...are they working on the EARN IT act by any chance?
I'd say they are definitely where they need to be.. It's prudent and wise they not be involved with rabble rousers who through their non compliance, indifference, and questioning of authority silently slaughter members of minority communities that this disease adversely affects more than wealthy elites who miss their bed bath and beyond or their tee time.
The LGBTQ+ community are basically ordinary people from all walks of life, including prominent names like Tim Cook and Pete Buttigieg. The community has I believe explicit public support from culture generating machines like Hollywood and political entities like the Democrat party. These aren't exactly wilting lilies in terms of power and influence.
It isn't obvious that supporting their liberties should take precedence over supporting anyone else's.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGBT_rights_in_the_United_Stat...
Of course, that's very much a nontrivial issue even among progressive circles. Your view is far from consensual.
Why do we have girls' teams at all?
Isn't it sexist?
Like, I don't know, saying "You cannot compete with men, go play dolls"?
At present, that is frequently trans people. Often trans kids.
Important for who, may I ask? Aren't there many groups fighting for that?
How many groups are working to promote civil rights?
The reality is clear. Civil leadership has been consolidated into the ranks of middle management and ad executives. Modern civil activism is pay-by-mail, one-newsletter-at-a-time, simply install and forget.
If you find yourself frustrated with the leadership of the civil groups you maintain, consider splintering you and those in your groups who trust you into a new civil group which focuses on a local level: Local canvasing could be far more effective than distributing online propaganda.
I tend to believe that, but are you aware of any studies that try to show that?
https://www.aclu.org/other/aclu-history-taking-stand-free-sp...
That was a classically apt appearance because no doubt a hypothetical Nazi state would ban the ACLU.
I've been personally torn about this myself. I got chewed out once by a professor for advocating that people turn out to oppose David Horowitz. My opinion was that his speech was foul and needed obvious opposition, but I didn't want him shouted down. I thought that his schtick of going to universities promoting "academic freedom" which basically meant being able to tell liberal professors to shut up was dreck. However, he was shouted down and couldn't be heard. I felt bad about that, and agreed with the professor in the end. But, in a way, the dude was getting a taste of his own medicine: he certainly advocated for deplatforming people himself.
“Your right to swing your arms ends just where the other man’s nose begins” is another example.
Society is a context where we exercise our liberties.
I’ve never heard it being used genuinely not even once.
I find it irritating: you don’t want freedom of speech? State than openly and tell me why.
I don’t think I even care, but please be honest about it and tell people why and what you would ban.
I am sure that, like every one using the arguments you are using, you would suppress free speech much more than that!
Be open and direct, we still have free speech my friend!
No need to hide between rhetorical devices.
But for the people saying the things you don't want to hear, that same speech is beneficial, with little harm.
It's easy to want to ban things you don't want to do. That's the entire point of it being protected in the first place.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shouting_fire_in_a_crowded_the...
Freedom of speech is a spectrum, and neither extreme of that spectrum is beneficial to a healthy society.
Who would decide what is fake news? The federal government? Perhaps a free speech Czar appointed by the president of the US? The current president of the US certainly does talk about fake news a lot. But no thanks.
Beyond fighting a Fabian struggle in favor of critical thinking and quality information flows (which are lacking all across our society, even if that lack is particularly obvious with a certain political group) I'm by no means certain what a good, useful, and just response ought to be.
I am confident that the danger is real and needs to be acknowledged. We need to find paths forward if we're to have any hope of keeping our civilization. And that means talking (and doing something) about the "propaganda, misinformation, and outright lies". Sticking our heads in the sand and screaming "Free Speech!" while the tidal wave informational sewage rolls over us isn't going to be sufficient.
The problem with your viewpoint is that, unless you plan to remove the ability of large swaths of the population who have been "robbed of their ability to think critically" to vote, ending democracy as we know it, whichever authority you construct to define what is "true" may not remain under the control of you and people who think as you do and then it will become Orwell's Ministry of Truth in all but name. Game over; civilization loses.
"The road to hell is paved with good intentions" as they say. Forgive us old-school liberals if we choose not to follow you down that road.
Why do we have to have a single central authority? We ought to at least be willing to speculate about AI-mediated Blockchains of Truth that reward factually accurate reporting. Or about ways to smoothly tell users how accurate the source they're reading has been in the past, or how to implement smart filtering of information streams to protect our own minds so that we can avoid wasting time on cognitive hazards.
The point is that we have options beyond just sitting back and giving up. The problem is real, as are the risks to responding poorly. But that doesn't justify not responding at all.
Something must be done. This is something. This must be done!
And,
This won't work. Therefore, nothing will work. We should do nothing!
I understand and agree with those who reject the first. But turning from the first only to embrace the second is also a mistake.
I simply started with a seemingly easy question: who decides what is and is not fake news? Trying to answer that question yourself hopefully helps illustrate just how challenging it is to find a solution that isn't worse than the problem. But hopefully with enough pondering on that question, one does start to lean in the direction that any solution must include individuals ultimately deciding for themselves what is and isn't fake news.
Does that imply nothing will work? For sure it does not. But it might imply we are already there: the best cure for fake news might be working harder to make real news more persuasive. It could be a boring matter of will and effort - a lot of grunt work. By talking to the journalists engaged in that work, you would uncover the actual challenges and perhaps ideas around the technologies that could better empower that change. Or not. The internet itself was supposed to help us become better informed. Clicks + adverts + automatic measurement, rinse, and repeat; proved that ideal wrong. At least for now.
Either the people collectively get a say in what is "factually accurate", an ill-defined concept in the first place, or they don't (authoritarianism); the mechanics do not matter. And if we accept your premise that large swaths of the population have been "robbed of their ability to think critically", then whatever the system decides is "factually accurate" will be corrupted if the people have a say in it. Or, in other words, "garbage in, garbage out".
If there are other options, please articulate them.
And I don't see how it fulfills your previous claim:
> and doesn't require some nefarious government czar.
Because someone has to decide who the experts are. Peer review in science is performed by those who have a degree from a government accredited institution.
Source with stats? Here's my anecdotal counter evidence: I only ever hear it used by people who don't want to limit speech except when it will cause immediate physical harm.
I can't think of a better example of something that should be protected speech, or a better example of how "reasonable" limits will get abused.
Fortunately, that ruling has been mostly overturned by now.
This comment seems more like you taking an opportunity to flex on someone in a comment instead of refuting my underlying point. That’s great the ruling this saying was used in was overturned (I’m taking your word for it) but citing that fact completely misses the point...
Pretending that nuanced reality doesn't exist is the definition of "rights absolutism".
>have, can, and will always find some new "threat" with which to justify taking away civil liberties.
So slippery slope, is what you're arguing? "First they make a completely reasonable and temporary restriction of right of physical assembly, next we'll be off to the gulags." Isn't really an interesting argument, is it?
Please find this text in my post.
The entire point of enumerating rights in the constitution and it's amendments is so that they are _not_ subject to changing circumstances.
Pretending that a small sentence can encompass all the possible nuance of the multiple situations that arise in our messy reality is being an "absolutist".
Such as?
The quote you know dates to 1919 and was a metaphor used to justify suppression of political speech during WWI.
https://www.oyez.org/cases/1900-1940/249us47
It's pretty fucking shameful.
https://www.popehat.com/2018/06/28/make-no-law-episode-seven... for a great podcast about it.
Yes, the "fire" quote is just a rhetorical device from Schenck. No, the "fire" quote is likely not true today.
The supreme court has very narrowly defined exceptions to the first amendment since the time of Schenck (just "fighting words," which is vague and narrow enough it may not really exist either). You can yell fire in a crowded theater; it's not fighting words. It just makes you a dick.
P.S., the historical context for the "fire" rhetorical device was that there had been a series of horrific theater fire mass-deaths in the early 20th century due to doors that were either locked, or opened inwards — before the era of fire safety regulation. Some deaths were due to crushing at the doors, rather than actual fire or smoke inhalation. Modern theater doors open outward and don't lock from the inside, so we don't have this particular flavor of horrific incidents in our social consciousness.
The podcast you linked to in your other comment seems to think the quote is true today (although not useful in most discussion due to being too obviously true):
> It’s a rhetorical device to say the First Amendment is not absolute, which is true, but that’s not in dispute. [...]
> It’s as if we were looking at an animal on the side of the road trying to decide what it is and I said not all animals are cats. Your reaction would be yes, thank you, I am aware, but the question is, what is that animal? We have the tools we need to decide what that animal is on the side of the road. With free speech those tools are a 100 years of Supreme Court cases.
There are people still being crushed to death at events today, maybe not theaters:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_human_stampedes_and_cr...
Moreover, I think this is true of most rhetorical devices in general, and that is part of what the podcast is criticizing. They are not attempts to collaboratively consider the evidence in order to arrive at shared conclusions informed by the knowledge of all parties; they are attempts to influence whatever conclusions may arise, by hook or by crook, to benefit the interests of the utterer, and whether either the utterances or the conclusions happen to be objectively true or false is none of the utterer's concern.
I consider this contemptible, and I try to engage in it as little as I can manage.
† Incidentally, this page explains that Schenck was not specifically overturned until Brandenburg in 1969 (although the Brandenburg decision doesn't mention Schenck), but the Supreme Court's progressively broader reading of the First Amendment was already protecting antiwar and anticapitalist activism by the 1950s, for example in Gibson (1946), Estep (1946), Dickinson (1953), and Yates (1957).
I understood Holmes to be saying that protesting the war in that epoch could lead to actual violence in the US. The domestic terrorism of the anarchists earlier in the decade could make you feel that way.
However, your reading of Schenck is incorrect.
I use many figures of speech every day which I don't know the etymologies of. I don't think it's necessary to study the origin of every figure of speech before using it.
(Personally, that's why I no longer support the ACLU - this wasn't analogous to the Illinois Nazis case, and as everyone expected, violence happened and someone died. I felt like the ACLU had let their focus on civil rights absolutism drive them to defending someone whose civil rights weren't actually under threat instead of spending their resources on actual ongoing threats to civil rights.)
Compromising once is enough to compromise it always and their recent posturing on social media has done nothing to dissuade that this is the case. They've only doubled down and joined the outrage mob driven political system.
I personally don't want to live in a world where every political ideology needs their own legal defence non-profits which only do things for political ends... not for a higher purpose. Largely because they lose tons of credibility in the face of dismissal when they compromise their values for politics.
Credibility is very important in this sort of thing. Plenty of other major human rights groups including Human Rights Watch and the ACLU long defended far-right groups and the world didn't burn down in the 1960s, 70s, 80s, 90s, etc.
They did it because they same thing that shuts those 'bad guys' down will be used to bring down the 'good guys'.
I highly recommend the founder of Human Rights Watch's book on this topic when they defended Neo-nazis in the 1970s:
Defending My Enemy: American Nazis in Skokie, Illinois, and the Risks of Freedom:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aryeh_Neier
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Socialist_Party_of_Am...
https://www.amazon.com/Defending-My-Enemy-Neier/dp/052508972...
I'm arguing that their lawsuit in Charlottesville didn't actually serve the goals of protecting civil rights or defending principles which are important to protect other people's civil rights. I'm arguing that the Charlottesville case was different from the Illinois Nazis case - Unite the Right wasn't primarily about speech, it was about violence, and the speech acts that Kessler et al. wanted to do would have worked just fine in the other park, which would have been logistically easier from a public safety perspective. I'm arguing that if Charlottesville's original decision had stood and established precedent that somehow later applied to a "good guy" protest, that would be okay, because of the specific facts of the Charlottesville case.
I'm arguing that the ACLU was right to take on the Illinois Nazis case, and would be right to take it on again today. You don't need to convince me of that. (If the ACLU has somehow managed to get itself into a position where it's not willing to do that anymore and it hasn't convinced people like me that it's learned its lesson from Unite the Right, then they're truly incompetent.)
It is of course a little difficult to separate the idea of protecting civil rights from political ideology: the idea that civil rights are worth protecting is a political ideology itself! But I think the broader point, which I agree with, is that you should be willing to protect the civil rights of people who do not think that civil rights are worth protecting.
This is easy to say with retrospect. How many other major protests in history would you have compromised had you known there would be violence?
Any embedded provocateur could easily kill any protest.
Any extremist portion of any political group, no matter how small, could kill the mainstream purpose of the wider legitimate group.
I'd much rather we strongly defend their right to protest in public spaces, regardless of ideology, and instead we react to any planned or actual violence (which is already illegal). Including targeting individuals who have that as part of their agenda. Not attacking the larger groups at the point of their freedom of assembly. Which is all ACLU ever protected them from when they defend their right to protest in one city park instead of one far away from downtown.
I'd love to see where Unite the Right people fought for the right to commit violence in court and where ACLU had any part of that...
Obviously the organizer didn't go to court and say, "I would like the right to commit violence, can you please give me that right because free speech." But he did go to court and say "Me and my militia buddies who are hoping for a civil war and are bringing their guns would like to hold a rally at this crowded location where police can't keep things under control, and the city said that we can hold a rally at this less-crowded location instead, can we have our original location please?" and the ACLU defended that.
I think we're too far off-topic to argue about whether my view of Unite the Right is true or not - but I think I've set out a coherent position about principles (and, in particular, if my view is wrong on the facts, then I am in favor of the ACLU's support on principle.) I think you'll find that I am, in fact, opposed to most riots and do not believe there is an unalienable civil right to riot. I do believe in the right of people to protest even if there's a violent faction you can't do anything about. (And, in particular, I don't believe that information in retrospect about the violence of a given protest is relevant. I would still hold the same position if nobody had died or even been injured at Charlottesville, because of the information we knew beforehand. That is, my position rests on it the ACLU having been wrong at the time they filed the suit, not after the fact, which is a good part of why I don't think they've learned anything from it.)
I never said it was. And that completely misses the point on why it's important. (surprise: you don't have to defend Charlottesville to defend the ACLU)
You're basically providing anyone an easy tool to kill any protest before it gets off the ground.
Any protest where antifa plays a role would be DOA (and having attending my fair share that's at least ~50% of the major ones)... do you think all the human rights, union, indigenous, etc groups control which protests Antifa shows up at? Should they have to self-regulate their protests so no one shows up wearing all-black is allowed to participate?
Anyway you're free to stop supporting ACLU if you prefer a political-driven legal group. I'm sure they exist. ACLU lost 30,000 members after Spokane but was still a force to be reckoned with for decades. I'm just saddened to see this short-term thinking also infecting lawyer groups and famous rights-defending academic institutions. I'm not surprised to see it in the media, Reddit, and elsewhere where higher values aren't embedded in their purpose.
The courts should always be the last line of defence and at a minimum should be immune from politics. Without politically neutral legal defence groups the world will be far worse off than the benefits of stopping a few nazis from protesting.
I followed their work for years and supported them for a long time. I'm saddened to see them shift in this direction.
Of course they should self-regulate - or at least make it very clear when the presence of violently-inclined groups isn't welcome to the organizers. Because the alternative is that the government will regulate those protests instead, which would be a lot worse.
>Any embedded provocateur could easily kill any protest.
But this wasn't a provocateur, promptly disavowed by the protestor leaders. It was concerted, intentional, premeditated violence. This was known, or at least expected, beforehand.
One kind of bad faith is that of the Illinois Nazis. Obviously, had they succeeded in their political goals, the ACLU would be purged and fundamental civil rights would be abridged for all but the chosen race. Still, they had a valid free speech concern, and the ACLU believed in a society where anyone could conduct a march, even if the Nazis didn't and were being hypocritical. So even though the ACLU was helping a group who was more than ready to backstab them, the ACLU was still able to accomplish its own goals. The general-case interest of the ACLU in protecting everyone's right to protest lined up with the specific-case interest of the Nazis in protecting their own right to protest.
The other kind of bad faith is that of Unite the Right, which was not being denied the right to rally - only the right to rally in a physically easier-to-control space, and which had not raised concerns because of the content of their messaging but because of the pro-violence groups that were participating. As a result of the bad faith, the ACLU was duped into believing there was a threat to civil rights, which there was not, and they were coopted into assisting the organizers with a goal that they didn't actually agree with.
I agree that it's hard to tell, but in the case of Unite the Right, opposing activists had been warning (with evidence) that the plan of the rally was to create conditions for violence and that their goals weren't merely speaking and peaceably assemblling. In the Skokie case, there were no such concerns. I even think it's reasonable for the ACLU to have gotten it wrong - provided they did a retrospective on how they got it wrong (that was not merely "we shouldn't defend neo-Nazis anymore"), which to the best of my knowledge they didn't do.
I had to refresh my memory of ACLU's involvement. FWIW, reading their own position, I think they made a good call.
But more importantly, they fail to explain their process for deciding which cases to take.
The handful of affiliates I checked don't publish their bylaws, meeting announcements, minutes, and so forth.
Having served as Secretary for my local political party, I saw firsthand the importance of transparency and accountability. While the charges of bias and so forth never go away, our org, uniquely in our region, always addressed those concerns head-on. We also proactively recommended to our members amendments to our bylaws, to address holes or changing circumstances.
The ACLU should do the same.