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Comment by dreta | Hacker News Reader

"We anticipate participation from diverse movements such as Occupy, the Tea Party, Black Lives Matter, and the movements for immigrant rights, drug policy reform, peace and justice, gun rights, and others.”

Alright, so i’ll be the first to say this. Colleges, and the mentioned movements, ESPECIALLY BLM, have a sick, warped sense of what the word “free expression” means.

If you truly want to implement the 5 principles you mentioned, and you want support from rational people, you can’t be looking for the backing of organisations that are currently working hard to stifle them.

I’m all for what you’re saying, but you seem to be turning towards people who push for more government control, and regulation. So, sorry, but so far you look like a threat to freedom more than anything else.

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I was fully expecting someone in HN to get very upset about Black Lives Matter. I don't know much about them, but judging from their Wikipedia entry, as a whole the movement seems to be doing much more good than harm.

It's also a pretty diverse group, and some have used the BLM monicker while being denounced by other members of BLM. So don't paint them all with the same brush. It's like saying that you're against John Stuart Mill or Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz because you dislike feminism[1]. It will be interesting to see which part of BLM the EFA considers to be representative.

[1] Or absolutely all of these people:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_feminists

After having read the talk pages and controversies surrounding a number of politically charged wiki articles, I could not in good faith use them as a source to determine which political groups have a positive or negative influence.

I'm starting to think disjoint, disorganized movements like BLM are a bad idea just from an organizational standpoint. It means your message can't be controlled, it means its up to each individual member what the groups means, and worst of all, It takes just one idiot doing something wrong before the whole movement is permanently tainted - mostly because the majority of people will not exercise the same benefit of the doubt you just did.

These disjoint, disorganised movements exist to try and avoid another issue; that of a single person or group of people who can be 'discredited' or attacked by their enemies.

If you have a proper structure, you provide targets to discredit in order to bring down a movement or group. Groups like Occupy and Black Lives Matter and whatever else don't want a 'pope' like figure that the media can focus all their efforts on attacking, nor an organisational structure that can get infiltrated or corrupted.

Unfortunately, that causes the trade off you mention; you have no way to control the message your movement sends. This is what's caused so many problems with GamerGate as well, the fact it's entirely based on a hashtag and a loosely associated bunch of forums and blogs means that their enemies accuse them of absolutely everything they don't like that day.

But it's a trade off. Either have it decentralised and avoid the issue of a single leader/organisation being a media target (but lose the ability to control the message and who's involved) or have it centralised with a clear leader and structure at the cost of these people getting attacked non stop by their enemies and people trying their best to decredit/arrest/potentially kill them.

It reminds me of how Occupy was discredited: "They're just thugs and lazy people who don't want to work...and they're occupying our parks, for crying out loud!"

Because why would anyone other than thugs and lazy people who don't want to work ever protest Wall Street?

For sure, thoigh some of them advocate violence and separatism, and at some points people with such views had a lot of followers, kind of like the Trump followers who are filled with fear of Muslims.

Note that the BLM logo is the black panther logo, and they were largely viewed as separatists. I'm all for the movement when it is peaceful and respectful of American values, but when people who advocate having their own space start having a louder voice, then I lose interest.

The Wikipedia is the absolute last place you should ever visit to read up on political movements. It’s a biased source.

If you say you support a particular movement, you’re taking on the whole baggage it brings. If you don’t want the whole baggage then don’t name names.

> It’s a biased source.

Every source is biased. Wikipedia tries harder to be less biased. And hey, you can frequently change the bias if you just go and edit the article yourself.

I suppose I should read Wikipedia and Conservapedia and take the average of the two to get closer to the truth? :-)

>It's like saying that you're against John Stuart Mill or Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz because you dislike feminism[1].

I don't see why you'd have to be against a person just because they support a different point of view on some specific issue.

Really? A person can be the flagship of a movement that is so opposed to your point of view as to be dangerous. A radically religious up and coming politician for example. Or, I suppose, Hitler.

Of course, but he was quoting a "list of feminists", which I haven't clicked but I guess contains dozens or even hundreds of individuals, whose lives most likely don't revolve around feminism.

And there are plenty of people whose lives didn't revolve around the KKK either. You would find that most KKK members believed in different treatment based on a person's skin colour, but disagreed with lynching or physical violence.

I argue that any group who focusses on itself is similar. You get some vocal intolerance (see the attack on Matt Taylor for a list of tens of thousands of intolerant feminists). However, what you get from the collective group is a misguided sense of entitlement. Eg. The founder of she++ dislikes gender based groups, so she established one herself! In fact, I'd argue she++ is one of the few gender based groups I know of.

As far as I'm concerned, prejudice is prejudice. BLM focus on black lives only. Feminism focuses on special treatment based on gender. how are either of these things fair or reasonable? Such movements can't help but encourage intolerance (eg. the attack on Matt Taylor). Hence, they should be denounced in the same way we denounce the KKK.

Any movement that focuses on one section of society (KKK, feminism) inevitably drives intolerance. Just ask Matt Taylor who was crucified by feminists for wearing a shirt designed by a woman. It is one of many examples that highlights why BLM and feminism are flawed in the same way.

EFA should only promote groups who represent everyone equally. You wouldn't accept the KKK, why accept others who encourage equivalent prejudices.

> Any movement that focuses on one section of society (KKK, feminism) inevitably drives intolerance.

If a section of society is marginalized and persecuted in the society as a whole, a movement to equalize things is bound to crop up. By your argument, you would prefer the African-American civil rights movement never to have existed, is that correct?

As a sidenote, I would like to remark that many feminists would like to define feminism as the struggle to end sexism for everybody. Consider this quote by bell hooks:

"In Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center, I suggest that defining feminism broadly as “a movement to end sexism and sexist oppression” would enable us to have a common political goal…Sharing a common goal does not imply that women and men will not have radically divergent perspectives on how that goal might be reached."

(devil's advocate) Arguably feminism has already succeeded in achieving equality by the end of the second wave. Although some feminists may indeed fight to end sexism for everybody, feminism still bears the implicit assumption that women are currently disadvantaged.

Please don't take threads on pointless ideological tangents. You are welcome to not like BLM, but you should know that there's no good outcome to litigating it here.

The EFF is the one that brought it up in the OP...

The EFF mentioned BLM in passing, right after the f'ing Tea Party. The commenter upthread doesn't want to talk about the EFF. They just want to talk about BLM on HN.

Who the EFA aligns with is relevant to the thread.

Currently the left in USA seems to conflate freedom of expression with freedom from different opinions, and, at least the mainstream left, seem to want more government involvement in the policing of speech.

So again, all of this matters, because it shows how they do, or might, define what their principles mean to them versus what they mean to you or me.

I think you're mixing up different groups of people. I know a lot of people who work in the area of criminal justice reform, and they're by and large not the same folks freaking out about what people say in colleges. Their primary interest is in sentencing reform, holding police accountable, and drug decriminalization. It's pretty far fetched to paint those folks as pushing for more government control.

Please remember the paradox of tolerance: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance

It is vital to understand that free speech, privacy, and many other rights, are inherently in conflict to some degree.

Whether you think people are striking the right balance is a different matter, and not one I will talk of here, though.

When I see something like this posted on the Internet I am reminded of a quote attributed to Socrates by Plato:

"The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise."

Every older generation tend to view the younger generation as a problem.

And vice versa - the older generation seen by the younger as holding back progress (in the west at least, eastern societies tend to respect the older generation more)

I’m 27. This is my generation we’re talking about.

They can work together where they agree, and if they can't agree then maybe the backing they anticipated won't be there. I'm glad they're trying to bring people together behind this cause regardless.

The EFF is a liberal lobby. I'm very concerned they are being regarded as the gatekeepers of our freedom, be it online or offline.

I don't understand why the EFF (and ACLU for that matter) are considered liberal. Aren't they libertarian, if anything? Don't conservatives care about privacy, freedom of expression, freedom of the press, religious freedom, and other civil rights?

Rejecting the EFF and ACLU looks to me like partisanship over country or principle: We don't care what they are doing, we're going to reject them because there is some association with liberalism. Fighting liberalism is more important than civil rights or anything else.

The ACLU specifically was on the opposing end of plenty of Bush-era legislation and got labeled as such. My childhood memories are pocketed with soundbites of Bill O'Reilly denouncing the ACLU as a bastion of American liberalism.

> The ACLU specifically was on the opposing end of plenty of Bush-era legislation and got labeled as such. My childhood memories are pocketed with soundbites of Bill O'Reilly denouncing the ACLU as a bastion of American liberalism.

They've been labeled as such for much longer than that. My point is, the label doesn't make sense. Bill O'Reilly doesn't like them because they are a threat to some of his political causes, like civil rights for people he doesn't like (prisoners, alleged terrorists, illegal immigrants, etc.). The ACLU opposes the much of what every President does - that's the main threat to civil liberties - including Obama's surveillance programs, for example.

Ah, Bill O'Reilly, that endless font of rational thought and uncannily accurate characterization.

It's not the ACLU's fault that reality has a liberal bias.

(for a Bush-era, Bill O'Reilly-ish-style definition of "liberal")

The ACLU is also a liberal association[1], although I agree liberals and conservatives work together in some issues. There's no doubt about it.

And yes, I think it's okay to reject them, because I am afraid of them gaining affection from everybody just to push an agenda later. If they wanted to herald digital freedom, they should have remained completely neutral in political issues, but they chose not to...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Civil_Liberties_Union...

How can they be neutral on issues directly related to civil liberties? It seems to me the liberal positions happen to align on issues of personal freedom, not that they are pushing a liberal agenda.

edit: The only questionable thing listed is their position on gun rights.

I don't buy Wikipedia editors' version of a political debate. I don't see the ACLU take political positions; can anyone name some (based on something besides Wikipedia)?

Well, if there was a more right-leaning advocacy organization that provided a similar level of lobbying and awareness for all of the digital issues that are important to people like me, I might consider contributing. I donate to the EFF now and will continue to do so.

I don't like the mention of groups like Occupy and BLM. Those are anarchist groups and I have no use for them. Coordinating with them will do our side (the side that cares about making sure we retain all of our rights in the "digital world" that we do in the physical one) more harm than good.

During the time of the debate around SOPA or PIPA, I found the Cato Institue particularly useful for two reasons:

1. There are a lot of people who won't read something from an organization with a liberal reputation regardless of the merits of the argument.

2. Their arguments matched up closely with mine. From an economic and game theory perspective I was mostly concerned about the implicit favoring of incumbent market participants, where upstarts wouldn't be able to build a business involving anonymous user-generated content. And, that there would be fewer lively communities and discussions overall with anonymous contributors.

I don't like the mention of groups like Occupy and BLM. Those are anarchist groups and I have no use for them

Those groups are the furthest from anarchists groups so I wonder why you would call them that.

There's nothing inherently wrong with a lobbyist. They're there to help inform representatives. As for being the gatekeeper, well, nothing is stopping you from making your own website or group and sharing your own views, or writing to and calling your representatives. They are likely really confused about the digital world and some might appreciate a call from any respectful fellow who offered to clue them in. I could be wrong but anyway it wouldn't hurt and it'd give you a sense for how far your voice can project.

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