There seems to be a brewing civil war in the left among the more libertarian leftists and the ones who support social engineering and who support illiberal techniques to achieve this (shouting people down, opposing people protesting or marching, etc).
As long as the constitution and checks and balances hold up, nazis aren’t going to pose a threat to us. If anything, driving them underground will just make them more desirable.
Thus why socialist progressive draw a distinction between them and “liberals,” I believe.
Given today’s media landscape, as I mentioned before, is there any such thing as “underground” anymore? We have YouTube personalities with hundreds of thousands of subscribers spouting white supremacist beliefs. Then there’s the major websites with the ear of the president doing the same…
“A stroke of the pen” is a rather dismissive way to refer to definitions that have been and continued to be subjected to a hell of a lot of scrutiny. Sure, the definition of what counts as constitutionally protected speech has changed in the past and may change again, but that doesn’t mean that the interpretation of the phrase currently recognized by the courts is subject to any old whim, or that the ACLU can freely reinterpret it with no undesirable juridical consequences.
Sure, but that’s not the same thing as modifying or abandoning the core mission itself for the sake of social change.
Fertility clinics, for example, may be exhorted to be more energy efficient or more inclusive in hiring or more socially responsible in various other ways while engaging in their business. But that’s different from telling them that they should actually stop trying to fix fertility problems (or should fix them only for a particular subset of reproductively challenged couples, or whatever) because of the threat of overpopulation.
Arguing that the core mission itself is problematic is not the same thing as saying “you should also make socially responsible change that doesn’t necessarily relate to your core mission”.
Again, you keep unjustifiably presenting these things as separate, as though “areas X, Y, and Z” are fundamentally different from “area K” and “issue A”. The ACLU’s activities don’t compartmentalize neatly like that. When it’s the “actions in area K” that make “lots of contributions to our society in areas X, Y, and Z” and also “end up causing harm to issue A”, you can’t just airily decree that they need to change what they’re doing in K.
Again, what we’re talking about here is a basic core mission that intrinsically involves certain benefits as well as certain harms. Saying that they just need to keep the benefits while abstaining from the harms is a fundamental misunderstanding of what’s going on.
Yes, I am: on this spectrum of opinion I’m in between the free-speech absolutists who disregard or dismiss the negative consequences of free speech and the advocates of free-speech restriction who disregard or dismiss the negative consequences of limiting free speech.
No, the problem with your lack of clarity is your shaky logic and inaccurate analogies, not your basic position of challenging free-speech absolutism. There are plenty of clear and rational arguments to be made against free-speech absolutism, but so far you’re not doing a great job of making any.
Fair enough.
That will happen with or without groups like the ACLU. The success of an ACLU is dependent largely on the functioning of other institutions that recognize the values that ACLU protects. If, however, we have an extremist right wing government that dominates the presidency, the congress, and the judiciary, then it won’t matter what ACLU’s values are because they’ll be beaten down in the courts. Ordinary people like you and me and your next door neighbor are mothers who decide to give birth to fascism, or to terminate its pregnancy at the ballot box. Not a damn thing ACLU can do one way or the other.
FWIW, I am a supporter of the ACLU but to BigT’s point, I don’t think that slippery slope arguments are always valid or appropriate. Other societies have restrictions on hate speech and they are just as free as we are in a lot of ways.
See, I think this is a rational opinion. You’re not necessarily defending the speech. You could even argue that the speech should be limited in some way, and yet at the same time, there is more than just free speech that ACLU defends. ACLU defends equal protection under the law, the right to be treated fairly under the Constitution, the right to a free press, to peaceably assemble. It’s not just whether to allow hate speech or not – if you wanna have that discussion, we can have it and it still won’t detract from the valuable work that ACLU does. ACLU defends the right of people to be controversial within the law. Hate speech, like it or not, is allowed by law. That is what ACLU is defending, and that’s not an insignificant thing.
Serious question: do you actually know what my opinion is on the matter? Because I’m pretty sure you don’t, if you are talking about my “shaky logic.”
I don’t agree in the slightest. It is not rational to treat the law like some fixed thing we have to accept. Nor is it rational to treat permissive laws as restrictive laws. Freedom of speech is the law, but it does NOT mandate that you take up every case where it is violated. We as human beings can decide if defending the freedom of speech in a particular situation is actually worth it.
As much as people want to divorce themselves from the consequences, you just can’t. You can’t point to “freedom of speech” and then bear no responsibility. When you defend the evil speech of an evil organization, you are helping them. What you have to do is argue that helping them is worth it because it accomplishes something better.
It will always be a balancing act. It was when we came up with the various forms of defamation. It was when we created false advertising laws and election laws. We restrict in fraud and causing violence (although we then went back on that last one). We have always had to have a conversation where the need for the freedom of speech hits the consequences of evil speech, and what the consequences will be.
And we must continue to have it, and not let the ACLU become like the NRA, an absolutist organization that does not care at all about the consequences. They NEED to be discussing things like this. This conversation should be ongoing forever.
If you want to say that Nazi speech needs to be preserved for the greater good, fine. Make that argument. (Same with other rights.) But appealing to the law is just begging the question. The law and how we react to it is the actual question at hand.
No, it’s not, it’s a right. Do even know the difference?
BigT the problem with your analysis is it always stops a few steps short.
And why is this in the Pit?
I think that this question could have been much more simple: A demonstration whose members are carrying firearms and other weapons and using words that imply support for violence, and are accompanied by others who have threatened violence or is part of a social or political movement that espouses violence against other people, particularly minorities or disadvantaged people, is not a pure act of expression that is entitled to absolute protection of the First Amendment.
I’m all for the ACLU defending Westboro. But if Westboro became a large movement that actually threatened violence, no.
Charlottesville is not parallel to Skokie.
BPC, post #52 is truly awesome. Enthusiastically cosigned.
I’m still not seeing many people grapple with the politics and PR of this, regardless of what you think about the principle. Defending racist dirtbags gives the ACLU cover to do mostly progressive work while preserving deniability/credibility. In fact, defending truly loathsome fringe groups might even be argued to be a copout, an all too easy way of maintaining this cover. If they were really about defending the principle everywhere, they’d be sticking up for the likes of the Koch brothers.
It’s rather nitpicky to say all we know is the one sentence, unless you think the NY Times reporter took that part out of context and misrepresented the overall thrust of the letter. But I also heard more about it from one of those who signed, interviewed on the podcast I mentioned. The gist was that her black friends were giving her tons of shit, like “how could you represent those people?” and she really felt the heat. My response would be that she should go join a different organization.
Nice. You should listen to that podcast: they talk to the Jewish lawyer who took the Skokie case. He talks about how he learned the values of protecting everyone’s speech rights from his parents, but then when he took the case there were many Jewish people very angry at him, some even getting violent.
Why are you dubious? As it happens, I suppose you’re technically correct as I’m not what Bush 41 called a “card-carrying member” of the organization (although my mother and grandfather have been, going all the way back to the 1930s). But I’ve donated money to them several times, which ought to count for something.
I completely disagree. I was appalled to learn that, for instance, Canadians would drive across the border to get newspapers reporting on sensational murder trials because the judge had ordered the news media gagged. “Secret tribunals” are not a thing we want to have. Sure, it seems innocuous enough in Canada, but that can hardly be counted on if it becomes a trend elsewhere.
BTW, my mother and sister are naturalized Canadian citizens. (My father is long dead, so I’m the last surviving member of our nuclear family without a maple leaf on my passport.)
I think it’s sad that someone way back when managed to get “slippery slope” classified as a prima facie fallacy, full stop. It may well be true that most of the slippery slopes people warn about are overblown at best; but that doesn’t mean that slippery slopes don’t exist at all.
Then I guess you’re not one of those who needs to read it.
This inane, vacuous comment shows you to be every bit as much of a clueless douchebag as the guy in my apartment building with the monster truck complete with MAGA sticker. (Other than what you presumably do in the actual voting booth, which I am grateful for.)
Now, a roundup of posts I want to praise for their acuity:
All great. One more that I love, but not quotable in the usual way (because the board won’t seem to automatically quote quoted material). Kimstu quoted the national legal director of the ACLU as follows:
On what ground indeed? :dubious:
ETA:
Because Nazis weren’t at that time a large movement that actually threatened violence. So as long as extremists are neutered and widely ridiculed or ignored, they can speak. Who decides when they cross the threshold? And who decides which hard left groups are extremists for that matter? Should James Baldwin not have had the right to darkly promise “The Fire Next Time”? (Uh oh, here’s that slope again.)
Did James Baldwin organize a demonstration of armed people who threatened to create a violent confrontation?
Do you agree that a threat should not be protected as free expression?
I think it could be very simple and perfectly justifiable for the ACLU to say that they won’t defend people who show up to a demonstration carrying weapons or anything other than signs and banners.
Legally carrying weapons is irrelevant.
As long as they don’t brandish them, I would have to agree. I would prefer we had much stronger gun control but since we don’t then this type of exception would be a loophole protecting only liberals.
How many times in history has restricting unpopular political speech been the right thing to do? How many cases can you name where it went well? What’s our prior going into this?
Reading these last few posts, I think another gap in agreement in this whole debate is the nature of white supremacist beliefs, whether its merely an “unpopular policial opinions” or a direct call to violent and racist acts. If you think the former, and that only direct physical violence can be called violence, then I understand where you’re coming from. If you think the latter, and that purely political acts can themselves be violence, then I understand where you’re coming from. I think it also factors into what you believe of another factor, how much an existential threat the status quo is for minorities, the disabled, the poor, etc.
Myself, I just have a visceral reaction. “We should raise income taxes across the board” doesn’t to me compare to “we need to genocide entire races, or, barring that, pass laws to make their living hell”. The former feels more like an “unpopular political opinion” than the latter.
I dunno, maybe it’s too late. Maybe Trump and the Republicans have already normalized the advancement of white supremacy if genocide is just another political opinion like gerrymandering and the capital gains tax.
Because who gets to decide what constitute “dangerous speech”? THAT’S the problem.
I guess the problem here is that we have a pretty decent legal standard for where free speech crosses the line into calls to violence - immediate, specific, etc. - and these chucklefucks just don’t fit it.
Now, you could make the case that we should add calls to genocide to this list. That sounds, by and large, reasonable. We’d need to strictly (and I do mean strictly) define it, but actual calls to violent action against a race could very easily belong to the list of “things that just aren’t free speech”.
But the fact that it necessarily needs to be strictly defined seriously limits its usefulness. How many legitimate calls to genocide were there at Charlottesville? The closest thing to a call for genocide I’ve seen from the entire alt-right edifice is “Is black genocide right?”, an article which skirts the line but doesn’t exactly come out and say, “Yes, we should kill all black people” and so would probably not even fall under this exception. Never mind what most people are complaining about - bog-standard white supremacist rhetoric is not typically genocidal these days. That very fact makes cracking down on what they’re saying without causing serious negative consequences down the line really difficult. 
(In case I haven’t made it entirely clear enough: fuck that article, fuck the alt right, and fuck white supremacy.)
No. It’s about entrusting the government, police, and other power sources with the ability to shut people up and jail them.
If you think so-called hate speech rules and laws will only be used on the most odious forms of speech you are mistaken. Even this own board stretches the definition of hate speech randomly or to score cheap points in a debate.
This is my problem. It’s the classic “punch a nazi” problem - the people advocating for punching nazis are typically not the ones also saying, “Okay, but let’s be very very clear on who counts as a nazi, and super careful we don’t punch people who don’t deserve it”.