About
    • AMMDI is an open-notebook hypertext writing experiment, authored by Mike Travers aka mtraven. It's a work in progress and some parts are more polished than others. Comments welcome! More.
Search
Full
Incoming links
from Good Old-fashioned Liberal Individualism

  • A note on fascism and deplatforming

    • ...the realization that the old-school liberalism that I grew up with is just false in many respects, and one of those its its model of free speech. The liberal idea is that speech and discourse is highly separable from action and power, so you can let all manner of ideas be debated in the speech-sphere and hopefully the good ones will win out due to rationality and make it into the sphere of action.
    • But this is entirely wrong, and its particularly wrong for political speech, which is always aimed at producing some kind of power shift in the real world. Political speech is not about ideas, its about the political strength of people and coalitions. Everybody kind of knows this, too, except a few naive intellectuals.
    • And it's particularly wrong when it comes to fascism, which attacks the liberal and rational basis of society. Fascism doesn't operate on ideas; and the Trumpian form of fascism is explcitly designed to allow people to express their feelings without regard to any ground truths, which are dismissed as "fake news".
    • Liberalism doesn't really know how to defend itself against these toxic ideas, given its metaphysics. I view all the cancellation brou-ha-ha as kind of a weak immune response of liberal civilization against an invasive and potentially fatal disease. It's maybe not the best defense, but its better than nothing, And like a biological immune response, it can go too far and cause more damage than it prevents.
    • Also I would think that all the weirdness at the margins of the Trump movement (Kek, meme magic, the Qanon cult, and the connections with Yarvin and Nick Land) would be topics of great interest here. Maybe it's too unpleasant to think about how weird shit is being weaponized by malignant forces, but probably not good idea to ignore it either.
    • Deplatforming is the social analog of Freudian repression. And while both of those might be necessary for civilization, they are imperfect, and the repressed will always try to find ways to reassert itself.
from Eric Raymond
  • [note: I have very mixed feelings about deplatforming – I used to be more of a free speech absolutist but that has changed over the years]
    • Ask Claude
      • Yes, this has happened — most notably at the organization he co-founded.
      • Banned from the OSI
      • Eric S. Raymond, one of the founders of the Open Source Initiative and its president for the first six years, was banned from two OSI mailing lists following messages whose tone violated the code of conduct.
      • The ban came in early 2020.
      • Raymond had posted to an OSI mailing list with the title "A wild co-founder appears," announcing his return after twenty years of staying off the list.
      • What followed were several posts over the next two days on topics relating to open source licensing, after which an OSI board member posted a notice that a subscriber had been removed from both the License-Review and License-Discuss mailing lists for repeatedly violating the Code of Conduct.
      • One absolute sticking point in the OSI's code of conduct is that you must not make threatening, disparaging, or belittling remarks about another person — and this is what appears to have led to Raymond being disbarred from posting.
      • One of his emails that is widely cited as a likely trigger described the originator of an ethical source license proposal as "a toxic loonytoon who believes 'show me the code' meritocracy is at best outmoded and in general a sinister supremacist plot by straight white cisgender" men.
      • In early March 2020, he was removed from two Open Source Initiative mailing lists due to posts that violated the OSI's Code of Conduct. Raymond himself said, "They never told me specifically which message was the cause."
      • Broader Ostracism
      • In recent years, Raymond has been ostracized from the open source community due, in part, to his remarks and writing about race, gender, and homosexuality.
      • A Notable Wrinkle: What He Was Banned For
      • It's worth noting that the proximate cause of the OSI ban was not explicitly his racism or gun advocacy, but rather his conduct in a licensing debate — specifically, his aggressive opposition to "ethical source" licenses.
      • The OSI cited violations of its own CoC, which Raymond's critiques directly contested by arguing that such policies prioritized non-technical ideological enforcement over merit-based contribution.
      • Raymond's own response was characteristically combative: he called for abolishing "Codes of Conduct" and "all the Orwellian doublespeak that goes with them."
      • So in short: yes, he has been deplatformed from the organization he co-founded, though the stated trigger was his rhetorical behavior in a mailing list debate rather than his broader racist or pro-violence writings — the latter of which have faced social and reputational consequences but have not, as far as the public record shows, resulted in formal bans from other specific projects.

deplatforming

07 Nov 2021 - 04 Nov 2026
Open in Logseq
    • Deplatforming is the social analog of Freudian repression. And while both of these processes are necessary for civilization, they are imperfect, and the repressed will always try to find ways to reassert itself.
    • The specifics of deplatforming controversies don't interest me that much – should view x be allowed to be presented at venue y? The arguments are always the same, and because absolute freedom of speech is almost never relevant (sure Nazis have freedom of speech, but they don't have a right to give a seminar at Yale, and its the question of who gets those privileged speaking spots that is at issue).
    • Instead I try to take a sort of abstract view – what is the nature of this process? It is an ongoing social political process of determining what kind of viewpoints are acceptable and which are not. This changes over time and place – anti-semitism, for example, used to be common and respectible, has changed to be unacceptable since WWII, but is now becoming accepted on the margins thanks to the rise of Trump and the alt-right.
    • There's nothing wrong with this, it's just how morality works. There's no objective right and wrong, there's just what we tolerate or do not. Many people can't handle this idea, believing that either there's an objective morality or there can't be any.