Airbnb’s ban of Nazis in Charlottesville sets an important standard
slate.com
slate.com
When they come for you and your soon-to-be-declared radical beliefs, remember how proud you were today.
> When they come for you and your soon-to-be-declared radical beliefs
Airbnb is a business. Not the government. They can't come for me. I go to them and if tomorrow they declare my beliefs radical, I will not go to them.
Nazism is not a case of "right vs. left", "republican vs. democrat", etc. It's not a case where it's an almost 50/50 split, but because the left has more power over media/tech, then the right's views are considered fringe and are "punished".
This is a case where almost everyone agrees that these views are completely outside of standard discourse. Don't conflate this with the common (and IMO somewhat valid) view that a lot of what's been happening lately is "repression" of the right by the left.
You can expect that if stuff like this starts happening more often, other jurisdictions will also respond.
In general, "I am free to not rent my property to a certain undesirable element" has a pretty ugly history, as most societies don't view housing as just another optional consumption good.
You know, renting your property is not an existential struggle and not everyone who reads Breitbart wants to have you and yours ethnically cleansed. There are laws to protect you, and you really don't need to be helping out the police with your fears.
Should we just throw them into water and see if they float? Or administer a "are you a Nazi" test on a polygraph?
EDIT: This is a problem of the current political climate where words have lost their meaning. A lot of people even remotely right of center have been called a Nazi or "alt-right" or "white-supremacist".
Obviously, you can't tell if someone is a Nazi, so only those who openly display their ideology should be banned.
How about good old fashioned, "Is that a fucking swastika your friend is carrying over his shoulder?"
But generally, yeah, let's test people for lack of empathy and other things. That would be much more interesting than what particular ideology they dress the underlying issues up with, and it would also address the "shutting people up for voicing things we can't handle because they're correct" crowd that hide under the mantle of social justice and whatnot.
Yes, the "Nazi ideology" espouses this. But you are renting to actual people, and
1) You have no way of knowing whether _they_ really espouse the ethnic cleansing of you and yours, or whether you just think they do. Lots of people wear swatstikas but they don't actually favor mass extermination. There are holocaust deniers who are called Nazis and maybe even view themselves as Nazis but, pretty much by definition, don't support the holocaust. As another example, elsewhere in this thread you have made characterizations about me that don't have any basis in reality, so who is to trust you to decide whether someone truly wants to ethnically cleanse you and yours?
2) even if they were _actual_ Nazis, which you have no way of knowing, by renting to them, you and yours are not going to be ethnically cleansed. The fact that someone has a political belief is not in and of itself a cause to make them fail to pay rent or fulfill any other of their obligations as tenants. As a result, in many jurisdictions, it's illegal to not rent to them.(a)
3) There is a strong likelihood that landlords will end up refusing to rent to people whose views they don't like. A capitalist landlord can refuse to rent to a communist, because the communist wants to overthrow them. That will turn into not renting to someone who is interested in communism, etc, which will turn into not renting someone who attends a communist rally. Someone else in this thread decided that a Swatstika on a "friend" would be enough evidence, so now we are getting into not renting to someone based on their associating with people suspected of Nazism, etc.
(a) In California, it is illegal to not rent to someone based on "arbitrary characteristics" not related to their ability to fulfill the terms of the lease. See, e.g. http://articles.latimes.com/2014/mar/30/business/la-fi-rentw...
Again, the laws differ jurisdiction by jurisdiction.
Believe me, it's not the leftists who end up owning most of the property. These protections are part of living in an open society in which people are not discriminated against based on their beliefs. As we get more of a housing crunch and in many cities there is a growing population of renters, it becomes more important that your political affiliation not disqualify you from access to shelter. This may mean that some landlords have to rent to those whose politics they dislike, but that's the price of living in a free society. You are free to espouse any ideology you want as long as you don't break any laws.
If they're Nazis, make Hitler salutes, and fly flags with swastikas on them, of course I do! That's practically the point of ideology lmao
People wear transgressive symbols and put on transgressive displays in order to piss others off and show their own independence. But wearing a Che Hat doesn't make you a communist, neither does sporting a hammer and sickle arm band. Neither does singing the International. Please don't confuse performative displays with the real thing: kids dressing up as historical cowboys and indians are not actually cowboys and indians. Stop pretending.
Lastly, we don't live in a society of self-help for this stuff. You are obligated to rent to anyone who can fulfill the terms of the lease, and if you don't like that, then get out of the rental business. Let the police be the ones charged with preventing mass extermination. Petty discriminations don't help protect anyone.
When you are trusting someone to host you in their home, or trusting someone to stay in your home, it is important to have safety policies. For example, AirBnB's policies are related to fire safety, theft/vandalism, and fraud. This is simply one other policy to make both guests and hosts feel safe using the platform.
It's like the day after the election, half the population started engaging in WW2 cosplay.
There are more Rastafarians in America then there are actual Nazis, and I'd wager very few people in this rally even know the definition of a Nazi, let alone are one.
You know what I think? I think you don't actually care about free speech. A Nazi (a real, card-carrying Nazi) drove a car through a group of leftist protestors and killed an innocent young woman. He took away, by force, her right to freedom of expression.
But I notice you haven't voiced any concern about that - you only care about freedom of speech to the extent that it's used to protect Nazis (and those who associate with them). But when it comes to protecting the free speech of protestors who disagree? All of a sudden, your deep concern is nowhere to be found. Give me a break.
What you are talking about is completely orthogonal to the first amendment. Everyone has a right to speech and everyone is protected from vehicular assault & murder by law. I hope that everyone on Hacker News condemns that act of violence.
Could you please point to the source of your claim that he was a "card-carrying Nazi"?
I want white supremacism die out, not white supremacist people themselves. I want their voice in the public dialogue. I want white supremacists to bring their ideology into the public sphere so that it can be visibly argued against. I want white supremacists to experience a change of heart.
Actually, ... yes. White supremacy used to be the norm. Slavery, lynch mobs, KKK, etc. all were considered normal. "To Kill a Mockingbird" was a book that talked about how normal such attitudes were (and still are in parts of the South)
White supremacy has been denormalized and it is dying says that continued denormalization does work.
In Durham, NC a confederate statue was pulled down. In the video, white people were seen abusing it. White people. That is what denormalization looks like.
Extremist views are hard to fight when they are safely hidden away. Like any infection, it's best to expose them to the light of day. It's more effective to point and laugh than to throw projectiles and yell. (Had that strategy been employed in 1923, there would have been no Mein Kampf.)
How fascism was covered by the media http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/how-journalists-covere...
The myth of political correctness https://thinkprogress.org/the-phony-debate-about-political-c...
What normalization looks like today https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/normalization-lesson-mun...
It doesn't gain them support. Putting their views in the spotlight demonstrates what sort of people they are, and helps combat them.
For example, the far-right British National Party had two seats in the European parliament from 2009-2014, but it didn't do them any good.
All I see on facebook these days are apologists and racists as the top comment on any news site. I see them on my twitter feed. I even see them in dating apps. Nobody wants them there, as they usually encourage a long chain of comments expressing the fact that they're unwelcome. Sometimes one or two are flagged and banned. A week later, another little network is built up again and the loud and extreme few are handed a megaphone. We need better filtering algorithms for this nonsense that operate on a macro level. You can call it censorship if you want. I'm not saying to make it impossible for them to communicate their message, they just should be relegated to doing so from one account at a time.
This didn't work out so well, http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2016/11/17/twitter_i...
This effort is half hearted at best, disorganized in practice https://www.facebook.com/notes/facebook-safety/controversial...
It's been vigilantes doxxing that have had the largest impact, however what they do is illegal and against the terms of service of the apps they're trying to rid of hateful speech. http://www.haaretz.com/us-news/.premium-1.806719
I would love to see more tech leaders actually build intelligent solutions to weeding out hatespeech on the internet.
Let them go underground, that's where they belong.
However I can't help but think that the reactions would be quite different if they had banned people attending a Sharia rally.
The problem with limiting freedoms to certain groups is that you have little to no control over who gets to decide which groups are acceptable.
Today it might be a group you don't like. One election later and it might be a group that you are a part off.
That is why you need to defend the principle, even if you don't like the specifics of what you are defending, and is why, for example, the ACLU is defending Milo: https://www.aclu.org/blog/speak-freely/how-could-you-represe...
I think sexuality should be a protected class. I do not think neo-Nazis or White supremacists should be a protected class. But in the case of the wedding cake, I think it would be fine for bakers, caterers, or photographers to refuse to work at a gay wedding, an event they consider immoral. If a customer happened to be a neo-Nazi and was booking a vacation stay, I doubt AirBnB would have cared. It was the fact that they were using the service to book accommodations for the rally that caused the company to cancel their booking.
> That is why you need to defend the principle, even if you don't like the specifics of what you are defending, and is why, for example, the ACLU is defending Milo
The ACLU is defending Milo from government suppression of his speech. I agree with the principle they are defending. This is not the same as a private entity deciding not to do business with him. The ACLU will not, for instance, help him sue Simon & Schuster for cancelling his book deal.
Is this guy a nazi [0]?
And what about all the people who call anyone who voted for or who supports trump a nazi?
That's the slippery slope.
Edit: https://www.quora.com/Is-it-legal-in-USA-to-wave-a-Nazi-flag
In what government has that worked out well?
Also, Trump is a president of the people and not some dictator. The congress has to pass laws and people on congress are voted for by the people. Trump cannot just ban random things on his own.
The president has pretty insane powers. Both directly and his appointments.
This is why the majority of Obama's Executive Orders that were subjected to court scrutiny were overturned.
Airbnb is not "the only one of its kind." If you look up the origin story of the company, or do a google search for their legal battles with cities and states, you'll learn that they very much do have competing alternatives, including the entire hotel industry.
Moral beliefs change, governmental systems evolve, laws take time to pass. You're complaining about why there is or isn't a law, but then you want to take this debate out of the reality from which laws exist in the first place. That sounds about as fun and productive as arguing computational implementations with someone who doesn't believe in the relevance of time or physics.
edit: replaced "computational theories" with "computational implementations"
Race
Color
Religion
National origin
Age
Sex
Pregnancy
Citizenship
Familial status
Disability status
Genetic information
If you want to add or remove a class, change the law. But political ideology is not, and should not be, a protected class. Private companies can decide if they want Nazis on their platforms, and this one doesn't. Take your libertarian fantasies elsewhere.
But ignoring historical reasons and realities, the contemporary moral argument for why religion deserves more protection than political ideology is because political ideology can be expressed (and protected) through participating in the political process. Whereas being a member of a religion is not seen as necessarily a political activity, especially in religions that do not engage in the political process.
And how long did it take for this to get enshrined into law, and how many people suffered unjustly in the mean time? Far better would have been for any discrimination of this sort to be illegal across the board, to avoid the need to build up enough political capital to create laws protecting vulnerable classes.
That there is a specific set of classes that it is illegal to discriminate against is the problem: the next class that we currently don't recognize has to suffer until they're capable of building up enough political capital to change laws. Until then they're subject to the tyranny of the majority.
> But political ideology is not, and should not be, a protected class
This the substantive part of this discussion. Why do you think political ideology shouldn't be a protected class?
Sometimes, the costs/risks of making and enforcing laws outweigh the potential benefit. Not everything wrong should be illegal; not everything morally obligatory ought to be legally mandatory.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZTT1qUswYL0
The broader context of this was the real-world provocations of Nazi demonstrations during this period in Skokie, Illinois (which had a significant population of Holocaust survivors). The officer in the scene above comments that "they won their court case" -- this is the case:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Socialist_Party_of_Am...
1. First amendment only applies to government actions.
2. Established case law that businesses offering a public service are not allowed to discriminate based on a protected class. (Hate groups are NOT protected).
3. Businesses are allowed to refuse service if it impacts their ability to serve all their customers (for example, you show up at the coffee house without clothes)
4. AirBnB has entered into consent agreements with California Fair Housing and Employment Department with regards to the landlords discriminating against guests.
5. AirBnB has a ToS that specifies the conditions imposed on guests.
AirBnB is quite correct from a business perspective to cancel the reservations.
Thought experiment if they didn't:
A landlord renting a house is Jewish or any other group that is hated by the "Unite the Right" and gets their house trashed.
... this puts AirBnB in what kind of legal situation.
I don't like speculation based on hypotheticals. Unfortunately, the car attack in Charlotte proves my point.
Fascism should be fought, but not in this way.
Whether or not it counts as a 'public accommodation' actually seems like a bit of a subtle question. Relevant wiki:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_accommodations
It seems like it'd be clear that AirBnB itself is a public accommodation, but not necessarily so clear that each individual renter on AirBnB would count as such. So while the site itself may not be able to discriminate, individual property owners may. IANAL though, but it seems like an interesting question. (Also, my post should not be construed to be advocating either position, simply contemplating the legal question)
1. The 'private club' exception. An individual renter is a small operation, and could maybe argue that their property represents a private club. In the same way that businesses under 15 employees (or whatever the limit is) are exempt from certain civil rights requirements. They're too small to be considered 'public' accommodations.
2. The word 'establishment': "any inn, hotel, motel, or other establishment which provides lodging to transient guests,". Is an AirBnB renter an 'establishment'? The word is a bit poorly defined, but an argument could be made that since most AirBnB renters are not incorporated, they could not be considered to be 'establishments'. It may also turn on the degree to which the renting is a primary use of the home in question. I.e. if you own the house only to rent it out, you are an 'establishment', but if you also live there and only rent it occasionally, you are not.
And while I welcome Airbnb's attention to the issue and the basic first-order attempt at doing the right thing, I also see this as an insidious way for Airbnb to shirk the responsibilities that come with public accommodation, and a lack of imagination on the ways they could contribute to a just world.
Protected classes have something in common, which is that they are aspects of nature and circumstance that their members don't control in the way that somebody decides to be a white supremacist. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protected_class)
I'm okay with Airbnb's particular move here, though I would strongly argue they are a public accommodation. Those two distinct questions got mixed up in my head.