Wednesday, August 23, 2017
ANITIFA and vigilantism against individuals as well as groups; a very slippery slope endangering free speech. liberalism and law-and -order
Salon has run a disturbing report or cover story by Michelle
Goldberg on “The Public Face of Antifa”, link . Goldberg provides the subtext, “Daryle
Jenkins has stepped up to explain this group’s violent attacks to a wary world.
It’s not easy.” A Facebook friend messaged this link to me at around 3 AM, Donald Trump's favorite time of the night.
An important part of the group’s “mission”, she
explains, goes beyond physical confrontation and hitting back. The group wants
to warn individuals (perhaps through direct intimidation) about the possible
direct consequences of becoming personally involved supporting “racist” groups,
either in physical rallies (as with Charlottesville) or even online,
perhaps.
I do understand the point that non-white people may
feel physically threatened by a gathering of certain groups, include the KKK
and neo-Nazis, and get (with some Second Amendment irony) that they may insist
on moral justification for the right to fight back. I had not been aware until
recently of accounts that most urban Confederate statues had been put up in the
early 20th Century specifically to intimidate blacks, so I am rather
shocked sometimes at those who demand that others join them.
But this still sounds like a slippery slope. It is impossible to say that the KKK is worse
than ISIS, for example (the latter may be more dangerous to me). It is true, it is customary for the US
government to label certain groups as terrorist-connected. But outside that zone, for an independent group
to threaten private individuals for their associations or online expressions
sounds like something that could spread to many areas, well beyond race or even
gender and sexuality issues as we normally see them now. We could decide that some person is somehow
underserving and must be driven into exile.
Personally combative vigilantism, whether from the domestic Left or from
radical Islam, has already sometimes forced some people to disappear and live
underground, ranging from Darren Wilson (the Michael Brown incident) to Molly
Norris (the cartoon controversy). With
very much of this, the whole liberal idea of law and order dissolves, and life
becomes a matter of fitting in to other people’s power structures, like in most
of the third world today.
I’ve mentioned Cloudflare’s Matthew Prince before, but
today he has a column in the Wall Street Journal, “Was I right to pull the plug on a Nazi website? “ He adds a subtext, “A handful of private
companies control whether speech can appear online. That’s reason to worry.” Prince adds to earlier comments where he says
He writes “The reality of today’s Internet is that if you are publishing anything
remotely controversial, your side will get cyberattacked” (Well, maybe.) “Without a massive global
network like Cloudflare’s, it is nearly impossible to withstand the barrage.” What counts as “remotely controversial?” Something like gender fluidity? Or sheltering undocumented immigrants? Or talking about radical Islam or North
Korea? I did have an experience with a discussion about 9/11 and nuclear threats getting hacked way back in early 2002 on an old legacy site. I can imagine how this could go, as I noted in a few postings back in 2013, with attempts to frame people for child pornography or sex trafficking (Section 230 again) for stepping out of line of somebody else's group political goals.
No wonder one-sided non-profits can send out emails
begging for money claiming only “they” can speak for you and protect you. How insulting.
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