Larry Flynt has died
bbc.com
bbc.com
I had the pleasure of working for Larry and can say that in some ways he was a hero of mine. Not because he was a pornographer, but simply because he did what he pleased and fought like hell to protect that right. He risked everything he had to prove his points because he knew if he failed he would have nothing. I didn't always agree with what we were publishing and producing, but I supported our right to do it. Larry on the other hand eternally supported others right to do the same without question.
America IS a more free place because of Larry. Say what you will about the man, he would not have cared less!
That's what's wrong with the "free" world. If something's legal doesn't mean it's moral.
He did what he pleased for sure, but at what expense. Many would argue he contributed to objectifying women. There's always a flip side.
Both of those sides won't really produce interesting discourse, unless you're very invested in making people more (or less) puritanical.
There are people without a militant views and people seeking to form views and people with weakly held options on the topic. I don’t know if we should shutdown conversations where there are 2 existing opposing camps with strong views
Not to turn this into that conversation elections are an example yet the winning party changes (except for Germany ;))
More than just the west lol.
In my experience there is significantly more variety.
OP's criticism was quite civil and reasonable compared to some anti-pornography people I've seen before.
And it's absolutely true magazines like Hustler objectified women! Have you ever seen one? The entire point is to objectify women and sex!
That's entirely different than claiming you're evil or bad for producing porn...
You can say the point of Hustler is to objectify women, or you can say the point of Hustler is to let people get their rocks off. These are both true, as far as they go, but there are assumptions in each statement that you need to unpack a little. "Getting your rocks off" acknowledges and tacitly approves of a certain framing of the magazine. "Objectifying women" acknowledges a different framing and includes a tacit disapproval. To say that a criticism of the magazine as objectifying women is reasonable because it is true is weak, because you're not acknowledging the framing. The rocks-off framing is equally true, and in the same way, but you might still disagree with it because of the framing.
Hustler is a magazine that pays women for provocative pictures, and it packages and publishes them for the sexual gratification of men. I think it's fair to say that it objectifies women, in the sense that the men looking at the pictures are treating them as objects of sexual gratification. To say, sans other context or sentiment, that the magazine objectifies women, does, however, suggest a puritanical goal or objective. Out of a large bag of potential framings, or combination of framings—libertarian, sex-positive, live-and-let-live, religious, enlightenmentarian, humorous remove, indifference—you're selecting the framing that suggests you want this thing to be attached to a strong negative valence. It's also done in the epistemically cowardly way in which many social criticisms are now made. If you said it was immoral, that would at least tip your hand a bit, and show a little conviction.
Had he not existed would women have been less objectified in that era? Do you know what their circulation/sales were compared to say Playboy at that time? Or other mass media that was running objectifying ads? What he added, was a rain drop in a lake, IMHO. Gotta pick your battles.
"You know, a free press is not freedom for the thought you love, but rather for the thought you hate the most. People need to tolerate the Larry Flynts of the world so they can be free." -Larry Flynt
That said, he too had to own his own platform in order to exercise his rights.
Flynt is more akin to Snowden or Assange, or even Parler, in boldness. (not comparing content, just free speech boldness)
Just look at Wikipedia. He called Sandra Day O'Connor "a token cunt". He wore the American flag as a diaper. Hustler regularly published Chester the Molester, a comic strip, even after the author was convicted of molestation (which later got overturned).
My father had a collection of Hustler from the 70s and 80s that as a teen in the early 90s I sneakily perused; this was definitely the golden age of the magazine's anti-PC speech, with all you mentioned, as well as unveiled racism.
I agree that his non-pornographic content would be viewed with a very sensitive eye today.
Based on my observations, quite a few people on this web site use downvotes to indicate disagreement or dislike. Many of them appear to hate Trump.
Also, I assume you are completely offended by fox news,OANN etc. lack of progressive voices? I agree, conservative media should open themselves up to platform more leftwing ideas in order to ensure diversity of thought. Similarly to the conservative subreddit, which is enforcing its groupthink the same way the literal communist subreddit is.
Instead of being constantly on the defense here... Why do you think you have a right to someone else’s resources for your speech? What entitles you to be published by anyone else at all?
MLK and the civil rights movement didn't own their own platform.
The LGBT rights movement didn't own their own platform.
The women's rights movement didn't own their own platform.
Would you have been okay with them being swept under the rug? It's not as if people in power didn't want to.
Don't like twitter censorship, make your own twitter.
Ergo, Parler.
Oh, but, that's not "your" platform, that's built on AWS's platform. So AWS can deplatform you.
What's next, if Parler sets up in a datacenter with their own physical servers are people going to attack their colocation/transit/peers or their DNS provider or their domain registrar or their SSL certificate issuer? Is LetsEncrypt a platform?
The biggest issue IMO is that with this you're centralizing all the idiotic and dangerous opinions and putting them in a huge echo chamber where they only ever see (mostly stupid) opinions of people they agree with. It's accomplishing the some of the goal the de-platformers want (they don't want to see the dumb content) but the content is still there, just more fringe and more radical and now they can rightfully complain about suppression of their opinions.
My concern is less apple banning things and far more when apple and google operate in lockstep.
there is a fundamental misunderstanding in the app store review world, it was highlighted when google banned element(??) the matrix client. will apple ban IRC clients because they can connect to bad servers with universally objectionable content? will they ban SSH clients because they can be used to hack?
With the last big ban controversy (fortnight) I was firmly in the pro walled garden camp, but, now i’m no longer seeing where the big duopoly draws the line and i don’t like it.
If my grocer is a jerk, I can go to a different grocery store. If this mechanic is always giving me dubious advice I can find a different one. Modern businesses, at internet scale, really aren't that way though. They are much more "winner take all". Maybe there are one or two winners, but when they win they really do take almost all the market share. And for most of the developed world simultaneously.
I can kind of get my own phone. Someone else in this thread mentions Purism. I could also get a rooted Android phone and install a version of Android that takes out Google. What I can't do, effectively, is make my own app, if the duopoly would prefer I not. I could put my app in a private app store or offer it to the kinds of people who use Librem phones, but the market there is too small to run a successful business. Google (via Android) and Apple are effectively both a monopoly, they sell/control almost all of the phones, and a monopsony, they control almost all of the supply of phone users.
I have yet to try one personally and might soon in spite of the price tag, i would love to be wrong but i don’t think i am.
Let's go through these.
It's basically brand new so there aren't a lot of third party apps. If you're the sort of person who loves installing the app for your Smart Toaster on your phone, you may not like this. But you get 95-99% of the value out of a phone if it can make phone calls, message people and has a web browser. Most apps are crap. They also have plans to support Android apps in the not too distant future.
The hardware is slower than similarly priced hardware. But again, does this really matter? You're not mining Bitcoin or rendering feature length motion pictures on your phone, are you?
Which leaves the price. It's high because they're still not making them in huge volumes. It means the early adopters will be people with money. But that's good; people with money attract developers etc. And once the volumes are higher the price will come down.
But this is all kind of chicken and egg. It's not impossible but it's hard and they may or may not succeed. If your point is that isn't already viable for everyone, that's certainly true.
There's absolutely nothing standing in the way of PornHub introducing a phone, because they want to adult apps to be allowed.
Want to sell adult content on Instagram, but you're not allowed? Go build onlyfans.com.
I don't think that's the point. They want to feel the warm satisfaction of righteous fury and enemy defeated.
In your last line you almost prove the opposite of your point. Yes, people in power didn't want to, and yet - despite not having unfettered access to the platforms of the day - they were not swept under the rug. My view is that's because they had a critical mass of people that cared enough that they literally couldn't be swept under any rug.
Yes, they largely either did or relied on convincing platform owners, not relying on platform entitlement. Now, they and the allies they convinced didn't own a single centralized platform, it was a decentralized network with big nodes like Rev. Dr. King’s Ebenezer Baptist Church, and small nodes like the individual members of the movement, which relied substantially on person-to-person face-to-face grassroots mobilization.
Maybe they weren't handed a platform on a plate, like we are today, but that is entirely the point: I think they did have their own publications and financed their own media. That's how they became a movement in the first place. You can't get mass acceptance at scale from your target demographic without building a platform.
I think the examples you gave are of people who struck out to build their own platforms, and did so successfully. This is why we even know about them in the first place, thankfully.
And they didn’t demand publication by others’ platforms either. They demonstrated in public spaces, often at great personal risk because they didn’t have equal access to public spaces.
Edit: sibling comment said even better, yes they did own their own platforms.
> Would you have been okay with them being swept under the rug? It's not as if people in power didn't want to.
Maybe you should stop “they”ing me. I’m not other than the groups that you’re using for your point. I’m directly a part of all of the movements you mention, either directly affected or in solidarity. And while you’re at it stop with the past tense.
In none of these cases did any movement demand to be published by someone else’s platform. All have tried to gain recognition sometimes seeking publication. But none have such entitlement to expect to be in someone else’s mouth against their will.
This is oversimplification.
There’s quite a difference between “not liking” and ruining career, denial of access to services etc.
Part of the problem is that only small group of people really “don’t like it” but capable of cancelling, and vast majority of people are happy to just ban that person in their feed and go on with their life (and large number of people are actually open to opposing views).
Flynt faced "organized canceling" from many groups. They just couldn't (continue to) use their influence in the government to punish him. He's in a wheelchair because of a failed "permanent cancellation" attempt.
Also, Democrats of the era didn't much liked him either. Could you imagine 90s-era Hillary Clinton ranting against language in rap music while simultaneously supporting this guy?
https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2014/apr/17/hustler-has...
Hah, safe to assume Mr. Sando is not British ( https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=tossing )
Thanks for everything you did for us, Larry. You’ve done good.
If you look at the part starting at 41 minutes in, you see Larry Flynt functioning as the voice of reason and restraint.
Implicit to free speech is the freedom to choose what speech to publish, and what not. Just as freedom of religion also includes the freedom to be an atheist or agnostic, and freedom of association is also freedom of disassociation.
Ben Franklin certainly believed in free speech, but he also wouldn't publish content he considered libelous and slanderous in his newspaper, rather he would tell people to take such stories elsewhere.
No, someone can __CLAIM__ to believe in free speech, but if they're not allowing it on their own platform then they really don't. There's a reason why the adage "actions speak louder than words" exists.
TIL interracial porn got Larry shot.
Historically, southern states were bastions of democratic party: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_Party_System
People are always touting how Lincoln was a republican, but when I read a bit about history it seemed that the parties switched sides after the war in terms of left/right alignment.
There was a realignment that happened due to economic development in the south in the 1970s and 1980. Industrial development in the south created the prosperous suburbs similar to the ones that politicians like Reagan relied on to win traditionally Republican states like Arizona. The economies of places like Georgia became reliant on low taxes and low regulation to get business to move there. You can see this even in the Democratic Party. Southern Democrats like Mark Warner and Keisha Lance Bottom are the most pro-business in the party. Lance-Bottoms (the Democratic mayor of Atlanta) and Brian Kemp (the Republican governor of Georgia) have more in common on economic issues than either do with anti-business northern Democrats like Jenny Durkin.
Nixon and Reagan’s appeal to the south is always denounced by democrats as being akin to adopting the pre-1965 Democratic support for segregation. Of course that’s ridiculous. In Congress and as Vice President Nixon had been a leading civil rights advocate, helping get through the 1957 civil rights act. (He was a racist, but he was strongly opposed to de jure discrimination.) By the time of Reagan and Nixon, the issue landscape had changed. People weren’t arguing about segregation, they were arguing about affirmative action and racial quotas. The natural conservative position on those is going to be different than on Jim Crow.
The process was already in motion in the early 1960s, and was a key part of Goldwater's strategy in '64. Perlstein's "Before The Storm" is a good book on this.
The notion that Nixon was an advocate for anti-segregation reform in the south is especially risible. Nixon did, in fact, appeal to the pre-'64 anti-civil-rights agenda of the southern states. Last time we talked about this, I put the Nixon campaign on the record, in a contemporaneous source pursuing this strategy:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25742135
You responded with a revisionist Claremont Review article, which is approximately the same thing as me responding to one of your comments with a Robin DiAngelo article. Amusingly, one of the Claremont article's sources is... Kevin Phillips, the subject of the contemporaneous news story I cited to you.
I can make it simpler for you. Here, from the article I posted, is a direct quote from Phillips, a primary source of your Claremont article on the "Myth of the Racist Republican":
All the talk of the Republicans making inroads into the Negro vote is persiflage. Even ‘Jake the Snake’ [Senator Jacob k. Javits] only gets 20 percent. From now on, the Republicans are never going to get more than 10 to 20 precent of the Negro vote and they don’t need any more than that . . . but Republicans would be shortsighted if they weakened enforcement of the Voting Rights Act.
Here I pause to request that you "wait for it", and note that if we weren't buried deep in a random thread that the good play here would have been to stop before the ellipsis, wait for someone to point out the VRA thing, and then unveil the rest of the quote, Simpsons "How To Cook Forty Humans" style, but, anyways:
The more Negroes who register as Democrats in the South, the sooner the Negrophobe whites will quit the Democrats and become Republicans. That’s where the votes are. Without that prodding from the blacks, the whites will backslide in their old comfortable arrangement with the local Democrats.
Persiflage, this revisionist history of ideological sorting. Persiflage, I say.
Lincoln wouldn't get far in today's GOP primaries...
A good example is Robert Byrd. A former KKK leader, he is also the longest-serving US Senator in history, from 1959-2010. He remained a Democrat the entire time, and was particularly skilled at outmaneuvering Republicans. He doesn't seem to have had a real change of heart. He was just a political opportunist who didn't mind compromising his principles to gain power. He called himself "Big Daddy" due to how good he was at getting pork.
A good solid reputation runs for 10-20yr even after you stop doing whatever it was that got you the reputation.
Look how long it took the midwest to realize that the neoliberals they voted for were shipping their jobs to china. They were running on the good will of supporting unions in decades prior.
The south flipped because republicans figured out that adding a bunch of religious rhetoric to their platform got them easy votes. If it was just civil rights the south would have been voting blue well into the 1980s.
That’s kind of true, but also oversimplified. Republicans have always been the party of religious evangelicals. In the time of Lincoln, abolition was in large part an evangelical Christian movement. After 1965, when both parties had embraced the civil rights acts, social and religious issues took on more importance.
Apart from that, you’re overlooking the economy. Southern states were poor and agrarian during the New Deal era. The wanted government support, they opposed tariffs, they supported a weak currency. All that places them at odds with big business, which was the other leg of the Republican Party. In 1930, the median income in the south was just half of that in the Midwest. After 1960, that changed dramatically due to southern industrialization. Newly minted middle class suburbanites started voting for low taxes and low regulation, just like in the rest of the country.
We all know what Hustler is. And if you're a gormless startup founder picking that as a name for your app or product, well that's your fault, learn you some history and watch "The People vs Larry Flint"[0]. Flint's case in the Supreme Court was hugely important, despite being a "purveyor of filth", and strengthened free speech rights in the US, in particular Hustler Magazine vs Jerry Falwell[1].
[0]: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0117318/
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larry_Flynt#Legal_battles
Looks like I've struck a chord among some HN users unintentionally.
Also I stopped calling it a noun, better?
If you don't recognize who he is it's hard to tell whether the title is saying that he's "a hustler and a founder" or "the founder of Hustler".
I disagree, it says "Hustler founder". Replace "Hustler" with <anycompany> and you have many a title on HN any day of the week that is "<anycompany> founder...." with no confusion.
The parent to my post said "The word Hustler being the first word of the sentence is unfortunate.". I'm guessing this is because of the nature and business of the company, i.e. hardcore porn, not due to a grammatical misunderstanding.
You're so intent on being offended by imagined offence taken by someone else that you're ignoring them telling you first hand that you've misunderstood them. The irony is astounding...
Oh jesus, the classic "no you're offended" weak defence. I am in a round-about-way pointing out how historically illiterate (younger) people are these days. Especially when, particularly on HN, free software, free speech etc is the de rigueur cause, yet somehow they don't even know the major recent Supreme Court cases that enforce and uphold the right to such things as satire. Hustler was a major case up there with Roe vs Wade. Now if I'm slightly annoyed by that, then so be it.
When I misunderstand titles and then realize my mistake I don't start complaining about it.
Can it be read either way? Yes. Does it really matter? No. Language is often ambiguous without context.
But even with that, it really isn't confusing. The ones who don't know who Larry Flint are may choose not to click on it whether they take the word Hustler as a verb or a noun. And the ones who do click will be disabused of their potential confusion almost immediately.
IOW, it's a huge nothingburger.
I'm amazed Hustler is still published as a printed magazine. Penthouse went through several bankruptcies and sales in the last two decades. Even Playboy gave up on the print issues last year.
No it’s not. Besides being a free speech advocate he helped normalize sex work. I doubt his properties have been especially safe and kind to sex workers, but the general population seeing sex work as “normal but maybe icky to some” has certainly made workers’ lives safer and their work overall less likely to be fraudulently exploited.
I’m not a particular champion of Hustler or Larry Flint, but I definitely think sex work generally deserves to be a part of the social contract and not a whisper and a wink.
Edit: your interpretation was right! And I’m glad for that.
I immediately got it, but I know who Larry Flynt was. The technical writer in me approves of your observation, though! "Hustler founder" would be a rather odd phrase to use to describe a founder who hustles -- you'd be more likely to say "hustler and founder" or "hustler-founder" or "hustling founder" -- but when there's any possibility for confusion, it's best to be (ahem) explicit.
I assumed (wrongly) that the objection to Hustler being in the title was a blanket rejection of sex work as a part of the general social contract worth discussing at all. But I assumed that based on very similar views widely expressed here, and a misunderstanding of very specific wording.
Believe me I don’t expect HN to ever be sufficiently pro sex worker. But I’ve seen enough anti that I’ve made a point to push back some when I can.
I wasn’t as charitable in my interpretation as I could have been, but honestly I had no idea Hustler isn’t such a common name that there would be any ambiguity. You could take a charitable interpretation in turn and recognize that I sincerely thought you were upset by the prominence of that publication/brand being in the title and see where the rest of my response follows from that.
For what it’s worth where I was going was all as explicit as I could make it, and based on a perception that you were reacting negatively to an article openly discussing a sex work publication. It’s been a predictable response to articles I’ve seen here lately on sex work topics and I misunderstood your comment as part of that general reaction.
Sorry again, and I appreciate your productive clarification.
Well this is likely an age thing. And to be honest, in my 10 years reading HN, the use of "hustler" to describe a Silicon Valley founder on the front page (and second) is pretty thin on the ground. There is no ambiguity unless you're a bit deficit in the history department (which is not our problem).
Only people who lived under a rock for the last 50 years. I'm afraid to say that in the context of the whole headline you'd have to be an actual idiot to not comprehend that Hustler is a company or product if you did not know that already.
Of course reading TFA alleviates that confusion pretty quickly.