Spotify, SoundCloud and other platforms have pulled the song, but its spread underscores the challenges tech platforms face in removing content that violate their policies.
Spotify, SoundCloud and other tech platforms have worked to remove a new song from Ye that praises Adolf Hitler, but the song and its video have continued to proliferate online including across X, where it has racked up millions of views.
On various mainstream and alternative tech platforms this week, Ye, formerly known as Kanye West, has been able to share his latest song, titled “Heil Hitler,” along with its companion title, “WW3,” which similarly glorifies Hitler, the architect of the Holocaust.
While some platforms have taken steps to attempt to pull down the song, others have seemingly let it spread freely.
It’s more an observation that your position isn’t justified well.
You are talking about weakening legal integrity of fundamental rights & committing violence against nonaggressors (violence against peaceful expression is never necessary): that’s flat out illiberal & incompatible with free society. Worst of all, you’ve failed to demonstrate any of it is necessary or sufficient to safeguard the fundamental rights free society stands for: basic logic indicates it does the opposite. Moreover, historical record discredits your position & shows such approaches when attempted are easily abused by authorities, harm society, and end up failing: you remain conveniently mute on this.
Claiming to have heard & understood it all before doesn’t mean your position now isn’t broken & muddled. “Defeating” illiberal movements in ways that end up defeating free society is incompetent advocacy. I think you’re mistaking fighting fascism (even at the expense of fundamental freedoms that define free society) with defending free society.
Anyone who seriously cares about free society needs to oppose illiberalism from your direction, too. I do. Your illiberalism is more insidious than overt fascism, because someone might mistake yours for progressive.
The only positive is there’s a better chance of reasoning with misguided people trying to do the right thing than someone who definitely wants to end free society.
No, this disagreement is real. I cannot support recklessly subverting fundamental rights to score cheap “wins” that ultimately result in loss. Committing to a free society requires integrity to defend all of it consistently.
It’s seems to me your “solution” adds to the problem. It’s possible to oppose it, oppose facism, & argue for a better solution.
Moreover, it seems to me you’re falling for their game. Testing integrity by trying to provoke society to weaken its legal protections enough to punish offensive exercise of fundamental rights is a classic challenge illiberals pose to lure society to attack free society.
Advocating for unnecessary limits on liberties is objectively illiberal. Weakening integrity of legal protections for fundamental rights increases their vulnerability to abuse by authorities, which is a step toward authoritarianism.
But it’s wrong, your reasoning is unsound, and no one has to agree with it. Your logic isn’t compelling.
Germany is not a great example. Do their restrictions inhibit the rise of abhorrent movements? People still speak & assemble privately. Neo-nazis are still around. AfD continues gaining with its intimations of ethnofascism skirting barely within legal limits. German laws seem ineffective at deterring the rise of far-right extremism, which looks hardly any different in the rest of the world.
Meanwhile, Germany has internet patrols penalizing vitriol, insults, & satirical images of politicians showing fake quotes & live police suppressing pro-Palestinian protests as anti-semitic. So, German laws seem effective at helping authorities stifle & penalize online criticism. At least when authorities (following eerily similar rationalizations in the US & Germany) try to suppress pro-Palestinian protests, protesters in the US have firmer legal claims to defend their rights.
The Principle of Charity means interpreting your words in their truest, likeliest meaning favoring the validity of your argument. It doesn’t mean just letting you have the argument.
If you don’t want to justify your claims convincingly, that’s fine. I’m still going to tell everyone who reads this why I think a free, democratic society deserves better than the deeply broken idea you’re pushing.
While I wish you well, too, you and the rest who endorse that thinking seem sorely misguided, and I wish you would think better.
The irony of rudely over-explaining intellectual charity to someone who just asked for a tiny bit of it from you is just…really something my friend. I hope you’ll pause on that for a moment and ask yourself if you ever sincerely tried to give me any whatsoever throughout this exchange.
I understand the concept of intellectual charity perfectly well, I’ve deliberately granted it to you repeatedly throughout this conversation. I, and people I enjoy talking to, extend intellectual charity a bit beyond just that literal definition you supplied, of reading specific statements in a charitable way. I try to extend intellectual charity to my assumptions about the minds writing the statements, because I think it’s kinder, more fair, more productive, and just frankly the “true spirit of the idea” (if such a thing can be said to exist). But again, it’s yours to give and not mine to demand.
To be clear, though, implying that I don’t know what it means, and that I invoked it as some kind of “win the argument button” is just…super uncharitable of you. A fun irony from someone who claims to know such an awful lot about the idea.
Separately, I’ll cheerfully concede that Germany does make your point better than mine, that was a sloppy misstep on my behalf. What I’ll say about that, to try to convince you one final time that my position is internally consistent and merits at least sincere consideration - I recognize the slippery slope that begins right outside the line of my position, and I recognize that diligent effort and vigilance must be brought to bear to prevent the narrow intolerance from cascading into broader denials of liberties.
And I still think that’s preferable compared to allowing some of the (historically proven…) most vile and damaging ideologies to spread. Even worse, I recognize that ultimately - human beings I don’t know or particularly trust will be the ones making those calls, because they’re interested in spending their lives in government and such, and I’m not. What I think you don’t properly understand about my position is how close I believe we are in the US to violent, world-shaping fascism. If that begins in earnest, is that the point where you finally say “okay we gotta do something more direct about this, the free market of ideas isn’t going to make this problem go away on its own”? I can tell you with certainty, the most vulnerable folks who suffer most (or at least first) under that scenario will never share your point of view. They’ll rightly condemn us for allowing this to happen, just as many of us condemn the oh-so-liberal Germans who stood by during the rise of Nazism.
Before we got to this precipice, I shared your point of view basically wholesale. Because I believed it worked well enough to prevent us from getting here - but I was wrong! - it didn’t. Maybe you’re right and we’ll tip back toward safety from the ledge, public sentiment and political movements tend to swing like a pendulum after all. But I personally no longer believe your approach is sufficient. I very well understand the risks of what I’m advocating for, and I still believe it’s the right move.
Maybe 10 years from now I feel differently yet again, I’d sure love to. But my intellectual life has been essentially a cascading series of the slow grinding away of idealism into ugly-but-useful pragmatism. And things just get worse, and worse, and worse, and worse…so I don’t really expect to return to idealism, as pleasant and “right” as it feels.