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Comment by AndrewUnmuted | Hacker News Reader

The ACLU has been useless as a civil rights organization for quite some time.

If you haven't already, I'd say it's definitely time to find a new defender of these sorts of issues.

The ACLU has let the government increase surveillance, force mask usage, and now enforce vaccine usage across millions during the pandemic.

They're staying silent because they agree with the policies - and you may too - but there is no denying that in terms of invasion of personal freedom it's very great and they're turning a blind eye to it.

The ACLU is a finite organization that needs to chose which battles to fight. Suggesting their not doing enough because they don’t prioritize your issues generally means you should be funding some other organization.

https://www.eff.org/ for example may better fit your personal beliefs.

They are actively supporting civil non-liberties now though, in print.

They are not what they used to be.

The odd thing about civil liberties is they also curtail other freedoms. The right to own property means the right to exclude others from your property. Trial by a jury of your peers means jury duty etc.

If you have fundamental disagreements around these issues you really can’t blame the organization for not doing enough. Them doing more or less isn’t the problem, them having other priorities is.

You might want to read this article and the HN comments around it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27414920.

The GP is not arguing against your political positions, but pointing out that an organization which use to focus & care about one position no longer seems to.

It’s clear the ACLU is internally conflicted, but that’s completely normal. “It split over decisions to represent the Nazis in the 1930s, the Ku Klux Klan in the 1960s, and the Nazis in the 1970s.”

The real change has been mostly how individuals say things that the organization may disagree with. Still, I am concerned US politics has become so divisive that the right wing is viewed how the Nazis where back in the 70’s.

As to my politics, I don’t support the ACLU. Requiring locations to host rallies they disagree with isn’t a free speech issue anymore than allowing protesters to block a freeway in rush hour would be. Protests at government buildings are different, but rallies don’t need to be allowed to block public streets.

A protest that inconveniences no one is a protest that's easily ignored. You have to bring attention to the issue, otherwise everyone else will just go on with their day.

Civil disobedience is not a bad thing.

Peaceful protests don’t inconvenience 99.9% of the US population and are largely ignored by the media. Civil disobedience isn’t signing up ahead of time and standing in free speech zones, it’s marching anyway and getting arrested.

Yup yup yup. During the civil rights movement people would do sit ins at businesses that segregated, blocking that businesses ability to make money. They marched in the streets, blocking traffic. Humans hate to change anything unless it becomes necessary, so to bring about meaningful change, you have to be a thorn in the side.

There are ways to address that conflict. I'm not trying to join the trope of criticizing the contemporary ACLU, but rather pointing out that rights aren't purely relative constructions. Negative liberty (prohibitions on government infringing rights) and tradition (eg property rights) are two ways of non-relatively reasoning about rights. And of course when rights are in balanced tension on a topic, it's possible to simply not advocate.

For example on the topic of employment discrimination, one could stay silent and thus not be advocating against the right to earn a living nor the right of free association. Furthermore, one can advocate for freedom from the employment treadmill that makes most everyone need continuous centralized-flow employment in the first place (this would be necessary for the negative rights construction to have good results).

Many things don’t have a neutral middle ground. What can governments or other employers require of their employees?

Can cops lie to suspects is another tricky one. At one end is a flat no, at the other is misrepresent themselves as the defendants lawyer or pretend to offer immunity in exchange for turning on other suspects.

My point about employment is that if employees had a good amount of bargaining power to say no (and not just yes to a different employer that will tend to move in lock step), then arbitrary requirements by any given employer wouldn't much matter. It's only the fact that people need a continual income to pay their financial rents that is the source of their needing to work and accept poor conditions. If we want to increase liberty in the general sense, then we need to concentrate on making it so people aren't mashed together in such zero sum engagements.

For cops lying to suspects, I have a hard time seeing how that is an exercise in liberty. They're working as agents of the state, and thus need to perform the specified job - if they wish to lie, then they can quit their job. For sure there is a tradeoff involving their effectiveness versus the liberty of individuals, but that isn't a tradeoff of liberty versus liberty. For this topic, the ACLU should be in the "flat no" camp regardless of where we might want the practical boundary.

The ACLU chose its case mostly in terms of the impact they will have. This is why the ACLU used to defend the KKK's 1st amendment rights even as recently as 2012. Now many of its members, even high profile ones, are arguing for the suppression of speech; justified by the Marxist ideological thinking that it mostly benefits "those in power" (https://archive.is/tL7Rj)

All the way back in “the 1930s, the ACLU started to engage in work combating police misconduct and supporting Native American rights.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Civil_Liberties_Union So it’s been about far more than free speech for the vast majority of it’s history. And it still defends such causes, one example is even in the article:

“In August 2017, officials in Charlottesville, Va., rescinded a permit for far-right groups to rally downtown in support of a statue to the Confederate general Robert E. Lee. Officials instead relocated the demonstration to outside the city’s core. The A.C.L.U. of Virginia argued that this violated the free speech rights of the far-right groups and won, preserving the right for the group to parade downtown.“

So while it’s scope has increased over time which has created increased internal tension, that’s always been the case. “The A.C.L.U. has in fact often gloried in its internal contentions. It split over decisions to represent the Nazis in the 1930s, the Ku Klux Klan in the 1960s, and the Nazis in the 1970s.”

Frankly the organization has never been filled 100% with defenders of free speech the Twitter age combined with a wider scope has brought this internal tension to the general public. The important work they do is generally in the courtroom which is far more focused.

The ACLU is a non-profit organization. They aren't responsible for your "freedom". Go put mask on and take a civics course.

With the pandemic you have it exactly backwards, the goal of mask and vaccine mandates is actually to increase personal freedom and civil liberty, by preventing spread of the virus that has already claimed many lives.

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