Rest assured I will not wait for people to discuss how they want to exterminate me before I raise my objections. There is NO civility here, I won’t fake it for the mere appearance of civil discourse.
What the hell do you think “body of political and economic doctrines” equals, eh? Inferiors and race traitors get gone or dead. It’s stupid to ignore or obfuscate this.
I agree. You should not have to be civil to someone who is trying to kill you.
Who at that ACLU speech wa trying to kill black people?
What defines hate speech? Who gets to make that call? See, the reason rights like freedom of speech and freedom of religion are so important is not just because of their value to society. They are valuable, but that’s not the only thing. It’s that in the past, attempts to deny those rights have ended really poorly. History is replete with cases where society said, “Let’s ban this religion” or “Let’s quash this free speech”. What percentage of those cases do you think are looked back on positively? Not only are these rights important, not only are there great temptations to restrict these rights, but we are collectively extremely bad at determining when it’s actually a good idea to restrict these rights. The ability to restrict speech is incredibly dangerous. It is a huge boon to totalitarians and anyone else whose ideas cannot stand on their own merits.
Okay, so who gets to define “hate speech”? Is “pigs in a blanket, fry 'em like bacon” hate speech? I know many on the right would think so.
Of interest to this thread: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/04/us/aclu-charlottesville-white-supremacists.html?_r=0
The thing is, though, that if government institutions unconstitutionally prevent Nazis from using the same means to express their views that other groups have access to, then you don’t have the freedom of speech to be a Nazi.
Just telling people that they’ve got a certain right doesn’t mean anything if you’re allowing their right to be infringed. This is why the ACLU has always felt itself bound to stand up in court for the rights of even quite horrible people when those rights are being infringed.
Yeah, I think there’s no getting around the fact that freedom of speech comes at a price, and when the people speaking freely are horrible people then the price is mostly paid by the people they’re being horrible to.
I think the way forward for the ACLU is to focus more on the 99.999…% of their activity that doesn’t involve defending the free-speech rights of horrible people (horrible from the liberal point of view, I mean; I suppose some non-liberals would consider the anthem-kneeler people whose free-speech rights the ACLU is also defending pretty horrible).
As I posted earlier, the ACLU does a hell of a lot to stand up for students’ rights, workers’ rights, immigrants’ rights, prisoners’ rights, suspects’ rights, police reform, LGBT rights, and on and on down the list of reliably liberal causes. In the context of that bigger picture, I think it will be easier to see why defending the free-speech rights of hate groups is an unpleasant but necessary concomitant of the ACLU’s overall mission.
Another approach I’d recommend is being a bit more nuanced about these issues in campus presentations. There is a widespread atmosphere of establishment tut-tuttery nowadays in academia and the media about anti-free-speech tendencies among liberal students who are pissed off about right-wing types using “free speech” as a shield for trolling with hate speech. While I agree that those tendencies are in the long run not helpful, I don’t think we get anywhere by just tut-tutting about them without acknowledging a legitimate grievance in there.
I’d bet, for example, that if the W&M ACLU event had been billed as something like “Is ‘Free Speech’ Code for Hate Speech?” instead of the more lecture-y “Students and the First Amendment”, that would have inclined more BLM supporters to engage in that discussion rather than trying to shut it down.
:rolleyes: Oh come on, Scylla, no fair indulging in alarmist hyperbole yourself and then trying to squelch it in other posters. No, the ACLU is not “trying to kill black people”, and no, current student protest culture is not “something like China’s cultural revolution”.
That’s not a recent change in ACLU policy, by the way; they’ve held that position since 1934 at least. Unfortunately, the issue of “drilling with arms” seems not to have been adequately considered in the run-up to the Charlottesville case.
The ACLU didn’t kill anyone, but they did give the Nazis the bullets, BLM are right to remind people of this. The result of Charlottesville wasn’t free speech, but violence and death.
You can’t wash your hands of that. Violent hate groups are violent people who gather in support of violence. That’s their raison d’etre. You can’t blindly accept ‘free speech’ as a fig leaf when one starts killing people.
OK - I accept that principle. All that is now necessary is to define BLM as a violent hate group, and deny them their rights.
Regards,
Shodan
And you’ll get it when they start preaching the extermination/removal of inferiors.
Attempted thread summary: youth is wasted on the young.
No, I get it when they start engaging in violence to deny the rights of others. They are then a violent hate group, and the government cracks down on them.
Or, we could apply the same rule to everyone - say whatever you want, even if it hurts other peoples’ feelings, as long as you don’t engage in violence or make direct, imminent threats against gays, Jews, police, white people, black people, Muslims, Asians, Trump supporters, Sanders supporters, communists, white separatists, or left-handed Rosicrucian Eskimos.
Regards,
Shodan
You, clearly, don’t get it.
The ACLU is handing out bullets?
The terrorist group Antifa are violent people who gather in support of violence. They went to Charlottesville to commit acts of violence and fights broke out between them and the Nazi/Klan. The only black lives matter supporters demand that police officers be burned like bacon. Birds of a feather, as far as I’m concerned. Should the speech of Antifa, the Nazis, only black lives matter, and the Klan be restricted? Are there any other groups you would like to see added to the list?
Maybe you didn’t explain it well enough?
No, you don’t get it. Do you really think that the people hurt by weaking free speech protections are, first and foremost, white supremacists? In this administration? Nazis are not an operational threat. Everyone saw their colors at Charlottesville - few in number, and weak. Incapable of spreading their ideas through debate, and reduced to violence - and not even effective violence. This movement is an operational threat to our democracy in the same way that the Taliban is. The far greater risk is that we respond to this tiny threat by destroying liberties that are essential to all of us, and especially those under threat.
Leave aside for the moment whether this is really a fair comparison. I don’t think it is; BLM is primarily a peaceful movement, while neo-nazis aren’t. But here we are - BLM held a mostly peaceful rally, then someone from within the movement killed a bunch of people. Just like how, at Charlottesville, neo-nazis held a mostly peaceful rally, then someone from within the movement ran someone over on purpose. How fucking trivial would it be for a motivated party to make this comparison, and use it to strip countless people of their right to peaceable protest under your rules? And how many motivated parties are there in Washington right now who really don’t like BLM?
This is why we don’t strip people of rights. As Scott Alexander so eloquently put it:
All throughout history, various despots and princes have thought “You know, the last hundred times someone tried to restrict freedom of religion, it went badly. Luckily, my religion happens to be the One True Religion, and I’m totally sure of this, and everyone else will eventually realize this and fall in line, so my plan to restrict freedom of religion will work great!”
Every revolution starts with an optimist who says “All previous attempts to kill a bunch of people and seize control of the state have failed to produce a utopia, but luckily my plan is much better and we’re totally going to get to utopia this time.” Or, as Huxley put it: “Only one more indispensable massacre of Capitalists or Communists or Fascists and there we are – there we are – in the Golden Future.”
So another way to put it is that rights don’t just say “Doing X has been observed to have bad consequences”, but also “Doing X has been observed to have bad consequences, even when smart people are quite certain it will have good consequences.”
The idea that the correct response to people exercising their rights in ways we dislike is to remove their rights is not a good one. The problem with Charlottesville was not “Nazis got to speak and protest freely”. It was “Nazis got violent and murderous”. That is the problem we need to deal with, and guess what: the state has perfectly good tools to deal with that particular problem!
I think this misunderstands both the facts and how the law works.
As to the facts, the legal dispute was over where these Nazis would protest. It was not over whether they would be permitted to gather. I don’t think there’s any reason to believe that the violence that day would have been any different if they had met further away from the ostensible target of their rally. You seem to be arguing that the City should have denied them the right to protest altogether. If there was enough evidence of the likelihood of violence, that can be justified. But if so, your beef is with the City of Charlottesville. The ACLU had no effect on that question.
As to how the law works, it’s not as if the ACLU refusing representation means these groups don’t challenge the law. All it means is that they get shittier lawyers and one of two things happens. Maybe they win (in which case, it doesn’t matter who represented them). Or maybe they lose. It is the losing that is the problem, because it makes a legal precedent. And legal precedent doesn’t care if you’re a Nazi or not. If the law gets worse for free speech, it gets worse for everyone. Except, not actually everyone. It gets worse for the people who (1) need it most; (2) have the fewest resources; and (3) have the lowest social power. Guess who that is?
Ah, OK. I missed the reference and thus misidentified the type of specious argument you were deploying. It’s not that you were ignoring BigT’s argument outright but instead indulging in a guilt by association fallacy. Thanks for clearing up my mistake. Will you now address your own?
To be clear, I am disputing the premise that because a line of reasoning was used or misused in one situation with tragic results it shouldn’t be used in any situation. (At least I hope that’s more clear.)
I think that in most instances this is acceptable. For me, it’s only when it impairs people’s safety that the price becomes too high.
Thanks for the info on the ACLU as well as the insight on the “tut-tuttery”. 
There is no such organization as “only black lives matter”.
I have a big problem with BigT’s views here. It almost seems like in the absence of it being legal to pass laws outlawing hate speech, we’ll just make it de facto illegal by imposing too high a social cost on organizations that defend it on 1st amendment grounds.
That’s a dangerous tactic, one that would make life very difficult for criminal defense lawyers in general. We don’t want to normalize intimidation of those who take the unpopular side in a legal battle.