The Law Freedom of Speech

[Chief]

Speaking of ads, Chief why is your site constantly encouraging me to hook up with single asian women?

I copped an awful hiding from the girlfriend when I showed her the hypocrisy of the left thread, and one of those ads popped up. She started ranting about something called pr0n cookies.

I usually just munch on oreo's when watching pr0n.

I think you view so many BF pages that the system is down to serving you the cheap dating ads.

 

[CheapCharlie]

Speaking of ads, Chief why is your site constantly encouraging me to hook up with single asian women?
.

I dont see the problem here

 

[CheapCharlie]

And that sucks, but it also depends on the contract he has with Patreon.

If they remain unresponsive, the best thing is for people to leave in support of him. Or get better ToS and contracts. We have had a lot of legislation in Australia about unfair contracts foisted on people who don't have much choice.

Or take legal action.

If you have one main provider that is easy to use of receiving money for support or giving it, that's what people are going to use.
Its like telling someone to accept another method of payment on EBay other than Paypal. If 99% of customers want to use Paypal, what can you change to?

Really? I don't remember banning my son from Pewdiepie. Could have happened.

So he has made millions. More than most people make in a lifetime. Go do something else. Make your own platform. Host your own videos. Sell your own ads. Or do it better and make a living from merch and other products, without external ads.

This isn't possible for a lot of people. Their area of interest wouldn't support a stand alone site, or they wont attract enough people to using the site.
How do you think you would go if you started up a BigFooty site today? I'd suggest it would fail, because you already have the established Bigfooty site and people are happy to stick with the one central platform.
Its the same with Youtube. Users want to stick with using one platform

He can use a personal credit card and reimburse.

None of these obstacles are insurmountable.

If he has real fans instead of passive viewers they will put cash or a cheque in an envelope and send it. That's how it used to be done.

How about bitcoin? The currency of the future!

What these guys are finding is their output is in no way unique, and they are completely interchangeable in the market for eyeballs. As soon as passively supporting them by watching ads isn't an option - and how many of you guys block online ads anyway? - it becomes too hard for the average viewer and they go elsewhere.

It's hilarious to see a young YouTuber parading through his garage showing off his sports car(s). They have NFI how precarious their situation is. They are dealing with cut-throat American companies that give not one pinch of s**t for them individually.

They signed away their right to say whatever they like. They put their entire fan base in the hands of another company. Crazy.

And they believe they have a right to make money from streaming a Fortnite session or filming a water balloon fight with their girlfriend. This is entirely superfluous and interchangeable content.

No one has a right to make a living through making videos, but its clear Jack Conte & patreon is banning people based on his personal politics, its nothing to do with content.

Do you really think people are going to send a cheque or cash? Its a ridiculous assertion.
Patreon doesn't just affect Youtube, it affects anywhere someone wants to ask for continued support. Users like to use patreon because it is easy and safe to use and everything can be done from one place

In the end this is not even about these guys saying what they like. It's about them making money from their content.

So, what would be the options to force Patreon and YouTube etc to let these people make money from their content?

Civil action? Legislation?

There isn't anything wrong with wanting to have freedom of speech and to make money from it. Youtube has a business model where it gets content for free, plugs in some advertising, and send a few pennies back the way of the content provider.
Patreon is there to make money, and allows people to support who they want for whatever personal reasons they want.
Why should Patreon be a moral arbiter when it comes to selected passages of speech?
Patreon is there to facilitate payments and take its percentage cut, and it should stay out of this virtue signalling guff that its boss Jack Conte continually buys into.
Or if it wants to be the moral arbiter, then it can apply the same standards to every single person who uses Patreon, checking into their past history, and if there is just one infraction of the Patreon view of acceptable behaviours, it can ban those people.
As it is, Patreon is using its market power to squash people Jack Conte personally dislikes

 

[Chief]

There isn't anything wrong with wanting to have freedom of speech and to make money from it. Youtube has a business model where it gets content for free, plugs in some advertising, and send a few pennies back the way of the content provider.

Just on that - from what I know it's 65% through AdSense. Might be different through YT.

 

[CheapCharlie]

Just on that - from what I know it's 65% through AdSense. Might be different through YT.

Youtube guys make money per view, depending on the ad type. So could be from $5-$10 per 10,000 views is my understanding. I think you need to have a minimum of 1000 subscribers now to be able to be monetised.

I was told you get paid less for views from certain parts of the world, example views from India paid a lower rate

 

[Chief]

Youtube guys make money per view, depending on the ad type. So could be from $5-$10 per 10,000 views is my understanding. I think you need to have a minimum of 1000 subscribers now to be able to be monetised.

I was told you get paid less for views from certain parts of the world, example views from India paid a lower rate

So - not pennies.

 

[CheapCharlie]

So - not pennies.

Yes pennies..

 

[Gethelred]

... You realise Sargon of Akkad's a bit of an idiot.

He's made claims based on scant evidence, and then proceeds to base his entire argument on those claims. Youtube is filled with videos debunking his and others like his videos, point out the errors in fact and the poor logic.

And what he talks about in that video already exists. It's called 4chan.

 

[FireKrakouer]

Youtube guys make money per view, depending on the ad type. So could be from $5-$10 per 10,000 views is my understanding. I think you need to have a minimum of 1000 subscribers now to be able to be monetised.

I was told you get paid less for views from certain parts of the world, example views from India paid a lower rate

So the makers of Baby Shark are millionaires then, with 2B views from a simple af song... what a time to be alive.

 

[Snake_Baker]

... You realise Sargon of Akkad's a bit of an idiot.

He's made claims based on scant evidence, and then proceeds to base his entire argument on those claims. Youtube is filled with videos debunking his and others like his videos, point out the errors in fact and the poor logic.

And what he talks about in that video already exists. It's called 4chan.

They give out degrees, phd's and government funded careers to much bigger idiots than him.

 

[Snake_Baker]

I think you view so many BF pages that the system is down to serving you the cheap dating ads.

Can I get a trade in on the Russian missus chief? They're a bugger to acclimatise.

 

[Leeda]

So - not pennies.

;laughing ... the Pennines ... or sorting like that .. curiouser and strange... these things rattle and they ground...

 

[Snake_Baker]

Taking on the Offendotrons: a review of Russell Blackford’s ‘The Tyranny of Opinion’

written by Helen Dale



A review of The Tyranny of Opinion by Russell Blackford. Bloomsbury Academic Press (October 18, 2018) 240 pages.

It’s fair to say I have a leitmotif when it comes to commentary. Starting in 2015 (in the Guardian) and multiple times since, I’ve written about offendotrons getting people sacked for their dissenting from progressive orthodoxy breaching politically correct speech codes. Typically, these episodes begin with something like an open letter, a Twitter pile-on, a petition. Sometimes the desired outcome isn’t a sacking. It can be having a book or paper withdrawn, or a publication contract terminated, or no-platforming a speaker, or inducing advertisers and funders to end financial support. Occasionally, it veers into criminality—doxxing, calling police to an individual’s house (known as “swatting”), street harassment.

I could bang on about offendotrons every week and have to resist the impulse. At the time of writing, Oxford Law Professor John Finnis—one of my university tutors and a devout Catholic—was in scope. The attacks on him proceeded in the familiar way. He wrote something “offensive” about gay marriage in a 2011 collection of essays. Someone quote-mines the book. Cue outrage, tweetstorms, a petition, and digging through everything he’s ever written. Finnis—according to the petition—is a homophobe who argues against “the humanity of disadvantaged people.”

The idea of testing Finnis’s ideas intellectually was not entertained until Oxford law student Bláthnaid Breslin wrote a thoughtful piece for The Times. She argued against many of his beliefs, but made the crucial point that his claims for natural law and human rights stand or fall independently of his fairly standard Catholic views on homosexuality. Instead: Do not pass “Go.” Do not collect £200. Go straight to “sack him!”

Russell Blackford’s Tyranny of Opinion: Conformity and the Future of Liberalism does three things to combat this unwelcome trend. First, it provides an updated restatement of John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty for the internet age. Second, it sets out the danger posed by intellectual conformity to public reason and political debate. Third, it provides a forensic analysis of the extent to which people on the political Left all over the developed world have adopted behavior once mainly indulged in by American social conservatives—the weaponizing of moral outrage.

In performing these three labors, Blackford also does lots of other useful things. He outlines how people on the liberal-left—where, incidentally, he positions himself—are often more afraid of each other than they are of their conservative or classical liberal opponents. He provides a bipartisan history of the “outrage industry” that goes back 30 years. Eschewing the phrase “fake news,” he instead discusses how credulous reporting (“believe all women!”) has something in common with the atrocity propaganda that emerged during World War I. He draws careful distinctions between historical shaming campaigns and modern ones.

From the first page, Blackford makes it clear his concern is with civil society and public reason more broadly, not freedom of speech in isolation. He recapitulates Mill in part because he agrees with him that private constraints on speech and behavior can be almost as destructive, at least in liberal democracies, as state constraints. Mill argued that “there needs protection also against the tyranny of the prevailing opinion and feeling, against the tendency of society to impose, by other means than civil penalties, its own ideas and practices as rules of conduct on those who dissent.” Blackford suggests that over centuries—at least in the developed world—we have learnt to manage and constrain the state. By contrast, we have not the faintest idea what to do about Google and Facebook. There’s only one internet, and we’re all trapped there for the rest of our lives.

Read more: https://quillette.com/2019/01/28/ta...of-russell-blackfords-the-tyranny-of-opinion/

 

[Chief]

Taking on the Offendotrons: a review of Russell Blackford’s ‘The Tyranny of Opinion’

written by Helen Dale



A review of The Tyranny of Opinion by Russell Blackford. Bloomsbury Academic Press (October 18, 2018) 240 pages.

It’s fair to say I have a leitmotif when it comes to commentary. Starting in 2015 (in the Guardian) and multiple times since, I’ve written about offendotrons getting people sacked for their dissenting from progressive orthodoxy breaching politically correct speech codes. Typically, these episodes begin with something like an open letter, a Twitter pile-on, a petition. Sometimes the desired outcome isn’t a sacking. It can be having a book or paper withdrawn, or a publication contract terminated, or no-platforming a speaker, or inducing advertisers and funders to end financial support. Occasionally, it veers into criminality—doxxing, calling police to an individual’s house (known as “swatting”), street harassment.

I could bang on about offendotrons every week and have to resist the impulse. At the time of writing, Oxford Law Professor John Finnis—one of my university tutors and a devout Catholic—was in scope. The attacks on him proceeded in the familiar way. He wrote something “offensive” about gay marriage in a 2011 collection of essays. Someone quote-mines the book. Cue outrage, tweetstorms, a petition, and digging through everything he’s ever written. Finnis—according to the petition—is a homophobe who argues against “the humanity of disadvantaged people.”

The idea of testing Finnis’s ideas intellectually was not entertained until Oxford law student Bláthnaid Breslin wrote a thoughtful piece for The Times. She argued against many of his beliefs, but made the crucial point that his claims for natural law and human rights stand or fall independently of his fairly standard Catholic views on homosexuality. Instead: Do not pass “Go.” Do not collect £200. Go straight to “sack him!”

Russell Blackford’s Tyranny of Opinion: Conformity and the Future of Liberalism does three things to combat this unwelcome trend. First, it provides an updated restatement of John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty for the internet age. Second, it sets out the danger posed by intellectual conformity to public reason and political debate. Third, it provides a forensic analysis of the extent to which people on the political Left all over the developed world have adopted behavior once mainly indulged in by American social conservatives—the weaponizing of moral outrage.

In performing these three labors, Blackford also does lots of other useful things. He outlines how people on the liberal-left—where, incidentally, he positions himself—are often more afraid of each other than they are of their conservative or classical liberal opponents. He provides a bipartisan history of the “outrage industry” that goes back 30 years. Eschewing the phrase “fake news,” he instead discusses how credulous reporting (“believe all women!”) has something in common with the atrocity propaganda that emerged during World War I. He draws careful distinctions between historical shaming campaigns and modern ones.

From the first page, Blackford makes it clear his concern is with civil society and public reason more broadly, not freedom of speech in isolation. He recapitulates Mill in part because he agrees with him that private constraints on speech and behavior can be almost as destructive, at least in liberal democracies, as state constraints. Mill argued that “there needs protection also against the tyranny of the prevailing opinion and feeling, against the tendency of society to impose, by other means than civil penalties, its own ideas and practices as rules of conduct on those who dissent.” Blackford suggests that over centuries—at least in the developed world—we have learnt to manage and constrain the state. By contrast, we have not the faintest idea what to do about Google and Facebook. There’s only one internet, and we’re all trapped there for the rest of our lives.

Read more: https://quillette.com/2019/01/28/ta...of-russell-blackfords-the-tyranny-of-opinion/

So it was the conservatives who infected the world with this. They have a lot to answer for.

 

[ShanDog]

So it was the conservatives who infected the world with this. They have a lot to answer for.

Thought that was fairly well known and accepted. It was the conservative types who shamed people into behaving in accordance with social norms for a long time. Probably always, and still occurs now, but the progressives really stepped up their game in this area over the last couple of decades!

 

[Snake_Baker]

So it was the conservatives who infected the world with this. They have a lot to answer for.

Blame it on whoever you like, just acknowledge it's existence as the primary tactic of the SJW movement.

 

[Snake_Baker]

Thought that was fairly well known and accepted. It was the conservative types who shamed people into behaving in accordance with social norms for a long time. Probably always, and still occurs now, but the progressives really stepped up their game in this area over the last couple of decades!

Like I have stated elsewhere, "mini Murdochs".

The same people that used to call out this absurd crap now lay silent whilst it reinforces their own politics.

 

[its free real estate]

Interesting essay:

​

Men like Stalin did not oppose freedom of expression simply because it threatened their personal power. They opposed freedom of expression because they earnestly believed it was a pointless exercise. There is no point in debating with representatives of the bourgeoisie when the ideas of the bourgeoisie were not pliable to debate. If the opposing stance was not the product of reason, it could not be undone by reason. Ideas could not be argued against, because at their base they were not arguments. Words were weapons. Those who possessed the wrong ideas could not be persuaded—only removed, enslaved, or conditioned.​

​

This is the dangerous endgame of an intellectual world where that allows no space for the argument made in good faith.​

https://scholars-stage.blogspot.com/2019/01/on-words-and-weapons.html

 

[Chief]

Thought that was fairly well known and accepted. It was the conservative types who shamed people into behaving in accordance with social norms for a long time. Probably always, and still occurs now, but the progressives really stepped up their game in this area over the last couple of decades!

IMO it was the conservatives who had the microphone. Das Internetten evened it up.

 

[ShanDog]

IMO it was the conservatives who had the microphone. Das Internetten evened it up.

Maybe for the first few years of widespread internet access. But with social media came increased visibility and perceived obligations to virtue signal by corporations and individuals which has led to the shaming mobs and outrage culture, fuelling speech restriction etc etc. It's all tied together IMO.

 

[Snake_Baker]

IMO it was the conservatives who had the microphone. Das Internetten evened it up.

So it's acceptable now?

 

[Chief]

So it's acceptable now?

Only when it's arseholes that nobody likes.

 

[Chief]

Maybe for the first few years of widespread internet access. But with social media came increased visibility and perceived obligations to virtue signal by corporations and individuals which has led to the shaming mobs and outrage culture, fuelling speech restriction etc etc. It's all tied together IMO.

But nobody is actually restricted from saying anything. Just limited on commercial platforms.

They can always start a web site and they have their voice for whatever they like.

Or start a newsletter like in the good old days.

 

[Snake_Baker]

Only when it's arseholes that nobody likes.

Okay, that explains bigfooty.com I suppose.

 

[ShanDog]

But nobody is actually restricted from saying anything. Just limited on commercial platforms.

They can always start a web site and they have their voice for whatever they like.

Or start a newsletter like in the good old days.

It's a bullshit argument Chief, not dissimilar in logic to those who say "But it IS ok to be white!" State-induced control of speech is one (terrible IMO) thing that many people are Ok with for (for some reason) at least to certain extents, and that's one aspect of freedom to speak your mind. The other is social compulsion - something far more grey but just as important to be taken seriously. The article SB referenced above is about a text that discussed just that, and inevitably, the subsequent talk ended up with the "But you can just start your own platform" argument. There should be a name for it like Godwin's Law. The fact that you could invest money into a platform that doesn't control any speech is not the point at all, and neither does it make you immune to social pressures either. The only way to do that is be anonymous, which creates its own set of problems if you're trying to have meaningful discussion on difficult topics.

If I started my own website and talked about how the gender wage gap was absolute rubbish, I could post what I want. However, as soon as I put my name to it, it only takes a prospective employer who is an idiot to google me, find it, and deny me a job. Or a promotion. Or any number of other things. I'd also no doubt have my family attacked by the odd moron and risk all sorts of crazies going bananas. Imagine if I wanted to run for an elected government position one day? Kiss that goodbye, unless I throw my lot in with staunch conservatives, because as an independent or even left-leaning party candidate it would likely nix my campaign. All because of social control over freedom of speech through shaming and mob mentalities. It's an important issue.