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from the right-to-speak-but-not-to-be-heard dept.
[Seconding-Ed note: This story is likely to be contentious. In the interests of helping set the tone, I would like to start off by quoting H.L. Mencken:
The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one's time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at all.
Further, this quote which has appeared in various phrasings and attributions:
I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.
To mind's eye, I must be willing to accept against my own words and actions any that I would wish to see imposed upon another. --martyb]
YouTube Restores Far-Right Channels After Appeal
Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:
The channels of two prominent far-right YouTubers have been re-instated after the video-sharing site said it made a mistake in removing them. Initially, YouTube gave no reason for changing its decision and just said it had made a "wrong call". Later, it said that while many people found the channels "deeply offensive", they had not broken its rules. The decision came days after YouTube's chief executive said YouTube had to be open to hosting "controversial" ideas.
YouTube removed several channels and accounts this week, claiming they had broken its hate speech policies. Among them was a channel run by white nationalist Martin Sellner and an anonymous British YouTuber known as The Iconoclast. Mr Sellner was reportedly in contact with the man who allegedly carried out the Christchurch mosque shootings in March this year that killed 51 people. Austrian police are investigating his links to the attack. He denies any involvement in the shooting.
Both men protested about the closure of their YouTube channels on social media. They shared information sent to them from YouTube, which said they had "repeatedly" broken its guidelines. On Thursday, YouTube reversed its decision and reinstated the two channels. Several other far-right channels that YouTube banned this week remain unavailable.
An explanation for the change of heart came on Friday. Farshad Shadloo, YouTube's global product policy communications lead, said that after a "thorough review" it had decided that the channels had not broken its rules. "We realise that many may find the viewpoints expressed in these channels deeply offensive," he said. Mr Shadloo added that YouTube had recently updated the way it handled "hateful content".
Earlier this week YouTube boss Susan Wojcicki wrote in a letter to video-makers that YouTube must remain an "open platform". She said the desire to welcome all kinds of views had to be balanced against a "responsibility to protect the community".
"A commitment to openness is not easy. It sometimes means leaving up content that is outside the mainstream, controversial or even offensive," she said. "Hearing a broad range of perspectives ultimately makes us a stronger and more informed society," she claimed.
'I am Talking Directly to You': US Attorney Delivers Powerful Rebuke to White Nationalists
The U.S. attorney for the Northern District of Ohio on Thursday announced new federal charges against a self-avowed white nationalist accused of threatening to commit an attack on a local Jewish community center. James Reardon, who attended the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, was arrested last week after authorities said he posted the threat on Instagram. U.S. Attorney Justin Herdman said Reardon has now been charged with one count of making threats as authorities continue their investigation into Reardon and whether he my have any accomplices.
Of course, not so much that, but what Herdman said after that.
"I am talking directly to you," Herdman said at a news conference announcing the charges. "The Constitution protects your right to speak, your right to think, and your right to believe. If you want to waste the blessings of liberty by going down a path of hatred and failed ideologies, that is your choice."
Herdman continued, evoking the sacrifices made by U.S. service members in World War II against Nazism, as well as those who marched for civil rights throughout U.S. history.
"Thousands and thousands of young Americans already voted with their lives to ensure that this same message of intolerance, death, and destruction would not prevail - you can count their ballots by visiting any American cemetery in North Africa, Italy, France, or Belgium and tallying the white headstones," Herdman said. "You can also recite the many names of civil rights advocates who bled and died in opposing supporters of those same ideologies of hatred. Their voices may be distant, but they can still be heard."
"The Constitution may give you a voice, but it doesn't guarantee you a receptive audience," Herdman added.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 30 2019, @09:27PM (5 children)
Ahead of differences, yes there are white haters and black haters and non-haters on both sides. (Plus it's bigger than just black and white, literally and figuratively).
I started to write a reply mimicing your style in a tit-for-tat fashion.
Before I finished it I realized that this was being unnecessarily hostile and mimicking isn't the best way to share my mind. But here's where I'd differ with what you wrote:
Racism isn't only about hate. Racism is just as much about ideas which propagate notions that things are all better now and people of color are perfectly equal to whites. Such notions are very insidious. They are false. They are about other issues which aren't overtly hateful as well.
The world of European civilization from about the mid 1400s had ongoing slavery involved in it. Slavery between Africa and Europe predated Columbus' discovery. The contributions of the people you mention occurred in that world and their discoveries were supported by it. Some, like Columbus, directly supported it since he involuntarily took six persons into servanthood on his first day in the "New World." That is just for openers, he also facilitated other 'servants' transported from Hispaniola to the Old World. I would be especially careful using him as an example.
If looking historically, there is a big difference between Black Panthers who wanted to make sure white people don't lynch black people and monitor and observe police brutality of persons of color. Whites actively lynched blacks long before blacks started actively defending themselves and demanding separations and White Segregation long preceded that of blacks and for different reasons. White Supremacists want to see blacks who don't hold their places subservient to whites lynched. These are big differences.
If you think people will become hateful or violent because of your choice of musicians then that pretty much shows the phantoms you are afraid of. Unless you were thinking of something specific and citable.
A lot of really nice people accept racist ideas without a second thought as just being the way the world works, and can hold racist ideas while still acting nice.
White people, generally, have no history of organized oppression or slavery for which they need to recover their pride from.
And none of this is written to make you incendiary or defensive. Just to try and widen perspective a little bit that maybe communication divides are more than just one way.
I'm not particularly interested in opening a dialog about this. The odds of it changing anything are low. I think posting this SN story in this way was ill advised and that the fact of the change of YouTube's attitude might be discussed independent of the right-vs-left white-vs-color howling that is likely being engineered by outside sources to sow discord. So I wouldn't expect a reply from me to this even if you do reply. But who knows (and who can tell with AC posting....)
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 31 2019, @02:35AM (2 children)
Not from people of other skin colors, but between different European-origin nationalities/ethnic groups, there definitely has been a history of organized oppression both in the US and Europe, just not within the past 70 or so years for the US or Western Europe. (The parts of Europe that were part of the USSR had it, but that's another story.)
Slavery between different Euro-ethnic groups also took place in Europe until around the same time that slavery in general ended. The slavery situation in Africa was similarly pre-existing between different groups before they started selling each other to Europeans. (For that matter, I'd be surprised if there's any ethnic groups on Earth that didn't engage in slavery at some point within the last five hundred years.)
(Score: 0, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 31 2019, @06:52AM
But, you fucking racist fucking fucker, who deserves to be fucked, slavery in the ancient world was never, I repeat, NEVER, based on race, or skin color, or any fucking thing other than that you were a fucking slave because you could not fucking read an write, and you lost a war. In nice wars, they killed all the military age males, so you might have the honor to become a fuck slave, female or young boy. So, don't lose wars, or your ass is at risk, libertariantard!
It is not until American Slavery that we have a Race based Slavery system. Fuching racists. Makes it easier to identify runaways, like Runaway1856, even if they are Free blacks. We could snatch them and sell them on the presumption that they were slaves, much like how now the Fucking Trumpt Racist Adminstration can apprehend peope who look Hispanic, on the grounds they might be illegal immigrants,
Now, if only we had a system, that would, for example, target any caucasian male opening carrying a weapon of mass destruction, and immediately lock that crazy fucker up, for being a crazy white man with a gun. That is what I want. White lives with guns, don't matter, and are a threat to the rest of us. Lock them up, and Send them back!
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 31 2019, @12:16PM
Also the muslin had a lot of white people of european origin as slaves, and the number surpass by a wide margin the black slaves thar the white had.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Reziac on Saturday August 31 2019, @06:19AM
"White people, generally, have no history of organized oppression or slavery for which they need to recover their pride from."
Really? Have you looked at the history of Europe? We did a bang-up job of oppressing and enslaving one another, starting with the earliest thralls and serfs, and culminating with the Soviet Union. Maybe not up to the standards of some other folks, but we did our best.
We also eliminated slavery and oppression sooner and more thoroughly than anyone else... so thoroughly that it's apparently been erased from the history books.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 01 2019, @04:56PM
you're a stupid brainwashed idiot. the historical "facts" you listed are bullshit. your simplistic interpretations are hilarious.