I wonder how large the generational divide is there. Are younger lawyers less likely to take cases of clients they deem detestable? The article alludes to some internal rift but the topic may deserve an article all on its own.
If only that. The younger lawyers would attack (sometimes physically, like with Molotov cocktails, as in the case of Urooj Rahman and Colinford Mattis) those they find detestable, and anybody in the law profession that dares to provide them with any service. Which once was considered a basic human right, but not anymore - now, if you defend the deplorables, you become unperson yourself.
Per the article, the old policy defending Free Speech was ...
> "we are committed to represent those whose views we regard as repugnant"
Whereas the new policy says...
> "lawyers should balance taking a free speech case representing right-wing groups whose “values are contrary to our values” against the potential such a case might give “offense to marginalized groups.” "
It's actually really sad. They've even explicitly paid for campaign ads for Democratic political candidates...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P0aqKS3ihVM
It's really just the ACLU in name only. They've done what so many organizations have done, and sacrificed their principles to take sides in the GOP vs Dem battle. Shortsighted.
What if the greatest threat to free speech is a political party? Should the ACLU allow that threat to advance unopposed so that the ACLU can claim to be non-partisan?
Your freedoms should _never_ be contingent on the expression (or lack thereof) of a particular political ideology.
Again, what if a party or politician is a significant threat to civil rights, and necessary to the defense of those rights is the defeat of that party? I think the ACLU would be abandoning its duties if they stood helpless on principle. Probably they should make clear their reasoning.
> Your freedoms should _never_ be contingent on the expression (or lack thereof) of a particular political ideology.
I'm not sure how that is relevant to the question. Also, there are exceptions to everything, including free speech and political ideologies. First, anything can be called a 'political ideology'; those words are not a shield. Second, if your political ideology is to seize power and end civil rights, you don't have unlimited right to promote it (especially if you are a threat to succeed); my tolerance for your rights doesn't extend to you taking away my rights.
The ACLU did not previously, and should not going forward, make value judgments about a defendant when deciding whether or not to take a case. Such value judgments run directly counter to the notion of equal rights under the law which is what they supposedly stand for. The ACLU should quite literally defend enemies of the state in the event that their civil rights are violated. If they are no longer willing or able to act in such a principled manner then we are in sore need of a replacement.
It is imperative that your legal rights not depend on others agreeing with or liking your views. You don't enjoy freedom of political speech "while saying the right things", you enjoy freedom of political speech "full stop".
(Do note that I have nothing at all against organizations that lobby for political change. The ACLU has historically done that as well! What set them apart was their commitment to defending the civil liberties of anyone and everyone, no matter what.)
That merely ignores the problem: It's (arguably) necessary for defending civil liberties. The old formulation now fails to defend civil liberties (and arguably always has, for minorities).
The former is inconsistent with the latter. The preservation of any set of civil rights you might conceive of is, absolutely, a “political agenda”.
It's also worth noting that the meaning of the word "political" is overloaded here. I did not use it in the same sense that you did - I hope that doesn't escape your notice. (Still though, a potentially ambiguous wording is nonetheless a shortcoming. It's on me to ensure that my communications are as clear as possible.)
Come on ACLU, is free speech a fundamental right or a contingent power to be granted or revoked?
That's not free speech.
And just to counter your actual point, what about a lousiana white person who's family's been living in poverty for 100 years? Do they get free speech? Or not, because they're white?
I'm not talking about political views, but the civil rights of minorities.
Calling civil rights 'political views' is an old, simple tactic of denying people's rights.
We agree (without getting into the weeds of the wording). My point is that the civil rights of marginalized people have long been highly 'selective'. The outrage when some rights of the majority are threatened is ironic, or something.
The majority usually doesn't need much help; look around, at successful people in almost every domain: white guys have tons of freedom, voice, opportunity, prosperity, safety, etc. Turn on the news and see who does the talking. I think concern for their rights is often (without talking about you in particular - I don't know you) cover for protecting their political and social power, protecting the established discriminatory system.
Civil rights are there for the vulnerable, who don't have power. 'Democracy must be more than two wolves and a sheep voting on dinner.' People in the majority have rights, absolutely, but that's not a problem and it's a distraction from the serious issues.
There might be racism in society but that doesn't mean you get to lump all white people together as more powerful than all black people. There are plenty of powerful black people, and plenty of zero power white people. What you are doing is basically race based identification and judgement, aka racism.
I agree factually in some respects, but I think that argument is a distraction. Obviously we must generalize somewhat; we can't write out every detail, and no matter what level of detail we include, someone can point out more that we omit. We could list the status of every individual in the country, but then we would be omitting their histories. On the other hand, generalizing about race is something I think we should be very careful about.
So yes, there are disempowered white people. There are disempowered disabled people and short people and immigrants and poor people, etc. There are disempowered rich white male in SV, for various reasons.
But I strongly disagree in this respect: We are talking about power resulting from skin color (what a concept to write - it's just absurd, but it's true!), not from other things. And all white people are much more powerful than black people in that regard. White people can go anywhere, buy anything, get any job, walk down any street, rent an Airbnb, interact safely with police, all simply by power conveyed by their skin color. It even affects where you can go in cyberspace: Look at popular Tik Tok videos; from what I've seen (not a lot, but compilations on YouTube), 98% white, some Asian and Hispanic, I'd guess 0.1% black. Join a gaming forum and make it known that you are black, and see what happens (based on what I understand).
To catalog everyone else who is disempowered is like talking about every other disease at a cancer conference.
It's not unambiguously true that freedom-of-speech itself is substantially responsible for anyone's loss of other rights. We can't even have a public conversation about this without freedom-of-speech, where all relevant ideas and evidence can be openly evaluated, unless there is essentially no gatekeeper (committee, policy, "filter", etc.) deciding on what is relevant or permissible speech. We will only have biased answers if we bias the discussion.
Further, even mere perception about the bias in the discussion (caused by censorship etc.) causes some people to disengage from the discussion altogether, and facilitates the "silo-ing" of groups of people who have little contact with each other. That is not a recipe for a functioning pluralistic society, and ultimately for peace itself.
It is unambiguously true that speech has caused it. Speech is the source of almost all political activity - guns rarely play a role.
I'm assuming that you're not claiming anything like a natural right against exposure to offensive speech ("speech acts").
(I assume you know that speech can certainly be criminal or tortious: Fraud, slander, incitement, harassment, conspiracy, accessory, violating official secrecy, etc. But I don't think that's the issue here.)
The only thing restrictions on free speech incentivise is conformity to the ruling party's policies and there is an implicit assumption here that the democratic parties values are really the correct ones - which many people of colour will dispute.
The moment the Republicans take over (which they will inevitably considering how few campaign promises Biden has so far delivered), they will turn this on groups like BLM and the Antifa movement in general.
Sure, but speech plays an enormous role, the largest role IMHO.
> taking action against the racist systems and people in power that really impact their rights
What is normalized among the public greatly determines, IMHO, the systems and powerful people. From another perspective: If we just changed the rules and the public didn't change, imagine what would happen. Also, note that people with political causes invest enormous resources in manipulating public opinion.
You cannot in fact change the rules if there hasn't been a shift in the public so this seems a rather moot point. I'm not arguing that you shouldn't invest in PR and education on these issues but muzzling the opposition just gives the next rulers in charge an already existing muzzle to use back on yourself.
There is a history of often murderous suppression of "radical" groups in the US and by and far the majority of these were socialists, environmentalists, and marginalised people.
The current fake appeasement to these demographics is just that - a mirage. They're willing to ban Trump from the internet but not raise the minimum wage, abolish the drug war, really come after companies for their industrial scale damaging of ecology or cease trade relations with countries like China, Saudi Arabia, and Israel.
Excuse me for not taking this current "wokeness" fetishization by fundamentally hierarchical power structures entirely as good faith.
It's also not clear to me at all that "speech plays the largest role". Of course, existing power structures want you to believe that because the thing they fear the most of all is armed and genuinely effective resistance and it also helps perpetuate the illusion of a free and democratic society as if all it took to conquer racism and imperialism was to have a sit down and chat - with the hidden assumption that prior exploited people were just too stupid to consider this before - but MLK and Ghandai would have gone nowhere if there weren't decades of riots and militant struggle preceding them that pushed the US and British governments to enter negotiations with these parties.
I think 'they' is way too broad. Some companies banned Trump from their platforms. Those companies aren't particularly involved with the policies.
> the thing they fear the most of all is armed and genuinely effective resistance
I strongly doubt it. Such things are so rare and unlikely, not only in the U.S. but in democracies in general, that it's not too far off saying 'what they fear most is a giant meteor strike'. Well that would be a big problem, but not what is most feared. There hasn't been one in the U.S. since the Civil War, and that one came top-down, from the power structure.
I also don't know where you're getting this idea that armed conflict between the people and the state is rare in democracies, least of all the US which has had several riots and armed conflict between the state and guerrilla organisations since the civil war, many of which have had a direct effect on legislation and happened decades before the Civil Rights act of 1960.
Even if doing so might advance that agenda in the short term, and I don't think that's the case to any great degree, all it takes is a shift in who the gatekeepers are for this to go very wrong.
Just look at how many countries outlaw all kinds of speech on the basis of this or that religious group being offended by it. Who gets to represent marginalised groups and say what they are offended by? How many or what proportion of them need to be offended for it to count? It's a quagmire.
Nice to hear, but how do you plan to do it? The rest of your comment ignores the problem, which is what has happened for generations.
Talking about X doesn't imply ignoring Y, and I object to the blatantly hostile and manipulative language.
> I'm not ignoring the many problems marginalised groups face, I am simply addressing the current topic of conversation,
That is an example of my point and (in my understanding) the point of the new 'movement' in the ACLU: Free speech is always the topic, and has been for generations, and the other civil rights of marginalized people are never the topic - or not enough to motivate anyone to solve the problems.
A sort of dramatic hypothesis: Free speech affects the people who sit at the table, so that's what they see and what they care about. The marginalized get table scraps.
I actually support the ACLU's 'old' stance on free speech, but that's not the topic of conversation IMHO.
Racists never needed the protections of free speech to argue for denying people their rights because those views already had widespread societal acceptance.
Now that explicit racism is no longer the norm, organisations like the Klan need to rely on free speech protections, but thats only evidence of how unacceptable their beliefs have become.
These earnest arguments that limiting speech will help protect people are terrifying.
It remains the norm in many places IME, including on the Internet and in many private conversations with white people.
Which returns us to the problem: What do we do about the other civil rights of minorities? People keep focusing on free speech for the majority and never address the far more serious problem.
> It remains the norm in many places IME, including on the Internet and in many private conversations with white people.
If you insist on grouping and stereotyping people by their race then you are the one that is perpetuating racism.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trial_of_Jian_Ghomeshi
Well, it is an prime example of why we have trials.... instead of public opinion lynch mobs with a noose and tree.
Frankly, those law students not wanting someone to have a fair day in court, should have been disbarred. Absurd! Court is how you determine guilt!
Again, laws don't matter... the truth doesn't matter, have a trial of public option, and even make it hard to have his side heard.
After all, they didn't want him to have a fair defense?
Canadians pay too much attention to US politics. We're not perfect, but for example "defund the police?
Look at a Toronto sized US city police, and social program budget. Now look at Toronto.
Surprise! Toronto's social programs almost rival the police budget. US city? Almost non-existent, and they get military surplus weaponry. No comparison. Not even remotely the same.
Yet Canucks run around, gibbering on about defund the police, when we've effectively always done that!
Perfect? No. But we should focus on our real issues, not transplant US issues here.
My point is, our courts are not US courts either.
https://www.sandiegocounty.gov/content/sdc/openbudget.html
A smaller county I’m from in California the social services agency is about double the sheriffs dept.
I wonder if the ability to seize and sell assets, plus hand-me-downs of ex-military equipment shift those numbers, compared to a Canadian city?
One of the narratives I've seen in news articles is that a writer will talk about the proportion of general funds to police vs social services. The funding levels could come from city general funds, county, state, or federal agencies. It makes sense to talk about overall funding instead of local funding for things like police and social services. People that are taking that tact are either disingenuous and slanting hard for their political gain, or ignorant of the complexities involved.
As to the hand me downs, $6b worth of equipment has been passed down to police from 1990-2017. That to me doesn't seem to be a significant amount. Averaged over 27 years across 50 states is $4m/year per state. I know it wouldn't distribute evenly, but that isn't a significant amount of value. There would likely be some unique items they couldn't get anywhere else though.
https://www.statista.com/chart/14027/how-much-is-the-polices...
EG, wish I had time to find my data re: Toronto, and at least reply cogently. Regardless, have a good one.
I think part of it is the rise of online echo chambers. People act like the media they consume, and latter generations grew up with online circle jerks being the norm.
Another factor is the rise of so much bad faith disinformation coupled with the extreme virality of bullshit on social media. It seems like the truth of a story is inversely proportional to its likelihood of being shared on Facebook.
There's been a panic about the explosion of things like Qanon, neo-fascism, and anti-vaccine disinformation. I hear a lot of people questioning whether it's possible to have a liberal open society without... ironically... censorship.
I don't think censorship can be the answer, but I don't know what the answer is. The last few years has left me utterly shocked at the gullibility of human beings. Do people even think at all or are we indeed just mindless "meme machines" whose central nervous systems are vectors for replicating patterns?
Censorship of those who seek to oppress is necessary to require freedom (or to put it another way, the paradox of intolerance is that you must be intolerant of those who are intolerant, to guarantee that maximum tolerance is not only possible but guaranteed over a long time frame).
On the note of meme machines, I always liked to think that Memes ought to be studied in a university course, Memetics could become a serious field of study.
Besides the obvious, who defines what is oppressive? If we are censoring people then there should be due process at a minimum, so who writes those procedures and laws? How do we ensure they don’t become politicized?
To ensure they don't become politicized, any new positive freedom should require a 2/3rds approval by the government (and for the people in the US that means you need to figure out multi-party or this is gonna suck) and removing a positive freedom would require 3/4th approval by the government.
The procedures and laws should be handled and drafted by a separated government branch, which is dedicated to protecting the freedoms granted by the constitution (as well as protecting the constitution of your country itself). They substitute prosecution in case of violations but do have to go through the same courts as everyone else.
To ensure that this doesn't escalate for person-on-person disputes, generally they should only prosecute those who are threatening to oppress or have oppressed a group of people or a person for being part of a group of people under protection from the constitution (like their sex, gender, economic background or skin color).
Then there’s the question about your so-called “nonpositive rights”. What does this include? What does it take to remove these?
Your vision of the future here is terrifying, and I will personally fight against a truth dictator and the removal of rights with every ounce of my being.
For example, owning property is a negative freedom, because the state must not act against your property to ensure this freedom.
Being free of violence is a positive freedom, as the state will have to act to ensure this freedom (by sending a police officer when you dial 911 for example). In this note, not being a victim of theft would be another positive freedom, as the state will act to prevent it or redress you as a victim.
Negative rights don't have to be removed, as you fear, they're simply rights that the state can passively guarantee without having to interfere. Generally, such negative rights/freedoms don't require protection from the state, (hence they're negative).
On the flipside, the positive rights and freedoms do need to be protected. You have a freedom of speech/opinion, which is positive in that the state should act that you can enjoy them. If it were a negative freedom, then they could be lost at the toss of a hat the next time a truth dictator comes to power, as they aren't required to be protected.
So by the very nature you say you fight the removal of these rights, you're already reinforcing that freedom of speech is a positive right. (I don't even get were truth dictator comes in?)
To point out, there is gov departments in a few countries that already do what I describe or very close to. While generally not perfect, they have been useful in digging out neonazi groups and fighting for your freedoms more than the armies of those countries.
At the moment, the US has no protection against a political party removing your freedoms from the constitution. If someone were to attempt it, they would be let off scotts-free, so to speak. There is no punishment for saying "poor people shouldn't have the right to vote or freedom of speech", which some of your politicians are already saying in a roundabout way.
And once you lost them, you won't get them back as easily and that will be more dangerous that violating someone's freedoms to protect everyone elses.
I suppose one could argue that this amounts to a threat of violence, which is a form of limited speech. I am not free to make bodily threats of violence toward other named individuals. Threatening positive rights is threatening force, so it definitely gets at least near to that line.
And even when elected, they threaten no force, they simply remove a right from the law.
At no point did they threaten force against poor people, only that their free speech be taken away. They got elected and are doing it non-violently.
Now poor people no longer have free speech.
Hence, either you must treat a threat against free speech as violence unconditionally of it's physical or psychological component (ie if it has a legal component) or you must acknowledge that free speech can be threatened by non-violent oppression.
1. Everyone is conservative about what they know best
2. Any organization not explicitly right-wing sooner or later becomes left-wing
3. The simplest way to explain the behavior of any bureaucratic organization is to assume that it is controlled by a cabal of its enemies