Hacker News Reader

Comment by simonh | Hacker News Reader

It's evidence of a fundamental misunderstanding of what free speech is and why it's important at the highest levels. Free speech is the right to say things that others find offensive. If being offended is enough of an excuse to silence others, then anyone, at any time, can silence anyone else with impunity. If this power is only given to marginalised groups, then it becomes a matter of who defines marginalisation and who gets to draw the dividing lines in identity politics.

Come on ACLU, is free speech a fundamental right or a contingent power to be granted or revoked?

View on HN

I happen to favor the old interpretation of free speech, but I think there's a strong argument that the traditional approach of defending all free speech facilitates a system where black people and others have been denied their rights for generations, and that we must act now to ensure their rights - that waiting any more is criminal.

I believe in free speech but only when it suits my political views.

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?

> political views

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.

As soon as you make civil rights selective and for only certain people, it’s a political view. Either it’s civil rights for everyone or you are taking some sort of political stance. Whether that’s repressing a minority (past) or repressing a majority (current trend), it’s basically treating people unequally and it’s just as bad.

> As soon as you make civil rights selective and for only certain people ...

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.

Except you are lumping in all white people as powerful. Which I profoundly disagree with as per my point in the first comment, what about someone who's white but has been generationally poor? It is absolutely ridiculous to call these people powerful or free or having a voice even.

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.

> 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.

I find it very easy to ignore the distinction between defending one's speech, and defending one's freedom-of-speech. ACLU's historical defense of freedom-of-speech is now regarded, very regrettably, as defense of the particular utterances being facilitated under that freedom.

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's not unambiguously true that freedom-of-speech itself is substantially responsible for anyone's loss of other rights.

It is unambiguously true that speech has caused it. Speech is the source of almost all political activity - guns rarely play a role.

The speech utterances are not transgressions of rights; it is the physical actions: assaults, lynchings, unequal imprisonment for identical crimes, etc. So riling up a bunch of people about how "Trump is a Nazi" ought not be a crime, but if someone immediately punched Trump after hearing that speech, then it was that punch that was the crime (violation of right to physical security / life of victim).

I'm assuming that you're not claiming anything like a natural right against exposure to offensive speech ("speech acts").

My point is that when the general gives the order for the war crime and the soldier carries it out, it's the general who is by far the most responsible, even though all they did was speak. The heads of any organization, from a country to a company to a coven - all they do is talk, but they have the most power and are most responsible. The speech is the most significant, powerful part, not the action (with exceptions). For some crimes, no action is necessary beyond speech.

(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 exact same restrictions on free speech disproportionately impact black activist groups who might not have the same corporate backing as many right wing think tanks or organisations.

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, I agree, but what are you going to do about the civil rights of minorities? The current system isn't working. The problem is that people focus only on free-speech-for-all and ignore the enormous elephant in the room.

Civil rights are not granted from cancelling racists from exposing their hateful views online, it's from taking action against the racist systems and people in power that really impact their rights. This can take the form of both violent and non-violent struggle but the key word is struggle, not just speech or the curtailment of wrong speech.

> the key word is struggle, not just speech or the curtailment of wrong speech

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.

"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.

> 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.

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.

Obviously, these companies themselves are not involved in the policies themselves but am I supposed to believe that all the major social media platforms independently decided to ban the then president of the United States when he had repeatedly violated their terms of conditions in the past with no response? That stretches credulity.

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.

We should absolutely act now to ensure their right, including their free speech rights both now and into the future. I do not see how handing veto power over free speech rights to gatekeepers advances that agenda.

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.

> We should absolutely act now to ensure their right, including their free speech rights both now and into the future.

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.

I'm not ignoring the many problems marginalised groups face, I am simply addressing the current topic of conversation, free speech. Furthermore the ACLU isn't ignoring them, they have many excellent programs devoted to those issues.

Talking about X doesn't imply ignoring Y, and I object to the blatantly hostile and manipulative language.

I don't see anything hostile or manipulative, but apologies if it seems that way.

> 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.

But it was never free speech that denied them their rights. The entire point of free speech is that it protects the rights of marginalized groups and enables them to advocate for changes in society.

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.

> Now that explicit racism is no longer the norm

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.

> > Now that explicit racism is no longer the norm

> 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.

Again, What do we do about the other civil rights of minorities?. Notice how people talk about everything else. Once you notice this pattern, you will see it everywhere and see it going back generations, which is how the racist status quo continues (whether or not that's the intent of the people talking).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com