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Comment by Spivak | Hacker News Reader

Depends on what you consider free speech to be I suppose. The left side of the political spectrum has for a very long time advocated for an interpretation of 1A that is "free as in liberty" while the right prefers a "free as in anarchy" approach. Neither is more correct than the other and we have plenty of examples of both in our laws. Rules of the road and FCC spectrum allocations being pretty easy examples of individual freedom being traded for collective freedom.

The last administration was far from perfect but I think they upheld their view of free speech quite well in terms of policy. This administration is on a revenge tour right now and is taking a "free as in I can say whatever I want" power trip so I don't think we'll know how they do until they cool off.

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> The left side of the political spectrum has for a very long time advocated for an interpretation of 1A that is "free as in liberty" while the right prefers a "free as in anarchy" approach.

You may have it backwards, depending on one's definitions of "left" and "right". It was Berkley's Free Speech Movement, largely composed of leftist students and sympathizers, that kickstarted the "free as in anarchy" approach to speech in its modern incarnation. And anarchy is not even an exaggeration as many of its members occupied buildings, engaged in shut-ins and shut downs of privately owned businesses, as well as mounted police cars when one of their members were arrested. In many ways, this is the style of freedom the internet offered at its earliest and most fringe.

It wouldn't be backwards, more like bipartisan. Furthermore, when assimilated by the Democratic party, the "free speech as in anarchy" idea got war dynamics (pragmatism in accepting persons and accepting the unacceptable) in the same way it has always been thought in the Republican side.

> And anarchy is not even an exaggeration as many of its members occupied buildings, engaged in shut-ins and shut downs of privately owned businesses, as well as mounted police cars when one of their members were arrested

As far as I can tell, freedom of speech never extended to actions. "Free as in anarchy" is more like being able to shout insults, offensive, blasphemous, and politically incorrect, or deliberately misleading speech.

The last administration was far from perfect but I think they upheld their view of free speech quite well in terms of policy.

The last administration: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2024/05/sunsetting-section-230...

That article doesn't mention the executive branch at any point.

> left side of the political spectrum has for a very long time advocated for an interpretation of 1A that is "free as in liberty" while the right prefers a "free as in anarchy" approach.

This is incredibly incorrect.

> right prefers a "free as in anarchy"

The right wing of USA politics claims this but clearly act in opposition to this claim.

Also, “anarchy” is the most extreme is “leftist” politics.

> Also, “anarchy” is the most extreme is “leftist” politics.

Depends on what you mean by 'left' and 'anarchy'.

See eg anarcho-capitalists as an example that most people would see as 'right' and that uses the term 'anarchy'.

(I'm explicitly not saying that their use of 'anarchy' is the correct definition of the term, just pointing out that at least a substantial number of people use a definition of 'anarchy' that makes this concept possible for them.)

Anarcho-capitalism is an oxymoron.

Capitalism creates hierarchies. Anarchy is a rejection of hierarchies, because it creates rulers.

Potentially unrelated, but isn’t anarchy-communism also an oxymoron?

How could you enforce communism under anarchy?

> Potentially unrelated, but isn’t anarchy-communism also an oxymoron?

Communism implies anarchism.

> How could you enforce communism under anarchy?

Communism, as a state, is the hypothetical self-sustaining stateless end-state envisioned by Communism, the ideology. Socialism (an intermediate state in the theory), and State Capitalism (an intermediate state—and one most real regimes claiming Communist ideology get stuck in—in practice) may need enforcement, Communism, almost by definition, does not (whether it os attainable is, of course, a different question.)

> > Potentially unrelated, but isn’t anarchy-communism also an oxymoron?

> Communism implies anarchism.

The economic system of communism in no way implies that it would be achieved via anarchic means; It only outlines that the participants in the system share resources towards achieving the common goals of everyone involved. How it should be done has been left as an unfortunate "left as an exercise to the reader".

Anarchic forces may be one way of doing so, but it is in no way implied by communism.

> Communism implies anarchism

How so?

Communism, as a state, requires rules. By that virtue, it’s not anarchy.

Communism as the utopian ideal I suppose could be considered anarchy, but in reality that would never happen, so IMO not really worth discussing.

Communists (believers in communism) set up socialist states. A communist state would be decentralized and voluntary.

The two are often conflated, but this fact is fundamental to communist philosophy, economics, and literature.

The USSR was the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, not "Communist Republics"

As a term, communist state is used by Western historians, political scientists, and media to refer to these countries. However, these states do not describe themselves as communist nor do they claim to have achieved communism — they refer to themselves as socialist states that are in the process of constructing socialism and progressing toward a communist society.[1]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communist_state

Was the USSR 'not communist' because it's lacked electrification, or because it lacked Soviet Power?

Anarchy is not a rejection of hierarchies, it’s a rejection of a central authority.

I guess it comes down to definitions again.

If you look at what people do for fun, they often create hierarchy and even central authority. They formally or informally elect a leader to their football team, who calls plays and helps with coordinating.

It's just that no one can really force anyone else to stay in that club.

> Anarcho-capitalism is an oxymoron. Capitalism creates hierarchies. Anarchy is a rejection of hierarchies, because it creates rulers.

Incomplete understanding: Under the ideals of anarcho-captialism, the capitalism part stresses any internal bureaucracies & hierarchies within an org to its absolute limit, and contributes to breaking them via competition from other businesses.

Hierarchies are not an inherent part of capitalism. Hierarchies arise by themselves as a result of the needs to specialize & coordinate labour towards tasks whilst scaling up the org's task-completing capabilites. Regardless of the economic system involved, the adoption & proliferation of hierarchies will persist as the need to scale becomes critical.

Capitalism stresses against this encroaching force by ideally having competitors with lower overhead, and pressuring them into adapting/improving themselves, or face collapse from within.

----

The above section is by no means an endorsement of ancap, as (like most proposed economic systems) it requires a more-ideal-than-realistically-possible environment & participants to exist. However, blanket dismissals of a proposed system are similarly non-advisable, as both lead to the same conclusions: A stunted development in ideological rigor & critical self-analysis.

Capitalism, in the sense of the real world system for whom the term was coined by its critics, relies centrally on the State to create an enforce a particular model of property rights to serve the interests of the capital class, from whence the system gets its name.

However. “capitalism” is sometimes used as a name for orientation toward something that is not that real world system, which isn't particularly coherent (because it was created after criticism of the real world system almost entirely for the purpose of “No True Scotsman” rebuttal of arguments against actual existing capitalism.) One of the consistent features of this somewhat amorphous construct is opposition to (and, indeed, ascribing every observed problem to the existence of) the State.

Strictly speaking anarchy just means "without rule". Not all anarchists explicitly rejected hierarchies of ability or markets that exploited such differences. Henry David Thoreau, Lysander Spooner, Benjamin Tucker, and Herbert Spencer, are examples of such an approach.

I guess you could read the word anarchy that way but the phrase "as in anarchy" has caught on to describe the notion of a thing being unrestricted on an individual level so that's what I went with. It's the common usage of the word and bares no intended relation to The Anarchist movement.

I'm curious as to your thoughts on the matter if you don't believe this is a fair assessment of each side's ideals. I do agree that how it plays out in practice is always going to be much messier once those ideals are filtered through humans who are by nature imperfect.

You two agree on what the right claims its position is. However, the Republicans are passing a bill called "Take It Down" that the Republican President told a joint session of congress he intends to use specifically to remove speech against him. This is clearly not demonstrative of a "free as in anarchy" position on speech.

Same thing happened with Elon Musk. When taking over Twitter, he described himself as a "free speech absolutist," which is the same as "free as in anarchy," but in practice he bans speech against his interest liberally, for example automatically removing any post that uses the word "cisgender," but also deleting tweets from reporters that he dislikes.

Also restricting videos that parody him.

The right believes in “free speech for me but not for thee”. Which isn’t compatible with any good faith attempt at a definition.

So does the left.

No, sir. Democrats have done lots of stuff that's not great for free speech. For example, when in charge of the government, they've worked together with obliging social media companies to remove what they considered foreign misinformation. But stuff like that is absolutely nothing compared to what's happening now, and it's disingenuous to suggest otherwise.

I can't think of a single thing Democrats have done in the last hundred years that is even in the same league as the President's promise to use the "Take It Down" Act to silence criticism, and I'll bet you can't either.

It started almost 5 years ago now, but "misinformation" was widely used as a justification to silence discussion about the pandemic and the vaccines.

You misspelled “willful and blatant misinformation”.

It is terrifying that you can’t see the material difference between uninformed fearmongering over vaccines and posting something unflattering about Donald Trump.

Even then, please point me to the legislation that forbid these types of discussion. I’ll wait.

> Also, “anarchy” is the most extreme is “leftist” politics

What? No it’s not.

Anarchy is the extreme libertarian position. The smallest possible form of governance is anarchy.

The extreme left is total communism, where everything is controlled in order to ensure a minimum standard of living.

You’re wrong, which is why you’re being downvoted. A decent intro to the topic on the anarchist side is Chomsky’s On Anarchism

I’ve been right and have been downvoted too ;)

But I’m not an expert on this topic.

How is anarchy not the extreme libertarian position?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anarchist_communism

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anarcho-capitalism

> While the earliest extant attestation of "anarchocapitalism" [sic] is in Karl Hess's essay "The Death of Politics" published by Playboy in March 1969,[8][9] American economist Murray Rothbard was credited with coining the terms anarcho-capitalist[10][11] and anarcho-capitalism in 1971

Left wing anarchism used the name much earlier and arguably was more influential historically even in the US. For example https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassination_of_William_McK... was done by a left wing anarchist.

But arguably in the US it might be used more often to refer to anarcho capitalists these days

I believe there's a similar sort of issue with the term libertarianism that was at least sometimes used to refer to something similar to anarcho Communism

My understanding of the main libertarianism is that it calls for extremely small government with minimal impact on the lives of individuals.

This seems pretty in line with anarchy.

I know that in the US “libertarians” tend to be fairly right leaning, but I don’t think that “libertarian” means “republican”

Maybe the confusion is just over semantics.

The ultimate communist goal is achieve a decentralized society where nobody is controlled or directed. They see abolishing class hierarchies as the path to achieving this.

Anarcho-capitalist libertarians seek a very similar society. They see abolishing governmental hierarchies as the path to achieve this.

> The ultimate communist goal is achieve a decentralized society where nobody is controlled or directed

Is this true? My understanding of communism is that everyone contributes to the community with their labor (thus the name communism)

The ultimate ideal is to have a society which does that on their own (imo something utopian and impossible in reality), but I always thought the goal was to guarantee a minimum standard of living via shared labor and wealth.

I agree it is utopian, but it is aslo true that it is what communists believe. The end stage communist state is contingent on post-scarcity. That is to say, more can be voluntarily produced than people willingly consume.

This is not mutually exclusive with providing a minimum standard of living.

This becomes evident when you dig into the details of the phrase "From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs".

>Marx delineated the specific conditions under which such a creed would be applicable — a society where technology and social organization had substantially eliminated the need for physical labor in the production of things, where labor has become not only a means of life but life's prime want.[1] Marx explained his belief that, in such a society, each person would be motivated to work for the good of society despite the absence of a social mechanism compelling them to work, because work would have become a pleasurable and creative activity. Marx intended the initial part of his slogan, "from each according to his ability" to suggest not merely that each person should work as hard as they can, but that each person should best develop their particular talents.[15][16]

>Claiming themselves to be at a "lower stage of communism" (i.e. "socialism", in line with Vladimir Lenin’s terminology),[17] the Soviet Union adapted the formula as: "From each according to his ability, to each according to his work (labour investment)".[1]

Exchanging individual direction and rights for central planning and minimum standard of living is a characteristic of socialism.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/From_each_according_to_his_abi...

>The right wing of USA politics claims this but clearly act in opposition to this claim.

Not at all. They just immediately embraced war dynamics. USA conservatives and libertarians (stop referring to right wing and leftism in USA, it makes no sense) view anarchy as their chance to fight for a fief or a monarchy.

EDIT:

>Also, “anarchy” is the most extreme is “leftist” politics.

Not really, it depends on whether you mean Bakunin and Foucault, or Thoreau, Stirner and Rand

I think it's more fair to say that liberals believe that the 1A protects speaking truth to power, while the conservative idea is more the 1A protects saying things people don't like.

America's founding fathers were absolutely raging liberals, and within the countries founding document -- the declaration of independence, the liberal idea of "social contract" was encoded. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_contract)

Liberals are suspicious of speech that violates the social contract, such as speech that is a prelude to violating other people's, like transgender people's, pursuit of life liberty or the pursuit of happiness. If you use your right to speech as a prelude to stripping other people of their rights, it is right for there to be consequences. The social contract in fact demands at least some degree of consequences, otherwise the social contract is useless because it's purpose is fundamentally to protect rights.

In a democracy, should people be allowed to vote for a dictator who promises to dissolve the government? That's a really rough philosophical question. I consent to a democracy, but I don't consent to a monarchy. It's the paradox of democracy and paradox of the idea of a government that exists primarily to protect rights.

>> America's founding fathers were absolutely raging liberals

Except that the first thing they did after gaining independence was to adopt the entire body of british common law, including basically all of the slander/liable jurisprudence. While it was certainly modified by the US constitution, they did not believe that every tom dick and harry should be able to tout lies about people unimpeded. Political satire was one thing, the british had already embraced that, but going after random civil servants or members of the public was not on. Calling judges or election workers criminals/pedos/traitors, as is the norm today, would not have been tolerated.

Yes. Liberalism is fundamentally about the social contract, so those limits on speech are compatible with liberal ideals.

It is very consistent with liberalism that objective lies are a punishable offense because they are violations of the social contract, similar as shouting fire in a crowded building when there is no fire, a tobacco salesman saying their product is healthy, or an opiate salesman telling doctors their product is not addictive. Of course that's idealistic because the truth in many situations is largely unknowable and the temptation to put government officials above the law is great. Reprisal for false accusations is a chilling effect for those making true accusations. That means there is a balancing act to be done.

Both type 1 and type 2 errors are bad. Since America cannot effectively punish lairs, that weakness in our system is being actively exploited to great effect, you can read fox news court documents where they defend their right to lie.

Unpunished lies give those who lie power, reduces societal trust, and drives division between members of society.

But likewise true accusations must not experience reprisal because otherwise it gives those in positions of power a shield against consequences for their crimes.

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