I've been suffering for 5 years. Each year worse than the last. My dose is capped at the 90mme and this prevents me from switching to extended release (ER) so that I can stop watching the clock and carrying around all my meds. My doctor is discussing switching me to a stigmatized medication used to treat addicts which would ban me from receiving further treatment. With the passing of time I become more immobile, lost almost my entire support system, lost myself and now I'm treated like a criminal and when my doctor goes on leave I can't find anyone who will treat me. She is so scared that she refuses to take the advice of my pain mgmt. doctor so even though I have a team, my quarterback refuses to pass the ball and take on their recommendations. It's life shattering, soul crushing, body wasting pain. An emotional, physical and economical assault. These providers are so afraid, that they are committing patient abandonment and malpractice with abruptly changing the treatment plan without patient consent and dropping their patients all together. Most of us can't afford the lawyers willing to prosecute the providers for malpractice and many won't even touch it. Not all the providers are misinformed but are just scared and their fear of the DEA is stronger than that of a lawyer. They are getting sanctioned and more from the government and sued by their patients (if at all) and feeling pressure from both sides and they are just as much victims as we are. They too are losing their livelihoods and more. Most pain clinics have closed their doors due to FDA and DEA overreach and patients are unable to find a new provider! We are asked to fill out questionnaires and if we check that box that we have pain we are immediately dismissed. It doesn't matter if they can treat us with other modalities, if you have pain at all, in any form, you are dismissed and deserted. These providers took the Hippocratic oath and it's now reflecting it's name, hypocrites. They promise to do no harm and treat patients and not leave one behind but they are leaving millions behind and causing irreparable harm. Families and loved ones are suffering too; watching their loved ones in endless pain without being able to help them, having to care for much of our needs because we are unable to anymore. The mass casualties of this mislabeled crisis (illicit drugs NOT legitimate scripts) should be enough for action! Recalls are done rather quickly for everything else but what about recalling the harmful policies? It's one thing to say it and publish new guidelines and statements but it's not changing anything. We don't have time to waste! WE ARE DYING! Every day that goes by without treatment or undertreatment is lives lost. I suffer from suicidal ideation (more like suicidal longing now) and I REALLY struggle to dismiss those thoughts because I have responsibilities that I struggle to manage. It's not enough for us to stand up. Doctors at risk, STAND UP! Doctor's who still believe in treating patients humanely, STAND UP! Government officials who know and are being offered money to look away, STAND UP! Supporters and loved ones of pain patients, STAND UP! Journalists and Anchors, STAND UP and TELL OUR SIDE! Millions of people are talking about how wrong it is to make us suffer...GET TOGETHER AND STAND UP! We are flooding news stations, senate, representative, social media, newspapers, medical conferences and boards with our plight and NOBODY is taking action. Oregon rolled back it's policies adopted but even as recent as yesterday patients are STILL NOT BEING TREATED! There's a LOT of talk and a LOT of action by us but nothing is changing. What will it take? How many of us have to die before we are seen and heard?

Right, which is why I expanded it to "lets imagine";

My point being, that the boundaries of speech aren't obvious and easy to find.

As much schadenfreude as I get in seeing conservatives recoil from "private entities can do what they like" it really isn't as simple as all that.

I can imagine a Prunefield sort of decision regarding online public squares.

I really love this comment. It serves to remind me that online communities MUST be moderated in some way, or things will get out of hand.

And the sooner you set limits the less trouble you will have in the long run.

That's not at all like what's happening here.

They're not banning "registered Republicans" or "registered Democrats".

This is more like banning T-shirts that read "registered Republican" or "registered Democrat" - and if people repeatedly insist on showing up wearing such shirts and have to be repeatedly sent home, only then will they ban those particular people.

That's... not at all what it sounds like is happening at Ravelry.

They're not demanding to know how each person voted so they can know whether to ban them (that would be what you're describing as "the after math of 1968").

They're insisting that partisan politics be kept out of it. i.e. what you're describing as the norm in hunting, fishing, and automobile forums.

Of course you're both right. Crime rates are lower than they were, but they're still too high, particularly homicide rates.

That said, there is a stark categorical difference between 1) cruelty directly enacted by the government, performed by government employees, in camps managed by officials, and 2) the ever-present reality of poverty and crime. The prior is a willful act. The latter is a result of complex social ills. Treating those as if they are the same kind of moral failure is facile.

Inner city crime rates? You mean the ones that are half the rate they were in the 90s?

https://fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/R45236.pdf is pretty clear on the matter (Figures 5 and 6 are quite straightforward).

In fact, it looks quite a bit like random fluctuations (see Figure 8), which can lead to fun numbers ("Homicide rates increased 150% in Arlington Texas, strangely not run by Democrats, due to having 8 homicides in 2015 and 21 in 2016. A rate of 5.3 per 100k. What an inner city hellhole!)

I don't think it's especially tricky if the users whose commentary is now banned had to register. If that's the case then it's simple to claim that Ravelry is a private club which can set its own rules, and that it decides whom to admit or bar prior to that person's entry.

If anyone who wants to can walk up and drop a comment without even leaving a for-real email address? That's different...sort-of. Good luck convincing a judge that a free-speech claim is worth bringing against a weblog, though.

I could see that as a tricky decision if rights are regarded as slicing up a pie, so that making one slice bigger necessarily makes some other slice smaller. I assume that was looked into regarding whether California's more expansive rights negatively impacted any other party's federally guaranteed rights.

That was nicely stated.

I read an interesting book on eating written by a woman who'd gone through just about every phase and fad. You must eat organic. You must eat vegan. You must eat free-range. You must eat local. You must eat food from our artisanal co-op. You must not eat tuna because save the dolphins. She'd been heavily involved in co-ops, neighborhood gardens, protesting, petitioning, organizing, and trying to raise people's awareness. Activist food politics had consumed her. Much later in her life, she just gave up from exhaustion at trying to save the planet through political eating, and just decided to eat food that made her happy, which finally gave her peace.

I suppose the question then comes "where is Ravelry?"

Is Ravelry where its servers are? Is Ravelry where it's readers are?

If we have discovered that The Internet is does not fall under any given state's jurisdiction, does it fall under the US's? (Because the US, thus far, has been acting like it has jurisdiction over the 'tubes when it comes to its citizens.)

I’m guessing that would get sticky pretty quickly.

I'm guessing that "pretty quickly" is "somewhere around right freaking now".

Setting aside jurisdictional questions, I'm going to opine that no, it doesn't. Pruneyard was specific to California's own constitution, not the US Constitution. Ravelry, not being the government, can control the speech of its members who are then free to not be members if they wish.
The crux of Pruneyard is that California has a broader provision of free speech- while the US constitution merely says that the government cannot abridge free speech, CA's constitution gives its citizens an affirmative right to speech that their courts have ruled applicable to shopping centers. SCOTUS simply upheld CA's law, ruling that CA was free to give its citizens broader rights than what the US constitution did.
Now back to jurisdiction- can CA force an online community to follow its own laws? IDK, but I'm guessing that would get sticky pretty quickly.

That was a good comment. I wouldn't have minded if it were longer. I know that the job of moderator is thankless, but I never thought about how often they must get dragged into conversations that are specifically not about the subject of common interest.

Chip,

Inner city crime has been a problem that Democrats have ignored for decades. You all have been in a tizzy about this detainment issue for about 5 minutes. I don't know if that speaks to the power of AOC to get the Far Left ramped up or if it is just about seeing a cudgel to use against Trump next year, but probably both.

You do realize that if we could conduct a survey probably a vast majority of Americans would say this is a very low priority for them, meanwhile you all are invoking images of the Holocaust. there's a tremendous disconnect there and I think that's more a problem of progressives than the masses.

Warning: this is very personal and probably not very illuminating.

I'm on Ravelry. I consider myself....well, kinda purple. I don't fit in any political camp right now; I privately refer to myself as "a woman without a party" 'cos that's how I feel. (Part of my distress is that I have friends on both sides of the divide...so I guess I am also a woman without a tribe, and that awakens a lot of bad childhood memories and old fears in me)

I dunno. I have really mixed feelings. Someone I know well is probably leaving the site due to "no longer feeling welcome" even though they aren't in the group that was considered to be causing the problems. Some people are leaving in a protest over what they see as an abridgement of free speech. (It is a private company) My understanding of the issue is that a few people - in a particular political group - harassed and even doxxed another member. Also, in 2008, apparently the FBI visited the founder and his wife over some threats against then-President Obama that someone posted on one of the groups in the site.

My assumption is, the fairly small team that run it, just got fed up, got tired of playing whack-a-mole with the few really difficult members, and instead of banning individuals for acting badly, put a broad banhammer down on certain speech.

Personally? I'd much rather see direct troublemakers be banned (e.g., violating the TOS, of which doxxing other members is pretty much the poster-child).

Like a lot of these things, there's some spiking-of-footballs and also rushes to judgement and armchair-quarterbacking. And also members who are disgusted by all the endless discussion of it being told "Yeah, but you have the Privilege of being able to exist without always worrying about politics."

I dunno. Most of the places I hang out there tend to have a big "this is a politics free discussion board" banner hung up and most people respect that, and people who don't get their posts taken down and a moderator note sent to them. I know this because I AM a moderator on one of those "let's just have fun, folks" sub-boards, and we mods have had to squash some political stuff - and some anti-religious stuff - and also one member who got stalk-y of an ex who happened to be on the board (that was a wild ride, let me tell you what)

I also asked to be - and was - de-modded from a different board because two members got in a fight, when I basically told them "either play nice on-board or take this to private e-mails to work it out" one came after me and it was upsetting.

Because another thing: being a volunteer mod can suck. It sucks big time when you get someone that you've had to moderate, and they decide that you have it in for them (even when you show them the rule they violated). It sucks when you have someone coming to you going "this person is my ex, you should know this, and they are stalking me online"

So I'm not surprised TPTB took the step. Maybe it wasn't the best way of dealing with it, I know a lot of people are upset with it and it's gotten way more news coverage than I thought it would (but of course: it bleeds, it leads, I guess, and it's been a slower social-news week)

I dunno. I'm gonna stay there. I DON'T talk politics on there and I tend to avoid the really really political discussion groups because I hate fighting. But I feel like this site I once loved is kinda imploding, and that there are a lot of people who never even knew about it before standing around on the fringes, some of them screaming FISH YEAH BAN EVERYONE WHO THINKS EVEN 5% NOT-LIKE-ME and others rubbing their hands together and hoping for the total demise of the site.

It makes my heart hurt, that's all I can say. I tweeted something this morning about MAYBE I JUST GIVE UP ALL MY HOBBIES NOW because I am getting so sick of the coverage, and it's hard for me to avoid, without me not hanging out the places I usually hang out online.

I dunno. I had a couple of ex-Christian friends once who claimed that religion poisons everything it touches, but in my experience, politics seems to do a better and faster job of it.

I can't adequately convey how profoundly sad the whole thing makes me, but it does. It's stolen a little of the joy I used to take in my primary hobby. (Maybe I go back to piecing quilt tops for a while, and store the yarn away).

No we get to see every Trumpist dumbass on Twitter[*] arguing that section 230 applies because Ravelry is a monopoly.

* But I repeat myself. Twice.

Who knew what when is a question that will probably never be resolved completely. Certainly the Americans who liberated them were completely unprepared for what they found, and one of the reasons they filmed them was to document conditions they were concerned would not be believed. Not that video evidence deters the deniers. Hitler's Willing Executioners, which argues that ordinary Germans knew exactly what was going on, remains controversial.

Have you ever seen Casablanca? Victor Laszlo (Ingrid Bergman's husband) is described as having escaped from a German concentration camp, and he's in good health and says nothing about the horrors he found there. The implication is that it's a prison camp, not a death camp.