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We've had multiple submissions on the confrontation in Charlottesville, Virginia between white supremacists and counter-protesters. We lead off with a submission about the altercation which culminated with a car driven into a crowd which left 1 person dead and 19 injured. Then we continue with GoDaddy informing dailystormer.com — a white supremacist web site which called for the rally — that they had 24 hours to find another registrar for their site. They signed up with Google's domain registration service. Now there are reports that Google, too, has dropped the registration.
This story could very well cause a lot of heat, but it is my hope we can look beyond the details of this particular situation and focus discussion on the overriding questions of freedom of speech/publication raised by one of the submitters and the implications it may lead to. This saying comes to mind: "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
Terrorism in Charlottesville: 1 Dead, 19 Injured
ProPublica reports:
Police Stood By As Mayhem Mounted in Charlottesville, Virginia
At about 10 a.m. [August 12], at one of countless such confrontations, an angry mob of white supremacists formed a battle line across from a group of counter-protesters, many of them older and gray-haired, who had gathered near a church parking lot. On command from their leader, the young men charged and pummeled their ideological foes with abandon. One woman was hurled to the pavement, and the blood from her bruised head was instantly visible.
Standing nearby, an assortment of Virginia State Police troopers and Charlottesville police wearing protective gear watched silently from behind an array of metal barricades--and did nothing.
[...] the white supremacists who flooded into the city's Emancipation Park--a statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee sits in the center of the park--had spent months openly planning for war. The Daily Stormer, a popular neo-Nazi website, encouraged rally attendees to bring shields, pepper spray, and fascist flags and flagpoles. A prominent racist podcast told its listeners to come carrying guns.
[...] the white supremacists who showed up in Charlottesville did indeed come prepared for violence. Many wore helmets and carried clubs, medieval-looking round wooden shields, and rectangular plexiglass shields, similar to those used by riot police.
[...] The police did little to stop the bloodshed. Several times, a group of assault-rifle-toting militia members from New York State, wearing body armor and desert camo, played a more active role in breaking up fights.
[...] The skirmishes culminated in what appears to have been an act of domestic terrorism, with a driver ramming his car into a crowd of anti-racist activists on a busy downtown street, killing one and injuring 19 according to the latest information from city officials. Charlottesville authorities tonight reported that a 20-year-old Ohio man had been arrested and had been charged with murder.
[...] A good strategy, [said Miriam Krinsky, a former federal prosecutor who has worked on police reform efforts in Los Angeles], is to make clashes less likely by separating the two sides physically, with officers forming a barrier between them. "Create a human barrier so the flash points are reduced as quickly as possible."
GoDaddy Stomps 'Daily Stormer' -- Site Moves to Google
The Washington Post reports GoDaddy bans neo-Nazi site Daily Stormer for disparaging woman killed at Charlottesville rally:
After months of criticism that GoDaddy was providing a platform for hate speech, the Web hosting company announced late Sunday that it will no longer house the Daily Stormer, a neo-Nazi website that promotes white supremacist and white nationalist ideas.
[...] We informed The Daily Stormer that they have 24 hours to move the domain to another provider, as they have violated our terms of service.
— GoDaddy (@GoDaddy) August 14, 2017
[...] In the Daily Stormer post[1], [Andrew] Angelin characterized [victim Heather] Heyer as dying in a "road rage incident." He said she was a "drain on society" and disparaged her appearance. "Most people are glad she is dead," he wrote.
"@GoDaddy you host The Daily Stormer — they posted this on their site," Twitter user Amy Siskind said in an appeal to the Web hosting company. "Please retweet if you think this hate should be taken down & banned."
[...] GoDaddy has previously said that the content, however "tasteless" and "ignorant," is protected by the First Amendment. The company told the Daily Beast in July that a Daily Stormer article threatening to "track down" the family members of CNN staffers did not violate Domains by Proxy's terms of service.
After the incidents in Charlottesville it seems GoDaddy have decided, one can gather from and after a massive amount of pressure, to no longer provide Domain name access to the Daily Stormer. While a private company is free to do whatever they like, I wonder if there will or might be further implications. I think the interesting question here isn't what happened in Charlottesville or what kind of stories they provide over at the Daily Stormer -- they might be or are a complete shitfest filled with neo-nazi-news for all I know. The interesting aspect is if companies should now monitor their customers, which it seems the Daily Stormer has been one for years, and ban or block customers that no longer align with company beliefs or that other customers find offensive. It seems the Daily Stormer has previously posted "tasteless" and "ignorant" stories that one can only assume have not aligned with GoDaddy policy or Terms of Service, but this one was somehow over the line and the straw that broke the camel's back?
I'm fairly sure the Daily Stormer won't be knocked offline or anything, there will always be someone willing to host them somewhere. So today they try to knock a neo-nazi site offline, I doubt many people will lose any sleep over that, but who is going to be next? Is this part of the ramping up of the current online-twitter-socialweb-culture? Is there a slippery slope here?
Google Domains, GoDaddy blacklist white supremacist site Daily Stormer
Ars Technica is reporting that Google Domains and GoDaddy have blacklisted white supremacist site Daily Stormer:
The article prompted a response from the site's domain registrar, GoDaddy. "We informed The Daily Stormer that they have 24 hours to move the domain to another provider, as they have violated our terms of service," GoDaddy wrote in a tweet late Sunday night.
On Monday, the Daily Stormer switched its registration to Google's domain service. Within hours, Google announced a cancellation of its own. "We are cancelling Daily Stormer's registration with Google Domains for violating our terms of service," the company wrote in an statement emailed to Ars.
[...] A lot of outlets covering this controversy described GoDaddy, somewhat misleadingly, as the Daily Stormer's hosting provider. But GoDaddy wasn't storing or distributing the content on the Daily Stormer website. It was the Daily Stormer's registrar, which is the company that handles registration of "dailystormer.com" in the domain name system, the global database that connects domain names like "arstechnica.com" to numeric IP addresses.
GoDaddy has faced pressure for months from anti-racist groups like the Southern Poverty Law Center and the Anti-Defamation League to drop the Daily Stormer as a customer. But until this weekend, GoDaddy resisted that pressure.
"GoDaddy doesn't host The Daily Stormer's content on its servers," the investigative site Reveal reported in May. "Because it provides only the domain name, the company says it has a higher standard for terminating service."
"We need to evaluate what level of effect we can actually have on the abuse that's actually going on," said Ben Butler, director of GoDaddy's digital crimes unit, in a May interview with Reveal. "As a domain name registrar, if we take the domain name down, that domain name stops working. But the content is still out there, live on a server connected to the Internet that can be reached via an IP address or forwarded from another domain name. The actual content is not something we can touch by turning on or off the domain name service."
But GoDaddy abruptly changed its stance on Sunday evening. What changed GoDaddy's mind? In a statement to Techcrunch, GoDaddy said: "given this latest article comes on the immediate heels of a violent act, we believe this type of article could incite additional violence, which violates our terms of service."
Reading GoDaddy's terms of service, this seems to support their stance that they could suspend the domain registration:
9. RESTRICTION OF SERVICES; RIGHT OF REFUSAL
[...] You agree that GoDaddy, in its sole discretion and without liability to you, may refuse to accept the registration of any domain name. GoDaddy also may in its sole discretion and without liability to you delete the registration of any domain name during the first thirty (30) days after registration has taken place. GoDaddy may also cancel the registration of a domain name, after thirty (30) days, if that name is being used, as determined by GoDaddy in its sole discretion, in association with spam or morally objectionable activities. Morally objectionable activities will include, but not be limited to:
- Activities prohibited by the laws of the United States and/or foreign territories in which you conduct business;
- Activities designed to encourage unlawful behavior by others, such as hate crimes, terrorism and child pornography; and
- Activities designed to harm or use unethically minors in any way.
As of the time of this being written, it appears that the Daily Stormer domain (dailystormer.com) is still being hosted by Google:
Domain Name: dailystormer.com
Registry Domain ID: 1787753602_DOMAIN_COM-VRSN
Registrar WHOIS Server: whois.google.com
Registrar URL: https://domains.google.com
Updated Date: 2017-08-14T14:51:45Z
Creation Date: 2013-03-20T22:43:18Z
Registrar Registration Expiration Date: 2020-03-20T22:43:18Z
Registrar: Google Inc.
Registrar IANA ID: 895
Registrar Abuse Contact Email:
Registrar Abuse Contact Phone: +1.8772376466
Domain Status: clientTransferProhibited https://www.icann.org/epp#clientTransferProhibited
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Runaway1956 on Tuesday August 15 2017, @12:57AM (30 children)
"discriminating against a protected class"
Oh yeah - reverse discrimination is all good. There ARE protected classes, aren't there? Got it. So, racism is a monstrous offense against humanity if the racist is white, but racism is not racism if the racist is nonwhite. On and on it goes.
(Score: 1, Troll) by aristarchus on Tuesday August 15 2017, @01:10AM (5 children)
Truly you are an idiot Runaway. Tell us more about how you are "oppressed" because you are a White Protestant Male Cracker.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 15 2017, @03:23AM (3 children)
Pardon me, oh great all-knowing, and supremely wise pedarast, but surely the failure is your own. If you were half as smart as you seem to think that you are, you could explain to Runaway why he is an idiot, is such a manner that convinces him to change his ways.
In short, you're the fucking idiot.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by aristarchus on Tuesday August 15 2017, @04:35AM (2 children)
Lord knows I've tried, as have many others! I have had students like this before, they are incapable of being educated, because they already know everything.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 15 2017, @05:36AM (1 child)
... and failed. And given up while still flapping your noise hole equivalent.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 15 2017, @06:10AM
I have it on confidential, that Runaway is a regular at the Turkish Bath in Texarkana! Can't say who told me, or what he does there, but just to let everyone know, Runaway is not what he presents himself to be. He is a two-faced, yellow-bellied, sap-sucking, Trump supporting by default, lying, Neo-confederate hornswaggler of the worst order, and a homosexual. Particularly with male goats. Sick! And Sad!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 15 2017, @01:57PM
I think you just demonstrated it with that comment.
(Score: 4, Funny) by Grishnakh on Tuesday August 15 2017, @01:23AM (23 children)
You show yourself to be an idiot here. According to federal law, race is a protected class, and there's no exceptions: discriminating against someone solely because they're white is just as illegal as if they're black.
(Score: 4, Informative) by The Mighty Buzzard on Tuesday August 15 2017, @01:48AM (22 children)
You'd think so, wouldn't you? SCOTUS has said otherwise every time it's legalized Affirmative Action though.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 15 2017, @01:52AM (21 children)
Nuance is lost on you... I wonder if Affirmative Action ever/does have any expiration clauses.
(Score: 3, Informative) by The Mighty Buzzard on Tuesday August 15 2017, @01:56AM (20 children)
Nuance my ass. Affirmative Action is racial discrimination and racial discrimination is wrong. There are no good forms of racism.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 15 2017, @03:32AM (1 child)
Affirmative action is sold as encouraging diversity. I'm not sure how much to buy into that, but I did work somewhere once where more than half the employees were from a certain country and liked to speak their language together. That was pretty annoying to everyone else, and the problem was actually a lack of diversity.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 15 2017, @06:21AM
Fucking Brits! Sus madres olían a bayas de saúco! And, they are racists, mostly.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Azuma Hazuki on Tuesday August 15 2017, @04:46AM (17 children)
AA is an aspirin for a tumor. One would rather have the aspirin if the only other choice is nothing, but AA is perilously close to being vacuous virtue-signalling.
And why is this? Because the problems start a hell of a lot earlier than college. I would, and do, argue that someone who is seriously interested in erasing racial disparities and working towards equality of opportunity (*not* outcome, which is by definition physically impossible) would fix the infrastructure and healthcare issues first.
Expecting people who grew up drinking lead-contaminated water and eating substandard food in dangerous neighborhoods with shit schools surrounded by violence with unstable family lives to prosper in college just because getting into it is made easier is somewhere between tone-deaf and rabidly delusional. Doubly so since college is somewhere between useless and a liability these days.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 15 2017, @05:39AM (10 children)
Affirmative Action is an aspirin for a tumor, the tumor is racism, of which AA also is. So AA is actually cancer cells for more cancer cells. See the problem with that approach?
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Tuesday August 15 2017, @06:07AM (9 children)
False equivalence. AA is an attempt, however misguided, to fight fire with reverse-polarity fire. This never works, *cannot* work, but if you think AA is the same thing as the Klan burning crosses on someone's lawn you're either too dumb to go outside without a leash or being deliberately and willfully wrong.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 15 2017, @06:21AM (6 children)
Did you just refer seriously to "reverse racism"? Why yes, I do believe you just did! Quick, drag your credibility to the Emergency Room before it finishes bleeding out!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 15 2017, @05:00PM
They are busy trying to save your brain, outlook grim.
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Tuesday August 15 2017, @05:34PM (4 children)
No. No I did not. Fucking read closer. If you want that in clearer terms, it's something like "this is an attempt to fight the harms of discrimination with a kind of equal-but-opposite reaction, not itself racism but using too many of its criteria."
I understand the motivation behind it, and it's better to have AA than have nothing, but if we as a nation are serious about fixing racial disparities the effort needs to be focused 18-20 years earlier than college. Prenatal care, safe water, nutritious food, safe neighborhoods, good schools, etc.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 15 2017, @09:14PM (3 children)
You're just doubling down on "racism is bad, so we need MORE racism to solve racism".
Lest you think I think everything would be fine and dandy without Affirmative Action, I recognize that the US government has been warring against US minorities - particularly black families - for generations now. If something is a problem (racism, government) the solution to said problem is not more of the same!
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Tuesday August 15 2017, @09:21PM (2 children)
I think we're agreeing with one another violently here, honestly. The difference is, you want essentially "repeal and don't replace" and i want "repeal and replace, immediately, with something that actually solves the problem."
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 0, Disagree) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 16 2017, @01:23AM (1 child)
We may agree that there is a problem consisting of a mix of government and skin-color prejudice (colloquially: racism). However, if by "repeal and replace, immediately", you mean to replace problems (enforced racism) with something which caused the problem in the first place (government - how else was the keeping of slaves "legal"), we are still very much in disagreement and one of us is still very, very wrong.
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Wednesday August 16 2017, @02:09AM
Ah, you're one of those. I really should have suspected. I'm tempted to ask what *your* solution would be, but the answer will probably not be amusing or novel enough to be worth the photons.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 15 2017, @06:58AM
Oh, it works! Just look at all these "white supremacy" submarginal types that are all upset about the unfairness of racial discrimination! Do you thing this is nothing? It will only take a slight switch before they make the connection. "Oh, if reverse discrimination is wrong, since it applies to my white ass, maybe it is wrong everywhere?" Well, we can hope, against all empirical evidence.
But you know, they are not wrong about this, it is just that they are still white supremacists who think that they should be in before Flint, that we have to stick together, us, um, Aryans? So, no Poles, No dogs or Irish, No Catholics! NO Serbo-Croats! And especially, no Vietnamese, no Cubans, no Afghans who were translators for American troops, because you know, they still are Muslins! And no Calicos!
And most especially, and this hurts me, because these are my kin: no Scots-Irish! They are not actually Irish, they are Lowland Scots, used by the British Monarchy to occupy Northern Ireland, and who were spread to the American colonies, often as prisoners in exile, to prison colonies like Georgia, and then became the racist core of the South, because, by God, if they were not English, there had to be someone below them, since then they would not be that! White trash, we call them today, people who are upset about Affirmative Action, because, as a Scottish professor once told me, those Scots-Irish in Northern Ireland are too stupid to realize that they are being used by the Brits!
And for those who do not know: The Burning Cross. Goes back to the time when the Celts were fighting those bloody white supremacists, the Romans. When the Romans attacked, riders were sent out along the borders of the Clans, carrying burning crosses, to signify that until the common enemy was repulsed, there were to be no attacks or cattle-raids between the Clans. How this got th be a "thing" amoungst a bunch of mongrel Americans who had no clan but only a (dubious) skin color, is beyond me. But Azuma's point sticks.
I think we need the equivalent of the burning cross for these Nazi and Neo-confederate types. Richard Spencer was saying they could have kill the counter protesters with their bare hands [rawstory.com]. Charming. But the point is that the internet can kill each one of these hate-filled bastards with social media! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yy-SiZSlmhI [youtube.com] Don't watch that video, it's violent, and may scare alt-right types. But we need to scare them, scare them straight. Let them speak, so we know who they are. Let them march, so we have pics and video. Let them be recognized everywhere they go, and be shunned by all decent people everywhere. Nazis had to flea to Argentina, where can the alt-right go?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 15 2017, @07:20AM
accept it can be proven that racial representation in many of these magical job fields has didly fucking squat to do with white supremecy, racism, or nazism whatever the fuck you want to call your imaginary boogie man today. So being actually racist against white people is just uncalled for and wrong. Riddle me this, what is the per capita representation of Asians in tech? or Jews in law? Yeah go fuck yourself woth "mah racism" bullshit.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday August 15 2017, @12:15PM (5 children)
Right now AA is the worst racism tumor out there. After all, the hunt for racism moved on to "unconscious" racism and microaggressions because there was no serious racism left to oppose. The war has been won and they're mopping up survivors at this point.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 15 2017, @02:47PM
Yeah, so true, e.g. white supremacy is only a joke kind of racism; even more is not a left racism, it's a right one, so a left kind needed to be invented.
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Tuesday August 15 2017, @05:39PM (3 children)
You're white, aren't you? No racial minority could ever say something that completely fucking ignorant about the modern USA. Racism is *not* gone just because you can only get away with a lynching if you're an LEO, Mr. Hallow.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday August 16 2017, @04:29AM (2 children)
Who isn't a racial minority these days?
That does mean it's vastly better than it was. What I think is complete bullshit here is speaking of racism as if it were still as bad as when tens or hundreds of thousands of Africans were kidnapped and sold to the New World. Or to speak of pollution as if it were still as bad as when rivers were catching on fire.
But one has to pretend that a mostly solved problem is as bad as it ever was in order to rationalize the crap such as affirmative action. A rational society would never have implemented affirmative action between it's more of the same venom as the original racism it is alleged to fight, and leads to the current situation where various special interests have become dependent on it and will fight to continue it no matter what.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 16 2017, @09:28AM (1 child)
I never thought, until this topic came up, that you were not just a right-wing libertarian Mises-loving idiot, but also a complete right-wing racist nut-job, khallow. I am sorry for you. AA generates no venom amongst normal white people. We take it as a normal part of the path to a race-free society. It is only pathetic racist losers like yourselves hiding in your momma's basements or in the trailer-court that see it this way. You do not not have a job because of Affirmative Action, you do not have a job because you are not capable of getting one and holding one down. Possibly because you cannot keep your darn mouth shut about your waco political opinions?
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday August 16 2017, @08:13PM
Why do you think a race-free society is desirable? Obviously, if there's no concept of ethnicity or race, then you can't have conflict based on ethnicity or race. But humans are naturally divisive as the rest of your post indicates. My bet is that humanity would in a race-free situation find some other reason for having and displaying bigotry as you did. At that point, it's just bigotry about something else, like where people have the right opinions, live in trailer parks, or have jobs.