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Comment by DocTomoe | Hacker News Reader

"Freedom of speech is always the freedom of the other side" - Rosa Luxemburg.

The sad thing is that only 22 years ago, the ACLU had their priorities straight: https://www.aclu.org/press-releases/aclu-statement-defending...

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Nice to see this quite wrongly understood quote from Rosa Luxemburg here. Her quote was a hand written notation in the margins of a text and scholars, given the context, come to the conclusion that these words were sarcastically used by her.

On other occasions she clearly spoke against democracy or freedoms for people having other ideologies than herself.

I personally had to learn not to use this quote anymore after discovering the background years ago in a documentary.

That is the first I hear about it. I guess I need to read up on early communism.

But even a broken clock is right twice a day...

I still like the quote, if we take the author out of the picture. The meaning behind the words and the meaning nowadays ascribed to it is absolutely positive imho.

You really believe those are good priorities for pro-bono legal representation when they can just as easily defend individuals and organizations that aren't actively promoting genocide and/or pedophilia?

Honestly, the worst among us are the ones that most need defense against the erosion of their civil rights because not defending them signals that those aren't rights that we care about and won't so much mind if they're taken away from us all

I think we would be far better off as a society if we chose a better civil rights backstop than a gaggle of genociders and pedophiles.

You get on a slippery slope pretty easily here. Just consider how heavily the Overton window moved in these last 10 years - what was baseline liberal in 2010 is often treated as right-wing to borderline fascist today.

The Overton window has actively been moved towards fascism, not the other way around.

Can you provide examples of baseline 2010 liberal that's now considered right wing?

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