You'll note the "First they came for" poem has a beginning and doesn't extend to all subcultures. It doesn't say "First they came for the KKK." And, of course, it doesn't say "First they came for the Nazis."
Just as saints and captains of industry deserve no less scrutiny and liability under the law than the rest of us, scoundrels and horrible people deserve no less protection under the law than the rest of us.
If your disgust for an entity prevents you from being able to recognize when they're doing something that's an unalloyed good, then you still have quite a bit of emotional maturity to develop.
To put the previous paragraph another way: It's entirely consistent to decry an someone as a loathsome scumbag that all upstanding people should shun and refuse to associate with while also remarking that that one time they dove into a freezing river to save a child being swept away was a good and noble thing to do, and behavior that we should all aspire to mirror.
And they got it. "I'd give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety's sake." But that doesn't mean anyone needs feel sympathy for the devil. We're not obligated to cheer when the wretched hive of scum and villainy keeps its liquor license another year. The law was followed and we can move on.
> If your disgust for an entity prevents you from being able to recognize when they're doing something that's an unalloyed good
... It is usually the case when we're talking about 4chan (and always when talking about Kiwi Farms) that "unalloyed" is doing a lot of the kind of load-bearing one probably wants an alloy for. 4chan's most positive benefit to society is as a litmus test for precisely how far the [xkcd-1357](https://xkcd.com/1357/) principle goes. They are 100% welcome, per their freedom of the press (and the freedom of speech of their users), to host their website. On their infrastructure. With their own DOS protection. In a country that recognizes those rights and protects them. That's the system working as intended.
No? Saving a child from being swept away in a freezing river is an unalloyed good, no matter how terrible the scoundrel that did it.
Like I mentioned, it looks like you still have quite a lot of emotional maturity to develop.
(You might also benefit from checking out 4chan boards that aren't /b/, /pol/, and /gif/.)
What if it's only as part of kidnapping the child and forcing them into grueling slave labor until the day they die? Is that still perfectly unalloyed?
(Not that I'm saying 4chan is metaphorically doing that here; just for the sake of argument.)
Emotional maturity is important. So is platform maturity. We are long past the point where "reader beware" and "it's just a hobby site" are good enough in an era where under-policed fora result in actual harm. I appreciate 4chan's strong stance on the topic of it not being their job to police their house... But I do often find myself cheering when someone compels them, as a site that receives 22 million unique monthly visitors, to act like they have any host responsibility.
It's hard for me to be deeply supportive, beyond my legal requirements to be so, of a site that hosts /b/, /pol/, /hc/, and /gif/ because it chooses to host them too.
So, yes, the poem does extend to all subcultures because it reaches out to include every voice of opposition to totalitarianism, until no one is left but the speaker.
It's also meant to be understood in the first four lines: The people mentioned — communists, trade unionists, social democrats, and Jews — were meant to be emblematic of people who are seen as enemies or outsiders to the author's cause. These are people whose values are seen to be radically different than our own.
Remember the context: the author of the speech, which was re-rendered as a poem, was a real person, Martin Niemöller, who was a pastor in the Confessing Church, which was an underground church movement organized in resistance to the Nazis.
However his speech, given in January of 1946, was an indictment of the Confessing Church. The movement was initially organized primarily as a form of resistance to governmental interference in religion, rather than to speak out for all people. Niemöller was, in fact, explicit that this was about people who were his "opponents" and his "enemies":
> "... The people who were put in the camps then were Communists. Who cared about them? We knew it, it was printed in the newspapers. Who raised their voice, maybe the Confessing Church? We thought: Communists, those opponents of religion, those enemies of Christians—"should I be my brother's keeper?"
Instead, Niemöller points out, in a theologically poignant allusion to the story of Cain and Abel in Genesis 4, that we have a responsibility to our fellow humans to look out for their wellbeing and their interests as our own.
So yes, that poem calls for you to look out for the wellbeing and interests — including freedom from oppression and censorship — for those folks who you might now perceive to be your enemies.
See:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_They_Came
It should be noted that Niemöller was not the only one to draw on this story as an indictment of the church's inaction. Margarete “Marga” Meusel, a contemporary and correspondent of Niemöller wrote this in 1935 which was antecedent in the body of thought informing the 1946 speech:
> Why does the church do nothing? Why does it allow unspeakable injustice to occur? ... What shall we one day answer to the question, where is thy brother Abel? The only answer that will be left to us, as well as to the Confessing Church, is the answer of Cain. ("Am I my brother's keeper?" Genesis 4:9)
This may be one of those "not everyone gets to win everywhere" situations. And if I have to choose protecting 4chan vs. protecting children...
... I can see two positions on the topic which have merit. So it's a good thing there are separate nations to decide on different bars of safety.
I would have no problem with a world where 4chan is free to operate in the US and blocked in the UK. Different countries with different cultures.
This message was sponsored by SafetyTM.
Every single day And every word you say Every game you play Every night you stay
I'll be watching you
No, in a free society the government doesn't decide, via its monopoly on violence, what it's okay for consenting adults to say or hear. And in a sane society, parents are responsible for policing what their children see and hear, and not the government.
That's the experiment we're running right now. The Internet is different from TV. It's interactive and bidirectional. Most importantly, it's decentralized. Network television could control what showed up in your living room without you expecting it. Verizon and Comcast can't (nor should they, but the "can't" matters quite a bit here).
(To be clear, there are definitely tradeoffs, and I see them. But I think it's important to steel-man the counter-position because the counter-position doesn't just go away. Especially since there's a non-ignorably-trivial number of citizens, in both the US and the UK, who feel the trade-offs are acceptable because they really do not like what they perceive open and unfettered Internet access to have done to one or two generations of humanity exposed to it in childhood at this point.
To argue against it, we have to face it, not dismiss it).
I reject the assertion that it is a "practical impossibility" for a parent to properly raise their child. The fact that it is common practice for a parent to outsource the raising of their child to strangers ("day care") and the government ("public schools") doesn't mean that is is smart, desirable, beneficial or conducive to raising a smart, moral and intelligent child. If your answer is, "I have to outsource the rearing of my child to others/the government because of XYZ", then my answer to you is don't have a child! The "trade-offs" that the non-trivial number of citizens in the US and the UK are choosing to make is to trade the freedom of other people so that they don't have to worry about properly supervising or raising their children. Sorry, you don't get to trade my freedoms for your convenience, especially when trading away my freedoms ultimately does nothing to solve the problem your tradeoff purportedly solves, as children will always find a way to access the internet anyway.
>Network television could control what showed up in your living room without you expecting it. Verizon and Comcast can't (nor should they, but the "can't" matters quite a bit here).
No parent was forced to buy a TV and no parent is forced to by their child a device with unfettered access to the internet. Suggesting that we should strip away the rights and freedoms of every adult and entirely abandon the right to privacy and anonymity in a fruitless attempt to bulletproof society for children is a non-starter for me and many others.
> You don't get to trade my freedoms for your convenience
Precisely that trade is most of politics and regulation, be it "You have to drive on the right side of the road" or "You can't swear on FCC-licensed airwave broadcast." We took a very liberal stance to the Internet, and much of Western society seems to be reevaluating that stance in this era.
The challenge with the Internet is that accessing it is so ubiquitous that even if a parent wants to keep a child off it, it's pretty impossible. You can get on it at any public library. Certainly we're not banning children from libraries to keep them safe? That's unworkable.
You yourself assert that children will always find a way to access the Internet. The unfortunate conclusion drawn from the strongest form of that assertion is that we must therefore make the Internet they can access child-safe.
(I recognize how this is a non-starter for many. My concern is that failure to engage the argument may leave those for whom it's a non-starter at a severe disadvantage as the opposing view consolidates political power to effect change. I think the result of saying l assuming the status-quo holds is we're going to wake up one day to find half the Internet ID-walled and the other half behind Tor).
I didn't say it is a productive argument, I said, "I reject the assertion that it is a "practical impossibility" for a parent to properly raise their child." I don't believe it is possible to make a productive argument in the United States because the overwhelming majority of Americans lack the capacity to think critically and make good decisions. The authoritarians who run our country will eliminate anonymity and privacy and there isn't a damn thing anyone can do about it. It doesn't matter what argument you make.
And in my parent comment above that, I further qualified that by saying, "No, in a free society the government doesn't decide, via its monopoly on violence, what it's okay for consenting adults to say or hear. And in a sane society, parents are responsible for policing what their children see and hear, and not the government. Our society is neither free or sane, but the point stands. Freedom is anathema to the authoritarians who are in the process of stripping us of our few remaining freedoms and what remains of our anonymity and our privacy.
That doesn't mean that we can't jawbone about how a free society should operate, and what people who give lip service to the concept of freedom should support. We can also point out that the authoritarians in charge could care less about the welfare or safety of your children, and must laugh to themselves about how stupid the masses are to trade what few freedoms they have left for the illusion of safety for their children. At least for now. Until posting unregulated messages is outlawed for the safety of the children, with all the usual suspects cheering it on.
I strongly suspect it doesn't include 4chan of the future operating like 4chan in the early 2000s. Things do change sometimes. But hey, in the short run? They certainly can in the US. They will probably be banned in the UK very soon for anyone who doesn't know how to set up a VPN or access Tor, but across that bridge when we come to it right?
Which to be clear, is nothing but a fiction you built yourself in order to insist on your failed arguments, 4chan is a 18+ site and it enforces the rule. It's literally the second rule of the site just below not posting illegal content.
Here, 4chan's design works against answering the question satisfactorily; their commitment to anonymity makes it difficult to say whether they really keep minors off the site (purely anecdotally, the answer seems to be "Not really; everyone knows click-through confirmation is a joke," but that's anecdote). OFCOM allegation, indeed, is more-or-less that 4chan pays lip-service to keeping minors out but fails in practice, and they demand better of service providers then "Well, we told them they're not allowed and if they make it too obvious to ignore we give 'em the boot; what more could we possibly do?" Because OFCOM has a list of what more they could possibly do.
There is a nonzero possibility that the Internet as a whole - including fora like 4chan - has become deeply enough integrated into daily human experience that 4chan having an "Are you over 18" clickthrough is no more acceptable than a 21-and-up club leaving the back door unlocked and never carding once you're inside.
> every voice of opposition to totalitarianism
Unless your definition of "opposition to totalitarianism" is very different from mine, I would hope it is transparent that the examples given in the comment you replied to are not such voices.