those with low credit scores? …
For these reasons, I oppose the idea.
I'm surprised you're the only person to bring this up (as a parent comment, at least). The majority of people in this thread are ignoring the biggest problem when this half-baked idea is cooked through. Once you give a governing body or company that kind of authority, you run the risk of them resetting their crosshairs. How do you determine who is a Nazi? How do you prevent abuse? How do you guarantee the protection of protest groups that might have significant political disagreements with the companies providing electricity? What happens if Nazis take power and this is already ok? The potential problems of this idea vastly outweigh any benefit.
No. Of course, Nazis do not deserve space on the internet. Americans seem to have mental erections whenever they hear the words "free speech", but the world is not that simple, is it? Even in America, there are other principles to uphold. To give an example I used before: I do not (and should not) have the freedom to accuse a person of sexual assault, while knowing such person is innocent.
Those things are not related. Nazis do not deserve any space for their hateful platform. But they obviously deserve basic human rights, such as healthcare, etc.
Those are two very different things, and put them together is not helpful at all.
ISPs, social media platforms, and other big companies having too much power is a separate discussion. Fascism isn't just different beliefs, it's incompatible with modern Western society. Trump shouldn't get a free pass to spew his bullshit wherever he wants to because he's president. If Twitter wants to ban him they should be able to. Being absolute about free speech or tolerance only enables people who don't want those things to abuse them against you.
I'm fine with ISPs not being allowed to drop residential customers for being Nazis, but pretty much anything beyond basic utilities access is fair game. Civility is part of why fascism is making a comeback in the first place.
Fascism is an offspring of modern Western society :P
There's an interesting documentary called Welcome to Leith (trailer) that's sort of about this topic.
In focuses on a group of neo-Nazis who deliberately move to a small town in order to try to become a majority there and create their own white supremacist community. Part of the film covers the people in the town trying to figure out what they legally can and can't do to address the issue.
The question in the title isn't the main focus of the documentary (it's primarily about the tension created by the neo-Nazis' incursion), but I mention it here because it's not only relevant to the topic at hand but well worth a watch.
That does sound interesting, not far off from the Free State Project.
I would instead ask how harmless your product has to be before it's okay if you don't police your customers. I had previously assumed that weapons, drugs, money transfer, and now social media are special cases.
Others have said this in slightly different ways: you deny them electricity to do their nazi thing, except-
For example, you don’t refuse them access to the grid, but you disallow them to build a tank.
The hard to figure out is the speaking/writing thing. It was clearer in my mind until i started writing. I’m a pretty ardent acolyte of free speech generally, but i do think there is speech which rises to the level of proscribable harassment. And there should be no electricity for that speech.
I would proscribe speech which could reasonably be expected to have the effect of causing others such an intense feeling of exclusion that they then do not participate in basic activities of life.