I live near Gettysburg and like 10 years ago, the White supremacist nazi kkk types wanted to rally and a bunch of people didn’t want them too. IIRC, the ACLU represented them or helped them and their right to March was upheld.
It was awesome!
You had a dozen or so hapless trailer trash losers walking down the street, and hundreds of people booing them.
I felt sorry for the Nazis. It was again awesome. I felt sorry for them not because I sympathized with their thinking in any way. I don’t. I felt for sorry for the bunch of misguided losers who feel that life has done them wrong and this is somehow the answer. They were pathetic.
That’s how I like my Nazis: Fat, stupid, pathetic. Parade them out once in a while, let everybody get a good look. They were doing everybody a favor, reminding us why this shit is so bad.
That was at least 10 years ago. Times have changed, I guess.
That was a nice moment. Those hapless idiots marching, and the streets packed with people booing and laughing at them. Not angry, laughing.
I guess my point is that the ACLU helping them to March was a huge positive in promoting equality. People of all races and creeds coming out to make fun of Nazis.
The thing is that despite what George H W Bush might have said, the ACLU is not a liberal organization as far as the Left/Right divide of the US goes. Since the US Left tends to be focused on defending the disadvantaged, and the disadvantaged are more likely than the overclass to have their civil rights violated, the ACLU is most likely to find themselves on the Leftl side of the political divide, but this isn’t always true. They don’t have a stake in who what proper taxation should be, or how much welfare should be spent, and they are often on the opposite sides of many American Liberal constituencies. For example, their support of pornography is attacked by feminists, and as in this case their support of free speech rights for Nazi’s runs contrary to the desires of Black Lives Matter. Similarly I could imagine a Right to Life group protesting the Libertarian pro-choice stance, even though generally both are thought of as part of the American Right.
That’s sort of a nice corollary to free speech. Good ideas do better in a free-speech environment than bad ideas. Charlottesville probably did more to hurt the nazi cause than any amount of left-wing bitching about them.
When I was a student in the 50s, we did listen to the other side. I went to a talk by William Buckley. I disagreed with most of what he said (he was pro-McCarthy, for example, something I was fervently opposed to) but we listened respectfully to him and it didn’t do us a bit of harm. He even made a point that I accepted. He pointed out that no Communist government had ever yielded power once they had it.
Nowadays, this probably couldn’t happen at the same school (U. Penn), although I am not certain. And that is a real loss.
Trigger warnings: If you can’t stand the heat, get the hell out of the kitchen snowflake.
I could equally well have instanced the German Nazi party, or the Soviets, or even Mussolini’s Fascist party as people who like the RC Church forbade free speech to those they disapproved of. Or Jean Calvin’s Geneva. Or Louis XIV’s Dragonnades.
When you deny free speech to any — because morals — free speech as a concept is destroyed.
That does not mean necessarily a horrible society, it may even be a peaceful happy one with dissidents silenced; but it won’t be a correct society.
It’s been years now. How can you not understand by now why people protesting against threats to their very lives and the lives of their family are not happy when those not under threat respond by changing the subject?
(Or not under as much threat. Police brutality does affect nonblacks as well.)
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You could have cited those instances, sure, but that wouldn’t prove your point either since again, just because something happened in other circumstances doesn’t prove that it will happen in ours. And yes, I do think killing is immoral and people shouldn’t be promoting it. If were right with your absolutist vision of free speech then there would be no free speech in America because we already limit speech in certain areas. You can’t threaten the President and hide behind free speech. I see no reason why we shouldn’t extend that protection to the rest of us.
The alt-right/Klan/Nazis are not marginal in your country’s politics and those psychopaths rally to get more pumped and violent. A good reason to restrict their rallies right there. Talk of the “Free speech” to incite violence will get no sympathy with me.
Does BLM preach for murder? If yes, then HELL YEAH, throw them in with the alt-right! I don’t give two shits for those who preach murder
Do you allow violent Imams in your country? I bet you don’t. For the good goddamned reason that their preaching might brainwash someone into a terrorist attack. Why are Nazis safe then?!? Why the goose and not the gander here?
The only black lives matter supporters vehemently object to the ACLU’s free speech, according to the linked article at the top of this thread. The only black lives matter supporters vehemently object that blue (police) lives matter. The only black lives matter supporters vehemently object that gay lives matter. It certainly seems as if the only black lives matter supporters only support black lives. Damn the ACLU try trying to speak while the only black lives matter supporters are shouting them down.
How can you not understand that many people object to being threatened by the actions of some of these protesting groups. Many people are simply not intimidated, or amused, by the antics of the only black lives matter supporters, the terrorist Antifa thugs, the Klan, or the Nazis.
I don’t see the fear of BLM as reasonable but I do accept that it exists. And fear of those other groups as well.
Now that I’ve answered your question will you answer mine? Do you understand why BLM supporters are frustrated with the response of “all lives matter”?
As already pointed out, there isn’t any such movement as “only black lives matter”.
The point of the BLM movement is that black lives matter precisely because all lives matter. That’s why it’s unjust for our society to accept treatment of black lives as though they don’t matter, or don’t matter as much as nonblack lives.
It remains a mystery to me why any white people get butthurt about that entirely reasonable and egalitarian position. I’ve ended up having to mentally file “Black Lives Matter” along with “Living Things Evolve By Natural Selection” and “Human Fossil Fuel Use Changes Atmospheric Composition” in the category Completely Unremarkable Veracious Assertions That Some People Get Irrationally Upset About.
I wish I knew and understood the arguments of those who are not afraid of the free speech slippery slope to properly debate it here directly. I think it’d be really interesting.