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Comment by krisdol | Hacker News Reader

Who is attacking the ACLU?

There is a segment of America that wants to prohibit speech that is "bad." In this case, the rhetoric of the alt-right and other racist fear mongers. This is speech that incites riots.

I'm glad the ACLU is there fighting this fight. Lest we forget that at one time unpopular speech was women's rights.

Should there perhaps be some limits, though?

For some reason, I can't imagine that advocating genocide should ever be considered legitimate free speech. I can understand political ideologies, even authoritarianism being protected - but advocation of genocide?

Why do we refuse to draw lines?

We draw the line where reprehensible speech turns into actual reprehensible actions. "I hate <ethnic group> and wish they were all dead" is far different from "There are <ethnic group> living a 333 Evergreen Terrace, please join me at 7 pm so we can kill them".

The problem is I'm pretty sure the only illegal thing in that is giving away private information, if that.

If you ban the advocates of genocide speaking publicly they will simply speak underground. If they do it in the open you'll at least know who they are.

>We bring it out in the open, where it can be seen and dealt with. Like a boil that can never be cured so long as it is covered up but must be opened with all its ugliness to the natural medicines of air and light, injustice must be exposed, with all the tension its exposure creates, to the light of human conscience and the air of national opinion before it can be cured.

-Dr. King, Letter From a Birmingham Jail

Forgive me if I'm being dense here, but how is genocide a form of speech? Genocide is a form of killing.

In Rwanda, there was a radio station literally advocating genocide and organizing slaughters. It played a major role in inflaming tensions that were already really high. You can reasonably see it as an exercise in free speech, but it was also very much an active participant of the genocide.

Needless to say, the USA is not 90's Rwanda.

Advocation thereof

Identifying with those who advocate for violence is not equivalent to advocating for violence.

Not saying it is, I'm not making any comments on the protest itself or the lawsuits for/against it.

Reasonable. In the US, the limit where speech stops being constitutionally protected seems to be incitement to imminent lawless action. See https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/395/444/case.htm..., and a later clarification in https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/414/105/.

By genocide do you mean mass abortion? Should we ban pro-choice speech?

care to tell us how foetus or whatever stage of development they are is a national, ethnic or religious group ?

There are limits. You can't incite violence or shout fire in a crowded theater or plenty of other reasons.

Funny story.

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

> The phrase is a paraphrasing of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.'s opinion in the United States Supreme Court case Schenck v. United States in 1919, which held that the defendant's speech in opposition to the draft during World War I was not protected free speech under the First Amendment of the United States Constitution.

There are tweets quoted in the article.

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