I agree that free speech is essential -- I imagine that they asked for money because I gave them money in the past. Can you agree that the starving, homeless, and sick might have difficulty exercising their right to free speech even if the ACLU protects it in court?
That's nonsensical. If somebody leaves the First Amendment behind, they are leaving liberalism behind. If you do not support free speech, you simply are not liberal.
But they still fought lots of commendable battles, sticking up for people that nobody else would. I think that's what they've lost... they would be scared to stick up for somebody that might get the wrong people upset with them.
The various police forces during the capital seige - in January, remember how that was this year - said they used less force because the participants were armed and knew they could shoot back
Their whole thing is that they will make the state think twice, whereas the peaceful and unarmed protestors get knocked around with no recourse
Without examples, its easy to think they are advocating for actually killing government officials with their guns in order to get their way, but after a year of examples I can at least say I have experienced competing and conflicting ideas in action
Given the reference to "a well regulated Militia" and "the security of a free State," the ACLU has long taken the position that the Second Amendment protects a collective right rather than an individual right."
If individuals aren't allowed to own and practice with weapons normally, then when it's needed the Militia will not be "well-regulated", as in well-armed or trained.
The 2nd amendment is really very important to all civil liberties, since otherwise there is nothing to stop a repressive government from taking control.
> O'Sullivan's First Law: All organizations that are not actually right-wing will over time become left-wing. I cite as supporting evidence the ACLU, the Ford Foundation, and the Episcopal Church.
[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20100715191034/http:/old.nationa...
That doesn't mean you have forbid Nazis from ever speaking (as if this would work), it means you have to make sure your democracy and your institutions are stable enough to survive their first period in government and manage to get a peaceful and fair transfer of power after that (instead of Nazis setting fire to the Reichstag, blaming it on communists, declaring an emergency and never have elections again).
I'd rather loose the right to utter certain inflamatory phrases than loose the right and the possibility to vote the next government out of office in a fair and representative election.
Do you mean the actual summary of what happened in the US over the past 50 years ?
"These Rights were convenient at the time we were a minority, but now, we are in power, they are in the way of our ideal utopia."
> I'd rather loose the right to utter certain inflamatory phrases than loose the right and the possibility to vote the next government out of office in a fair and representative election.
And that's why the 2nd Amendment is protecting the 1st. (and all the subsequent).
NYT's double standards are ridiculous
If Citizens United had gone the other way, nothing would stop the government from banning books or social media posts as well. (During oral arguments before the Supreme Court, the government lawyer admitted they believed they could ban books and YouTube videos as well)
Citizens United is frequently misunderstood - the main problem with it is that because restrictions on recognized political party fundraising still remain on the books, political money ends up flooding into third party organizations that are less under control of the institutional party and are more likely to be extreme. Meanwhile political candidates can plausibly deny their connection to the actions of such super PACs. Making the playing field even again by allowing larger or unlimited direct donations to candidates or parties would be the way toward a just but also effective solution.
I give an extensive explanation on the economics of free speech here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M8HbvC6vqIY
I interviewed Noam Chomsky on it last week here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wUPZ8rSESZo
And we are building it here (sorry for the bad design so far): https://rational.app/
> ACLU Again Cowardly Abstains From an Online Censorship Controversy: The once-principled group issues P.R.-scripted excuses or engages in obfuscation to avoid taking stances that would offend its liberal donor base.
https://greenwald.substack.com/p/aclu-again-cowardly-abstain...
Edit: HN always seems to downvote anything which doesn't go with the censorship of controversial view points.
No one cares that the NRA only gives a crap about half of 2A. No one cares that the federalist Society has a very specific view of the judiciary… but when the ACLU defines a cause in their own way, people go nuts with accusations of hypocrisy because it doesn’t line up with their own personal definition of “civil liberties”.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
" Sect. XXI. That the right of the citizens to bear arms, in defence of themselves and the state, shall not be questioned. "
Countries with fewer guns have fewer armed police officers and fewer policemen shootings.
These are separate issues. All Americans experience a collective punishment from law enforcement because they might have "a" gun on them.
I think this is mostly inaccurate? The Jan 6 protestors/rioters mostly left their guns at home due to fear of D.C.‘s strict gun laws. Even the oathkeepers planned to keep their guns in Virginia and ferry them over by boat only once “called up as militia”.
The Capitol police are used to dealing with protestors and demonstrators and have never opened fire on a crowd with live ammo before. The one time it did look like a rioter (Ashlii Babbit) was going to get too close to members of Congress they used their firearm without hesitation.
If I find the quotes again from officer(s) interviews I’ll link you
“Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as”
Many people just have a problem with word except on that line and so many other places in society. As such the ACLU’s goal is to push for improvements not simply defend the current situation.
Americans have guns
Right wingers showed up with them and then said it was left wingers, who do also own them
> While the department had received court approval for a “no-knock” entry, the orders were changed before the raid to “knock and announce,” meaning that the police had to identify themselves.
> The officers have said they did announce themselves, but Mr. Walker said he did not hear anything.
Amazing how in 2021, with an abundant of factually checked information available, some HN commenters can use the internet to write a comment, but cannot use the internet to fact check their assertions before posting.
The NRA does plenty of activism that doesn't involve defending people against charges, but for this incident they've been silent. For comparison, here is a statement that was put out by Gun Owners of America: https://www.gunowners.org/goa-speaks-out-after-no-knock-raid... . IMO it doesn't go far enough, condemning the general practice but failing to condemn the specific murderers, but at least they've said something.
However, I do not believe a pro gun group should work to get rid of no knock raids. I think a more generalized civil liberty group should work on that. I am very much in favor of NRA working on 2nd amendment cases (and those related like 4th amendment cases where they are taking a person's gun). I am not sure what other activism you are talking about, but if it is not about guns I don't think the NRA should work on it.
If Kenneth Walker (Taylor's boyfriend) had been murdered instead, would this not include demanding justice for him? Or if by "defend" you mean only against legal charges, why should the home defender have to win the armed conflict in order to receive support?
> I do not believe a pro gun group should work to get rid of no knock raids
No knock raids are logically incompatible with private ownership of firearms, and the right to self defense in general. They directly follow from assuming a compliant disarmed populace that will suffer attackers until the "authorities" arrive, which is precisely what gun advocates reject. As such, fighting no knock raids is firmly within the scope of gun activism.
https://twitter.com/kittypurrzog/status/1401610476237197312
The ACLU should split into two groups: ACLU Sr, which fights for free speech rights, and ACLU Jr, which fights against them
(Yes, I saw this when PG retweeted it.)
If only that. The younger lawyers would attack (sometimes physically, like with Molotov cocktails, as in the case of Urooj Rahman and Colinford Mattis) those they find detestable, and anybody in the law profession that dares to provide them with any service. Which once was considered a basic human right, but not anymore - now, if you defend the deplorables, you become unperson yourself.
Per the article, the old policy defending Free Speech was ...
> "we are committed to represent those whose views we regard as repugnant"
Whereas the new policy says...
> "lawyers should balance taking a free speech case representing right-wing groups whose “values are contrary to our values” against the potential such a case might give “offense to marginalized groups.” "
It's actually really sad. They've even explicitly paid for campaign ads for Democratic political candidates...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P0aqKS3ihVM
It's really just the ACLU in name only. They've done what so many organizations have done, and sacrificed their principles to take sides in the GOP vs Dem battle. Shortsighted.
1. Everyone is conservative about what they know best
2. Any organization not explicitly right-wing sooner or later becomes left-wing
3. The simplest way to explain the behavior of any bureaucratic organization is to assume that it is controlled by a cabal of its enemies
https://www.aclu.org/blog/civil-liberties/mobilization/aclus...
As I support their efforts generally. I find picking and choosing seems counter to the what protecting our civil liberties means in a whole.
More seriously, the ACLU has always faced an identity crisis and a consequent PR problem.
If the ACLU embraced all civil liberties, wouldn't you expect more Bill-Of-Rights-T-Shirt wearers to be more supportive?
First step of the free speech agenda: Breathe.
It's short term vs long term thinking and clearly they know way more about the Constitution and law than I do to identify major threats to liberty. It's pretty normal for both lay people and professionals to disagree with that strategy, as there are often disagreements in the law. And while I think having this discussion is important, framing it as an existential crisis for the organization is a bit fatalistic.
It's my opinion, and people are welcome to disagree (that's OK), that much of the angst directed towards the ACLU in this thread is more appropriate and effective if directed at the government bodies suppressing free speech, instead.
"In Soviet Russia, we too have freedom of speech. But in America, you have freedom after speech" -- Yakov Smirnoff
"We defend civil liberties and rights guaranteed to each individual, including freedom of speech and expression, equal protection under the law, and the right to personal privacy."
I know a lot of faculty who have been attacked or even fired for "left wing" research and FIRE hasn't spread a peep. Heck, I know people who've been put on blast by Hannity and received death threats from strangers and had their students call them slurs in legally protected channels just because the kids know they can. Silence from FIRE.
Unsatisfied with the world they've inherited, as they should be, the next generation wants revolution, not reform. They want to tear down the old system and build something new. They see the results of the old system and have little respect for its jaded, corrupt defenders.
The older people decry it, saying that the revolution is throwing out the baby with the bathwater, that reform is the best approach. The new movement responds that reform hasn't worked.
I think both sides have a point; the problem is winner-take-all outcomes for either side: Revolution does destroy, often more than it creates, and I think the principles of free speech must be preserved. But if you are satisfied with the old system, you are living a privileged life under a rock: Tens of millions or more in the U.S. alone are denied their rights, denied life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. The old system has not delivered on its promises; reform has not delivered. And the new movement is right that older people are corrupt and jaded: I've seen myself that many of my peers, people who used to be honest and open, have aged to fit that description; it's worse than the younger people think.
It's never a mistake to get rid of hereditary monarchs.
I've managed to get junk mail from both sides of the political spectrum now, which has been interesting (the conservative groups have had me on their mailing list forever, and I think a subscription to Harpers got me on the liberal groups).
Unfortunately, other than the issues involved, I can't really tell a big difference between fundraising styles. "Assume the reader is an idiot and send surveys with the most leading questions you've ever heard of, then ask for money." Usually, they say "Please send us $15 to process the survey, and your best gift."
The questions are absolutely, loaded, leading questions that would be laughed out of any courtroom or actual attempt at a statistically accurate survey. They're things like "Do you agree that racial injustice and white supremacy is the most important issue facing America today?" and "Do you agree that widespread, unchecked illegal immigration is on a path to destroy the nation we love?"
One group actually has survey stickers you respond with - "Yes, illegal immigration is a huge concern!" and "No, I'm a global elitist who supports illegal aliens voting in our elections and overthrowing our Democracy." Or something of the sort.
I guess it works or they wouldn't do it, but it's absolutely insane how these "surveys" are worded. I'm sure all they do is look for a check on the inside instead of "processing" them.
Oh, and just in case you're a drooling moron who doesn't know how to read a letter, the attached letter highlighting the supposed problems will reliably include at the bottom of the pages, "Over!" "Next page please!" "Flip over to continue reading!" and other insulting directions that more or less imply I don't know how to read a multi-page document. Since it's apparently against federal law to leave whitespace in such a fundraising request, they fill the last page with "PS: This is an URGENT issue that requires your rushed donation to STOP THEM from DOING EVIL THINGS." "PPS: Please rush your donation back!" "PPSS: I'm still going to put stuff here so there's no whitespace."
But I do tend to respond in long form, usually expanding on answers, and often include 2-3 typed pages in response when the survey lacks nuance. I doubt it ever gets read, but it's good practice for being able to expand on issues.
In any case, the ACLU isn't getting my money. Neither is the Heritage Foundation, and neither are any other groups that send me these "surveys" where the only important question is "But how much can you afford to give?"
They've been accused of being racist and sexist for quite a few years. [1] is one example.
[1] https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2020-06-11/black-at...
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/the-disinte...
https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2013/06/dont-wa...
https://reason.com/volokh/2018/06/22/aclus-david-cole-respon...
https://aclu.procon.org/did-you-know/
The Rutherford Institute is better than the ACLU today:
Edit: A reply would be nice if down voting. The examples the first subject in the article uses are implicitly comparing liberty of speech to protected/disenfranchised classes or characteristics of people, and how ACLU seems to have changed disposition here. That's my point. My use of Identity Politics is not baiting -- it's a well studied topic in the social sciences.
Please, define where the actual line should be.
I think there's a fair amount of existing law that's made rather ridiculous by this position. In particular, the whole notion of conspiracy goes out the window when it's by definition not possible to share in responsibility for an act by persuasion. I'm not even sure it's possible to extort: if you can plausibly say you will wreak mayhem on a person for failing to comply, and you do so, and they comply rather than get mayhem wrought upon them, you've got what you want but you have never done more than speak. Your actions have never once crossed the line. The fact that your speech functioned as plausible threats is irrelevant: it was always and only speech, because nobody called you on it.
- Anti-BDS (Boycott, Divest, Sanction) statues being written into state and local law in jurisdictions all over the country.
- Efforts to legally sanction corporations that exercise their free speech rights in opposition to certain political issues, such as repealing MLBs antitrust protection for moving the All-star game from Georgia.
- Even if there are not legal efforts, widespread outrage at similar exercises of free speech, such as the rights holders of Dr. Seuss books voluntarily deciding to discontinue publication of a small subset of his not-very popular books.
- Anti-protest bills that in some cases essentially decriminalize violent opposition to the free speech rights of people you may not agree with. (1)
- The Trump White House banning left-of-center media from attending certain events (2), and overall making numerous statements aiming to paint media they don't agree with as fake, lying, etc.
I can readily admit the left has a free speech problem, but this problem is in no way unique to the left.
(1) https://www.koco.com/article/oklahoma-legislature-oks-bill-t... (2) https://outline.com/dfhh9h
When those you exile move to a new organization/group/fandom either attempt to shut that down before it grows, or if grows to become powerful Join an organization/group/fandom that is popular/powerful, and complain ....
Basecamp and coinbase showed that you either choose to have zero tolerance of politics in the workplace, or the woke will make you spend as many resources as possible on political activism instead of whatever you used to do. A dynamic that has been so toxic to work dynamics and productivity that even a woke company like Basecamp had to course-correct.
The organizations that have chosen to forbid political activism at work have lost employees that prioritize this over work, but those that remained have gotten back to work with fewer distractions and its arguable that loosing people that prioritize activism at work over the company vision is a net positive.
The question facing the ACLU is should they be partisan (fight for the rights of just one side) or merely political (fight for all side’s rights, even the sides that you disagree with).
I was really hoping to chime into a fruitful discussion about positive vs negative protection of the first amendment rights. 1A says "... Congress shall make no law ..." but California's Constitution (for example) goes farther to say "Every person may freely speak, write and publish his or her sentiments on all subjects, being responsible for the abuse of this right". This lead to the fascinating Pruneyard Shopping Center v. Robins Supreme Court case[0] which surfaced the careful distinction between the two senses of Free Speech and the government's obligation to protect it. Where does an org like ACLU stand on what precisely defines Free Speech, and, the responsibilities of each State, Federal Govt and NGO like itself to protect it?
IANAL, just someone who hoped we'd discuss things a bit more carefully on HN.
0 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pruneyard_Shopping_Center_v._R...
I find it incredibly ignorant that this article (or anyone here for that matter) fails to mention the name George Soros. The dude literally did a hostile takeover of the ACLU a few years back in the form of overly-generous donations[1].
The ACLU isn't "facing an identity crisis", it's been strategically taken over to push a divide-and-conquer strategy within America. Notice how everything they do nowadays is focused around heated "us vs them" topics? This isn't a mistake, or a natural byproduct...it's 100% by design. Not really sure what the end-goal is, but the ACLU's current agenda (and most of George Soros funded organizations) is clearly to get everyone in America to hate each other.
[1] https://nonprofitquarterly.org/50-million-soros-grant-to-fun...
If the ACLU sacrifices its principles to earn the approval of the woke authoritarian left, then the people in charge never really had those principles.
"Any government regulation of speech or published material is destructive to free society."
Hopefully you immediately think of exceptions: illicit pornography, fire in a theater, ingredient labels/active ingredient listings, directly false marketing, misrepresenting contracts, direct physical threats/"fighting words," convincing someone to commit suicide, intellectual property related speech, advertisements to kids, speech in the military, speech under NDA's, security clearance related information, publicly accusing someone of a crime they didn't commit. Maybe you might think speech is different whether it's from a citizen or non citizen. Maybe it's different from a corporation and a person. Maybe it's different if speech is done in good faith (because a person honestly believes their words) or bad faith (because someone wants to manipulate somebody). Maybe the mode of speech matters, whether it's internet, radio, spoken word, telephone, or otherwise.
Referring to free speech in indirect terms creates a problem, because it denies the grey. Free speech arguments are all about determining the correct gradient of grey for society. Being able to identify and understand grey area is a strong signal of being informed. The grey area is why people who are knowledgeable are unsure and people who know nothing are confident. One sees complexities, the other is blind to them.
Every person on the planet being able to publish a message that can be read by every human (twitter) is something the human race has never had to face before. Facebook can choose to promote hateful speech with algorithms and incite hatred through doing so, gaining them engagement (addiction) in the process. Is that healthy for society? Is fox news healthy? On the other side is CNN (fake news?) healthy? Should China/Russia be able to purchase American airtime? Should American celebrities and businesses be protected from having their speech coerced by foreign powers?
Reasonable people can come to different conclusions on what it means for speech to be "free", what counts as speech, what context around the speech matters, and what entities should get "free speech" protection.
This is why it is encoded as an absolute, so that one’s perspective on what is reasonable or not is irrelevant. If speech causes harm that person can be sued for harm in a civil case. But the government shall not make any law infringing on the right to free speech.
> "Any government regulation of speech or published material is destructive to free society."
Things go off the rails right off the bat by conflating the First Amendment with freedom of speech, which almost always bodes ill for the remainder of the arguments presented. Anyway, the 1st Amendment is a subset of the general principle of freedom of speech that happens to bind the government. The formulation in Article 19 of the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights is a bit clearer about what freedom of speech is:
"Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers"
This encompasses individuals, organizations, businesses, and, yes, governments. This is why the deplatforming of Parler (which in some sense was a happy thing) is still a freedom of speech issue despite not being a First Amendment issue or illegal; third parties stepped in to interfere with those who wanted to impart legal (albeit deplorable) speech and those who wanted to receive legal (ditto) speech. What can be done to one set of people can be done to any other, bad or good, and that's a hazard.
> "Hopefully you immediately think of exceptions..."
Sets up the unfortunately all too common "speech that causes clear and immediate harm is illegal so you don't _actually_ believe in freedom of speech" argument which, much like attacking a point nobody was trying to defend, is neither interesting nor persuasive. Such speech is seldom the core issue of the controversial freedom of speech cases we're discussing in the first place. For example, neither the ACLU's Skokie or even Charlottesville freedom of speech cases had known expectation of immediate harm to others, despite the odious nature of who they were defending.
> "The grey area is why people who are knowledgeable are unsure and people who know nothing are confident. One sees complexities, the other is blind to them."
A pleasant appeal to HN's collective intellectual vanity. Let's see where it takes us.
> "Every person on the planet being able to publish a message that can be read by every human (twitter) is something the human race has never had to face before. Facebook can choose to promote hateful speech with algorithms and incite hatred through doing so, gaining them engagement (addiction) in the process. Is that healthy for society? Is fox news healthy? On the other side is CNN (fake news?) healthy? Should China/Russia be able to purchase American airtime? Should American celebrities and businesses be protected from having their speech coerced by foreign powers?"
Let's substitute for your final paragraphs, a statement I feel is equivalent (please let me know if you think it's an unfair characterization):
"The knowledgeable know better than the ignorant so it's justifiable for the knowledgeable to protect them from themselves by limiting fake news/hateful speech from what they see, with the understanding that what constitutes fake news/hateful speech is decided on by the knowledgeable."
While seductive to a certain type of mindset, the paternalistic and ripe for abuse nature of this idea should be self-evident. It is the progressive equivalent of Kipling's (deeply racist and colonialist) "The White Man's Burden", only here the it is the progressive who are being exhorted to bring enlightenment to the benighted ignorant.
But let's go further and suppose that it were justified somehow, we'd still be faced with the problem that we not know the truth now and, even worse, we don't know what the future will determine the truth to be. Permitting suppression of "hateful speech" would have suppressed the civil rights movement (immensely unpopular in its time), LGBT rights movement (same), and other social movements now deemed important steps in improving human civil rights.
So, in the end, there is nothing new, insightful, nor persuasive to be found here.
(I await the inevitable reply where I'm accused of being a conservative.)
>> Referring to free speech in indirect terms creates a problem, because it denies the grey. Free speech arguments are all about determining the correct gradient of grey for society. Being able to identify and understand grey area is a strong signal of being informed. The grey area is why people who are knowledgeable are unsure and people who know nothing are confident. One sees complexities, the other is blind to them.
"Free speech is table stakes for a free society" is not code for "I believe every entity should have the inviolable right to say whatever they want whenever they want." – I interpret it to mean "A society can't be free unless one of its founding principles is freedom of expression." Another sentiment it expresses is, "we should start from the position that what happens to be expressed is allowable unless it falls under a category where we deem it to be curtailed – versus – speech is strictly regulated, it's a privilege rather than a right, we need to explicitly enumerate the areas where it is unregulated". You're not interpreting what they said charitably in my opinion. And saying "You know things aren't black or white, they're grey" is rather pointless a lot of the time in because you can just counter the supposed argument without the additional lecturing meta-observation which to be honest comes across as kind of condescending to my ears.
Lastly – it's not some massive revelation that there are limitations to freedom of expression:
“Freedom of speech is not regarded as absolute by some with most legal systems generally setting limits on the freedom of speech, particularly when freedom of speech conflicts with other rights and protections, such as in the cases of libel, slander, pornography, obscenity, fighting words, and intellectual property.
Some limitations to freedom of speech may occur through legal sanction, and others may occur through social disapprobation.”
It is hard to imagine them defending an anti-trans person in 2021. As despicable as those people are, they still have civil rights. As a gay man, I would have been despicable for most of the past 100+ years, but the ACLU would have defended me anyway. That version of the ACLU no longer exists.
Reading through their Twitter again just now, it is clear they have gone off the rails.
This precise thing is why it's baffling that people can suggest cancel culture is only something to complain about if you've done / said something wrong. What is considered wrong does not always age well. Sometimes we ourselves are the baddies.
GOA and SAF (Second Amendment Foundation) are far far better when it comes to actual legal challenges to laws that infringe the 2nd Amendment
To their relative credit, they do seem to be struggling with it in a way that very few other orgs are, and you occasionally see them take principled action.
My replacement donations are Fire and Institute for Justice.
I feel there's merit to a singleness-of-purpose within an organization, and ACLU's attempt to juggle "12 or 15 different values" detracts from its effectiveness.
ACLU is lost, I stopped donating a while ago as well, and it won't return until they oust those that work against the liberal ideal.
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ZQG9cwKbct2LtmL3p/evaporativ...
Universities are hardly right-wing institutions that fire academics for left-wing research, quite to the contrary "academics" too often engage in indoctrination instead of teaching students to engage a subject to mastery. We are at such a bad point that even harvard is so stooped in dialectic that it argue 2+2 is not always 4, something an elementary kid knows is bullshit.
Maybe you should re-read your comment a few times and think critically about it.
You're just going to leave it there? What/who is FIRE? This isn't one of those unique words easily discovered during a web search.
It seems they also edited their comment to include a link - seems pretty reasonable to me.
Here's an interesting bit:
> The A.C.L.U. of Virginia argued that this violated the free speech rights of the far-right groups and won, preserving the right for the group to parade downtown. With too few police officers who reacted too passively, the demonstration turned ugly and violent; in addition to fistfights, the far right loosed anti-Semitic and racist chants and a right-wing demonstrator plowed his car into counterprotesters, killing a woman. Dozens were injured in the tumult.
> Revulsion swelled within the A.C.L.U., and many assailed its executive director, Anthony Romero, and legal director, Mr. Cole, as privileged and clueless. The A.C.L.U. unfurled new guidelines that suggested lawyers should balance taking a free speech case representing right-wing groups whose “values are contrary to our values” against the potential such a case might give “offense to marginalized groups.”
That's not political correctness, that's ideals colliding head-on with the grim reality. The real world isn't a Disney movie, and doing the "right thing" doesn't magically make everything work out positively.
So the Virginia ACLU defended the freedom of speech of Nazis, and the Nazis did what Nazis do and ran over people they didn't like, killing a woman. At that point a lot of people started asking themselves "Are we really being a positive influence?". And a conflict began.
I see this as a conflict between deontology and consequentialism. Deontology says "free speech was defended, the outcome doesn't matter. Let's keep going". But it turns out that deontology isn't that great of a fit for the real world, because people do care about consequences very intensely. Few have the iron-clad nerve needed to say "an innocent died as the consequence of my/my group's actions, and nevertheless I wouldn't change a thing".
I think the major difference now vs the 70s is that news spread far wider, and consequences are communicated far better and more viscerally.
Those people were clearly in the wrong though. After all, why join a civil liberties union if your support for said liberties is conditional on your whims?
I see this all the time in the so-called "paradox of tolerance", which is of course only a paradox if you assume a consequentialist framework as unstated background assumption.
Personally, I feel asking people to make personal consequentialist decisions gives them far too much leeway to bring personal bias in, so I'm in favor of deontological freedom of speech - on consequentialist grounds.
I can see why this discussion's turned ugly, but it can't NOT be ugly. None of this is hypothetical. It's blown up because the aforementioned Nazis worked out that they could compel the ACLU to effectively become a Nazi ally and devote their forces to the cause of terrorism. Under the ground rules of what the ACLU is, if properly managed, the organization can be used to clear the way for violence and actions that are not on brand for the ACLU, and not what it thinks of as 'civil liberty'.
This is a clever sort of meta-gaming thing, but it's also an obvious existential crisis for the ACLU to the extent that the ACLU cares at all about terrorism. I think there's an assumption that we can define some things with a bright line never to be infringed upon, and that there will never be exploits to undermine our assumptions.
And I mean, that's not even true for mathematical proof, much less free-speech liberalism.
Which, yeah, sucks but I'm a sufficiently intense competition and all that..
I haven't drooled in a while, but I do actually appreciate those kinds of hints.
I agree with everything else you said though. It's hard to imagine that debasing the very concept of surveys will be a net positive for democracy.
Oh nice, we are following federal fundraising laws now. This is an improvement.
But it's very, very consistent. The "Outrage you so you give us money" letters in these surveys don't leave any whitespace on the last page.
On the other hand, there are some groups I support who will send something along the lines of a 10 page, single sided, properly written letter (no random *BOLD* italic and the ever-popular "ink pen looking circles to draw your attention to the outrage of the day") explaining in competent written English what they've been doing, where they'd like to expand, and what they need to accomplish this. I'm far, far more likely to support those groups (though I generally just give locally, I've less interest in what's going on in Washington than in our local town and region).
It seems like you're complaining about the fact that the left is not conservative at heart, which is odd. It's not exactly some sort of hidden agenda that the point of the left is to win elections and wield executive power rather than obstructing the government and focusing solely on individual rights.
I am old enough to remember times where at least some individual rights - speech, association, honest elections, equality in the eyes of the law for all people regardless of their identity, due process - were the causes that most of the left would support. There were people on the left that genuinely supported Civil Rights movement because they believed all people should have equal rights. Now equality is offensive for them, and so are due process, free speech and other values their previous generation wrote on their banners.
Some of the group's members might actually be pluralist civil libertarians at heart.
But this news demonstrates that the vast majority are not. They were authoritarians in libertarians' clothing, and today's political environment is woke enough for them to swap out their duds.
It's easy to be principled when it doesn't matter. To anyone who didn't live through it, the Nazis are an ancient demon that feels as relevant as Darth Vader or the Devil. What do I care if 4chan wants to name a soda "Hitler did nothing wrong" for the lols?
It's a lot harder when you perceive the speech that your principles would have you save to be a tangible threat to your safety. If some on the left (rightly or wrongly) see e.g. unmoderated alt-right social media activity as a risk factor for something bigger than 1/6, there would be an inherent tension between principles and pragmatism.
I'd be interested in seeing evidence as to whether the left has trended toward a particular side, but it's a shame that this has to become an issue in the first place.
Yet somehow it's not a "tangible threat to safety" while a bunch of wackos fantasizing on the internet how Trump is about to be revealed as the Messiah is. Sorry, it's very hard to treat such "safety" concerns as genuine while keeping ignoring the real safety threats. It's more like a pampered $100K-per-year college student cries that she feels "unsafe" going to their college campus because somewhere there on campus there is a professor who once said something that puts him slightly on the right of AOC. It's not what people mean by "safety", it's weaponizing "safety" for political reasons.
In Sheldon Messinger’s analysis of an old-age pressure group formed in the 1930s, the Townsend organization, he shows how the organization managed to stay alive by transforming its political goal of increased support for the aged through a radical economic plan into social goals of fellowship and card playing and fiscal goals of selling vitamins and patent medicines to its members. The unanticipated consequence of fund-raising techniques based on selling items, rather than political programs, was to turn the organization into a social club. The changing social and political scene also, of course, produced a change in goals. In a somewhat similar vein, Joseph Gusfield shows how the Women’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) had to abandon its attack on drinking per se after prohibition was repealed and change to an attack on middle-class mores and life-styles in general, in order to serve the needs of its members. Mayer Zald outlines how the Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA) changed from helping poor migrants from the farm or abroad, who found the city a fearsome experience, to providing recreation for middle-class suburban youths. The Christian ethics of the early period, designed to sustain the faith of helpless people, gave way to a bland ethic of the American way of life; the practical help and training changed from information and techniques for survival in the urban jungle to physical culture and recreation for youths and adults with leisure time on their hands. In both cases, the organization survived the environmental changes and found a new mission.
-- Charles Perrow, Complex Organizations (1972, 1979, 1986)
https://www.worldcat.org/title/complex-organizations-a-criti...
The period described largely spans the first half of the 20th century.
"Once overtaken by a clique of political activists using it as a the platform to further an agenda unrelated to the org mission's statement, organisation X faces an identity crisis"
This is why tech businesses like Basecamp, Coinbase or Shopify are pushing back against partisanship and political activism in tech.
(Decided it was unfair to throw a large org under the bus without being able spend a few hours to defend the claim.)
Like why do no-profits and charities seem to corrupt their aim at a greater speed than for profit businesses?
It seems inherent to the different aims of charities and businesses. Nucor Corporation has a nominal lineage from "Nuclear Corporation of America Inc." incorporated in the 1950s. But its actual business has had nothing to do with nuclear technology in 50+ years; it found more success in the steel business. Shareholders aren't mad that the company isn't following its original nuclear technology mission since it found a better business. There's nothing to "corrupt" when a business goes after different markets.
But some donors will be upset if a charity focused on one mission broadens or deviates from its original mission. Some people may also be happy with these sorts of change, of course, but mission changes tend to be more controversial with charities than with for-profit companies.
And becoming partisan isn't just a way of pushing for the core mission more/less effectively. It means dropping huge chunks of the core mission (rights for anyone you disagree with).
... and sorry HN for polluting the database with ascii when a single upvote would have done fine!
Fighting words, credible threats... These topics can't just be hand waved when discussing whether the ACLU should be fighting for the rights of Nazis to spout hate. Civil lawsuits are rarely even redress as most people can't afford a lawyer to just go around sueing people, even when the cases are egregious. And I don't think anyone wants a world where the ACLU is the unofficial 4th branch of government.
In other words, if the baseline of what is societally acceptable is moved, things that were previously considered extreme are more likely to be seriously considered.
meanwhile families of those who died in 2020 still haven't received help from BLM despite promises https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/breonna-ta... https://www.complex.com/life/michael-browns-father-ferguson-...
The places the US does not let journalists access are countless. A prominent example are most of the US' border facilities, the detention-like migrant "housing" facilities among them.[1]
So what you brought up can clearly not be a differentiator between those countries in terms of such an index.
[1]: https://edition.cnn.com/2021/03/22/politics/biden-administra...
Edit:
To be fair to Burkina Faso I should point out that their 'displacement camps' are a case of taking care of people in need: refugees of war. Meanwhile the US facilities are just locking people up before sending them home.
- https://pressfreedomtracker.us/all-incidents/amid-backlash-d...
- https://theintercept.com/2019/08/30/guantanamo-bay-press-res...
If you're aware of more recent information, do share. As I said, this is just the results from a cursory search and may not reflect the current situation.
Just b/c the article says it does not make it so. The ACLU has a broad agenda of things they defend. "Civil Liberties" does not just mean speech.
It’s true that civil liberties means more than just free speech. They’ve also done very important work in defending the rights of the accused, for example.
What they never were, until the organization was stolen, was a generic left of center organization that advocated whatever happened to be popular among that sector of society regardless of whether or not it had anything to do with civil liberties, or indeed were outright opposed.
There’s always been ideologues that thought that anything and everything else should give way before their moral certainty about everything. It just unfortunate that they’ve destroyed an institution that stood up for specific meta-principles.
That's what, despite its flaws, makes the US special.
The first amendment in America protects speech (etc), while freedom of expression in Canada has stricter limits on speech w.r.t. hate speech. I'd argue that Canada's limits are more reasonable. I also accept that rational people could argue the opposite. I trust in the democratic process to deal with these issues.
The limitations on hate speech are something I agree with strongly, and would vote against someone wanting to reduce them. So I guess you'd find my position bizarre.
Source(s):
Everyone is consequentialist in some measure. It's in human nature.
In the end, we all want to be happy and to enjoy life, and to be proud of our work, and as a result we care when things get in the way of that.
You can see plenty evidence of this in modern times. Eg, to pick something a bit less dramatic, Brexit didn't work out so well for a lot of fishermen that supported it, and it's not hard to find news of them being very upset by this and demanding change. It turns out having sovereignty doesn't make one all that happy when it threatens one's own livelihood.
Well of course this was done after my comment.
Nope. It becomes a side-taking issue when sides are taken in a self-directed manner, rather than indiscriminate support. eg When the UN medics treat warlord soldiers after they have been left behind, the UN has not "taken sides".
I think part of it is the rise of online echo chambers. People act like the media they consume, and latter generations grew up with online circle jerks being the norm.
Another factor is the rise of so much bad faith disinformation coupled with the extreme virality of bullshit on social media. It seems like the truth of a story is inversely proportional to its likelihood of being shared on Facebook.
There's been a panic about the explosion of things like Qanon, neo-fascism, and anti-vaccine disinformation. I hear a lot of people questioning whether it's possible to have a liberal open society without... ironically... censorship.
I don't think censorship can be the answer, but I don't know what the answer is. The last few years has left me utterly shocked at the gullibility of human beings. Do people even think at all or are we indeed just mindless "meme machines" whose central nervous systems are vectors for replicating patterns?
Censorship of those who seek to oppress is necessary to require freedom (or to put it another way, the paradox of intolerance is that you must be intolerant of those who are intolerant, to guarantee that maximum tolerance is not only possible but guaranteed over a long time frame).
On the note of meme machines, I always liked to think that Memes ought to be studied in a university course, Memetics could become a serious field of study.
There is a big difference however between the traditional old American left largely coming out of an academic, fairly elite milieu, and the much more diverse left today.
For people like Chomsky who used to defend the right to Holocaust denial say, it's a very abstract, intellectual debate. For a lot of Asian working class people, proliferation of hate-speech is a very real threat today. I don't think this tension is new either. Even during the civil rights era, there were marked differences between black activists (or even militant groups) and the public left-wing intellectuals.
Equality is not offensive and a left-wing value but today it is more obvious that there is a tension between formal equality in front of the law and genuine equality in the real world. And because there is now more voices in politics, the left is changing.And so is the right by the way, whose elite values are very, very far removed from the ordinary voter.
> For a lot of Asian working class people, proliferation of hate-speech is a very real threat today.
Anti-Asian hate speech has the history over a century long, at least, in America - sad, but true. It's not a new thing. And for all those years, Asian community managed to achieve huge success and become very prosperous, in fact so much that now the woke higher education institutions discriminate against this community (as they did against Jewish community years ago) - because they are too successful and make their formalistic "diversity" goals harder to achieve! Clearly, abandoning the ideals of the free speech is not necessary for the community to succeed, even in the presence of haters.
> there is a tension between formal equality in front of the law and genuine equality in the real world
No, there's no tension. Of course, the former does not guarantee the latter - it's only a necessary condition, but never a sufficient one. There's much more that a society needs to achieve equality of opportunity - if it's at all possible, and it will never achieve the equality of outcomes, of course. But the paradoxical conclusion the new left is making from this - completely common in human affairs - difference between the ideal and the worldly practice falling short of it - that the ideal has to be abandoned completely, since our inability to achieve it - even witnessing the huge progress that has been achieved - means it's a false ideal.
Even worse is that to replace this ideal, the old and tired ideas of racial division, segregation, racial hate and unequal treatment depending on skin color and ethnic identity, are unearthed, dusted off, and paraded as some kind of solution for inequality. Not only it could never work - forced inequality can't lead to equality - it is morally repugnant, and will cost us as a society a lot to drive those ghosts of the past back underground where they belong.
In brief, “woke” means having awakened to having a particular type of “critical consciousness,” as these are understood within Critical Social Justice. To first approximation, being woke means viewing society through various critical lenses, as defined by various critical theories bent in service of an ideology most people currently call “Social Justice.” That is, being woke means having taken on the worldview of Critical Social Justice, which sees the world only in terms of unjust power dynamics and the need to dismantle problematic systems. That is, it means having adopted Theory and the worldview it conceptualizes.
Under “wokeness,” this awakened consciousness is set particularly with regard to issues of identity, like race, sex, gender, sexuality, and others. The terminology derives from the idea of having been awakened (or, “woke up”) to an awareness of the allegedly systemic nature of racism, sexism, and other oppressive power dynamics and the true nature of privilege, domination, and marginalization in society and understanding the role in dominant discourses in producing and maintaining these structural forces.
Furthermore, being woke carries the imperative to become a social activist with regard to these issues and problems, again, on the terms set by Critical Social Justice. This—especially for white people—is to include a lifelong commitment to an ongoing process of self-reflection, self-criticism, and (progressive) social activism in the name of Theory and Social Justice (see also, antiracism).
Roughly speaking, it generally refers to a combination of progressive political goals with a you're-either-with-us-or-against-us intolerance of anyone who is neutral (or insufficiently supportive) toward those goals. I assume this is more or less what asabjorn meant.
As it is, I think a good faith reading of his comment would just require woke to mean "people who expect their work to conform to their politics".
I worked at an investment bank recently, they just wanted to make money -> not woke. After that I worked at a brokerage, the CEO announced she wanted more female managers, not just because it would be profitable but for her political beliefs -> woke.
But the current mood is absolutely moral certainty and off the charts self righteousness.
The moral certainty is obnoxious to a comedic level, bordering on tropes of self righteous college students in Che Guevara shirts lecturing about their enlightenment after two semesters at uni.
Their members may be less openly confrontational - more genteel - than some ACLU employees.
But if you think they're any less certain of their morality, or any less self-righteous than those ACLU employees, you're not seeing reality clearly.
Come on ACLU, is free speech a fundamental right or a contingent power to be granted or revoked?
Even if doing so might advance that agenda in the short term, and I don't think that's the case to any great degree, all it takes is a shift in who the gatekeepers are for this to go very wrong.
Just look at how many countries outlaw all kinds of speech on the basis of this or that religious group being offended by it. Who gets to represent marginalised groups and say what they are offended by? How many or what proportion of them need to be offended for it to count? It's a quagmire.
That's not free speech.
And just to counter your actual point, what about a lousiana white person who's family's been living in poverty for 100 years? Do they get free speech? Or not, because they're white?
It's not unambiguously true that freedom-of-speech itself is substantially responsible for anyone's loss of other rights. We can't even have a public conversation about this without freedom-of-speech, where all relevant ideas and evidence can be openly evaluated, unless there is essentially no gatekeeper (committee, policy, "filter", etc.) deciding on what is relevant or permissible speech. We will only have biased answers if we bias the discussion.
Further, even mere perception about the bias in the discussion (caused by censorship etc.) causes some people to disengage from the discussion altogether, and facilitates the "silo-ing" of groups of people who have little contact with each other. That is not a recipe for a functioning pluralistic society, and ultimately for peace itself.
The only thing restrictions on free speech incentivise is conformity to the ruling party's policies and there is an implicit assumption here that the democratic parties values are really the correct ones - which many people of colour will dispute.
The moment the Republicans take over (which they will inevitably considering how few campaign promises Biden has so far delivered), they will turn this on groups like BLM and the Antifa movement in general.
Racists never needed the protections of free speech to argue for denying people their rights because those views already had widespread societal acceptance.
Now that explicit racism is no longer the norm, organisations like the Klan need to rely on free speech protections, but thats only evidence of how unacceptable their beliefs have become.
These earnest arguments that limiting speech will help protect people are terrifying.
What if the greatest threat to free speech is a political party? Should the ACLU allow that threat to advance unopposed so that the ACLU can claim to be non-partisan?
Your freedoms should _never_ be contingent on the expression (or lack thereof) of a particular political ideology.
ACLU (and others) cite it as a 5-4 decision but even the dissenters on the case believed it was an individual right, they just still thought it could be regulated / scrutinized. In that sense the individual right won 9-0.
Further what the hell does a "collective right" even look like in the first place....
the ACLU hates guns, does not believe anyone outside the government should have guns, the "collective right" was just their cover so they did not have to admit they only stood for some of the constitution not all of it
//EDIT: Mods have rate limited me, so in response to comment below allow me to add
I guess I should have implicitly stated Constitutional Rights, and more specifically Bill of Rights in the context.
On top of that, that is still not a "collective right", that is more of a Balance of rights, You have a right to your property, I have a right to my property, if your actions (aka polluting ) damage my property then you have directly harmed my individual rights and are thus liable
An example of this would be the fact that I have the right to swing my arms, but if I swing my arms in a manner that hits another person I have violated their bodily rights not to be injured by me. No one would claim that is a "collective right", no here we are balancing individual rights, their right to not be injured trumps my right to swing my arms in the physical space they occupy at that moment
I'll give a non-gun example - you buy a piece of property near the headway of an important river. You have an individual right to improve the property, and really use it any way you want. HOWEVER - the people who live downstream of you ALSO have a collective right to use the river, which puts a limit on your individual rights. You can't dump pollutants or trash in the river, nor can you divert the waterway. You have an individual right to use your own property, but your neighbors (depending on the issue, this may be local or global) have a collective right not to suffer damage or externalities from that use.
In the context of the gun discussion, the collective rights people believe that gun ownership is intended to defend the neighborhood, not for individual self-defense.
This is the problem with the whole "DO YOUR OWN RESEARCH" retort that lots of political arguments deteriorate into. If YOU have already done said research, and you have an informed opinion from said research, then you should share it directly in the conversation at hand.
Not only do you avoid looking like a jerk by trying to end a conversation with "look it up" or something similar; you are also able to potentially be the reason someone changes their mind on the subject because you evangelized something that you believe in instead of leaving them potentially thinking "People who like FIRE must be jerks."
What on Earth are you talking about? Your whole comment is in reference to rebuffing a request for more details with "look it up". _Nobody here is doing that_. The original comment mentioned FIRE without describing it; presumably you don't think every mention of an organization must come with an executive summary? The response then whined about how the previous comment left them with an ungoogleable dead-end. My comment simply said that, with context, it was far from ungoogleable (and thus the aggressive tone towards the parent comment wasn't warranted). The reason I personally didn't provide more information is that I myself am not that familiar with FIRE, certainly not to the extent that I'd be able to summarize why they're an adequate substitute for the ACLU.
> you evangelized something that you believe in instead of leaving them potentially thinking "People who like FIRE must be jerks
This and the rest of your comment is a perfect example of the decay of discourse behind things like the ACLU's troubles. Instead of trying to understand what they read, people like you are desperate to pattern-match to some imagined ill and then mistake your hysterical emotional response for moral reasoning.
Unwavering, unconditional support for an idea - any idea - seems like it could result in a bad time.
Personally, I'm not sure where I sit on this one, and I think there's a valuable, good-faith discussion to be had on whether free speech as we see it today, is actually a net good or not. It's an inherently complex question worthy of debate.
Pre-Brexit, there were a lot of people that really wanted sovereignty.
Post-Brexit, it turns out that sovereignty didn't make a lot of those people happy, because it got in the way of their employment or business, and it turns out you can't eat sovereignty.
Same thing happened here. It's a lot easier to defend a despicable person's right to hold a protest when they're powerless. But when people start dying that gets a lot harder to justify.
Only for those who were unprincipled in the first place. Those who approach civil liberties from a point of subjective right vs wrong are doomed to failure - the moment a case comes up that clashes with their own viewpoints, they will abandon the liberties they claimed to defend. On the other hand, those who approach civil liberties as a matter of principle face no such dilemma.
...until they remember that there are that there is more than one civil liberty, and more than one person who has civil liberties, and that sometimes one person exercising a particular civil liberty can prevent or conflict with another person exercising a different civil liberty.
Once you are dealing with a society bigger and more complicated than Gilligan's Island, you cannot escape these dilemmas.
It's kind of a fairy tale of the kind Disney sells you: if you do the right thing, everything works out for the best. We like that idea because simplicity is appealing, but the real world is complicated and conflicts with such nice notions.
In Disney movies when you do the right thing, it saves the world in the end.
In the real world when you do the right thing, sometimes all you achieve is nazis running over a crowd, and you end up with a crisis of conscience and not much to show for it.
Nothing the ACLU ever did blew up in their face. People haven't "started dying" because of the rights they defended. Instead they just got taken over by people who are immersed in your worldview and willing to parasitize and destroy any organization they can get their hands on in a belief that people should be ruled by hard-left "experts", who will make them "happy", even if they don't seem to realize it or agree.
ADL's stated mission is "To stop the defamation of the Jewish people, and to secure justice and fair treatment to all..." It seems like the ADL has legitimate work it can be doing, unless you think Jews and all people are treated fairly. I don't think you're saying that, and I do think you're saying it's not doing the work that it could be doing. Could you say more about that?
"Of the 1,715 victims of anti-religious hate crimes:
60.2 percent were victims of crimes motivated by offenders’ anti-Jewish bias."
Anti-Jewish hate-crimes make up a majority of the anti-religious hate crimes in the US. (You could argue they should be classified as "Racial/ethnicity/ancestry bias" but that's another discussion).
The statistics aren't perfect - not every crime or possible crime is reported to law enforcement, and not every law enforcement agency in the US shares hate crime information with the federal government. A recent law changed that so it's required instead of optional, so likely more will be doing so in the future.
Whatever their legitimate grievances, that's not an acceptable response.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trial_of_Jian_Ghomeshi
Well, it is an prime example of why we have trials.... instead of public opinion lynch mobs with a noose and tree.
Frankly, those law students not wanting someone to have a fair day in court, should have been disbarred. Absurd! Court is how you determine guilt!
Again, laws don't matter... the truth doesn't matter, have a trial of public option, and even make it hard to have his side heard.
After all, they didn't want him to have a fair defense?
Canadians pay too much attention to US politics. We're not perfect, but for example "defund the police?
Look at a Toronto sized US city police, and social program budget. Now look at Toronto.
Surprise! Toronto's social programs almost rival the police budget. US city? Almost non-existent, and they get military surplus weaponry. No comparison. Not even remotely the same.
Yet Canucks run around, gibbering on about defund the police, when we've effectively always done that!
Perfect? No. But we should focus on our real issues, not transplant US issues here.
My point is, our courts are not US courts either.
And probably some other things. A holistic theory for what should or shouldn't be covered has always escaped me.
The ACLU caving to political donors under new executive directors in the Obama years isn't a nothingburger to lawyers like me who looked up to them.
They aren't ignoring Free Speech cases. They are actively fighting against them.
Do anti-BDS laws mean the ADL has an identity crisis? Or they should be having one? They seem related to their mission.
I’m not a lawyer, and I’m not an expert in the first amendment, its case law, or anti-BDS laws. You might be right that some or all anti-BDS laws violate some first amendment right in some way. I don’t know which analogy is the right one to apply to anti-BDS laws, something different legal scholars and lawyers argue about. It seems like reasonable people can disagree about what is constitutional and what is not here. Maybe the supreme court will rule on it specifically, and even then it might still be the case that reasonable people can disagree.
That's perfectly good reasoning, but:
> ADL has engaged in lobbying for policies that unconstitutionally conflict with the first ammendment.
as to your premises, again:
> > Citation / explanation needed.
Personally, I'll continue to defend the US model. Speech should have no legal limits, but that doesn't meant it doesn't have civic consequences. Those who disagree are free to do so publicly, repeatedly and loudly.
And honestly this is the weirdest fucking thing: there’s _plenty_ of legal limits to free speech in the US, and yet there’s this loud section of Americans who believe the particular lines drawn in the US were etched in stone or something.
Not really? The limits are essentially directly inciting violence, directly threatening, and knowingly aiding someone in the commission of a crime (ie literally coaching someone else on how to break the law). That's not "plenty", that's really the bare minimum (and exactly how it should be, from my perspective at least).
Edit: Crap, just realized I forgot about our ridiculous obscenity limitations. Those shouldn't exist IMO, but to be fair about the only thing that's managed to run afoul of them so far is literal bestiality porn. (https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/413/15/) (https://caselaw.findlaw.com/us-supreme-court/535/234.html)
As a practical example, consider China's recent "security" law that allows only "patriots" to run for political office.
For something a bit closer to home, looking at various ToS and codes of conduct reveals how wildly definitions of "hate speech" vary in the US alone.
"So, let me be crystal clear: the first genocide of the 20th century is no different. What happened in the Ottoman Empire to the Armenians beginning in 1915 was genocide. The genocide began with the ruling government arresting and executing several hundred Armenian intellectuals. After that, Armenian families were removed from their homes and sent on death marches. The Armenian people were subjected to deportation, expropriation, abduction, torture, massacre and starvation.
What happened to the Armenian people was unequivocally genocide.
We believe that remembering and educating about any genocide – Armenian, the Holocaust, Bosnia, Rwanda, and others is a necessary tool to prevent future tragedies."
https://www.adl.org/blog/adl-on-the-armenian-genocide
"In 2007, Abraham Foxman came under criticism for his stance on the Armenian genocide. ADL had previously described it as a "massacre" and an "atrocity", but not as a "genocide".[134] Foxman had earlier opposed calls for the US Government to recognise it as a "genocide".[135]"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Defamation_League#Armenia...
The closest I think they've gotten to gun cases is probably this one, which was more of a 4th amendment issue:
Then there was this case, which was mainly 1st amendment, but with strong 2nd amendment ingredients:
* climate science (death threats, widespread media attacks, attempts from politicians to cancel grants)
* digital privacy (death threats)
* history of policing (death threats, attacks from Hannity, attacks from the Hoover institute trying to prevent her thesis from being accepted)
* history of women in medieval europe (see below)
* US civil war history (attacks from state politicians)
The most extreme case is the person who does history of women in medieval europe. Organized groups of students take her class and are clearly trained in precisely the places where they can write hate speech specifically focused at her but also just general hate speech against women but have privacy laws make it impossible for them to actually be associated with their writing. This is a tactic designed to get her to slip up and breach some sort of privacy protection, upon which time they immediately bring legal action. I'll let you guess whether FIRE is protecting her in the legal action.
Universities are hardly right-wing institutions, true. But that doesn't mean that FIRE is a bipartisan institution.
If you want a nationally recognized example, go check out what is going on at UNC Chapel Hill now.
The UNC Chapel Hill case is a bad example as Nikole Hannah-Jones engaged in divisive political activism in her role instead of academic rigor and is the brains behind major indoctrination efforts such as the 1619 project. Someone like her that teach students what to think instead of how should not get tenure, and does not meet the academic rigor to teach.
Calls for academic freedom has been used to subvert university resources from academic pursuits to political activism. This was never the intention behind protections of academic freedom and is a corruption of the academic pursuit.
You may believe the 1619 Project is a "major indoctrination effort" and that it lacks "academic rigor", but that's not established fact at all. Many people think highly of it and of her work - including her potential UNC professional colleagues, who wanted her there in a tenured job at an excellent university. It does represent a point of view that disagrees with established ones, but that's almost the point of academic research: Find where established beliefs are flawed. Especially on sensitive topics, that may result in an angry reaction and division; that shouldn't stop people from publishing, and that's what tenure protects.
Nothing about the conservative response to the 1619 Project seems distinguished from that kind of reaction, or from the reactionary response to most attempts to address racism.
> Someone like her that teach students what to think instead of how should not get tenure, and does not meet the academic rigor to teach.
What basis do you have for saying she teaches in that manner? All professors have their own research, their own point of view, and they teach it. If you've taken a liberal arts college class, you will recall that you are expected to be able to handle that and think critically about it.
> Calls for academic freedom has been used to subvert university resources from academic pursuits to political activism.
What distinguishes those things? Who decides? Just because it has happened at some time in some place, is that evidence that it's happening now? Should we eliminate all academic freedom?
FIRE issued a statement about investigating UNC chapel hill. Do you have any information that NHJ approached them to represent her in a lawsuit and was turned down?
Your other examples are pretty vague but if they are secret enough that you can’t link to them, why would you expect FIRE to have learned of them? Is this inside information you have about the professor reaching out to FIRE and being turned down?
This is an oversimplification. What you might be extrapolating from is the common sentiment that complaining about cancel culture is not substantive in cases where an individual appears to have done something wrong enough to justify the consequences. Yes, "wrong enough" is of varying subjectivity in each case, but focusing on "cancel culture" as some kind of monolithic evil instead of focusing on the details of each case is a very common source of noise, and so is commonly criticized, and that criticism may be what you're accumulating into "cancel culture is only something to complain about if you've done / said something wrong".
When you are not killing people quickly in accidents, you are killing them slowly with particulate pollution. And if that's not enough, you are also making a big contribution to global warming, an existential threat to our civilisation. It is unconscionable!
This is what people will say in the future anyway. You can make your own mind up.
I suppose one could argue that this amounts to a threat of violence, which is a form of limited speech. I am not free to make bodily threats of violence toward other named individuals. Threatening positive rights is threatening force, so it definitely gets at least near to that line.
And even when elected, they threaten no force, they simply remove a right from the law.
At no point did they threaten force against poor people, only that their free speech be taken away. They got elected and are doing it non-violently.
Now poor people no longer have free speech.
Hence, either you must treat a threat against free speech as violence unconditionally of it's physical or psychological component (ie if it has a legal component) or you must acknowledge that free speech can be threatened by non-violent oppression.
Besides the obvious, who defines what is oppressive? If we are censoring people then there should be due process at a minimum, so who writes those procedures and laws? How do we ensure they don’t become politicized?
To ensure they don't become politicized, any new positive freedom should require a 2/3rds approval by the government (and for the people in the US that means you need to figure out multi-party or this is gonna suck) and removing a positive freedom would require 3/4th approval by the government.
The procedures and laws should be handled and drafted by a separated government branch, which is dedicated to protecting the freedoms granted by the constitution (as well as protecting the constitution of your country itself). They substitute prosecution in case of violations but do have to go through the same courts as everyone else.
To ensure that this doesn't escalate for person-on-person disputes, generally they should only prosecute those who are threatening to oppress or have oppressed a group of people or a person for being part of a group of people under protection from the constitution (like their sex, gender, economic background or skin color).
Then there’s the question about your so-called “nonpositive rights”. What does this include? What does it take to remove these?
Your vision of the future here is terrifying, and I will personally fight against a truth dictator and the removal of rights with every ounce of my being.
Nice to hear, but how do you plan to do it? The rest of your comment ignores the problem, which is what has happened for generations.
Talking about X doesn't imply ignoring Y, and I object to the blatantly hostile and manipulative language.
> I'm not ignoring the many problems marginalised groups face, I am simply addressing the current topic of conversation,
That is an example of my point and (in my understanding) the point of the new 'movement' in the ACLU: Free speech is always the topic, and has been for generations, and the other civil rights of marginalized people are never the topic - or not enough to motivate anyone to solve the problems.
A sort of dramatic hypothesis: Free speech affects the people who sit at the table, so that's what they see and what they care about. The marginalized get table scraps.
I actually support the ACLU's 'old' stance on free speech, but that's not the topic of conversation IMHO.
It is unambiguously true that speech has caused it. Speech is the source of almost all political activity - guns rarely play a role.
I'm assuming that you're not claiming anything like a natural right against exposure to offensive speech ("speech acts").
(I assume you know that speech can certainly be criminal or tortious: Fraud, slander, incitement, harassment, conspiracy, accessory, violating official secrecy, etc. But I don't think that's the issue here.)
It remains the norm in many places IME, including on the Internet and in many private conversations with white people.
Which returns us to the problem: What do we do about the other civil rights of minorities? People keep focusing on free speech for the majority and never address the far more serious problem.
> It remains the norm in many places IME, including on the Internet and in many private conversations with white people.
If you insist on grouping and stereotyping people by their race then you are the one that is perpetuating racism.
Sure, but speech plays an enormous role, the largest role IMHO.
> taking action against the racist systems and people in power that really impact their rights
What is normalized among the public greatly determines, IMHO, the systems and powerful people. From another perspective: If we just changed the rules and the public didn't change, imagine what would happen. Also, note that people with political causes invest enormous resources in manipulating public opinion.
I'm not talking about political views, but the civil rights of minorities.
Calling civil rights 'political views' is an old, simple tactic of denying people's rights.
We agree (without getting into the weeds of the wording). My point is that the civil rights of marginalized people have long been highly 'selective'. The outrage when some rights of the majority are threatened is ironic, or something.
The majority usually doesn't need much help; look around, at successful people in almost every domain: white guys have tons of freedom, voice, opportunity, prosperity, safety, etc. Turn on the news and see who does the talking. I think concern for their rights is often (without talking about you in particular - I don't know you) cover for protecting their political and social power, protecting the established discriminatory system.
Civil rights are there for the vulnerable, who don't have power. 'Democracy must be more than two wolves and a sheep voting on dinner.' People in the majority have rights, absolutely, but that's not a problem and it's a distraction from the serious issues.
Falsely shouting "Fire!" in a crowded theater is currently allowed per the Supreme Court [0], as of Brandenburg v. Ohio [1], as it is not an incitement to imminent, lawless behavior. The "classic ban", incidentally, was actually a ban on speech opposing the draft during WW1. The "falsely shouting fire in a theater" analogy was created by judges to justify banning anti-draft leaflets.
0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shouting_fire_in_a_crowded_the...
Sure, and that’s exactly the basis for it in most rich free countries. You’ll find some social and historic wrinkles, but there’s very little you can’t say in Canada that you can say in America.
The Canadians don’t make a whole dog and pony show over MY FREE SPEECH RIGHTS though, which is why Canadian politics is a little less completely beholden to special interests, why hate speech is illegal there, and why you don’t get direct-to-consumer pharma advertising there.
I agree completely. This is exactly the reason why I believe most ACLU staff are thoroughly unqualified for the job. Defending civil liberties as a matter of principle is not something most people can do. That's perfectly fine. What annoys me is the hypocrisy of it. Don't believe in civil liberties for all? Fine, just don't pretend you do.
If WE are stopping the BAD GUYS from marching on OUR turf, then what precedent does that set for permitting a civil rights march in Selma?
Most of us aren't pure-logic Kantian robots. We have a goal in mind that's beyond simply being logically consistent. When we form an organization that sometimes defends the Nazis, we're not doing it because our only motivation is that some rights are absolutely inviolable no matter what. We do it for mostly pragmatic reasons, such as the one you've outlined. If the Nazis get a fair trial, then that helps ensure that we also do. If we make too bad of a law to use against the Nazis, we could end up as victims of it some day. Defending the Nazis is ultimately a means to the end of achieving a good society for us to live in.
That's why whenever the true end of doing such things starts being endangered, principles start faltering.
And it's valuable. Barely a year after getting people fired for takes was popularized during BLM, we see the cannon turned on journalists who wrote a pro-palestine essay in college. Nobody could have predicted it.
The former is inconsistent with the latter. The preservation of any set of civil rights you might conceive of is, absolutely, a “political agenda”.
It's also worth noting that the meaning of the word "political" is overloaded here. I did not use it in the same sense that you did - I hope that doesn't escape your notice. (Still though, a potentially ambiguous wording is nonetheless a shortcoming. It's on me to ensure that my communications are as clear as possible.)
Again, what if a party or politician is a significant threat to civil rights, and necessary to the defense of those rights is the defeat of that party? I think the ACLU would be abandoning its duties if they stood helpless on principle. Probably they should make clear their reasoning.
> Your freedoms should _never_ be contingent on the expression (or lack thereof) of a particular political ideology.
I'm not sure how that is relevant to the question. Also, there are exceptions to everything, including free speech and political ideologies. First, anything can be called a 'political ideology'; those words are not a shield. Second, if your political ideology is to seize power and end civil rights, you don't have unlimited right to promote it (especially if you are a threat to succeed); my tolerance for your rights doesn't extend to you taking away my rights.
The ACLU did not previously, and should not going forward, make value judgments about a defendant when deciding whether or not to take a case. Such value judgments run directly counter to the notion of equal rights under the law which is what they supposedly stand for. The ACLU should quite literally defend enemies of the state in the event that their civil rights are violated. If they are no longer willing or able to act in such a principled manner then we are in sore need of a replacement.
It is imperative that your legal rights not depend on others agreeing with or liking your views. You don't enjoy freedom of political speech "while saying the right things", you enjoy freedom of political speech "full stop".
(Do note that I have nothing at all against organizations that lobby for political change. The ACLU has historically done that as well! What set them apart was their commitment to defending the civil liberties of anyone and everyone, no matter what.)
That merely ignores the problem: It's (arguably) necessary for defending civil liberties. The old formulation now fails to defend civil liberties (and arguably always has, for minorities).
https://www.sandiegocounty.gov/content/sdc/openbudget.html
A smaller county I’m from in California the social services agency is about double the sheriffs dept.
I wonder if the ability to seize and sell assets, plus hand-me-downs of ex-military equipment shift those numbers, compared to a Canadian city?
One of the narratives I've seen in news articles is that a writer will talk about the proportion of general funds to police vs social services. The funding levels could come from city general funds, county, state, or federal agencies. It makes sense to talk about overall funding instead of local funding for things like police and social services. People that are taking that tact are either disingenuous and slanting hard for their political gain, or ignorant of the complexities involved.
As to the hand me downs, $6b worth of equipment has been passed down to police from 1990-2017. That to me doesn't seem to be a significant amount. Averaged over 27 years across 50 states is $4m/year per state. I know it wouldn't distribute evenly, but that isn't a significant amount of value. There would likely be some unique items they couldn't get anywhere else though.
https://www.statista.com/chart/14027/how-much-is-the-polices...
I am no expert in water rights at all, but this seems to be a pretty clumsy example.
I do get that you are trying to give an example of the "tragedy of the commons", but you are comparing civil liberties which while not ensconced as "inalienable rights", are supposed to be applied equally and non-revocable.
Almost every tragedy of the commons example I can think of is subject to government just doing its job and coming up with the best compromise (once they even realize it is a problem). In many cases what seems best for everyone today may change in the future.
How would you even apply this collective right to any other amendment from the Bill of Rights? Only give a fair trial if an entire community is arrested? Only stop unfair search and seizure if its for an entire town?
Campaign financing - Notorious for enjoying minimal regulation in the US relative to other developed countries. Again I'm not sure how else a functional democracy is supposed to be maintained?
Invasion of privacy - I'm a bit fuzzy on this one. Are you referring to things like HIPAA, or to something else? Bear in mind that such regulations only apply to the professionals who are already authorized to view the data. To me it seems similar to the confidentiality you enjoy when talking to an attorney.
I already noted that I disagree with the existence of obscenity restrictions. The other ones you mention (national security, government employees, emotional distress) are fairly nuanced and quite limited as far as I understand. The vast majority of restrictions seem to boil down to the generic idea of knowingly and intentionally working to break some law that isn't itself related to speech.
I just can't seem to get too worked up over such a practical set of restrictions myself. Does it bother you that you can't legally incite a mob, or intentionally teach an aspiring terrorist to manufacture explosives? Or do you just object to my characterization of that as being a minimal set of restrictions? But if that isn't minimal, then what is?
No, it doesn’t. Even the narrow standard applied when a public figure is the subject (“actual malice”) can be satisfied either by the speaker/publisher knowing the material is false or speaking/publishing it with reckless disregard for whether it is true or false.
In past times, nonviolent forms of 'cancelling' that would seem familiar to us today were also employed. It was/is called 'shunning.' Our modern term is just a euphemism for that.
1: https://www.bop.gov/about/statistics/statistics_inmate_offen...
This sounds completely contrary to what in practice every government on Earth does. Of course the State can arm their agents, if they want to - you don't need to specially mention it as a fundamental right, as you don't need to specially mention they are allowed to breathe or eat - that's how it always happens. What doesn't always happen and needs special protection - is the right of the citizens which are not government agents, and thus the government - which always has a lot of armed people in their employ - can easily walk all over them. To mitigate it somewhat was the exact purpose of the Bill of Rights.
However, multiple states specify in their constitutions who comprises their militias. In Virginia, for example, it is "composed of the body of the people." In Illinois, "The State militia consists of all able-bodied persons residing in the State except those exempted by law." Given such constitutional provisions, it seems unreasonable to think that police were in view when speaking of a "well-regulated militia."
I'm saying that the second-amendment-means-collective-rights people are not concerned with what the second amendment said or with what it was meant to do. I am saying that their concern is preventing people from having guns, and their criteria for making an argument are, first, can this argument be used to prevent people from having guns, and, second, can it be connected -- however tenuously -- to the raw text of the second amendment. The goal is repeal-through-motivated-interpretation.
(Another thing you'll learn immediately by reading that discussion is that one of the primary purposes of the second amendment was to prevent the United States from having a standing army...)
EG, wish I had time to find my data re: Toronto, and at least reply cogently. Regardless, have a good one.
> Researching my book, I looked into what actually happened in the Weimar Republic. I found that, contrary to what most people think, Weimar Germany did have hate-speech laws, and they were applied quite frequently. The assertion that Nazi propaganda played a significant role in mobilizing anti-Jewish sentiment is, of course, irrefutable. But to claim that the Holocaust could have been prevented if only anti-Semitic speech and Nazi propaganda had been banned has little basis in reality. Leading Nazis such as Joseph Goebbels, Theodor Fritsch, and Julius Streicher were all prosecuted for anti-Semitic speech. Streicher served two prison sentences. Rather than deterring the Nazis and countering anti-Semitism, the many court cases served as effective public-relations machinery, affording Streicher the kind of attention he would never have found in a climate of a free and open debate.
and some are saying it's not working now[2]:
> For the Michalskis, all this was evidence that German society never truly reckoned with anti-Semitism after the war. Germany had restored synagogues and built memorials to the victims of the Holocaust, Wenzel said: “So for a lot of mainstream, middle-class people, that means: ‘We’ve done it. We dealt with anti-Semitism.’ But nobody really dealt with it within the families. The big, the hard, the painful questions were never asked.” In Wenzel’s view, the Muslim students who tormented his child were acting in an environment that was already suffused with native anti-Semitism. “A lot of conservative politicians now say, ‘Oh, the Muslims are importing their anti-Semitism to our wonderful, anti-anti-Semitic culture,’ ” he said. “That’s bull. They’re trying to politicize this.”
[1] https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/copenhagen-speech-v...
[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/21/magazine/anti-semitism-ge...
This said, European police generally gets away with a degree of prevarication that North Americans would find unconceivable. The US constitution enshrines the rights of individuals over government, in a way that no European country can match (as far as I know).
There are literally places in the world right now where wearing the wrong t-shirt color outside (Thailand, Belarus) Can get you jailed, tortured, or possibly killed.
Claiming a stance is a result of "luxury" is not the shortcut to win a debate that you imagine it to be.
1) Life
2) Free speech
Which one do you feel precedes the other?
In that sense all other rights depend of free speech.
So if they fight for the right to not be sent to gulags (from which many did not return) on the basis of speech, you consider this an expression of "luxury"?
And do you think free speech might help fighting for their right to life? For example would BLM find fighting to end police killings of Black people easier, or harder, if they could be jailed for their advocacy?
There might be racism in society but that doesn't mean you get to lump all white people together as more powerful than all black people. There are plenty of powerful black people, and plenty of zero power white people. What you are doing is basically race based identification and judgement, aka racism.
I agree factually in some respects, but I think that argument is a distraction. Obviously we must generalize somewhat; we can't write out every detail, and no matter what level of detail we include, someone can point out more that we omit. We could list the status of every individual in the country, but then we would be omitting their histories. On the other hand, generalizing about race is something I think we should be very careful about.
So yes, there are disempowered white people. There are disempowered disabled people and short people and immigrants and poor people, etc. There are disempowered rich white male in SV, for various reasons.
But I strongly disagree in this respect: We are talking about power resulting from skin color (what a concept to write - it's just absurd, but it's true!), not from other things. And all white people are much more powerful than black people in that regard. White people can go anywhere, buy anything, get any job, walk down any street, rent an Airbnb, interact safely with police, all simply by power conveyed by their skin color. It even affects where you can go in cyberspace: Look at popular Tik Tok videos; from what I've seen (not a lot, but compilations on YouTube), 98% white, some Asian and Hispanic, I'd guess 0.1% black. Join a gaming forum and make it known that you are black, and see what happens (based on what I understand).
To catalog everyone else who is disempowered is like talking about every other disease at a cancer conference.
For example, owning property is a negative freedom, because the state must not act against your property to ensure this freedom.
Being free of violence is a positive freedom, as the state will have to act to ensure this freedom (by sending a police officer when you dial 911 for example). In this note, not being a victim of theft would be another positive freedom, as the state will act to prevent it or redress you as a victim.
Negative rights don't have to be removed, as you fear, they're simply rights that the state can passively guarantee without having to interfere. Generally, such negative rights/freedoms don't require protection from the state, (hence they're negative).
On the flipside, the positive rights and freedoms do need to be protected. You have a freedom of speech/opinion, which is positive in that the state should act that you can enjoy them. If it were a negative freedom, then they could be lost at the toss of a hat the next time a truth dictator comes to power, as they aren't required to be protected.
So by the very nature you say you fight the removal of these rights, you're already reinforcing that freedom of speech is a positive right. (I don't even get were truth dictator comes in?)
To point out, there is gov departments in a few countries that already do what I describe or very close to. While generally not perfect, they have been useful in digging out neonazi groups and fighting for your freedoms more than the armies of those countries.
At the moment, the US has no protection against a political party removing your freedoms from the constitution. If someone were to attempt it, they would be let off scotts-free, so to speak. There is no punishment for saying "poor people shouldn't have the right to vote or freedom of speech", which some of your politicians are already saying in a roundabout way.
And once you lost them, you won't get them back as easily and that will be more dangerous that violating someone's freedoms to protect everyone elses.
If the intention of the 1619 Project was merely to use rigorous historical methods to expand the purview of the historical record in accordance with the useful-sounding aspects of truthful claims that have been suppressed, as some insist, it would be a valuable, if not necessary, contribution.
However, the goal the 1619 Project is not, and never was, to improve our historical understanding. Rather, its goal was always to perpetrate a critical historiography that muddles and besmirches it (i.e. problematize). This it seeks to achieve by calling into doubt the American metanarrative and establishing alongside it, if not in place of it, the critical race Theoretical metanarrative instead: that the United States is indelibly racist and has been since its origins. This includes undermining trust in the liberal ideas of individualism and human universality, wherein people are judged by the contents of their character and recognized for their common humanity, and forwarding identity-group thinking that is more useful for (radical) identity politics.
The fact that so many professors at UNC shares a critical consciousness is a sign of how far gone that university is from its original liberal vision of truth-finding in favor of identity politics.
> What distinguishes those things? Who decides? Just because it has happened at some time in some place, is that evidence that it's happening now? Should we eliminate all academic freedom?
If an academic is engaging in critical consciousness, basically creating meta-narratives to further a radical political activist goal instead of truth-finding, it should be treated the same as an academic that mainly teaches baptism of Christianity in history class and produce a revisionist meta-narrative to further baptism. Such a person would not receive academic freedom protections.
Can you support that assertion? I got the sense of your position before; my question is, what makes it true?
As critical theories are self-critical only in accepting critiques from critical theories (all other criticism is deemed an application of hegemonic power), it is not possible to defeat a critical theory with matters of facts. They can only be problematized more severely, which, while it defeats the specific critical theory, ultimately replaces it with a stronger critical theory. The most obvious way to undermine the 1619 Project in specific, then, is not to argue about matters of historical fact around the events of 1619, 1776, 1863, or any such period; it’s to point out that it erases the earlier and more severe suffering of American indigenous people who were genuinely enslaved and subjected to genocide by the Spanish starting almost a century earlier.
Again, it is not the matter of fact here that will overturn the 1619 Project (as being, itself, problematic). It is specifically that the 1619 Project did harm to indigenous peoples by erasing their allegedly earlier and more consequential suffering (Again, because it’s so difficult to remember about critical theories, truth and falsity do not matter in these analyses; it just has to be forwarded forcefully enough while appealing to the lived experience of suffering of subjugated indigenous people).
Critical theory projects like the 1619 project is therefore not a tool to improve our historical understanding, and is inherently in conflict with the liberal projects ways of finding truth.
In college, it certainly has and is recognized. Tenure, in particular, is at least partly designed to protect professors' ability to research and speak, free of censorship or influence.
It is true that tenure is there to protect professors engaging in the liberal project on unpopular topics. However, many do not pass the bar to receive tenure.
Nikole Hannah-Jones of the 1619 project is not engaging in the liberal project tenure seek to protect. I've said elsewhere in this thread that the goal the 1619 Project is not, and never was, to improve our historical understanding. Rather, its goal was always to perpetrate a critical historiography that muddles and besmirches it (i.e. problematize). This includes undermining trust in the liberal ideas of individualism and human universality, wherein people are judged by the contents of their character and recognized for their common humanity, and forwarding identity-group thinking that is more useful for (radical) identity politics.
She is therefore in direct opposition to the liberal mission of the universities, and she does not deserve to receive tenure protection to continue subverting resources intended to further the university liberal mission to what is useful for (radical) identity politics. Protecting the universities liberal environment agains activists like her is a necessary precondition for continuing the liberal project.
The importance of the point that her 1619 Project is not a serious attempt at historical understanding but a project within critical race Theory is beyond calculability. This is because the standard approach to challenging the 1619 Project’s bogus claims and attempts to roll itself out into our society and educational system is to challenge its historical legitimacy, and this is unfortunately a necessary part of engaging with it. The trouble is, because the 1619 Project neither is history nor claims to be history, this necessary activity is ultimately severely limited in its purposed utility.
Letting political activism like this into the universities therefore makes it harder to continue the Universitys original mission of continuing the liberal project of real knowledge seeking and research. Not everyone is fit for research and teaching, and you do have to protect the liberal system from efforts such as this for them to remain centers of knowledge production and truth seeking.
For this reason the ability to local community members to be armed was required as they needed to defend themselves as well as the local community when called upon by the sheriff.
You cannot in fact change the rules if there hasn't been a shift in the public so this seems a rather moot point. I'm not arguing that you shouldn't invest in PR and education on these issues but muzzling the opposition just gives the next rulers in charge an already existing muzzle to use back on yourself.
There is a history of often murderous suppression of "radical" groups in the US and by and far the majority of these were socialists, environmentalists, and marginalised people.
The current fake appeasement to these demographics is just that - a mirage. They're willing to ban Trump from the internet but not raise the minimum wage, abolish the drug war, really come after companies for their industrial scale damaging of ecology or cease trade relations with countries like China, Saudi Arabia, and Israel.
Excuse me for not taking this current "wokeness" fetishization by fundamentally hierarchical power structures entirely as good faith.
It's also not clear to me at all that "speech plays the largest role". Of course, existing power structures want you to believe that because the thing they fear the most of all is armed and genuinely effective resistance and it also helps perpetuate the illusion of a free and democratic society as if all it took to conquer racism and imperialism was to have a sit down and chat - with the hidden assumption that prior exploited people were just too stupid to consider this before - but MLK and Ghandai would have gone nowhere if there weren't decades of riots and militant struggle preceding them that pushed the US and British governments to enter negotiations with these parties.
I think 'they' is way too broad. Some companies banned Trump from their platforms. Those companies aren't particularly involved with the policies.
> the thing they fear the most of all is armed and genuinely effective resistance
I strongly doubt it. Such things are so rare and unlikely, not only in the U.S. but in democracies in general, that it's not too far off saying 'what they fear most is a giant meteor strike'. Well that would be a big problem, but not what is most feared. There hasn't been one in the U.S. since the Civil War, and that one came top-down, from the power structure.
I also don't know where you're getting this idea that armed conflict between the people and the state is rare in democracies, least of all the US which has had several riots and armed conflict between the state and guerrilla organisations since the civil war, many of which have had a direct effect on legislation and happened decades before the Civil Rights act of 1960.
The overall tone of the comments here seems to regard speech as an obvious, unadulterated good. I think the reality is actually much more complex.
The point many people here have is that if you only defend non-offensive speech, you’re not for freedom of speech at all. Nowhere on earth bans what they consider non-controversial, inoffensive speech.
I’m not familiar with the incident (save it, don’t care), but I can promise you that no honest coroner has ever given “free speech” as a cause of death.
this is not the first dismissive comment I've had on HN of people showing a disregard for knowledge & literally not caring to know the issue they comment on. both instances i've participated in involved race which is telling to me imho. Seems to go against the ideals of this forum.
I'm no trying to argue either way just point out the example in the article. Personally I lean more towards free speech at all costs.
Of course, the people who make these types of arguments never apply them consistently. I find it incredibly difficult to believe that someone still talking about a car accident in Charlottesville four years ago, while not mentioning the numerous murders, assaults, arsons, and other crimes committed by BLM activists, is someone that is genuinely concerned about "inciting violence".
The Bill of Rights was primarily all about liberties / negative rights, whereas since the 20th century people have started talking about entitlements as rights, when they're not, because that entitlements ultimately must be provided by others (primarily through taxes, but also in constraints/mandates on the behavior of others, e.g., limitations on striking by police or other services, the requirement to register in the draft / Selective Service for men, & eminent domain). Government entitlements typically involve the involuntary actions and compelled behavior of people.
Further, its not at all clear to me that carrying permits have anything to do with the constitutional amendment. The discussion at the time and the amendment itself refer to national defense, both from external and internal threats to the nation, not "bring a gun with me to the store" (concealed/open carry), which I think is what makes many people uncomfortable.
Many other countries have regulations of this form, that you have to purchase safety equipment and the government can audit you to ensure that you are safely storing your firearms. This gets people concerned about the government seizing your guns, but I don't think those concerns are realistic (assume the gov decides to do that one day, does having a national gun registry and your gun in a safe make things look any different than the police going door to door with a swat team and searching the house)? I don't think it does.
[0]: Eventually. this would take a generation or two
I'm sorry, but this is just laughable on the face of it. You see, I'm French (as hinted by the mis-autocorrect of "too"), and "regulated" (well, "régulé") means the same in contemporary French as in contemporary English. And the meaning comes straight from Latin (regula: rule, law), probably by way of 1066 like most legal terms.
The notion that "regulate" means anything but regulate IN A LEGAL DOCUMENT of all places is thus ridiculous. Or at the very least utterly implausible. But maybe you're right; I can't fail to notice you don't provide any proof for this improbable claim.
> Another thing you'll learn immediately by reading that discussion is that one of the primary purposes of the second amendment was to prevent the United States from having a standing army...
Another unsubstantiated claim, and just as improbable on the face of it. In any case nothing in that wording even hints at that.
> I can't fail to notice you don't provide any proof for this improbable claim.
> Another unsubstantiated claim, and just as improbable on the face of it.
I'm not responsible for the failures of your knowledge. These claims are both quite obvious, if -- as I specified above -- you take the time to read the things that this set of people said and wrote at the time.
Here's a letter from George Washington in which he contrasts an "irregular and disjointed militia" with a "well regulated militia": https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Washington/03-08-02-...
> The irregular and disjointed State of the Militia of this province, makes it necessary for me to inform you, that unless a Law is passed by your Legislature to reduce them to some order, and oblige them to turn out in a different Manner from what they have hitherto done, we shall bring very few into the Feild, and even those few, will render little or no Service.
> your first object should be a well regulated Militia Law. The people, put under good Officers, would behave in quite another manner, and not only render real Service as Soldiers, but would protect, instead of distressing the Inhabitants.
Here's a speech by George Clinton from 1798, in which, instead of referring to a "well regulated militia", he refers to a "well organized militia": https://quod.lib.umich.edu/e/evans/N25292.0001.001/1:2?rgn=d...
> The means of national defence should rest in the body of the people. A well organized militia is the only safe bulwark of a free people, competent on all occasions to repel invasion and suppress insurrection. Standing armies are not only expensive but dangerous to the liberties of the state. In republics every citizen should be a soldier.
Note that this is not at all an unexpected meaning for the word "regulated" to have. "Regulation" as in command is related to "rule" as in rulership. "Regulation" as in correct operation is related to "rule" as in the straight line drawn by a... "ruler".
It had that meaning a thousand years ago. Nah, 2000 years ago ("regula"). You're saying that it meant something for a millennium, started meaning something else, and then went back to the original meaning -- all in good time to support your opinion. How convenient. And without any evidence. The rest of what you quote supports my interpretation, not yours, which is just weird.
> In that sense all other rights depend of free speech.
That's not true.
Not to be inflammatory, but North American police generally gets away with a degree of murder that Europeans find inconceivable.
Key quote: "The victims were unarmed in 1 in 6 (753;16%) fatal shootings."
https://www.bmj.com/company/newsroom/fatal-police-shootings-...
For balance, this 2018 gives lower numbers - hovering around 60ish per year. Although that is still significantly higher than 9.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/fatal-police-s...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_killings_by_law_enfo...
The problem with the kind of critical theory dialectic Nicole Hannah-Jones use is how the claim of truth is made. I showed you how critical theory projects like the 1619 project makes a claim and deals with truthiness. I made it specific to this project and how it inherently makes unfalsifiable claims as it builds upon “lived experiences” of convenient political activist utility.
I even showed you an example of how you overturn a claim in critical theory projects, with an example relevant to the 1619 project. This example makes it very clear how different this type of academic dialectic is from the liberal project.
Universities are traditionally stewards of the liberal project, although unfortunately at this points it’s been corrupted to further the Hegelian religion of critical social justice.
Here's another way to think about evidence: All you showed me was your thinking; you didn't show me anything from the 1619 Project.
Your points have intriguing points, but as written here, all they are now is points about you, not about the world.
Ultimately, those life necessities must be provided by oneself or by someone else, or some combination. Freedom of speech can allow for the best ways of providing these things to be selected. The alternative is that only the prevailing view is considered or approved, often leading to much worse provision of these necessities, including starvation (feudal systems, communism, warlords, etc.).
You simply cannot exercise free speech without life, you cannot fight for free speech if you are not alive. Free speech is totally dependent on existence.
> The most obvious way to undermine the 1619 Project in specific, then, is not to argue about matters of historical fact ...
Well that is a convenient formulation for someone who disagrees and has no facts.
I disagree for the reasons below that
> Well that is a convenient formulation for someone who disagrees and has no facts
Your question is inherently about how the claim of truth is made in the type of dialectic the 1619 project use. I showed you how critical theory projects like the 1619 project makes a claim and deals with truthiness. I made it specific to this project and how it inherently makes unfalsifiable claims as it builds upon “lived experiences” of convenient political activist utility.
I even showed you an example of how you overturn a claim in critical theory projects, with an example relevant to the 1619 project. This example makes it very clear how different this type of academic dialectic is from the liberal project.
As an example, you talk about people's motives; what evidence do you have of these motives? What evidence do you have for your claims that it is 'critical race theory' and for your characterizations of it?
At this point, the claims above are only words from a random person on the Internet. If we want to talk about truth and criticism, such claims are notoriously very weak.
IME, the focus by some political groups on 'critical race theory' is the same old rhetorical tactic of attacking the messenger and changing the subject from the issue:
In this case, the issue issue is racism in America's founding. You openly say you won't address the evidence, which seems to match that pattern.
Are you are a critical social justice adherent and subscribe to its anti-racist (which means being a racist) doctrine? If so I think you should declare that.
If you share this ideology we do not share values as I believe in the liberal doctrine of truth seeking and believe skin color is not informative of anything but melanin level, which both are in direct opposition to this faith/ideology.
No, you're the one making claims about the meaning in 1066. What I'm saying is that the meaning of the word that originated in the 17th century ( https://www.etymonline.com/word/regulate ) had not, by the 18th century, fully displaced the earlier meaning. That the displacement is complete today is meaningless.
But I wouldn't conclude that there was a 200-odd year period during which the word was in use, but had no meaning.
Could you help me understand how "history shows us" that this question implies that the loss of free speech can't be a threat to life?
The first thing dictators do is remove free speech. This is what enables removing all the other rights at the dictator's whim, because then nobody can speak out against it. Nobody can even inform others about it. This is why totalitarian regimes so aggressively suppress free speech.
The Soviet Union collapsed soon after Gorbachev stopped repressing free speech (glasnost and peristroika). This is not a coincidence.
Could you explain to me how you'd exercise freedom of speech, while dead?
Are you being pedantic to win an internet debate or really trying to understand other perspectives?
Edit: The thing you keep missing though is that one cannot choose. I have the right by default. I can choose not to exercise my rights, but by living I have the right to speech.
Having a critical consciousness is about the process I described above, I never claimed I had to know what she felt. Deconstructing her words and going down the endless rabbit hole of claiming a “it quacks like a duck and walks like duck, it has ducklings, although it’s not necessarily a duck” then that might work on someone else, but not on me.
I think the burden to support your claims is on you. Readers can't check the evidence for every comment. It's more efficient too - you already know your argument and what you've seen, and you do it once rather than every reader duplicating effort.
Sorry, but with no evidence it's not meaningful to me - there is so much dis- and mis-information on the Internet that I think people are insane to trust it. Note that I did spend the time to ask you, because you seem to have thought it through. Nothing personal.
> I never claimed I had to know what she felt.
You did make claims about the project's motivations and about hers as a teacher (and maybe more - I don't remember).
> Deconstructing her words and going down the endless rabbit hole of claiming a “it quacks like a duck and walks like duck, it has ducklings, although it’s not necessarily a duck” then that might work on someone else, but not on me.
Maybe assume some good faith; nobody is trying to make something work on you. For the reasons I said above, I simply can't trust what I read on the Internet; I need evidence. Trusting people's claims on the Internet is a cliche for foolishness these days, and we know it does incredible harm in our world. I know you don't want to write a dissertation on HN, but maybe link to someone with credibility who already has.
She is the creator of one of the biggest critical social justice anti-racist projects, the 1619 project, which is the strongest argument I can think of that she is an adherent of and an important figure in that ideology.
With that as an established fact then in the context of a traditionally liberal creed organization like the ACLU or a liberal University, its relevant to detail how that ideology is in conflict with liberalism and why it is reasonable that a top ideologue of critical social justice is not given stewardship of a liberal position.
> Maybe assume some good faith;
When you question if the creator of one of the biggest critical social justice projects is a critical social justice adherent I think its fair to question if you are arguing in good faith.
Exactly. I would not fight _for_ my right, but to protect the rights I already have. In the US, thats why articles in the bill of rights are phrased as they are. The first amendment doesn't say, "congress grants the right speak freely." Instead it is -- congress shall make no law [...] abridging the freedom of speech. This is because I have the right already and the amendment is there to protect it.
Edit: typos, grammar, and clarification