I have a business with a bit of traffic. I also have a big door upon which I let some local businesses and groups put up flyers.
If I refuse to allow a particular business or group to put a flyer on my door, is that censorship?
I didnt say the book was “bad”. I said trans reviewers said it was transphobic. I am not trans, so I am not a expert on this. I trust the experts.
So you think it’s wrong if a private organization like Twitter doesn’t allow pro-pedophilia or pro-genocide messages?
I’ve asked a variation on this multiple times, with no answer.
I didnt read it either, but many transpeople did and their reviews all said it was transphobic.
There is no censorship going on- as poster after poster has informed you, so it might as well be about transphobia.
Are you transphobic??? Why are you fighting so hard for a transphobic book?
If “true free speech” is unlimited free speech, then yes I’m not a supporter of true free speech in the real world. As an ideal, sure. But you keep bouncing back and forth from what you’d like to see in some idealized way versus something practical, so it is hard to keep track.
It is notable that you keep not answering the hard questions about unlimited free speech in the real world.
Perhaps a good place to start (after 179 posts) would be what you define what you mean by “true free speech”, and whether you talking about an ideal or the real world.
I don’t see it as censorship but I don’t think it’s a good statement for a lead ACLU lawyer to be making on social media if the organization is to uphold its anti-censorship reputation.
Ideas can be false. They can be fraudulent. They can be erroneous. They can be disingenuous. When accepted as true, certain mistruths can be dangerous.
But an idea by itself is not dangerous. To call it dangerous without refuting it on rational grounds (just emotional ones) is what should be raising red flags, IMO. Stifling debate about the idea is another red flag. Overreliance on secondhand opinions about the idea…yet another red flag.
People talk about government censorship as if it always arises from a vacuum. But it comes from a public that has a low bar for “dangerous” ideas and a reluctance to think for itself. They trust the government to do the thinking.
The ACLU has no problem acknowledging that many of the organizations that they defend are vile. I’ll continue to support them, even if every single member states on their twitter feeds that Nazis, the KKK, NAMBLA, Westboro Baptist, and the like are the lowest of scum, as long as they defend those groups’ right to speech free of government censorship. If Strangio petitions his congressperson to ban the book, THEN we’ll talk.
I’m wondering how this scales for you. Is it contributing to the death of free speech when SDMB warns or bans someone due to hate speech? If a local newspaper doesn’t print a letter to the editor? If a bar ejects someone yelling about the Holocaust being a "good idea? " If you tell someone to leave your party (at your home) for advocating lynching?
If any person is ever deprived of any single platform anywhere, is that killing free speech?
Right. Nobody has ever been entitled to their preferred platform, consequence-free.
Paying to get published - what is called “vanity press”, as k9bfriender already touched on, has long been considered the bottom tier of the multiple alternatives to traditional publishing. You might as well self-publish (which as has been said earlier, the devices and network on which we are exchanging this conversation enable us to do much more easily than in the past, and with a reach unimaginable as late as the 80s)
Your statement (and Greenwald’s) is, at best, a massive overstatement. There have always been many self-identified liberals unsympathetic to the demands of horrible and oppressive people to obtain a platform to promote their horrible and oppressive ideologies.
For example, the ACLU-defended proposed 1978 Nazi march in Skokie, Illinois was a REALLY unpopular idea. There were GG and Boomer liberals all over the place (many of them Jewish, understandably) doing their damndest to legally prohibit the march as well as, less excusably, threatening violence against not only the Nazis but the ACLU members defending the Nazis’ civil liberties.
In fact, the planned Nazi march never actually took place in Skokie itself. As the chief ACLU lawyer for the case remarks in the above-linked article:
So yeah, all the current millennial-deploring panegyrists of some sort of supposed vanished “golden age” of “leftist belief in free speech” need to take their heads out of their asses. There has always been strong division of opinion about free-speech absolutism on the US left, and the 1970s were not significantly different from today in that regard.
The mission of the ACLU as an organization is to oppose unconstitutional infringement of civil liberties. Neither the ACLU itself nor any of its members or representatives are in any way obligated or expected to promote an agenda of uncritical advocacy for the unchecked dissemination of all ideas and positions.
I don’t think you are clear on how either publishing or the custom baking industry works.
Bakers are offering a commercial service to the public in general, just as, say, tailors are when they advertise custom alterations to clothing.
The service provider can choose to restrict the specific types of service they offer. For example, a baker might decide they won’t make cheesecakes, or cupcakes, or bachelor-party cakes. A tailor might decide that they won’t do alterations on furs, or handweaves, or overcoats.
But once you as a commercial provider have decided on the specific services you’re going to offer to the public, you can’t refuse to provide those services to an individual member of the public based on their membership in a protected category.
If you offer to do alterations to business suit jackets, say, you can’t refuse to alter a jacket for a black customer because you personally believe that black people shouldn’t have business-type white-collar jobs.
Likewise, if you are willing to bake an engagement-party cake that says “Congratulations Lee and Chris” when Lee and Chris are an opposite-sex couple, you can’t refuse to bake one for a same-sex couple named Lee and Chris because you personally believe that same-sex couples shouldn’t get engaged. (That last example is assuming sexual orientation counts as a protected category, but according to what I understand about the recent EEOC v. Harris Supreme Court ruling, that interpretation has now been significantly strengthened.)
Publishers in general are not offering book publication as a commercial service to the general public. They are seeking contracts with specifically chosen authors to publish books with broadly pre-determined content which they will then sell to the general public, usually paying the author advances and royalties from sales. The publishers are under no obligation whatsoever to publish any book that they don’t want to be associated with, even if an author offers to pay them for it.
As k9bfriender notes, “self-publishing” firms or vanity presses are different, in that they’re simply providing a commercial service to authors in exchange for the authors paying them.
It’s a good question and I’ve been thinking about it. What I do believe very strongly is that the degree of censorship currently occurring (and being supported and promoted) by people whose ideas I might otherwise agree with is too much, and is harming society. Does that mean no speech should ever be censored by Twitter? I guess promoting illegal activity would be reasonable to ban, which would cover pro-paedophilia and pro-genocide messages, but then what about civil disobedience? And for books, I think you mentioned a Nazi book? I think Amazon should sell it, and newspapers should carry reviews if there is enough interest to warrant them. The reviews would surely be sharply critical, but that’s kind of the point. Not sure about advertising. I’d like to see some arguments for and against, but I don’t think I’m going to get them here. Don’t know if there is anywhere you can go to get a full range of opinions. Sorry I can’t give a more definite answer.
There’s an aspect of this story that’s got little attention in this thread, and it’s instructive. Greenwald mentions in passing an ACLU employee who Tweeted in favor of the book and then faced “relentless calls to have [him] fired.” He ended up deleting the Tweet.
Regardless of our feelings about the book, surely we can all agree that this is the big story here, right, that someone at the ACLU felt so threatened by mob action that they had to censor their own speech? Why isn’t anyone talking about this aspect of the case?
Maybe because I misrepresented it slightly. The Tweet wasn’t in support of the book; it was a flippant Tweet in support of deplatforming it. This is what happened to the dude that Greenwald is so fucking freaked out over:
Given the OP’s previous threads which are so upset when a transphobe faces pushback for saying transphobic things, it’s pretty interesting that she (and Greenwald) completely ignore the threat to free speech that Strangio is facing.
Please be careful, I’ve heard of small businesses driven out of business by boycotts after refusing to allow flyers for popular causes they disagreed with.
So this isn’t a philosophical disagreement. You just have a different bar for when you think it’s appropriate for private organizations to restrict speech on their platforms.
That’s a pretty small scale disagreement.
Yes, this. Laws don’t arrive from on high inscribed on stone tablets. People make them based on what they think is right and wrong. If they cease to value free speech then it will be chipped away at until it’s just empty words.
Yup. There are a lot of red flags being raised right now.
And a follow up, @DemonTree:
You say it’s appropriate to restrict advocacy for illegal behavior. So let’s explore that. Pedophilia is illegal (as it should be), and you’re fine with restricting advocacy that pedophilia should be made legal. I am too. Here’s another example - drug use is illegal. Are you fine with platforms restricting speech that advocates that using drugs should be legal? If not, then what’s the difference? Why is it okay for platforms to restrict pro pedophilia legalization stances, but not pro drug legalization stances?
I don’t think I did say that. I said maybe it was reasonable, but then what about civil disobedience? I guess it would be against the rules to advocate for that here on the Dope.
Restricting paedophiles from sharing information that helps them commit crimes should obviously be banned. And I’m happy to have the same rules for drug users. Restricting pro-legalization stances is more obviously against free speech. I think if forced to choose between a myriad of arbitrary restrictions and allowing advocacy for any position, I’d prefer the latter. I used to think we could restrict only the obviously bad stuff, but it turns out not to be as obvious as all that…
Pretty much every media outlet, if not every single one, bans advocacy for the legalization of sex with children, and has for a decade if not longer. And rightly so. Supposed “free speech” advocates never complained about this before.
I don’t think they actually care about free speech. They just want their speech to be unrestricted by anyone. And they’re duping folks like you into thinking it’s about free speech, when it’s just about their speech. Greenwald is a prime example - he’s permanently enraged that the mainstream liberal media no longer takes him seriously, when he used to be quite popular. But he didn’t spend years advocating for pro pedophilia legalization advocates in the past. Because he doesn’t care about free speech - only about his own speech.
That right there is it. Notice what I said above: Greenwald doesn’t give a shit that Strangio faced threats to his job over his Tweet, and that’s not what DemonTree is worried about either, even though she’s started (I think) and participated in (I know) threads bemoaning cancel culture over almost identical circumstances. It seems to be the content of the speech that motivates them.
Which is fine. The focus on process to the exclusion of content is a deeply misguided approach to the world. We need to be able to look at content. But we need to acknowledge that that’s what we’re doing and not dress it up in high-minded language about process.