PayPal Still fining $2500 for Promoting anything “Discriminatory”, “Intolerance”
reason.com
reason.com
That sure sounds like intolerance to me. Otherwise what are they tolerating?
Imagine, one day, one of your own beliefs becomes lumped under the umbrella of facism. Imagine that you disagree with this categorization, but nonetheless, the categorization is made.
How would you feel about someone telling you about the paradox of tolerance in this case? Don't you think it's a bit more complicated than this?
Honest question - do Americans really believe fascism is increasing? By most (all?) metrics Western societies are radically more tolerant on racial, LGBT and religious issues than even 2 decades ago.
Assuming that just because Things Are Okay Now that there's no problem is exactly how we got Trump elected in 2016, and why Italy, Brazil, and the Philippines have all elected far-right or outright fascist leaders since then as well.
Also consider that Republicans have been perfecting a legal minority rule for decades via gerrymandering, court-packing, closing polling locations, enacting (unnecessarily) stricter voting requirements, and focusing on winning states with disproportionate federal representation by population count, and are now proposing state-wide abortion bans, taking over school boards to ban books and alter health and science curricula, and more.
This is all to say that even though the majority of Americans ARE far more tolerant than they were before, the fascists or fascist-adjacent contingent have been not only been growing, but have been amassing power at a rate disproportionate to their size.
Not to mention, just calling Brazil, Italy and whoever else potentially fascist is ridiculous.
Fascism has no meaning anymore because people like you. If you want to actually fight against fascism don't call everybody fascists.
Do you take the same view when it comes to socialism or communism? Would it be fine to label the majority of the Democratic Party socialist?
My impression is this is a story being told by the media and seems true when you spend a lot of time on Twitter. If it weren't for 24 hour news telling me so, and occasionally spotting some weirdos like the "Patriot Guard" walking around a city, I don't think I'd have any sense of this being real in my day to day life.
> and are now proposing state-wide abortion bans, taking over school boards to ban books and alter health and science curricula, and more.
The abortion issue has been being battled forever now, and it's odd that one side is being seriously labeled "facist" all of a sudden, now that the tug of war game has pulled the flag a bit to their side. And I have seen books "banned" (i.e., excluded from small public school libraries) for one reason or another by "both sides" my entire life.
Why, sounds like what's going on here.
Thank you, I will update my fascism definition card.
"freedom of speech is so important that paradoxically, the government must ban a small part of it (of those who want to restrict it, like Paypal and HN commenters) to preserve the rest."
If an argument can be used to prove contradictory positions depending on framing, then citing that argument as if it is conclusive without that missing framing is wrong.
Assuming a person making this mistake is acting in good faith, pointing this out is constructive, and allows the opportunity to complete the argument with by adding missing framing.
FYI it would be a frame-dependent 'Proving too much' fallacy, not a 'slippery slope': https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proving_too_much
I think there's a misperception (in most responses) that I'm bringing up the paradox as a complete justification for PayPal's actions, which I'm not. Rather, it's a direct argument against OP's apparently free-speech absolutist position. Essentially, so many people here on HN are saying "how dare anybody draw the line anywhere, because the act of drawing the line is actually a form of oppression."
Perhaps from the perspective of someone who thinks purely like an engineer, this black-and-white framing of the issue makes perfect sense. But by the measure of real-world consequences, that's simply not true and perhaps it just takes some time and life experience to realize that. It did for me - I used to be much more of an absolutist on this stuff but I've seen, over the last three decades, how conservatives have used misinformation to change public opinion on issues that should be clear-cut. Simply arguing against them doesn't work because it's much easier to spread emotionally-charged falsehoods than to sit people down and give them the much longer, more complex, correct information.
And to a point you made, it's much more difficult now than it ever was to know if anyone's making the free speech absolutist argument in good faith, because the internet is now rife with people who spend time in the chan communities and are completely aware that "pro free speech" is an easy and effective proxy for "I can share my Nazi-adjacent views with no consequences" that easily tricks moderates into fighting for them.
The Paradox itself works in this regard, that freedom cannot be absolute. But we can have larger and smaller degrees of it.
Lenin's tolerance matrix of other ideologies is something like this (S = Self, it's a me!, Y = Yay, O = OK, M = Meh, N = ehhh... K = kill):
S-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K
He just wants communism and everything else is disallowed. The situation is obviously awful.
You could have a different kind of ruling ideology:
S-O-O-Y-M-O-N-N-K-N-N-Y
It more or less likes a couple other ideologies that don't really conflict with it, and can allow at least some form of a lot of other things, but would gnash its teeth. But it kills Lenin, because you have to.
This would be a much better situation, but not one of complete freedom.
The problems with the Paradox as used today are not that the Paradox's logic doesn't work when we near some limit of ideological permissiveness.
The problem is that most of the woke and progressivists who incessantly cite the Paradox ARE LENIN-TYPE ACTORS THEMSELVES. They don't actually, in practice, tolerate anything but their own ideology, as we constantly see with DEI loyalty oaths propagating everywhere and people arguing against eg. pushing young kids into gender reassignment surgery getting deplatformed while hospital speakers, behind closed doors, celebrate how it's possible to fund entire clinics on phalloplasty alone). They are the exact sort of people against whom Paradox censure should be applied.
There is a second question wrt to ruling ideologies, separate from their tolerance matrix, which is how disastrous and mistaken they are. Part of the reason we should ensure that Lenin won't win is because he wasn't simply peddling his ideology in a really intolerant way. It was that he was trying to institute communism.
Communism is not bad simply because it has a kill-all nontolerance pattern, but because if the ideology rules, the results are abject garbage: One dystopian society after another and mountains of the dead. As E. O. Wilson put it, Marxism "is a nice idea, but for the wrong species."
Meanwhile, much of Europe was Christian for centuries, and while the religious tolerance pattern was the nastier one, Christianity overall seems much more compatible with flourishing human society than eg. communism is, and in fact resulted in societies that were the envy of the world. It is much more tolerable to live under a sane ideology than one that's incompatible with humanity, all else being equal. (NB for those who need it: I am a lifelong atheist and would chafe under fervent Christian rule)
Woke progressivism, in my view, has that same misfit problem communism does, although it's less actively murderous than its predecessor. Humans are tribal, status-seeking, competitive, religious apes and woke doctrine is essentially weird ostensibly secular Harrison Bergeroning.
But that's neither here nor there, the tolerance matrix thing was the point, and the observation that it feels off because we at least subconsciously know the lefties pushing it are Lenin-pattern kill-allers.
1) It’s a blanket justification of suspending the rules when you believe the rules to be threatened, which devolves to “the most fearful have the fewest restrictions on their behavior” which I’m sure you can see is a problematic paradigm.
2) People often take it as a given that the assumption in the paradox of tolerance, that “tolerance fosters intolerance” is true but that’s not actually clear at all. It might as easily be untrue, or more untrue than not. It could be backwards for all anyone knows.
That's an incredibly eloquent way to put it. I'm going to use that going forward with your permission.
I've been saying for years, it feels like many orgs in the US are run by cowards, NIMBYs and BANANAs, so the pace of change is abysmal. You can watch your grandkids grow old before those kinds of people ever agree to make a change.
>> That sure sounds like intolerance to me. Otherwise what are they tolerating?
> Just gonna put this here for no reason…
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance
Since you aren't being very clear, I'm going to assume your point is that the "Paradox of tolerance" justifies PayPal's actions. That's obviously missing the point. IIRC, the "Paradox of tolerance" only argues for intolerance in very specific circumstances, not a intolerance at your "sole discretion" of categories of things you find odious.
And although it's not hard to get a merchant account per se, it is 100x harder than getting a Paypal account which takes 5 minutes and doesn't require any underwriting or paperwork. So people and businesses still use it (and Stripe, Square etc) rather than going through the hassle of getting a merchant account.
These are the people in charge.
Person of colour sounds very similar to coloured person, so presumably you'd want to avoid either of those terms.
But it reads like you're saying the opposite.
This isn't an an issue of semantics that you're trying to make it out to be - it's just not your business in the first place.
You seem to place more value in the views of the supposed victims of discrimination. Ironically, this is discriminatory to anyone else who has something to say on the topic.
> Ironically, this is discriminatory to anyone else who has something to say on the topic.
Pointing out discrimination is not discrimination. Telling a marginalized person how they should view their own identity is not your place. Doubly so because you don't seem to understand the meaning of "discrimination" outside "someone told me I was wrong."
Was I being discriminitory? Or are you referring to someone else?
If you want to have a discussion based on discrimination in the here and now that's one thing, dredging up century plus old things to complain about doesn't get anyone anywhere. In fact it weakens your argument because it suggests that the only discrimination is past discrimination, and we now live in an enlightened world where there is no discrimination.
Further. You're veering very far from the question posed, and inserting a lot of assumptions you have no basis for making.
> Further. You're veering very far from the question posed
I'm here because you decided to argue semantics. Try some self reflection.
> (in terms of your ancestors being forced into slavery for the color of their skin or the constant barrage of laws attempted to keep you below others in society because of the color of your skin)
Where's all this slavery? What are these laws?
>I'm here because you decided to argue semantics. Try some self reflection.
I wasn't arguing semantics, I was asking a genuine question. The GPs reasons seemed to conflict with their apparent position. So rather than arguing against what I thought it said, I asked the question.
Not sure what’s so difficult to understand lol.
If they were accused of racism for saying someone was black rather than a person of colour, and they said that was silly. That seems more reasonable.
And while perhaps being rude, I don't think being of a certain colour gives or removes any authority or expertise you may have on the subject. If you want to identify as purple, can I not comment unless I also identify as purple?
It adjusts the implicit context of what is being said. Which is heavy when it comes to white men telling Black individuals how to perceive themselves. In any case, calling someone's provided identity "silly" is hard to construe as anything but an attack. The best case context here is that you have assumed it is not important to them and thus harmless to denigrate. Which comes with its own loaded baggage of how people of privileged social classes don't consider how or why identity is so central to disadvantaged groups because they never really need to think much about being a "normal" person.
It's not a particularly malicious attack. But it's needlessly abrasive. No, don't comment on someone's identification as purple. Nobody asked for your opinion. If you want to ask them about their identity that's probably ok.
My reply said it depends upon what actually happened. Your quoted part quotes me as saying it's perhaps rude (perhaps because we don't know what actually happened). So if I'm potentially accepting it's rude how am i assuming it isn't important? Youre the one that seems to be doing all the assuming here.
What I was disagreeing with is the statements about authority and expertise. It's got nothing to do with authority. And I would love it if expertise came into the picture at all. But I would guess any etymological defense of any word would probably be cited as more evidence of X group subjugating Y group, and as blackness is a lived experience then nobody but yourself is qualified to say whether you're black or not, and any attempt to biologically or socialogically delineate blackness is racist or something and further evidence of subjugation.
>No, don't comment on someone's identification as purple
Theres a difference between commenting on something and commenting on someone who identified as that thing.
It's the difference between talking about obesity and calling someone fat. I have just as much right to an opinion as the person who identified as obese, to talk about obesity. They are no more or less an expert on obesity just because they are (or identify as being) obese.
The you in my statement was generically directed towards someone calling another person's described identity silly.
> What I was disagreeing with is the statements about authority and expertise. It's got nothing to do with authority. And I would love it if expertise came into the picture at all. But I would guess any etymological defense of any word would probably be cited as more evidence of X group subjugating Y group, and as blackness is a lived experience then nobody but yourself is qualified to say whether you're black or not, and any attempt to biologically or socialogically delineate blackness is racist or something and further evidence of subjugation.
No, this is missing the point quite dramatically. You have no authority nor expertise in telling someone what their identity is, not because you lack credentials or a shared experience, but because you're not them. It is their identity. It's rude to say something like this even if you're Black as well.
> Theres a difference between commenting on something and commenting on someone who identified as that thing.
If someone tells you they identify as X, and you say X is silly, there's an overt implication that you have just called them silly.
> It's the difference between talking about obesity and calling someone fat. I have just as much right to an opinion as the person who identified as obese, to talk about obesity. They are no more or less an expert on obesity just because they are (or identify as being) obese.
You can have whatever opinions you want. But when you share an opinion that implies a negative trait about obese people, you will have insulted any obese people taking part in the conversation, or even implicitly not in the conversation but just known to the participants.
Everything you're saying here seems to suppose that you can only be held accountable for the first order effects of your speech. Which is perhaps how the law works, but it isn't how people communicate and understand each other.
> implies a sense of authority or expertise that you really have no business in.
What about this is inherently unique to the specific word 'silly'? Further the "no business in" applies to someone's (self identified) race.
So every way I try and parse this, I get to a general statement.
So why, when I challenge said general statement, do you insert the word 'silly' in there?
I'm not talking about that, I'm not talking about insulting people. That is rude. What I am challenging is the idea that you can't comment because it
> implies a sense of authority or expertise that you really have no business in.
That statement isn't limited to rude things.
So rather than running off saying > Everything you're saying here seems to suppose that you can only be held accountable for the first order effects of your speech.
Which has absolutely nothing to do with anything. Why don't you read your first post and even if you didn't intend for it to be interpreted that way, at least accept that I did.
If you want to talk about making some other comment on someone's provided identity, well, I'm still going to advise you not to do that. It's just not your business. There's very few contexts where it's going to be appreciated. What are these comments that you feel you must share?
> Further the "no business in" applies to someone's (self identified) race.
Lacking a shared identity and commenting on that identity does lessen your social pretext to comment on it. But no, it's not exclusively a race thing. It's moreso that it is their personal identity. It's not yours. And any unsolicited commentary on it is likely to be taken as adverse. It's not cool to tell someone how to be Black just because you're Black yourself. Or any other identity.
I'm saying, very plainly, that doing shit like this will make people think you're an asshole. And you're asking why can't you do it. And that's just not a valid question. You can do it. You ought not to. Why? Because it will make people think you're an asshole.
If you want to "foster a discussion" on an identity issue, that's different. But it begins with asking questions, or asking for feedback on ideas. Not with challenging their perceptions or asserting your own.
And I still don't think you understand what 'shit' I am saying.
Where did you tell off this person? How did PayPal catch wind of it?
You don't want a welfare state? Must be because you are intolerant to the minorities that use it. 2500$.
You don't want to see a biological male pummeling a woman in a cage fight? obviously rooted in discriminatory ideology! 2500$.
You questioned the election results? You are intolerant to democracy! Oh wait, you were referring to a special election in Georgia? Our bad, we've reimbursed you for our erroneous detection and applied the usual double standard.
You are vocalizing autonomy and authority over your own body? Antivaxxer detected, docking 2500$. Oh, dang, the automated system didn't realize you were referring to an unwanted baby so we've reimbursed you.
We absolutely need to criminalise banking discrimination, but ultimately we are not going to because quite a lot of politicians quite like banking discrimination against their enemies.
Surely the judiciary has a monopoly on punishment of 'crimes'.
But I agree with your overall point. Payment processors should be seen as public utilities that people have a right to. It shouldn't be up to private companies, who has access to that.
Not in the slightest, and has been actively encouraged since Operation Choke Point and FOSTA/SESTA.
In what form? Wait until people start losing $2,500 at a time for questionable reasons?
Is your contention that we should wait to see if PayPal abuses this policy, or wait to see if PayPal rescinds it?
Even if this was communicated in error, it shows how far this policy went internally to show up in customer facing copy. This calls into question any benefit of the doubt I’d usually be tempted to extend.
Obvious examples like unabashed white supremacists aside... what happens in less clear cases, like when a Palestinian rights organization starts posting BDS stuff, and Israelis respond by calling them a terror group?
One more justification for uncensorable, provably non-inflationary digital currencies.
What I take issue with more than anything else is the idea of a private business expropriating money from people based on the contents of their speech, as a change of contractual policy, buried deep in the terms of service, that many laypeople cannot be reasonably expected to read and comprehensively understand.
I'm also concerned about this policy being weaponized by bad actors. Say someone impersonates a PayPal user online and posts genuine hate speech, complete with calls to violence. Or someone sends a payment to an innocent PayPal user with a memo that implies the PayPal user was engaged in hateful or malicious conduct. What happens when someone is having a mental health crisis and says some awful things on Twitter due to genuine mental health issues? What happens if a PayPal user's online account on another platform is hacked and used to post hateful content? What safeguards are in place to ensure that only those who are actually guilty are financially penalized?
It's fine to dislike crypto, there are valid reasons, but let's be factual here.
To me, it sounds like someone is either ignorant or arguing in bad faith for them to suggest that there are no digital currencies which are non-inflationary. BTC will never exceed 21 million bitcoins in circulation.
To address your other concern - the "problem" being addressed is a private company seizing your money over the contents of your speech. With self-custody of digital currencies like Bitcoin, it is not possible for third parties to expropriate your funds, provided you have protected your private key.
By contrast sometime around 2140 the final Bitcoin will be mined, and we're already reducing the number mined per block. Inflation can still happen for reasons besides supply, but it's generally much less probable.
You own your body. Your labor is just you consciously deciding to operate your body in a manner that fulfills the needs of someone else in exchange for something of value. The value of your money being diluted is, for the worker, no different from wage theft by an employer - the rightful compensation from your productive labor being taken from you without your consent.
Those rights are not a given either. In fact this is a first time I hear those are "rights".
If I pick an apple from a tree using my productive labor, somehow apple doesn't seem to care about my rights and starts to rot.
Are you sure you're not confusing rights with desires?
Inflation is a tax, albeit an indirect one. It decreases purchasing power of the citizens (with the greatest harm incurred by the most vulnerable), it decreases the value of the nominal debt held by the government, and it's produced outside of a democratic process (federal reserve is, in theory, independent - not subject to the demands of politicians, who, in theory, represent the interests of the people).
A tax that nobody voted for, that harms the poor and helps the government is nothing like the natural decay of an apple. It's value being taken from you without your consent, not unlike a mugger taking value from your wallet in the form of the currency itself.
Many people engage in labor in exchange for value, denominated in currency. Theft of the value of the currency, ultimately, boils down to theft of labor.
Most results of the productive output decay same way as apple does.
If you trade iPhone for a car, both car and iPhone will lose value over time. But in your world if you trade iPhone for $1000, only iPhone will lose value. That doesn't seem fair.
Furthermore, you're saying it harms most vulnerable, but I don't believe it is generally true.
If both a billionaire and a salaried working class person lose 10% of their wealth, gap between the two shrinks. Of course, laws of nature are such that rich are getting richer, but that's a different story.
Plus, flatly rejecting the notion that people have a right to not have the value of their wages stripped by deliberate, human intervention in the first place - with a rationalization for wage theft of "some of the things you would buy with your wages lose value over time anyway"?
Forgive me for having a hard time taking you seriously - you're starting to sound a bit like Tucker Carlson. Have you ever actually been part of the working class?
And I never denied that. All I'm saying is that in isolation inflation shrinks the gap between the two. It seems like you're trying to challenge it with emotions.
> Maybe that means the working class person can't keep the lights on, maybe they eat 400 calories a day to ensure their children have adequate nutrition.
Another emotional take. But I encourage you to speak to a working class immigrant. Working class struggles in US are nothing compared to the rest of the world. It's quite funny seeing how top 1% keeps complaining about top 0.01%.
> Plus, flatly rejecting the notion that people have a right to not have the value of their wages stripped by deliberate, human intervention in the first place - with a rationalization for wage theft of "some of the things you would buy with your wages lose value over time anyway"?
I'm still waiting for an explanation why result of labor not losing it's value over time is a human right. You gave several emotional takes and went into ad-hom territory, yet said nothing on the matter.
> Have you ever actually been part of the working class?
I did engage in manual labor for a brief period of time. Though I fail to see how that's relevant. Have you been a billionaire?