> Progressive causes are near and dear to my heart. I am a feminist and staunch Democrat. As a federal public defender turned law professor, I have spent my career trying to make change in a criminal legal system that is riven with racism and fundamentally unfair to those without status and financial resources. Yet, as someone who understands firsthand that the fundamental rights to free speech and due process exist only as long as competent lawyers are willing to vigorously defend extreme positions and people, I view the ACLU’s hard-left turn with alarm. It smacks of intolerance and choosing sides, precisely what a civil-liberties organization designed to defend the Bill of Rights is meant to oppose.
What an incredibly level headed take. It's so level headed that it seems fake when projected onto the landscape of modern political discourse.
>It's so level headed that it seems fake when projected onto the landscape of modern political discourse.
Yes, and we need more of this sort of thinking, from everyone capable of it. I believe we have to stop thinking that "keeping your head down" is a solution. It is not. We must challenge unfairness itself, even if, especially if it yields an outcome we would prefer. This means principle over loyalty, and it won't make you popular but it may save our civilization.
Personally I'd like to get back to a world where the fate of civilization is not the responsibility of every individual to worry about on a daily basis. That same mindset is underneath all the polarization as well; are you really a good (or loyal or principled) person if you're not actively fighting for causes X, Y and Z? Could be correlation instead of causation though.
But that's what freedom of speech is for. If you are a citizen of a free country with freedom of speech and voting rights, everything is your responsibility. You are supposed to be the ultimate source of power.
If you think something is wrong in the society, fixing it is your responsibility. You can of course ignore it if you think the issue is not particularly significant or if it looks like other people are already handling it. But if the issue is important and contested, you are expected to get involved.
The deeper issue behind polarization is that people don't agree on the principles the society is built on. The Constitution may codify some principles, but too many people consider them insufficient or illegitimate. There is no fix to this apart from the vast majority of people agreeing on some set of principles.
I think everyone should try living a few years as a non-citizen in a foreign country. It gives a different perspective on politics. You live somewhere in the long term and see the issues around you, but you don't have the same rights as most other people and your responsibilities are limited.
At least in the United States that’s really not what the founders were going for. Their stance was more, “First, imagine there is no government. Then people come together. What would they reasonably agree to out of self-interest?”
It wasn’t about individuals being responsible for solving every societal problem they each observe, and it wasn’t about creating an apparatus individuals could use to solve arbitrary social problems.
It was about self-governing individuals negotiating with each other and having the tools to safeguard those agreements against tyranny. Individuals were responsible for themselves, not society. Political society existed as a compact to lift up the individual, not the other way around.
> If you are a citizen of a free country with freedom of speech and voting rights, everything is your responsibility.
I vehemently disagree. America is a representative democracy. We vote for representatives in the legislature and other parts of government who are responsible for the "everything". All the regular people have to do is vote for whichever representatives they think will do a good job. There is no obligation that everybody be informed in all matters concerning how to run a country. Even congresspeople have specializations: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_Senate_c...
That's the voting rights part. Freedom of speech gives you the right to tell your representatives how you want them to represent you. If you choose not to get involved in a contested issue, your representatives will think that the issue is not important to you. They will then prioritize their efforts accordingly. As far as everyone else is concerned, an opinion you don't act upon is indistinguishable from not having an opinion at all.
Freedom of speech makes representative politics a market, where effort is a key currency. You may dislike markets in general or think they are inappropriate in some situations, but they are an inevitable consequence of individual liberties.
What about a social media site for congressmen where you can only, like / vote / comment if you are a verified constituent and every post is linked to a real identity. And moderation was done wikipedia style. As in a comment may be removed, but you can see why it was removed and it's content and author can still be viewed via history or something similar.
This type of thing is only possible in an environment where there is roughly homogeneous values. When values diverge extremely on basic issues -- only 1 side will trust the tech owners not to shadow ban, astro turf, fake polls etc.
Bold of you to assume the congresscritters are interested in reading the letters written by constituents. At the local and state level I've had _some_ success in getting in touch with my local reps but when it comes to the federal level? Nothing. Every email I've ever sent is responded with the generic "Representative foobar is working for all americans blah blah blah..." followed by the generic press release they send out every few months.
It is the job of congress to write up and pass laws concerning matters I will never understand, and for which I am grateful that I am not obliged to understand.
What do you want me to say? Throw away the constitution because congressmen are idiots, lets do direct democracy and all pretend we're experts on everything? Nobody can be informed on everything; anybody who thinks they are is obviously an obvious idiot who doesn't know his own limitations. No, direct democracy sucks for anything much larger than a canton, and certainly for any group with interests as serious and diverse as America's. What we have now is far from perfect, but it works reasonably well and I wouldn't throw it away in exchange for a nuclear-armed ochlocracy.
The mere thought of that sends shivers up my spine.
>Personally I'd like to get back to a world where the fate of civilization is not the responsibility of every individual to worry about on a daily basis.
Then your only choice is an unfree world. Maintaining freesom requires constant vigilance because those who want power and control never sleep.
Rubbish. Bob from the car factory can take a sabbatical without the free world sliding into tyranny. In fact, very little that I have done in my life - if anything at all - has had any appreciable effect on free society. This is the kind of "I know this is rubbish but it conveys an ethos I want to convey" statement that's sending language and meaning into decline.
A single individual slacking on maintaining a free society isn't going to end everything, I agree. That was never my point. Collectively, the majority of people in a society must maintain vigilance.
200 years ago an individual working on a farm would have zero practical influence on the national scale. They did not have to fight evil everyday because they were not aware of it and it didn't effect them.
I'd make an argument (open to being wrong) that the majority of people who choose to degrade their quality of life, daily, fighting (lesser or fake) "evil" have no meaningful effect on the outcome. There's a small percentage of dedicated people who make a difference. The mentality that you're describing just encourages more people to join that majority and actively lowers the influence of those dedicated people because of it.
I’m pretty sure on the whole you’re wrong about 200 years ago, and wrong overall. The sentiments I wrote mirror those from Ancient Greece, and there are many equivalents from a great many societies since then.
Do you think people didn’t have to deal with bandits? Or try to decide if they should give to their neighbors during a famine instead of pretend they had nothing?
Or deal with being (or their children being) conscripted into terrible wars or defend their land? Or had to make decisions on a day to day basis on if they should take advantage of someone, or protect someone?
The focus you seem to have on national politics to the exclusion of all else is the bigger issue I think?
We have the most influence on the things closest to us, and as things get larger and further from us that wanes. National issues bubble up. I’m not saying ‘go March on Washington for every issue’.
I’m saying ‘stop the abuses you can, make the best decisions you can, and work hard to make things better where you can’. And don’t just sit back and go ‘meh, I don’t make a difference anywhere’.
Because you can make a difference somewhere.
That means local, regional, etc. can be impacted more - and that is often done by day to day decisions. That means $50 to a cause, if it is worthwhile and effective in others. That means taking a stand in a water cooler discussion, even if it won’t make friends, when it is important. That means, if you have kids, teaching them right and wrong in a useful way.
> Personally I'd like to get back to a world where the fate of civilization is not the responsibility of every individual to worry about on a daily basis.
It always has been every individual's responsibility.
What is different now is the loss of individual agency. People no longer believe that they can make a difference individually, nor do they believe that individuals can be actually be responsible for their actions.
Instead we are taught we are part of a system and that system determines outcomes we face in our lives. That we are not individuals, but belong to a group that defines how we think and how we act and it is not something we can escape from.
And what happens is that the only people in a position to do anything about solving any of our world's problems is the ones in central state government. That it is up to the government to free us or solve world hunger or save the environment or whatever else we think is the problem with society.
And the result of this is the loss of individual agency. We don't feel in control nor do we feel that we can make a difference. Instead we feel as if we are dependent on an external locus of control; politics.
So this compels people to obsess about politics. The only control we have over government is vote, but our individual vote doesn't matter. So to make a difference we need to "game" the system, forced to create narratives and convincing arguments and debates and stories to convince everybody else to agree with us.
However this 'external locus of control' we place in government is illusionary.
The government can't solve poverty, it can't fix the environment, it can't provide universal health care. All they can do is seize the wealth generated by the public and repurpose it to try to address those problems while causing a whole raft of other problems along the way.
The truth of the matter is that society is not defined by government. It doesn't work because of government and it never did.
Instead society is constructed through the individual relationships and voluntary associations people have with one another. The places you work, the churches people go to, the stores you shop at. Your friends, associates, and neighbors and, in turn the relationships those people have with everybody else. with everybody else. These casual and formal groupings and links that individuals create between them are the fabric in which society is constructed.
It is also the place where problems get solved. It is from this social fabric we get grocery stores, truck drivers, policemen, hospitals, plumbers, construction workers, and every other type of person, profession and jobs that goes into creating the resources on which human life depends.
So your personal responsibility for actually "doing something" and "changing the world for a better place" resides in your relationships with those people. How well you do your job. How well you take care of your family. How often you are willing to help out other people. The volunteer jobs you take. The financial aid you provide for other people and other initiatives.
You can tell you are doing a good job when you profit and other people profit from your existence among them.
Arguing on twitter and "taking up causes" online accomplishes nothing. It is not the signaling, or arguing, or showing solidarity or icon changing that provides any meaning. It is in the doing. It is the same now as it was 200 years ago.
>The government can't solve poverty, it can't fix the environment, it can't provide universal health care. All they can do is seize the wealth generated by the public and repurpose it to try to address those problems while causing a whole raft of other problems along the way.
This demonstrates how successful the right wing corporate media has been in training Americans that "government doesn't work" when all you have to do is look outside to find out that it's a lie.
I think you are misunderstanding. A healthy civilization is composed of a certain number of openly principled people. If your civilization has fallen below this threshold, it will suffer. But choosing to be an out-spoken, principled person is, I believe, always good on the basis of virtue alone. It's worth being that way no matter the current situation. It's roughly analogous to getting vaccinated.
We can choose to have a civil debate, and perhaps, one of us might even change their mind. And if we cannot agree, we can choose for ourselves. If we must agree, then we abide by the law, whether or not we think it is wise, and the loser can (and should) attempt to change the law.
Yes, and the solution has traditionally been to vote for principled leaders. Now, I don't think people know what principled means. They don't understand why "hypocrite" is a bad thing, and neither does anyone they know. Nor do they understand why allegations without evidence are dangerous - unless it's leveled against them, of course. Something deep and important is missing from many millions of minds; it was either there and suppressed or removed, or it wasn't there and didn't get nurtured. Of course, maybe it's always been this way and that's why small-scale illiberal leaders of the rabble, who themselves see the value in these things, have always been important to large scale liberal rule.
I remember when this approach was considered normal, and even people that were unable to raise to it at least tried to fake it. I'm not being facetious here, I really remember it, and I'm not even that old. I wish those times would return one day.
"... in 2018, the ACLU spent $800,000 on a campaign ad for Stacey Abrams during her run for governor in Georgia and $1 million in an attack-ad campaign against Brett Kavanaugh during his Supreme Court confirmation hearings."
There's more of the same, but it's enough to get the picture.
That's all you need to know. The ACLU is not about fairness for everyone.
They aren’t the American Fairness Union. Stacey Abrams is a proponent of expanding civil liberties. Brett Kavanaugh has repeatedly demonstrated contempt for them, exemplified by the coming decision that overturns Roe.
I probably don't agree with Brett Kavanaugh but I do certainly believe he was subjected to an extended and transparent political smear campaign. I don't think it is a good picture for an organisation for civil liberties to partake here and if they are connected to that it is a bit worse than a bad look.
So its a bad look for a special interest group to pursue that interest when a Republican operative is involved? I don’t understand how the two are related. Are you saying Brett Kavanaugh was wrongly construed, that he will support civil liberties? Seems like money well spent by the ACLU.
I don't see any possibility how the media campaign against him can be construed as a gain for civil liberties. Especially like you almost admit that it wasn't about his failures as a person and just politically motivated. This is independent from how well Brett Kavanaugh will later defend civil liberties or not.
How is it independent? The reader can decide if he's morally qualified or not, but he had a long judicial record to rely upon for the ACLU to decide that he wasn't a friend of civil liberties.
Yeah, this thread it wild to me. Are we really gonna both sides this and pretend that candidates who openly and proudly oppose the liberties that the ACLU fights for are somehow equivalent?
The ACLU can’t just sue for liberties that require legislation be passed, that is unless you’re in favor with more legislating from the bench. And in that case they have to support politicians that will further their mission.
ACLUs’ political donations aside, the world is not fair, and some are playing to win to inflict suffering on others. Arguing for fairness for everyone doesn’t necessarily mean you want fairness; it can also mean you’re looking for a system vulnerability to exploit. Revealed intent matters.
I would not enable fairness for someone attempting to harm a family member, a loved one, the general public, or myself, for example. To do so would be to empower their harm projection.
Weirdly enough I don't see anything the ACLU is doing in the article that's particularly left or even progressive, just barely Democrat. My guess is there's 100x as much money available to an org fighting for a particular party's most important items at a given moment vs actually looking for free speech violations.
The ACLU on Northern California is the #3 donor (over $300k) for the effort to reject the recall of the progressive DA in SF. (sfethics.org list of actual donors, not guesswork).
Regardless of one's position on the recall, it seems an odd thing for the N. Cal ACLU to be putting over 5% of it's operating budget into this campaign.
Yes, the level-headed take is that an organization has not taken a "hard-left turn" unless they are calling for redistributing the land and cancelling the debt.
Unless your baseline is "Nordic countries" or similar, the US is pretty far to the left.
This is true regardless of whether you look at the size of the government, relative to the economy or where it sits on the spectrum between ethno-nationalist vs self-criticism/openness to outsiders. The US has a much larger than average sized government spending vs the size of its economy and it takes in three times more immigrants per year than any other country.
By comparison, China, Japan, India and other major world powers are considerably further to the right. Even influential small countries such as Israel and Singapore are also a bit more conservative.
> Unless your baseline is "Nordic countries" or similar, the US is pretty far to the left.
How about most of Europe and Latin America?
It is hard to define what "left" means nowadays but it is telling that you believe the "size of the government", as defined by mostly military spending, can consist as a checkbox for being part of the left.
I am not arguing about the other governments you mentioned, I am arguing that it is simply incorrect to use "size of government" as a measure of how "left" a country is, particularly when using the US as an example. The US is notorious for having very bad safety nets while disproportionately investing in military, both of which are hardly causes favoured by the left.
Germany takes more and this is raw numbers not adjusted by the size of the country. Germany is less than a third the size of the US and taking more. Spain takes 60% as many immigrants as the US and is roughly 1/7 the population.
> Not sure where the claim about taking immigrants is coming from
The link was right at the bottom of the comment and if you click it, you'll see data sources mentioned prominently.
As of 2020, the US has 50.6 million foreign born immigrants, while Germany, which was #2, had 15.8 million. Adjusted for current population it's fairly close. The UK, in contrast had 9.4M, and Spain 6.8M. All of these countries have immigrant populations compared to world averages.
You could nitpick at time frames or various other ways to slice the data but there's no defensible claim that the US accepts fewer immigrants than most countries.
One of their most visible (on Twitter) attorneys is a transgender person who openly called for "stopping the circulation" of a book discussing critically the transgender phenomenon [0]. This is the same org that once fought for a neo-Nazi organization's right to hold a march. From "I may not agree with your opinion, but I'll defend your right to say it," to "we must prevent opposing views from being heard" in under a decade.
The 2nd Amendment isn’t as cut and dry “minimal gun restrictions” like some organizations want you to believe. I think the ACLU’s interpretation is defensible
Except they don't defend it. If they did they would be advocating against standing armies. If it's believed to be a collective right to promote the common defense then the scale of the US Military is a major affront to that. But realistically we are so far removed from what the founders envisioned we we should do a total redraft.
An army, like a militia, would fall under "collective right". So I don't see how their stance is against standing armies.
Re: redraft, I go back and forth. I think if we want to be textualists then we need a redraft because the founders couldn't possibly have envisioned the modern world. The idea of redrafting isn't that radical -- Thomas Jefferson wanted it [1].
But pragmatically, I don't think we'll ever redraft it. Both liberals and conservatives would have to agree to a redraft (they won't) and then agree on what the new draft would be (they won't). The only way to modernize the Constitution and Bill of Rights is to interpret it using a modern lens. "What would this document mean if it was written with today's world in mind?"
Basically they say The Founders wrote the whole amendment in the Bill of Rights to express the right of US to have an army (that's the only way I can make sense of the term of "collective right" with regard to keeping and bearing arms). That's kind of weird - first of all, the Army is already mentioned in the Constitution, why mention it again? Second of all, who would really argue the US government can't have an army - what case would such amendment serve, what argument it would resolve? Amendments usually address some important questions or establish some important principles - e.g. protection of freedom of speech, or personal freedoms, or freedom of religion, etc. - and limiting the power of state to infringe on those. Seeing "also, US Government can have an army" among these is kinda odd, at least it does look odd to me. I can't shake the feeling that is is not a serious interpretation but more of a legalistic trick - we pre-decided we don't want to give people access to the guns, and now we have a task of reconciling the text of the Constitution which seemingly contradicts that with this conclusion, so we invent this concept of "collective right". Which AFAIK doesn't exist for any other right, does it? You don't call 1st, or 4th, or 5th, or 6th amendment rights "collective". Even for rights "found" later - be it privacy, or access to certain medical procedures - nobody I know argues it's a "collective" right which can not be accessed by individuals but only through the intermediacy of the state functionaries. It seems to be the only one that this argument appears in. That is certainly something one would consider "odd".
> Basically they say The Founders wrote the whole amendment in the Bill of Rights to express the right of US to have an army (that's the only way I can make sense of the term of "collective right" with regard to keeping and bearing arms). That's kind of weird - first of all, the Army is already mentioned in the Constitution, why mention it again?
There’s an important word right there in the (extremely short) text of the amendment: “militia.” That word explains why the amendment exists in addition to the constitution’s mention of the army: it’s because army and militia are different things. We agree that the amendment very clearly is not referring to the right of the United States government to maintain an army, but I see no indication that the ACLU or any other significant groups believe that.
But it seems odd to me that the first 13 of the 27 words of the amendment would explain why militias are important, when a militia would be an extremely rare use case for owning a firearm.
> it’s because army and militia are different things.
OK, then where's that militia which is not an army but is a "collective" that is not composed of individuals owning, keeping and bearing arms? Which structure is it referring to? I can't find anything matching the description in the US (outside the army which we excluded, and the police, which doesn't fit either and isn't a federal business anyway). Moreover, I can't find anything matching the description anywhere in the world either - if we look at other countries that have people bearing arms outside the army - e.g. Switzerland - they keep and bear arms personally, not "collectively". So again, it looks odd - what exactly does this right mean? It again sounds like "it's not what you mean, you can't have the gun, it's 'collective'" - ok, so tell me, what does it mean then? Unlike many other concepts in the Constitution, this one seems pretty tough to figure out.
I think you are confused on what these terms mean. "Collective right" obviously does not mean that that individuals cannot own guns. It means that the right to own guns is in the context of a regulated militia. Obvious regulations that a militia might want to have are minimum age requirements, training requirements, equipment safety requirements (such as requiring owners to store and transport their guns safely and perform regular maintenance). "Collective right" means that the right isn't an individual right, in other words, individuals do not have the right to buy, sell, and own any firearm they want in any condition they want for any purpose they want.
These definitions are abundantly clear in any good-faith conversation about gun policy. The ACLU in particular is quite clear about which policies they believe infringe on civil liberties and which do not. For instance, the ACLU's position is that laws which restrict the types of weapons or ammunitions which can be owned generally do not infringe on civil liberties, while laws which restrict categories of people from owning guns often do infringe on civil rights (the examples they give are immigrants and people with mental disabilities). Incidentally, the ACLU also believes that many current federal restrictions on gun ownership do infringe on civil liberties, like the prohibition of certain convicted criminals and people with mental disabilities when there is no indication of violent behavior.
> It means that the right to own guns is in the context of a regulated militia.
Ok this is already an oddity. There's no second such right. I mean, the right for religious freedom does not require you to join a regulated religion (even if many do join organized religions). The right for free speech does not require you to be a journalist. The right for speedy trial does not require you to join a speedy trial club and pass regular legal training. And so on. This is what I'd call odd. But there's more.
> Obvious regulations that a militia might want to have are minimum age requirements, training requirements, equipment safety requirements (such as requiring owners to store and transport their guns safely and perform regular maintenance).
OK let's assume so. Note that most gun regulations in anti-gun states and cities have little to do with this - but let's assume that's what ACLU wants.
> For instance, the ACLU's position is that laws which restrict the types of weapons or ammunitions which can be owned generally do not infringe on civil liberties
How this follows? How "you can not own a gun with certain feature" fits with the above? Does this feature prevent training, or is particularly unsafe, or preclude safe transportation and storage? Not at the least. So how does it fit in this concept? It comes to the comical, that two models of the same gun, with small cosmetic change, may one be legal and another illegal in certain states (OK, let's not be coy, in California) - can anybody seriously argue that's because one can be used in militia and another can't? That's beyond odd, that makes no sense. I mean if we talked about guns that somehow useless to militia (don't know, let's assume you found an argument that specific type of a gun is so peculiar that no militia would ever have a reason to use it) - ok, I'm willing to accept that makes sense in that framework. But that's not how the regulations that ACLU supports and endorses work!
> while laws which restrict categories of people from owning guns often do infringe on civil rights
Again, how does it work? You named age restriction yourself. Isn't it "category of people"? But let's say we talk about people who are violently insane, or that are career felons, maybe violent gangsters who were imprisoned for many years for their crimes. You don't want such guys in your militia, probably, right? If you have them there, they'd probably loot everything instead of defending the fellow citizens, maybe? Yet it's absolutely "category of people". Let's take mental disabilities - of course, there is a whole gamut of disabilities, but in general you'd want your militia to be mentally stable, right? So how does it work? It looks again that the position does not even have internal consistency, that's even before anybody would start to attack it on merits of its principles! Again, that's a very odd position to hold.
That is a really cool name. My hyperbole was to point out that they are picking and choosing which "civil liberties" are valid, independent of law and judicial precedent. They totally have that right, but their positions do align with the US moderate left on most issues, including firearms.
True, I had my doubts after the initial introduction. Although I don't understand the remark about extreme positions that need and get legal defense. Because those statements are indeed the ones needing it the most and what is considered extreme can change on a day to day basis.
But the essence is correct. What I find most interesting about some of these "left" causes are that they don't argue for any liberties. They most often do the exact opposite and advocate putting people under new rules. I think that is missing the mark.
Freedom of speech always needs defendants and that will never change. But that is not what the ACLU is doing.
Lara Bazelon is a rigorous thinker and a staunch believer in procedural justice. This leads to heterodox takes like, for example, supporting Betsy DeVoss’s efforts to roll back Obama’s Title IX reforms: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/04/opinion/-title-ix-devos-d.... (As a conservative, I disagree with more her than I agree with her, ironically including with respect to Title IX, where I agree with Obama for conservative reasons.)
These are being promulgated by executive actions--the Department of Education issuing guidance using its authority over federal educational funding as the hook for enforcement. Thus they have been flipping back-and-forth between administrations. The Obama-era guidance was significantly rolled back by Trump, to include things like not allowing evidence to be admitted from a witness not subject to cross examination. Biden then undid certain parts of the Trump rule, specifically getting rid of the cross-examination requirement: https://www.browndailyherald.com/article/2022/03/activists-e...
It doesn't feel remotely level-headed. Just about anyone in my AP English class could have made all of that up 12 years ago. That is, using circular logic to defend something like freedom of speech is something I expect any high school senior to be able to do.
What I would like to know is, why it's so important if, for most of us, for the best and most capable parts of our lives, we don't have anything that resembles free speech. In fact, we expect to have our income and Healthcare cutoff if we really speak our minds often in the workplace.
What I would like to know is, why it's okay for a few people to lie about the gravity of a pandemic and cost us 1M of our countrymen.
What I would like to know is, how countries just as capable as us manage to lead better lives despite not having free reign over discussions on Nazis.
What I would like to know is, why the staunchest proponents of freedom of speech choose to hit that down vote button to push comments like mine into oblivion rather than have an honest set of questions seen.
I haven't really heard anyone use anything but propaganda based circular logic or slippery slope fallacies to answer why unbridled free speech is necessary.
Moreover, it's hard to believe there is much substance to people's positions on unbridled freedom of speech when people are so religious about it. It's hard to believe that we have the right answer when we don't allow an ounce of nuance in the discussion.
Democracy requires free speech. So, if you're against free speech, then you're also against Democracy.
What form of government would you prefer? The biggest modern alternate examples are China (I'm guessing you disapprove of their zero covid policy, but your comment is ambiguous), and Russia (which also seems worse than the US according to the criteria I could tease out from your comment).
> Democracy requires free speech. So, if you're against free speech, then you're also against Democracy.
Why does democracy require free speech? Can I not vote for whoever I want even if I'm mute?
> So, what concrete alternative do you propose?
You get that there are many other countries in Western Europe that don't have as much free speech as the US right? You get that the lock down policies of many other Western countries seem Draconian relative to our policies right?
You get that giving me some of the most extreme examples of alternatives makes it seem like you are arguing in bad faith right?
Why do we need a brand new form of government? We didn't need a new form of government to ban saying "fire" in a theater.
> Why does democracy require free speech? Can I not vote for whoever I want even if I'm mute?
I think it would be extremely difficult for the electorate to make educated decisions about who to vote for if speech supporting a certain candidate is suppressed, for example.
Free speech and the ability to vote are deeply intertwined. Without the ability to discuss candidates and issues openly, the electorate can’t make an informed, honest choice. If one candidate or side of the debate is suppressed or censored, that in and of itself affects the outcome of an election.
It seems extremely difficult for the electorate to make educated decisions about who to vote for due to the lack of consequences for completely misleading or false statements. Is a politician's lie protected by free speech?
Yes, as should be the speech of each person who points out the politician is lying.
A prerequisite for a politician to experience consequences for lying is for people to be free to discuss the lie, persuade fellow voters that he is lying, and disseminate that fact freely.
You’re not going to prevent politicians from lying by limiting speech. You’ll achieve quite the opposite effect, actually.
Free speech doesn't mean consequence free speech. Someone aspiring to public office should be penalised for deliberately misleading voters. The imbalance of power and exposure means that the many people who correctly point out the lies and manipulation are unheard, while the perpetrator of the lies and manipulation can freely continue to lie and manipulate.
They will be penalized, by the voters, if people are allowed to discuss the politician’s actions and statements freely and make their own judgement about his fitness for office, and if they actually choose to do so.
Ask yourself why those voices of truth go unheard. Or why the politician’s lies continue without consequence. Is it not because of a lack of robust speech around the politician’s behavior?
Why doesn’t that robust speech occur? Sometimes it is suppressed. But more often, the root of the problem is that most people prefer to be lied to. Seeking and discovering the truth is hard work, and it is work that no person should outsource to a third party. Yet that is exactly what people do, when they rely on the press or media for the truth. Those organizations lie at least as frequently as the politician does.
Literally yes, because the next prompted question is 'who determines what political speech is true and therefore allowed?', which is a path fraught with dragons.
Some statements are grey areas. Some are provably true or false. If a politician continually makes provably false statements, and they're supported by a large proportion of the media, then what recourse do voters currently have to prevent this from continuing?
Edit: What I'm suggesting is that free speech is protected against retribution from the government. The elected officials should be held to a higher standard. They are the government, and should not be protected against retribution from the voters. There should be serious penalties for any elected official who continues to make provably false statements after they've been pointed out.
In the first place, this is a thought-terminating cliché. Second, nothing prevents a politician from saying one thing to the voters and then doing something completely different once in office. (Especially at the federal level where there is no recall or recourse). The only accountability provided surrounds reelection.
It is the job of voters to hold them accountable. Our politicians are a mirror of ourselves. We usually get the leaders we deserve.
All 3 of these are non-substantive aphorisms that serve no discussion purpose. They are statements, bare ones at that, and do not pose a question or seek anything.
Universal recall would be some great low-hanging fruit to pick. As would algorithmic districting to deal with the gerrymandering problem so representatives are actually representative.
Those statements are substantive if you engage them in good faith, which you chose not to do. I'll elaborate for clarity.
Our lying, corrupt politicians are selected from an electorate who themselves peddle lies and falsehoods on social media, and often choose to believe convenient lies that support whatever cause they want to believe in. That's not my opinion. It's an empirical fact, which you can go verify for yourself: you don't have to spend but five minutes on Facebook or Twitter to see that it is true.
The people that complain about lying, corrupt politicians are almost always the same people that peddle lies on social media. If these people truly want less lying, corrupt politicians, then a prerequisite would be for them to not engage in that behavior themselves. As I said, our politicians mirror ourselves, and they are selected from among us. We get the leaders we deserve.
Universal recall won't solve the underlying problem. We'll cycle through lying politicians more frequently under such a system, but the incentive to lie to get elected remains unchanged.
Algorithmic districting simply punts the issue to a different group of people, who will be just as corruptable as the current set of people who draw district boundaries. Who will write the algorithm? Who will set the rules under which the algorithm operates? At least under our current system, politicians accountable to voters each term set the boundaries. How will the people writing the algorithm be held to account?
"The people that complain about lying, corrupt politicians are almost always the same people that peddle lies on social media. If these people truly want less lying, corrupt politicians, then a prerequisite would be for them to not engage in that behavior themselves. As I said, our politicians mirror ourselves, and they are selected from among us. We get the leaders we deserve."
This is false. I'm not sure where you get this idea from. The people that complain about lying, corrupt politicians are everyone. You did it in your reply. The "mirror ourselves" statement is defeatist and useless. There are honest people in the world. They are calling out lies and corruption every day. You do them the ultimate disservice to claim that they are "almost always the same people that peddle lies on social media".
Doctors, judges, witnesses in court cases and many others are held to higher standards of truthfulness than the average person. These are legally binding, and have real penalties. Why can't we hold politicians to the same standards?
If a witness in a trial is found to be lying, they can't resort to "Freedom of speech!" as a defense. They are charged with perjury. We should consider elected officials as being constantly under oath, and any dissembling should be treated as perjury.
> What I would like to know is, why the staunchest proponents of freedom of speech choose to hit that down vote button to push comments like mine into oblivion rather than have an honest set of questions seen.
I didn't downvote you and don't like if someone does it without leaving criticism. That said, I understand the objection to your reasoning very well and maybe people refrain from answering because the pitfalls of your model for speech are trivial. It comes down to who get the power to define truth. That is not a problem if anyone is allowed to leave their opinion. There will be people that abuse that right and that is the cost of it.
And we have seen intentional lying which I believe was a great mistake in current times when information moves that fast. Because the lie will come to light at some point anyway.
> It comes down to who get the power to define truth. That is not a problem if anyone is allowed to leave their opinion. There will be people that abuse that right and that is the cost of it.
I don't understand how you can call my issues with it trivial when I've heard this same propaganda over and over again for decades. I think the issue is that people made this propaganda their religion and are now unable to see that nuance can be used to safely reduce free speech.
You can't yell fire in a crowded fire when there is no fire can you? Why do you act like these safeguards don't already exist for other things?
The propaganda is actually the people saying there are consequences for speech and it must therefore be limited. It is a trivial observation that there are consequences but that is of course not a justification to curb it. Again, the problem with "reasonable" exceptions is that someone has to define them. Free speech means the spread of ideas, it doesn't mean you are allowed to lie if you swear an oath to a judge.
But we specifically see language policing and idea suppression in supposedly scientific institutions (hot examples: climate change, gender, wars, racism, immigration, ...).
> What I would like to know is, why it's okay for a few people to lie about the gravity of a pandemic and cost us 1M of our countrymen.
1M people died but the way your sentence is framed is that without those lies 1M people wouldn't have died. That looks like quite the intent to deceive, which makes it look like you are the liar. Why is it ok for you?
Furthermore it's quite obfuscated. Yes people lied about the pandemic(every politician lies, it's like a contest to elect the best liar). I'm willing to bet some of those lies saved lives(just by chance, who knows).
So directly in answer to your question. Speech should be free because that's how society advances, free speech is how you question the current dogma, it's how society moves forward. There's costs and benefits. Charlatan will con people. The way you deal with charlatans is by exposing them with better speech.
Banning speech is weak sauce for people that don't know how to be convincing.
> What I would like to know is, how countries just as capable as us manage to lead better lives despite not having free reign over discussions on Nazis.
I live a pretty good life as an immigrant. Can't complain. Great country, wouldn't want to be anywhere else. The country where I come from does not have "free reign over discussions on Nazis".
> I haven't really heard anyone use anything but propaganda based circular logic or slippery slope fallacies to answer why unbridled free speech is necessary.
That's an admission that you really haven't heard or considered the best argument for free speech. If you can only state arguments from one side of an issue, you haven't made up your mind, it was made for you.
Pretending the actions of the government and the actions of private entities are equivalent borders on being deliberately obtuse. There is an enormous difference between being fired because you called a coworker the n-word and having uniformed men with guns show up at your front door because you taught a dog to sieg heil.
They are not equal, but they are similar and can have similar effect. I.e. if your bank seizes your account because you dared to express wrong opinion, it's different than the government did it, and yet you'd still have no access to your money and it could ruin your life pretty thoroughly. If you get fired because you consider your medical information private and do not want to disclose it, especially when you work remotely and it's irrelevant to any job function - it's not the government that fired you. But does it make the situation much better for you?
It is more dangerous when a totalitarian government infringes your rights. That doesn't mean when a private company infringes your right it's not dangerous too. Maybe less dangerous, relatively, but still very very bad.
And, btw, a lot of seemingly "private" actions turn out to be actions performed by private actors on behest of the government, which either forces or entices, by using their gigantic powers to both break and promote business, the "private" companies to act as their agents, "voluntarily" - or else.
Yeah one of the things I really dislike is that I think a lot of people who expect "free speech should be protected on the internet" also believe "companies should have the right to refuse service to anyone"
I think those two beliefs are fundamentally at odds with each other. If you think that companies should not be allowed to moderate community content, then you must also believe that a cake maker who bakes a cake may not refuse to make a cake for a customer lol.
It's Sturgeon's law applied to arguments. 90 percent of arguments are inconsistent and short-sighted.
But, there is room for a nuanced consistent position regarding common carriers and/or monopolies having fewer freedoms than other businesses. Granted, many free speech maximalists aren't making these nuanced arguments, but some are.
90 percent of arguments going against the consensus are crap, but it's vitally important that we don't stifle dissenting arguments. The biggest problems with free speech are libel, fraud, and a woeful lack of critical thinking in the general populous. The first two can be handled with better laws. I think better critical thinking education starting in late elementary school is vital to counteract some of the ill effects of social media.
Thanks for the strawman; you know as well as I do that you can be fired for a lot less than calling your co-workers obscenities. I've seen people fired for just mouthing off about their office job while they're at the grocery store.
Also, don't tell me it's important if you're more than willing (re: you're going out of your way to defend it being taken from you) to have it taken away from you. Don't tell me I'm being obtuse if you can say that it's unimportant for one of the most valuable portions of your life.
You are being obtuse. The freedoms we are talking about are freedom from government interference. Being an asshole still means that private people and companies will treat you like an asshole.
I don't see this as level-headed at all. This is really an extension of the "both sides" logical fallacy. It reminds me of Elon Musk's ridiculous tweet [1].
Why is this ridiculous? Because there is no extreme left in US politics. There's like 4 members of Congress you could consider leftist. The Democratic Party as it exists now is a center right party that makes just enough progressive noises to fundraise without actually doing anything legislatively.
In the last 10 years the only things that have really changed are legalizing of gay marriage (long overdue), #MeToo, some attention to the institutional racism that black people continue to live under and a long overdue reevaluation of widespread transphobia. That's literally it.
On the right, we reacted to the first black US president by electing a bona fide white supremacist [2]. The #1 show on the #1 "news" network openly pushes Nazi propaganda [3]. And what was the supposd left doing? Pelosi is campaigning for the only anti-choice Democrat in Congress [4] (ironically in Texas when the Supreme Court draft leaked).
The right has been massively successful in creating wedge issues to make people care about things that don't matter (eg trans people in college sports)
We've had 49 years to Federally codify Roe v. Wade but the supposed part of the Left has refused to do so despite numerous opportunities to do so.
Which brings us back to the ACLU: what hard-left turn?
> In the last 10 years the only things that have really changed are legalizing of gay marriage (long overdue), #MeToo, some attention to the institutional racism that black people continue to live under and a long overdue reevaluation of widespread transphobia. That's literally it.
Um... that's literally it?
Bad take my guy. Just because you can copy/paste links and make citations doesn't make your take any more true. It smacks of extreme ignorance. And saying things like "on the right, we reacted to the first black US president by electing a bona fide white supremacist" just discredits you further - this is a highly politically charged statement that tells on your positions (and frankly, your mental state).
> "on the right, we reacted to the first black US president by electing a bona fide white supremacist"
Do I have to cut and paste all Trump's comments and recorded statements? Politics are infuriating to discuss because you find yourself debate truth, things that are obvious but still denied.
No, you're responding to someone that just asserted concrete evidence doesn't establish truth, and that anyone that reads primary sources is probably a nutjob.
Besides, I think HN would throttle you well before you got a few percent of the way through them.
I'm familiar with a couple of these, unfamiliar with others. One problem with your cited articles is the fact that most of them don't contain direct quotes - many of them are based on second- or even third-hand accounts.
Some of these are so flimsy I'm wondering if you sent these in jest or not. Are you an elaborate troll? Serious question, because if so, I'm taking the bait. :)
I went through each bullet point and even followed links of sources. I suppose the first one was what you meant to send me? I'm familiar with this quote and it's definitely high on the list for cringe quotes. At worst this sounds xenophobic.
I'm sorry, how does this quote (I watched the video) make him racist? He basically said nothing in that quote, except he didn't admit he was wrong, which is pretty par for the course.
You actually picked an article with some teeth here. There are actually a couple of things in here that are pretty cringe from Trump's perspective (Chinese virus, anyone? Even though that turned out to be true! And the supposed Black vs White Apprentice - yeesh) but some are straight up ridiculous. 2004, he fired a Black contestant from The Apprentice? Is that really the best they got? Further, many of these are about actions taken by Trump businesses, not by Trump himself. Again note the indirect quotes from people.
BTW: you should use sources that aren't blatantly biased. Nice try, troll!
Instead of seeing a clear pattern over decades of awful statements and personal quotes, you give him the benefit of the doubt (which he doesn't deserve). Trump perhaps made it this far because one of his true skills is dancing on the line without fully crossing over it, so people that actually enjoy his awful racist ideology can still argue in polite society that "he didn't really mean that"
You can't force someone to see something they've already made up their mind isn't there.
This is a bad faith interaction, it was wrong of me to even attempt dialogue.
You'll get it right after I spend time providing evidence the sky is blue, not green.
Which is to say, you'll never catch me wasting my time talking to someone that needs such a clarification, and clearly won't listen to evidence that contradicts their immovable and laughable conclusions.
There is an extreme left in US politics, and it's a large percentage of the population.
The problem is the electoral college. You only need 50% of the votes in the smallest twenty states to fillibuster legislation in congress, twenty five states to withold funding, and sixty to overcome a filibuster.
It turns out 7% of people are all that's needed for a filibuster, and 12% can block one, assuming you have the right people. Those "super voters" are in the most conservative states in the US.
I think the populous cities should demand constitutional changes to ensure each vote counts equally. Failing that, they should work towards secession. As it is, the majority of the population is in states that send more money to the federal government than they get back, and the states running the biggest deficits are trying to claw everyone else down to their (fascist, fundamentalist, and antidemocratic) level.
I'm far more moderate than the liberal bogeymen the Republicans like to demonize.
Each person in less populated states has vastly more power than each person in more populated states. Why? Because each state gets to choose two senators. Does that make sense? I guess it does to people in those less populated states, who in effect have and hold on to the power they have. Is that how it should be in a democracy? Of course not. But people who have the power often don't like democracy.
Perhaps the democratic party shouldn't have abandoned trying to make a broad appeal.
And there is a big difference between 7% being able to block a bill and 7% being able to pass a bill. A fair number of people view it as a feature that it can be hard to pass a law when there is only some opposition.
It's an interesting set of opinions, which would be great if you didn't think these are indisputable facts that any reasonable person would agree to. Which they are definitely not.
Bill Clinton and Obama would both be considered homophobic nazis, white supremacists (a black white supremacist in the latter case, I've been assured that's a real and extremely dangerous variant of white supremacist by many foremost self-proclaimed experts), and woman haters for their views and policies on gay marriage, border control and immigration, even abortion (they said that abortions should be rare). So I'd say we've come a good way since electing those two bigoted old hatemongering dinosaurs, haven't we?
I can't tell if this a "both sides" butwhataboutism or not. But there's enough of that and enough people who will mistake my statements as "Republicans bad, Democrats good" that I'll address that even if that's not your point.
A better way to reduce my position is "Republicans bad, Democrats slightly less bad". Or, perhaps more accurately, "Republicans bad but effective, Democrats slightly less bad but completley ineffective."
That all goes to my point: the Democrats as they exist in modern US politics are completely feckless. They are way more concerned with fundraising, the aesthetics of appearing to do something and doing everything they can to stamp out any remotely progressive or socialist element of the party. There's no better example of this than the concerted effort to coronate the only candidate in 2016 who could get Trump elected over an actual progressive.
Obama, who I personally like as a person and a statesman, was a pretty ineffective president. Obama the candidate was progressive. Obama the president was just another Democratic right centrist who reneged on many campaign promises (eg codifying Roe v. Wade).
And Bill Clinton was the architect of mass incarceration of Americans (particularly minorities) with the 1994 Crime Bill (which our current president was one of the primary architects of). The 1994 Crime Bill was an abomination.
But you see, all of that makes my point: there is no Left in America. That's why I find things like Elon Musk's tweet so ridiculous and why I dismiss any notion that both sides are now more extreme. They're not. The political spectrum as a whole has shifted right. That's why "both sides" is both a logical fallacy in general and quite ridiculous in this case in particular.
> A better way to reduce my position is "Republicans bad, Democrats slightly less bad"
And you think this makes it better? It doesn't. The fact that you are on the left to most Democrats does not mean your political opinion is fact. It just means it's your opinion - which you are totally entitled to, just if you try to remember disagreeing with it doesn't make a person a *ist Nazi. If you hold to that, what you'd do is preclude any possibility of a rational discussion with you.
Disagreeing with me doesn't make you a Nazi. In the case of Tucker Carlson (whom I was referring to), spreading Nazi propaganda (eg [1]) is what makes him a Nazi. I don't mean he's a Nazi as a perjorative. I mean, quite litearlly, he's a Nazi.
The Third Reich had cultural Bolshevism [2]. Now we have other popular figures like Jordan Peterson arguing "cultural Marxism" [3]. It's completely different I'm sure.
If you suffer through Tucker's screed, he basically argues that black people are inherently violent. black people are inferior to real (ie white) people and that they're being manipulaated and used by George Soros against "real Americans". Replace "George Soros" with "the Jew" and you have an almost word-for-word translation of Nazi Germany propaganda.
Highest rated show on the highest rated "news" network by the way.
This isn't hyperbole. The normalization of Nazi views and fascism is terrifying and real. It's this same propaganda that has convinced people that there even is an extreme left in US politics.
> Disagreeing with me doesn't make you a Nazi. In the case of Tucker Carlson (who I was referring to), spreading Nazi propaganda (eg [1]) is what makes him a Nazi. I don't mean he's a Nazi as a perjorative. I mean, quite litearlly, he's a Nazi.
Sorry, it was too painful trying to get through the Nazi propaganda you're spreading here. I'm afraid that I won't be able to take your word for it though.
I think it's rather much more likely that he is not literally a Nazi by any objective definition, that it is not Nazi propaganda he is spreading. It may be wrong, insensitive, even racist things he is saying, but it also may be things that aren't obviously wrong or necessarily racist but they threaten your beliefs and opinions. You'll forgive me for not just accepting that someone else is a Nazi based on anonymous internet accusations. I would certainly be open to reconsider it based on e.g., a transcript.
I am sympathetic to the issues of watching Tucker Carlson for any extended period. That one video I referenced actually broke my soul to watch. So let me show you some digests:
- "Quiz: Can You Tell the Difference Between Tucker Carlson and an Admitted White Supremacist?" [1]
- "How Tucker Carlson Stoked White Fear to Conquer Cable" [2]
Replace the entire thing Tucker Carlson said with the entire text of Mein Kampf and you have the entire text of Mein Kampf.
He is accusing George Soros, a specific unique Jew. Arguing that is an attack on all Jews? Or the Sacklers, for that matter. Three specific Jews who committed genocide against various ethnic groups with genetic commonalities in opioid response, genocide against 2D6 variants, genocide of that gene. And in that specific instance, if you tell me it would be anti-semitic to attack the Sacklers, dude I don't care. When you say a specific powerful Jew represents all Jews, it's literally saying he's their savior or king, Messiah, or their GOD. I highly doubt good Jews like you taking them hostage like that. I prove I'm pro-semitic with my actions and words and friendship and solidarity but like I talked about before, I'm not going to cooperate with threats of accusations of being a bigot. It's not worthwhile, too easy to carry out, total impunity. And further speak for yourself, you don't speak on behalf of others, if others consider me to be very much the opposite of a bigot, whereas you in fact would qualify, don't say you speak for them. You are no messiah.
No respect for those accusations, no fucking respect for torture either.[2]
If an accusation against a member of the group is described as an accusation of the entire group, you couldn't denounce anybody for anything because everyone is part of a group and saying the whole group is bad is censored, called offensive. Particularly some groups and not others, like you can say anything you want about white people, absolutely anything, make any generalization, say they're all racist and therefore deserve are racially inferior[1]. But then you accuse one member of another group of any crime? Well that gets tricky because there's bigotry from all groups against all groups, but uh...the press kills those stories.
The movement is in practice trying to censor everything white people have to say. Silence whites.
And frankly the one calling "George Soros" "the Jew" is you, you wrote those words for the first time. You're the inventor of that piece of bigotry. A Nazi might put your comment as a source in his bibliography, then your words would be word-for-word inside a future Nazi book.
[1] In fact the progressive movement right now considers racial inferiority to only be attainable through racism. Everything else, any deformity or genetic abnormality, no need for treatment ever, six fingers whatever, they don't talk about deformities even if they were presented by every member of a group. No need for treatment to root that gene out, even if it's medically desirable, the group in question wants to do it and has the money, they hate that they object to that. The real inferior deformity, which deserves to be treated with scorn and hatred, is anything they can accuse of racism.
[2] Hey at least in Room 101, in which I would spend what according to the Gregorian Calendar was a lunar month, I have a roof over my head. I have four walls that prevent everyone except my formally accredited doctor, his assistant...like in 1984 there was a guy in a lab coat preparing the injections, that guy. I remember exactly nothing but there were three people normally. There were the orderlies, who you normally never see, the guys strapping you down, coercing you physically. All accredited professionals. And there's the beautiful toys, the video games, the time machine, the place in which I lay or sit, the straps, maybe sensors to impress me with numbers quantifying the suffering inflicted like I'm going to say "oh 35 that's a big number, hope it doesn't go up to 300 because pain is linear", the syringes with the recreational drugs I suppose were good shit. Them touching me on the hand, bedside manner, telling me I'm mad and they're going to cure me exactly like in 1984. Them like reading 1984 out loud to me to delete it all.
That's a book about a madman being cured by a psychiatrist, in the psychiatrist's own words, O'Brien/Barros literally claims to be curing the man he calls a madman, Cussen/Smith, of insanity. It's a book about medicine. It's a medical textbook. The peak of Oceania technology, where all that research money really goes. Same stuff they use to drill into the men at Guantanamo. And it's stupid shit, if you look behind the curtain it's really dumb manipulative shit.
But I have a home during that entire time. Just as Jesus on the Cross, during crucifixion, had a place to himself that nobody could evict him from. Nobody told him get off the cross and fuck off, ripped him off the nails creating orifices out of the stigmata, stole his crown of the true King covering his beautiful face with blood, told him he didn't add up to shit and wasn't the real deal, didn't deserve a shot at martyrdom. Like, you haven't paid rent for your sacrifice or we just want to kick you off. We can't let you fulfill and become the first guy to stick up to torture.
At least if I'm being tortured somebody gives a shit about me enough to torture me, because it's extremely expensive, requires a lot of staff and a support team, somebody has to pay for all of that. They're ganging up on the torture victim (or victor, if he doesn't succumb) and it's just much less impressive when you see it for the incredibly pathetic act of cowardice it is. In 1984, it looks like it's just O'Brien dominating Smith, but read it closely several times and the Ministry of Love is a hugely expensive operation. Anybody can act like they're invincible with that amount of people ganging up on "the minority of one."
But somebody cares, on the street nobody cares. Eviction I respect, torture I just don't.
> I don't mean he's a Nazi as a perjorative. I mean, quite litearlly, he's a Nazi.
Again, you say it like you think it makes you argument better. On the contrary, it makes it much worse. While disliking Carlson and calling him a Nazi in a pejorative sense would be somewhat plausible (though massively exaggerated) argument, calling him literally a Nazi (i.e. member of NSDAP or one of the following parties) is plain and obvious lie.
> The Third Reich had cultural Bolshevism
The Reich didn't "have" it - Bolshevism was a real movement, and its adherents have wreaked massive havoc in Russia, killing millions, and in Germany the German Communists - which were ideological twins to Bolsheviks in Russia - were a major competitors of Nazis. That doesn't make either of them good guys, to be sure - they were both horrendously bad, with Nazis succeeding in being more horrendous, but in a meaning of "killing of 20 millions vs just killing 10 millions".
Bolsheviks weren't some Nazi invention. Neither are Marxists - many modern activists openly admit to being Marxists. Some don't use "Marxist" but adjacent terms like "socialist" or "democratic socialist" but once you ask them about their ideological axioms, they are right into Marxist mainstream.
> he basically argues that black people are inherently violent.
I'm pretty sure he doesn't. And the give-away word here is "basically". If we dig it up, it'll soon turn out Carlson didn't say anything like that, but you interpreted something he did say - by taking the most hostile interpretation possible and making two or three logic leaps from here - is as saying that, and that's why you needed to add "basically".
> Replace "George Soros" with "the Jew"
That's a cheap trick. You can't do such replacements - it's completely OK and not anti-Semitic to criticize a particular Jew for what he personally does. It's exactly when you replace it with a generic - i.e. make a shift from personal actions to imagined inherent racial/enthnic qualities - where it becomes racist and anti-Semitic. So you essentially saying "if you make anti-Semitic generalization then it'd be anti-Semitic". Of course it'd be - but it's you who did it!
Soros is a particular person, who happens to be Jewish (as are millions of Americans). It is completely legitimate to criticize him - and any other Jew - for what that particular Jew does in his personal capacity. Same, of course, is true of a Black person, Asian person, woman, man, gay person, trans person, blonde person, left-handed person - any person who you criticize for his personal action, it is not bigoted, regardless of which checkboxes that particular person checks in their personal data file.
To argue otherwise would mean to establish separate rules for different identities, and that would be bigoted - instead of defining person by their action, or, as one person said, "by the content of their character", you lump them together will all people who look like that person, or have similar genetics, or similar other inherent unchangeable qualities - completely erasing their personality and their personal agency and responsibility.
> The normalization of Nazi views and fascism is terrifying and real
Saying something "is real" because you imagined it doesn't make it real. You're not God Almighty that can create reality by His word. It's just your words, and they are worth even less when you use them carelessly.
> It's this same propaganda that has convinced people that there even is an extreme left in US politics.
"Extreme left" is an emotional and subjective term. Of course for some people some leftist positions appear extreme, just as for some other people some right positions appear extreme. That's just their opinion. Pretending like there's some objective measure that defines "extreme" and you used this measure and concluded there's no "extreme left" is, again, pretending your personal opinions are facts. But they aren't.
> The Reich didn't "have" it - Bolshevism was a real movement, and its adherents have wreaked massive havoc in Russia
Sigh. "Cultural Bolshevism" is not Bolshevism. It's a rhetorical device invented by the Nazis to attack various people and things they didn't want in the Third Reich. It had nothing to do with actual Bolshevism but was things like art, music and authors that didn't reflect their values. See "Degenerate Art" etc.
Oh sure they did attack artists they didn't like. Unlike many other things, that one wasn't unique to the Nazis. So do people in the US. Both sides of the spectrum attack art that they don't like - in different ways. Just this month Dave Chapelle was physically attacked on stage because somebody didn't like his art. This is not the only case by far - people get "cancelled" for all kinds of artistical "crimes", and though physical attacks are thankfully still rare, threats and property destruction becomes more and more common.
Below that, in the legitimate field, there lies a long-standing tradition of art critique - which yes, sometimes harshly criticizes certain art. This is what Peterson is doing too, though it is by far not the most important part of his work.
Are all these people Nazis then? I don't think so. Not even the person that attacked Chapelle - he was a violent idiot, but likely not a Nazi. I think, instead, certain people - mostly on the Left - are abusing "Nazi" label to delegitimize their opponents and the criticism of any actions of their side, while keeping the right to criticize - and sometimes physically attack, destroy, burn and maim - from their side. Needless to say, it's not how political - or cultural - discussion should be properly held.
"whataboutism" - hah give me a break, you brought up historical change and previous presidents to contrast how things have changed! Now it's whataboutism to do the same thing because you don't like the point.
And it was satire! Not surprised it's difficult to recognize but clearly it's spectacularly idiotic to actually call a black person a white supremacist. No, if I was going to criticize Obama for something unironically it would obviously be his rampant corruption and nepotism, warmongering, foreign interventions, and many failures in Eastern Ukraine and the South China Sea, underestimation of and troubling relationship with Putin, etc.
And I hear a lot of claims without evidence that "there is no left" or that one party is less worse than the other. I'm not convinced by either. The former is just pointless arguing of semantics when the intention is normally pretty clear, and the latter is clearly highly subjective.
Additionally, I am old enough to remember when being against illegal immigration wasnt a "hateful extremist right-wing", issue. (Pre-2016, Schumer, Pelosi etc talked about it a lot).
Oh they were all talking about securing borders, halting illegal immigration, etc. Hell, some of them even separated immigrant children from their families at the border and caged them. At some point in time that all became the Nazi™ thing to do, prior offenders were all retroactively absolved of their sins, and asking about how that made any sense was "whataboutism".
> So, let's just say there is a vaccine that is approved and even distributed before the election. Would you get it?
> I will say that I would not trust Donald Trump. And it would have to be a credible source of information that talks about the efficacy and the reliability of whatever he's talking about.
This is the exact same tactic used by anti vaxxers on the right. s/Donald Trump/Fauci/. Talk about undermining public trust in institutions - this is the (now) vice president publicly saying that it would have been possible and probable for a vaccine which wasn't safe or effective to be released to the public.
There were a few weeks early on when the vice, slate, the Atlantic etc. were minimizing the virus, and the right was taking the other side. Then it switched overnight with no acknowledgement. Vice even pulled some articles. Then later Fox news suddenly claimed they had always been pro vaccine. I read it was something to do with consistency with Rupert Murdoch's news properties in the UK. There are a few countries where it stayed the other way around, Israel I think?
So if (and I do mean "if") you're calling recent Republiccan statements and policy as simply being against "illegal immigration", that's a level of revisionism right up there with the Civil War being about "states rights". For example:
- "Tucker Pushes Racist ‘Great Replacement’ Theory Yet Again, ADL Renews Call for Fox to Fire Him" [1]
- "Trump referred to Haiti and African nations as 'shithole' countries" [2]. He then went on to say we should have more immigration from Norway, which is probably the whitest country on Earth. Coincidence?
- "President Trump Pardons Former Sheriff Joe Arpaio" [4]
- "The parents of 545 children separated at the border still haven’t been found" [5]
- "Here’s what you need to know about Title 42, the pandemic-era policy that quickly sends migrants to Mexico" [6] (a policy that should've ended on the first day of Biden's presidency but--fun fact--Biden has excluded more asylum seekers under Title 42 than Trump did)
If Republicans actually cared about these people they'd end policies that destabilize countries and create refugee crises like the completely unwarranted sanctions against Venezuela and Cuba.
For the record, when it comes to foreign policy, the Democrats and Republicans are exactly the same.
And yes, the fact that so many want to leave their very poor, often dangerous or dirty, countries validates that they are indeed shitholes. They will tell you as much, if not in words, by their actions. It doesn't mean that that person is bad or that you hate them (or their culture, ethnicity, etc.) if you frankly describe the unfortunate situation of their country with that word.
As someone from outside the US I agree that the "left" in the US are mostly just corporate stooges with empty promises. I think progressive causes are mostly a distraction and don't really help most people that would need state support the most.
But subjecting yourself to the left - right dichotomy is disabling to yourself for the most part.
Gay marriage is a point, although on a state level that is pretty much a tax adjustment today. There were no real other demands. Perhaps gender neutral passports, but honestly that isn't really a foundation for policy crafting. Which demands did #metoo have and which were realized? Same with the question for the movements against racism? There is no result because there are no demands. Or at least I didn't hear any.
There are women in low wage jobs that could use support. How is #metoo helping them. How is removing police helping regions with crime problems. Ending prosecution of drug users was on the plan since decades and is sensible in contrast to recent demands.
> Because there is no extreme left in US politics.
No extreme economic left. Instead, the left concentrates on racial issues, which is how enforcing even existing immigration law has become taboo, whites have been a minority among births since 2016 [1], and the white supremacist president campaigned with a "platinum plan" for Blacks.
Except for the 2nd amendment and abortion opponents, the right has been an utter failure. A puppet for corporate interests pushing overseas invasions and tax cuts.
In any case, if merely implying that borders should be enforced qualifies as white supremacy, then it's no wonder no party is considered "left", even on non-economic questions.
The closest thing are the extremes in SF and a few other places.
The progressives in SF can't even keep their tools on the school board sharp enough to avoid being kicked out of office in the most liberal city in the US.
In contrast, there are left wing parties in other countries that know how to run for office, hold positions, and get things done. You know - by actually doing things.
The game-theory problem is: unilateral disarmament is a recipe for losing in today's political world. If progressives choose not to use the tools available for them to exercise power, you can be sure that conservatives won't make the same mistake. Could one convince conservatives to give up a supreme court seat? Because that's an entire branch of government (and perhaps the most powerful) that is likely to be controlled by conservatives for the rest of our lifetimes. Likewise, the Senate awards outsized power to rural states; what are the odds that conservatives would agree to a more equal representation? That they would vote for a federal ban on gerrymandering? Historically conservatives have been more strategic at preserving their political power; it's hard to see how we overcome many of the current dysfunctions the US is facing.
Simple, stop wasting money, get rid of licensing requirements, and fire HR departments en banc.
We wasted $xxx millions on BLM. They could have helped the justice system by taking that money and forcing every interaction with the public to be recorded through body cameras. Instead the money is being used on influence studios. How are we going to get rid of bad cops if we cannot identify or categorize them.
Licensing requirements are ridiculous, it causes wastes of time and hiking of wages to meet the ridiculousness. Someone who is in a bad neighborhood looking to go straight would need 500 hours of cosmetology school to weave hair. Why? There is no licensing requirement for aeronautic engineers!
HR departments are full of scared losers. We all know this. They are the people who were not smart enough in high school, got a non real degree, be then entered the corporate work environment. Because they do not have the capability to think, they have to rely on mimicry. That is why when a job needs to be filled, instead of doing a good job, they simply look at what everyone else posts at other firms. Then the HR departments make sure to hire someone with a degree so if things do not work out, HR can say: we did our best. This credentialing keeps good candidates out and causes cribbing to happen. Don’t have a degree, don’t apply. I have had to fight to get non degreed people promoted out of their current position with HR because the candidate was not “one of us.”
Who is we? I think most donators understood what they were donating to and feel fine about it.
Totally with you about the licensing requirements, but the HR thing just seems like a rant. Corporate beurocracies are risk-adverse to a fault, HR's KPIs aren't related to company performance. I think they're trying not to get fired.
Entrenched interests are why things rarely advanced. Look at dentistry we are still drilling teeth like the greeks and making very little progress except on the most advanced procedures.
Dental advancement never gets anywhere because drilling teeth makes money and it sucks so people put it off until they NEED more expensive procedures and that works great.
Dentist that want to really make a difference and use the latest techniques really can't afford it because of the regulatory burden and huge costs associated with everything.
Right. One party is fighting for fairness and democracy, the other for domination and autocracy. But I believe it is still possible to be fair by those who fight for fairness, and to be democratic by those who fight for democracy. And they can still win, eventually. It is called progress and it has been going on for centuries.
I think both major parties have pretty strong authoritarian streaks that they show in different ways. I'm a registered Democrat, and I agree that the authoritarian streak in the Republican party is stronger and more dangerous at the moment. However, I think it's also dangerous to ignore the authoritarian tendencies in the Democratic party.
Good point. If authoritarians could they of course would take over the Democratic Party totally.
As you know Republican Party used to be the one opposing slavery.
It's like Putin is really not against USA. He is only against USA as long as he is not its for-life president. And he loves democracy as longs as he is the only one who can decide what democracy means.
> Historically conservatives have been more strategic at preserving their political power
Only if your recollection of history starts in 1994. When Biden was elected to the Senate, Democrats had almost 10 percentage points greater representation in the House than their share of the House popular vote, a feat the GOP has never matched: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Popular_vote_vs_actual_...
And look at how many Republican Supreme Court appointees went wobbly. The majority that upheld abortion rights in Casey in 1992 consisted of five Republican appointees, with the lone Democrat voting with Rehnquist, Scalia, and Thomas.
In terms of strategy, the GOP was a complete tire fire until the Gingrich Congress of the 1990s.
I'm not sure I agree with you that this is a levelheaded take. The individual identified with 2 different groups and defers the individual's personal beliefs. It's hard to see if the reason why he/she believes in these things as a personal stance or to maintain membership within those groups.
Associating with groups, esp like these, means alignment to the groups priorities. I see this tribalism as part of what has really destroyed the modern political landscape.
The new definition of levelheaded is “straw man assertion I don’t back up with facts” then “somber toned analysis of straw man impacts”
The internet revealed that facts are real, but interpretations are extremely up for grabs. I mean is is really a “hard left turn” to stop defending the KKK or is the author just living in a world where people don’t grasp how truly outside of contemporary society that the KKK operates in?
In a world where accused KKK members are not allowed legal representation, the mere (unsubstantiated) accusation of being a ideological member of such a group becomes a weapon to end all discussion and silence the out group.
Applying mob rules (as seen on Twitter and other social media) to the legal world is most certainly a step backwards from a civil liberties perspective.
If only that were true, because pretty much everyone accused of being a bigot seems to still possess the ability and willingness to spout hatred and bigotry all over the TV, Internet, and the halls of Congress. Having your Twitter privileges taken away from you - if that happens to you at all - is hardly the end of the matter.
We are not yet in a society where such people are denied legal representation, so I'm not sure what bearing that such people still existing has on such a hypothetical world?
If you are saying that there still exists a number of actual racists acting racistly on social media, I would agree, but a not-insignificant number of them have been banned!
Social media isn’t the only place to get your message across. And even if a few have been banned, there’s an infinite number of copycats who share their views and who haven’t been deterred from expressing themselves.
Yeah, the American right is definitely silenced in today's media landscape. I can think of dozens of people banned from every appearing on Fox News becasue they were accused of racism.
> The internet revealed that facts are real, but interpretations are extremely up for grabs. I mean is is really a “hard left turn” to stop defending the KKK
Speaking of strawmen...
It is a hard turn to stop defending everybody's rights though. Where everybody includes the entire spectrum from Robert Byrd to Mother Teresa.
> or is the author just living in a world where people don’t grasp how truly outside of contemporary society that the KKK operates in?
Speaking from authority as a KKK member, what I have seen of the contemporary society that the KKK operates in is that there appears to perhaps be a tiny core group of people who voluntarily become KKK members. These people are largely viewed as sideshow freaks and circus clowns who (aside from perhaps Gov. Ralph Northam? /s) have basically zero power as a group . And then you have the other far larger cohort of us who have been unwittingly "volunteered" KKK membership by various "experts" who don't like our opinions but are otherwise incapable of rational discussion of them.
It's a great system. First you make some group so abhorrent that their rights should not be defended. Then crown yourself the sole expert and arbiter of who does and does not belong to that group. The best part about it is that you get to be the one defending the marginalized from bullies and discrimination, and defending human rights and democracy from fascists.
> And then you have the other far larger cohort of us who have been unwittingly "volunteered" KKK membership by various "experts" who don't like our opinions but are otherwise incapable of rational discussion of them.
ACLU membership and staff have always been fairly left, but they were impressively focused on (IMO) the most important civil rights as rights through their work at ACLU, and largely kept their personal politics out of that. A "mission driven organization", as it were. Pretty sad to see what's happened over the past few decades (accelerating; not sure when it started, but it got really bad around 2012-2016, and then far worse). They always believed in "all civil rights except 2A", but I could overlook that since there are other 2A-specific organizations.
I still support them on specific issues, but they're often on the anti-liberty side on other issues, or just actually crazy. Sad.
> ACLU membership and staff have always been fairly left, but they were impressively focused on (IMO) the most important civil rights as rights through their work at ACLU, and largely kept their personal politics out of that.
If that's true, their fundraising was less focused. I made one or two donations to them in the late 90s or early 2000s, and got piles of junk mail for every liberal cause for decades after.
Never made any other political donation, except to the EFF, so I know it's the ACLU that distributed my name (I've made EFF donations from other addresses, and have never gotten any extra junk due to that).
Here is the testimony of the ACLU for this trial, if you're curious about it. I watched it live and was beside myself. There are a lot more shenanigans than listed in the article. It's important to listen to the actual words spoken and changes in voice, see the facial expressions, watch the dancing around the questions, hear the contradictions.
Just look at the 'good faith' allowances granted when government officials violate the legal system's own laws and requirements. Not only is it ineffective if someone is good at lying, it just voids it's own laws and requirements if the liar is a government official because 'good faith'.
You can impeach someone and/or offer up other witnesses to chip away at a liar's credibility. "Good enough" doesn't come close to describing the level of deception necessary to render our entire legal system completely ineffective.
I'm a lifelong member of the ACLU. During all the years, I've disagreed with numerous things they have done and that they do presently, including this involvement in politics. However, there are few organizations doing the legal representation that they do on behalf of the poor and the marginalized, and for that I continue to support them. Insisting that an organization perfectly fit my personal preferences is a fool's errand. As with everything in life, I don't want to fall into the trap that perfect becomes the enemy of good. The ACLU ain't perfect, but it's certainly doing good work that IMHO merits my continued support.
If the article is correct that they’re selling their services to parties in private civil suits, along with positions in the organization (for use by the individual for publicity), I think you should reconsider your support. The ACLU was once an effective advocate for free speech, but the fact that they're selling themselves to either side of a private dispute should be a sign that the ACLU has changed.
edit: this is all premised on the idea that you were supporting them for their old 'free speech' mission, rather than the new 'values', which I now realize may have been in error.
Thanks for your thoughtful comment. As you sensed, I supported their old mission and parts of their new mission.
However, I agree that if they view their new mission to be "selling themselves" to one side or the other, that would indeed detract from my willingness to continue supporting them long-term.
I just can't imagine what conversations happened inside the organization, where they were willing to ghost write for Heard and sell off a position to her, then switch to taking money from the other side; all of this in a completely private dispute with no public interest on either side, other than visibility. This whole situation seems absurd to me.
Were they desperate for money? Or fans of Amber Heard? Or were they swept up in enthusiasm about a high-profile case of spousal abuse? I am not aware of the ACLU taking a general position on defamation suits between private parties in the past.
Eh. If they exchange one lawyer's time for $3.5 million in donations that will be used for all their other causes, that's actually a pretty good deal. (Or at least would be if Heard paid up, which she apparently didn't.)
I don't see a fundamental conflict between the ACLU's core beliefs and offering legal aid to a woman accusing her ex-husband of domestic violence. (Although I'll readily admit I don't see much reason for ACLU to get involved either.)
The default position on most articles, especially critical ones, should be that they have utterly failed to accurately grasp and convey the key issues. This seems to be a universal law not just of journalism, but of knowledge sharing in general, especially where controversy exists.
I believe the complaint here is actually more "The ACLU is no longer defending my political enemies".
The issue is not that the ACLU is taking on causes the author disagrees with. The issue is that the ACLU has switched away from "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it" thinking. And instead they are taking a few cases of "I disapprove of what you say and will therefore not defend you". Let alone the weird Heard case that seems to be "You give me money so I give you backing and legitimacy".
No, the frog doesn’t know it’s being boiled at all.
Being fully aware of an organization’s good and bad behaviors is the opposite of being unknowingly boiled. Even if one chooses to continue supporting the organization in spite of some disagreement.
The problem with this problem is that there isn't a better alternative.
There's a lot of people in this thread complaining about how the ACLU is ruined because they are no longer free speech absolutists.
That's not why I give, or ever gave them money. I give them money because they solve all sorts of other problems. If the biggest problem in your life is 'the far american right can't speak as loudly as it likes', that's certainly terrible, but it pales in comparison to the harm of all the other civil liberty violations that the ACLU tackles.
> If the biggest problem in your life is 'the far american right can't speak as loudly as it likes', that's certainly terrible, but it pales in comparison to the harm of all the other civil liberty violations that the ACLU tackles.
Speech is the most important non-violent right that we have, regardless of who is speaking or about what issue. Without Freedom of Speech, corporations or the government could simply censor the other liberties out of existence. You can't be a civil rights absolutist without being a free speech absolutist.
> Speech is the most important non-violent right that we have
Really? More important than the right to vote? Than the right not to be arbitrarily detained? Than the right to a fair trial?
I strongly believe in the importance of free speech when it comes to true statements or criticism of the government. But the idea that the right to spread deliberately false information or directly incite violence is not just a fundamental right, but the most important fundamental right? Honestly, I just don’t find the argument very compelling
Yes, the right to free speech is more important than those rights because it is what lets you say that the other rights have been violated. If you have the right to vote, but not the right to say that you were prevented from voting, you don't actually have the right to vote.
That doesn't explain why absolute free speech is necessary. If you are allowed expose violations of your voting rights, but not allowed to engage in hate speech... you still have the right to vote?
But part of it is also the broader context: There's a contingent on the far-right who complain about their speed being limited as they actively campaign for stripping minorities of civil rights. I interpret the post as indirectly suggesting that siding with those minority groups means you are less committed to civil rights (because the right-wing folks are the primary ones concerned about speech restrictions, while minorities are concerned about everything). Which quite frankly is an absurd conclusion
"hate speech" is whatever the current political climate deems to be unacceptable speech. Today it's hateful to be against homosexuality, tomorrow it's hateful to be against any other approved policy from your favorite political party.
I disagree. Never in my life has the best solution to anything been the extreme, instead it's always been balanced and nuanced solution that have ended being more optimal. I've observed this in science, physics, engineering, medicine, culinary, inter-social relations, business, in everything.
Based just on that, I already get a red flag when someone says that an extreme free speech position, such as free speech absolutists, is the best solution to have a liberal society with civil liberties.
In my experience, balanced and nuanced is always better, and you must always have provisions to handle special cases, there will always be special cases.
Free speech is very important, like you said, beyond violence, how else you going to influence and assert any improvement or changes to defend, retain or ask for more liberties?
But speech can remain civil and respectful, it doesn't have to include slander, or threats to a person, insults, ridicule, raised voices, talking over people, etc.
And then you have the conflict with other liberties. Yes governement shouldn't be able to restrict anyone's speech, no matter what. But between themselves, citizens should be allowed recourse to slander for example. They should have ways to protect their reputation when it is being harmed by someone intending to harm it through misinformation, lies, and false accusations, and that would require the government to intervene and uphold someone's right to their reputation.
Also, we should be allowed to create communities with code of conducts that include speech behavior. If you come to my house and start bad-mouthing my daughter, insulting her, and I kick you out, you shouldn't be able to sue me for violating your free speech rights. I should be allowed to control the code of conduct of others in my own home. Similarly on my website, in my comment section, or if I am a company running a social community space I too should be allowed to do so in order to protect my business. Robo-calls, spammers, calling me or leaving spam in my email, website, I should be allowed to block them, or have some service that auto-censors them, it shouldn't be that their creator can prevent me from blocking them because it infringes on their creator's right to free speech. Same for bot accounts and all that. So clearly I feel there needs to be special provisions for exceptions to the right to free speech, and when exactly it applies, to whom, about what, and how the speech itself is conducted and what the speech is actually saying, is it false accusations, slander, threats, spam, etc.
There are plenty of orgs that tackle portions of what the ACLU used to - enough that I’m sure with 3 or 4 donations one could replace the former ACLU donations one made.
For example, FIRE has done way more for campus free speech issues this last decade or two than the ACLU despite a considerably smaller budget. Between them, Institute for Justice, and EFF, I don’t miss my ACLU donations much.
I'm not sure why you're implying that FIRE "despises" speech; perhaps you see them as conservative. That said, here's are some recent situations in which FIRE has taken the side of what would be under the general progressive/liberal umbrella:
I'm not sure what you're suggesting. This is the comment:
> FIRE has done way more for campus free speech issues this last decade or two ...
> You mean conservative speech? Or has FIRE actually defended speech they despised, like the ACLU used to?
It seems to imply that FIRE has done way more for conservative campus free speech issues. I supplied examples of times when FIRE supported non-conservative campus free speech. I'm not quite clear how else to read that comment, but would love your take.
I’m not a conservative or right wing in any way. FIRE doesn’t turn away people based on their political views or the political content of their speech as far as I know; I would stop donating if that were the case.
Why the SPLC over the ACLU, if their missions largely overlap?
I give to both, FYI.
If you don't give a crap about all the social causes, and just care about alt-right speech, I agree, the ACLU is not the organization you should donate to! In that case, I also can't say I care very much for your vision of the problems in this country, but it's your opinion, everyone's free to have one.
I do care about alt-right speech. I care about leftist speech. I care about anarchist speech. I care about conspiracy weirdos speech. I care about religious nut job speech.
I think the point of the article and general consensus here is that their missions should not overlap as much as they do.
Or as the ACLU puts it, on why they defend abhorrent groups:
"The ACLU is frequently asked to explain its defense of certain people or groups — particularly controversial and unpopular entities such as the Ku Klux Klan, the Nation of Islam, and the National Socialist Party of America. We do not defend them because we agree with them. Rather we defend their right to free expression and free assembly.
Historically, the people whose opinions are the most controversial or extreme are the people whose rights are most often threatened. Once the government has the power to violate one person’s rights, it can use that power against everyone. We work to stop the erosion of civil liberties before it’s too late." https://www.aclu.org/about-aclu
Which is somewhat different than the SPLC:
"The SPLC is a catalyst for racial justice in the South and beyond, working in partnership with communities to dismantle white supremacy, strengthen intersectional movements, and advance the human rights of all people."https://www.splcenter.org/about
In Heard's case, the ACLU is creating an ambassador position and crafting the credentials for the ambassador they wish to hire (the op-ed). Knowing the level of deception they're engaging in - and not from a low-level employee but from their general counsel - how do you trust/verify any claims the ACLU makes?
What about the "poor and marginalized" students that were falsely accused and expelled from university over Title IX kangaroo courts?
> When the Trump administration proposed in 2018 a new regulatory scheme for schools to follow in Title IX campus-sexual-assault cases that offered more protections to students defending themselves against these allegations, the ACLU responded in an angry tweet thread: “It promotes an unfair process, inappropriately favoring the accused.”. (The following year, the ACLU declared its support for new Title IX regulations’ “fair process requirements for live hearings, cross-examination, [and] access to all the evidence,” but it has never taken down the tweets or walked them back.)
I had a friend working with one of their lawyers and she was amazing. I can't agree with an article that says to quit helping a group that is still fighting for civil liberties, even if I don't agree with their following cancel culture hook, line, and sinker. Maybe someday they'll go too far though I suppose.
Whether you think they are still fighting for civil liberties depends on what you think civil liberties are.
Recently they have been supporting the “civil liberty” of men such as Lia Thomas to compete on women’s sports teams. I don’t see that as a defense of anyone’s liberties, but rather as an attack against the liberties of female athletes, and of women in general. They are on the attack against women’s sex-based rights.
I’ve stopped supporting them.
I used to support them even though I was disappointed in their 2nd amendment stances, because their work on 1st, 4th, and 5th amendment issues was so valuable. But now they’ve turned into a misogynist organization, actively campaigning against civil liberties.
> They are on the attack against women’s sex-based rights.
One thing you'll find is a lot of people find this sentence very strange. Replace "sex-based rights" with "race-based rights" or any other trait passed on at birth and you'll find the ACLU's actions to be very consistent.
People claimed the ACLU was anti-white decades ago. I guess now that that argument isn't working, misogyny is the new claim.
Your claim that they’re misogynist is just outright bizarre. The idea of “sex based liberties” being something the American Civil Liberties Union is misogynist for not upholding is wild. It’s obvious why they wouldn’t based off their history and name.
Agreed. The ability to support a cause for the greater good, even if some of it makes you uncomfortable, is just a sign that you’re not totally brainwashed by one “camp” or another, imo. It’s a symptom of retaining individual thought while working toward collective progress. It would be far more troubling to be part of a movement that operates fully in lock—step.
This being the internet, I feel the need to attach a disclaimer that there are limits to this general rule, but I don’t think the ACLU is currently crossing them.
Sure. But I don't have the time (nor realistically the ability) to review each one and determine which one is as effective at the ACLU in that representation.
I consider myself socially liberal, am a non religious jew, and vote democrat.
I used to donate to the aclu monthly for ~2 years. The ACLU has absolutely lost its way. It should defend freedom of speech and the Bill of Rights regardless of the message its clients are attempting to spread. I donated to it specifically for that reason as I believe the Bill of Rights to be amongst the most perfect set of laws in existence. I stopped donating once the ACLU started openly choosing sides. Did not know about the Heard / Depp thing but if true that is absolutely outrageous and representative of an organization that is a shell of its former self.
I've been a relatively big ACLU donor, big enough to have been appointed an "Individual Giving Officer." I've met with some of their leadership.
They've begun taking positions against individual civil rights. They've always been anti-2nd amendment, which I can understand, but this has escalated to the point that I think they're often on the wrong side of 1a issues as well.
I won't donate to them anymore. I regret that I did in the past.
It’s a shame because society needs examples of institutions that represent values as important as free speech. If we want to move forward we have to tolerate nazi speeches as long as they obey the law.
When institutions like that disappear it’s a lot harder for individuals to keep up the fight.
The hard thing about defending Nazi's marching is that people have to understand that it sets a precedent for the Black Power movement to march or women's rights movements to march or pro-choice movements to march. If you let these horrible people's rights be stripped away, then when a new power sits in the driver's seat, those causes that you care about can be stripped away because of the short sighted, greedy view taken.
“I disagree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it”
The issue is, of course, the thorny problem of allowing illiberal speech. What would the above author say if someone told them: "I disagree with what you say, and I'll make it illegal to say and jail you for it in the future"
Are you, the original author, supposed to defend their right to threaten your freedoms with your own life?
From this paradox emerged the current debate over de-platforming and "free speech" because people are nervous that their liberties are at risk, and thus they shouldn't tolerate intolerance.
Personally I think it's tricky. We have many, many examples of nations where illiberal leaders abused their freedom of expression to gain power only to pull up that protection behind them and become a dictator while crushing dissent. We really only have a few counter-examples (namely the United States) where free speech absolutism has survived multiple regimes.
The model of free speech that is currently popular on the Right, namely freedom from public backlash as the result of open expression, is juvenile and not enumerated in the Bill of Rights. You have the right to say whatever you want from the perspective of the State, but you do not have the right to an audience or to escape the consequences of your speech. Nobody should ever be arrested for their political opinions, but this idea that the left has gone "woke" or mad by cancelling people they disagree with is simply their right as individuals. So long as the Government isn't making it illegal for you to appear on TV or have a cell phone provider (for example), there's no such thing as being cancelled by the government from a 1st amendment perspective.
On the left there's a bit more nuanced debate that basically pressures private institutions to cancel and de-platform actors that the left feels are attacking the foundation of their institutions. This is all above-board from a legal perspective, but can feel illiberal because it is largely mob-rule. Nuance is discarded and lives can be ruined by accusations that aren't researched in-depth before being blasted out into the world of social media. Here there also needs to be restraint, but again it's not like Verizon is cancelling someone's cell phone access because they had a bad tweet. It's ironically a very capitalist movement where the fear of affiliation hurting the economics of a business causes them to release a statement or "cancel" someone for their speech. Turns out being a racist isn't a great marketing tactic in our capitalist world.
In sum I think the danger to our democracy is still greater from actors who seek to use freedom of expression as a ladder to the top, and then kick away that ladder once in power. It's the biggest weakness of open democracies, and one that should be guarded against carefully. Thankfully a strong commitment and defense of the 1st Amendment from both parties should thwart strongman attempts. We need to make sure that political tradition stays alive.
Free speech is a social value to be upheld not just by the government but by the larger society and the people that comprise it.
Private companies have the legal right to deny their platform as they see fit, but it is illiberal and censorious to deny it on the basis of viewpoint.
I think private companies can deplatform whomever they choose and be as "woke" as they choose to be. The only obligation a corporation has is to its stockholders, like it or not. They aren't public squares, much to the dismay of many of the people who cry foul.
The ACLU can also take this path, but I think it's truly a shame. And there is no such thing as "free speech absolutism", not even in the US. The litmus test (to my understanding - I'm not even close to a lawyer) is the call to action, where it would be legal to say, "I wish someone would burn this place this place down" as opposed to "Let's burn this place down" during a protest might be illegal (I may be wrong in this example - ask a real lawyer).
I also don't believe in a repercussion free society where you can post anything on social media and face no societal backlash. We are social creatures and dictate socially acceptable behavior as a group, at large. If you take a stance that goes against the grain, right or wrong, there will be social repercussions. People have to understand that before they post, and I hope they do. Sometimes standing up for what you believe is worth it. Sometimes making a crappy joke really isn't =)
>They've begun taking positions against individual civil rights... this has escalated to the point that I think they're often on the wrong side of 1a issues as well.
Isn't this because civil rights of one individual are often in conflict with the civil rights of another?
A common example is the baker tasked with making a wedding cake for a gay couple. Should the baker have the civil right to practice their religion which does not condone gay marriage? Or should the gay couple have the civil right to not be discriminated against for their sexuality? You can't take a position in this situation without being against someone's civil rights.
As the political environment in the US becomes more polarized, these conflicts become more common and the apolitical path becomes less tenable.
EDIT: I wasn't trying to start a debate about this specific court case. But the fact that simply mentioning it did spark that debate basically proves my point. There is no universal agreed upon line between the civil rights of one individual and the civil rights of another. When these conflicts arise, the ACLU's work will be inherently political because an apolitical compromise is rarely possible.
> Isn't this because civil rights of one individual are often in conflict with the civil rights of another?
Kind of, yes. I think where things go off the rails is where projection and extrapolation come into play.
Recall: one of the key defining cases of the ACLU was their defense of (actual) neo-nazis marching in Skokie in the 70s.
Contrast this with the ACLU in 2017 arguing that San Francisco should prevent an alt-right protest because of theorized violence (the protest went forward. No violence materialized). Volokh wrote a bit about it here: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/201...
There's a lot of inconsistency in the modern day ACLU. I think they've walked some of it back in the last few years, but from 2016-2020 I think they kind of lost their mind and I saw a lot of strong advocacy for these sort of projected societal norms -- don't let the bad people protest -- rather than the staunch defense of individual rights no matter who the individuals may be.
I want an ACLU that isn't polarized by politics. With a focus on individual rights.
You are leaving out some important context. The ACLU statement against those alt-right protests came in the immediate aftermath of a similar rally in Charlottesville that resulted in violence and death. People have a right to protest whatever their political viewpoint. However they don't have a right to incite violence. The ACLU no longer believed that these protests would be peaceful so they came out against them.
You can argue that the ACLU made the wrong decision because maybe they were misinformed about the nature of the protest and whether it would lead to violence. But the principle behind their decision seems clear and obvious. They will support peaceful free speech and not support speech which incites violence.
In particular, it's worth remembering the ACLU was backing the protestors at Charlottesville when it happened. They felt like they had blood on their hands.
For the record I am pro-gay marriage, but your example is BS. The baker in your example was willing to bake them a cake. They were never denied a cake. What the baker was not willing to do was bake them the exact cake that they wanted, claiming that fancier cakes were artistic expression and not the same as the standard priced on their menu cakes, and that forcing them to create an art piece cake they didn't want to make was the equivalent of compelled speech. It would be the equivalent of going to a restaurant and asking for something non-standard and off menu (say change a meal to vegan or gluten free), being denied that, and then claiming the restaurant violated your rights. Or going to an artist who sells t-shirts with their standard art and saying they denied me service when they wouldn't let me commission a custom piece that they didn't like to content of.
This discussion has been rehashed over and over again, but you're wrong on the facts of this case.
The owner claimed that he would bake any cake, but the evidence shows he refused before they discussed any styling or even what the cake was. He would sell them cupcakes or prebaked items, but wouldn't bake any cake, arguing it was compelled speech. The problem is that in the absence of asking for a cake which specifically mentions gay people, the owner's line of argumentation works equally well for refusing to cook a burger for black people at a diner. By being a business owner in a community, you give up certain civil liberties because you have increased power to infringe upon the civil rights of others.
Your analogies all fail because they consider situations where the customer asks the seller for a different, non-standard product. But that didn't happen; they were refused before any products were discussed.
> By being a business owner in a community, you give up certain civil liberties because you have increased power to infringe upon the civil rights of others.
Big [citation needed] here. The Constitution doesn’t say you give up your rights by being a business owner and participating in the economy.
Owning a business is not a right, though. Public commerce is pervasively regulated in all sorts of ways that might plausibly constitute "speech". The first amendment guarantees your right to make your opinions heard to all who want to listen. It doesn't say anything about making a buck doing it.
Owning a business is most definitely a right. One of the highest. It falls under 'life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness' and is explicitly a right given by the constitution. It is on the same as familial association which is also a right legally recognized as being granted by 'life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness'.
It comes from Locke, actually, and the third right enumerated was explicitly "property". But this is strawmanning anyway. I'm not saying the government has the right to seize property (that's covered quite explicitly under the fourth amendment). I'm saying that there is no right to operate a public business without regulation.
And sometimes regulation says "you can't police what your customers say with your product". Which is why I have a hard time taking some people seriously on this argument, which is so precisely analogous to the Twitter situation where they stand on the other side.
(FWIW: I think Masterpiece v. Colorado was absolutely correctly decided. Twitter doesn't have to put anything on their cakes that they don't want to say.)
Sorry, I'm a little confused by your post(I didn't follow this story originally and was, um, indisposed when it all happened so I don't know any of the larger social discussions that occured at the time other than a few newspaper articles). I'm was raised by hippies to be a diehard libertarian with a son who has had a lot of judgements and pain in his life because of who he is (and who he is is amazing so f all yall who judge him without knowing him). So this is kind of an existential crisis for me. I'm really really grateful to read all these thoughts.
I was absolutist about individual rights. But this discuss has me seeing that the absolutist view can allow people to be denied basic freedoms too (like how blacks were in the past). Each side is actually advocating for rights in this scenario, no matter which side I take. Before I would say the government can't limit rights, so tough luck to people who have theoretic constitutional rights but can't actually take advantage of those rights because society as a whole denies them to them over something arbitrary (race, sexual preference). Now I'm not sure. Our Government was created to ensure rights are protected from the tyranny of the majority as much as to protect from government tyranny (hence religious freedoms, freedom of speech, etc). This discussion has me seeing that protecting protected classes need a way that they can actually experience the rights given to them by the constitution and that is no different than the government enforcing freedom of religion.
I'm kind of at the point of seeing that past freedoms (to discriminate) resulted in non government imposed limiting of peoples (minorities, those with non-standard sexual preferences) basic freedoms (freedom to travel, be in public life, associate, have the same life experiences as others).
I think you are saying that businesses shouldn't have compelled speech but that the government can regulate business so that protected classes have their basic rights to enjoy/live life actually made available?
Sorry, not trying to be dense, just possibly adjusting some major life long beliefs.
Constitution doesn't matter when it's federal law. Title II of the Civil Rights Act of 1964:
> Outlawed discrimination based on race, color, religion, or national origin in hotels, motels, restaurants, theaters, and all other public accommodations engaged in interstate commerce; exempted private clubs without defining the term "private".
Then cite where the constitution explicitly protects discrimination against protected classes.
The problem citing the constitution here is it's an argument from ignorance. You can't ignore federal laws just because the constitution doesn't say anything about them.
> Constitution doesn't matter when it's federal law. Title II of the Civil Rights Act of 1964
> The US constitution overrides other US laws, not the other way around.
> Then cite where the constitution explicitly protects discrimination against protected classes.
That reply was not about protected classes, per se. Please don't strawman off constructive criticism. Acknowledge you made a bad assertion or ignore it as irrelevant to your point.
- Asking where the constitution talks about protected classes is a loaded question, because it's protected by federal law.
- Stating the constitution overrides federal law is an argument from ignorance, because the constitution doesn't say anything about discrimination against protected classes to override it with.
Selectively ignoring the context of this conversation (i.e. "it's not about that per SE") to make my comment look like an unrelated straw man is cherry picking.
The problem with constitutionalists declaring freedom of association here is that the courts have repeatedly, undeniably upheld that the federal laws protecting civil rights are more important than the centuries old document (or, in a way, linked to the 14th amendment).
> Constitution doesn't matter when it's federal law. Title II of the Civil Rights Act of 1964
> The US constitution overrides other US laws, not the other way around.
> Stating the constitution overrides federal law is an argument from ignorance,
It is not an argument from ignorance. There was no argument about discrimination made. There was a reply (a correction) to point out a flaw in your argument. You are intentionally trying to pretend there was no error in your own argument by circling back to an orthogonal point. It was simply incorrect on its own to say "Constitution doesn't matter when it's federal law." I don't understand why you are bending over backwards, to defend something that doesn't matter to the points that matter to you, at all.
You have been striking out against people who are trying to help you have a stronger argument, by pointing out weakness. That's something worth thinking about in the future. GL with whatever.
The US Constitution guarantees freedom of association, i.e. the freedom not to associate, to discriminate on any basis you please. The CRA removes that right for a delimited number of protected classes but doesn’t remove it generally.
Can you point to something establishing what you say it true?
The specific situation you reference would seem to totally be a violation under my argument but taht doesn't invalidate my argument (especially since I did not mention a specific baker).
In the situation I presented would you grant that no rights are violated?
You claimed "the baker in your example was willing to bake them a cake. They were never denied a cake". That's 1) referencing a specific baker (the one GP mentioned with a definite article) and 2) a positive claim about that baker.
>In July 2012, Craig and Mullins visited Masterpiece, a bakery in Lakewood, Colorado, and requested that Phillips design and create a cake to celebrate their same-sex wedding. Phillips declined, telling them that he does not create wedding cakes for same-sex weddings because of his religious beliefs, but advising Craig and Mullins that he would be happy to make and sell them any other baked goods. Craig and Mullins promptly left Masterpiece without discussing with Phillips any details of their wedding cake.
>The parties did not dispute any material facts. Masterpiece and Phillips admitted that the bakery is a place of public accommodation and that they refused to sell Craig and Mullins a cake because of their intent to engage in a same-sex marriage ceremony.
The distinction Masterpiece argued was that they were discriminating against Craig and Mullins on the basis of gay marriage, not on the basis of being gay. See e.g. Elane Photography v Willock for why this argument doesn't work.
Even taking that line on face value (although I would argue that the rest of the quotes portray a different story), the distinction between "standard service" and "custom work" is nigh-useless when divorced from the content of the custom service, which weren't discussed ("Craig and Mullins promptly left Masterpiece without discussing with Phillips any details of their wedding cake."). If a diner said "we'll make you a hamburger, but we won't make one without onions", and said that only because of a customer's race, that would be transparent discrimination.
In other words, you can refuse custom work that goes against your principles, but you can't refuse custom work to someone that goes against your principles. And in the Masterpiece case, the content of the custom work wasn't discussed.
Thank you for your persistence. I know it probably seems obvious to you but this helps my thinking. You can refuse work that goes against your principles, but you can't refuse custom work to someone that goes against your principles. I still think it takes agency away from artists in a way I am not comfortable with but because people suck it is probably a needed tradeoff or else people will couch unfair behaviors as artistic discretion.
Not the place and way off in the weeds, but I wonder how this plays out with a wedding photographer, who is required to be at the event that they might be against.
Frig, I wish there was a different example I'm really not trying to defend the baker. I'm trying to understand expanded (government) limits on freedom that we didn't have in the past that are paradoxically needed in order for people (gays, minorities) to have freedom (marriage, free association, ability to just do the same things I take for granted) that they didn't have in the past. Not trying to be a monster here. Just trying to understand things. Bringing it back to the article this is we need something like the ACLU as an organization to navigated these things in a way trusted by people on all sides of the political aisle.
The Colorado Court of Appeals actually mentions a case involving a wedding photographer decided by the New Mexico Supreme Court, Elane Photography LLC v. Willock.
NM SCOTUS decided even more strongly, arguing that the New Mexico Human Rights Act, "prohibits public accommodations from making any distinction in the services they offer to customers on the basis of protected classifications. The NMHRA does not permit businesses to offer a limited menu of goods or services to customers on the basis of a status that fits within one of the protected categories." (I'm Quoting Lexis, not the ruling)
I'm not sure I agree with this ruling, but it's unclear whether it would have been decided the same way if the Court had interpreted Elane Photography's services as an artistic work rather than a utilitarian service. NM SCOTUS had a few arguments, but basically it decided that anti-discriminatino laws aren't compelled speech because Elane Photography could just decide not to be a company performing a service:
>However, unlike the laws at issue in Wooley and Barnette, the NMHRA does not require Elane Photography to recite or display any message. It does not even require Elane Photography to take photographs. The NMHRA only mandates that if Elane Photography operates a business as a public accommodation, it cannot discriminate against potential clients based on their sexual orientation.
>The Barnette Court noted that the dissenting students’ choice not to salute the flag “[did] not bring them into collision with rights asserted by any other individual.” 319 U.S. at 630. That is not the case here, where Elane Photography’s asserted right not to serve same-sex couples directly conflicts with Willock’s right under Section 28-1-7(F) of the NMHRA to obtain goods and services from a public accommodation without discrimination on the basis of her sexual orientation.
>The same situation is true in the instant case. Like the law in Rumsfeld, the NMHRA
does not require any affirmation of belief by regulated public accommodations; instead, it requires businesses that offer services to the public at large to provide those services without regard for race, sex, sexual orientation, or other protected classifications. Section 28-1-7(F). The fact that these services may involve speech or other expressive services does not render the NMHRA unconstitutional. See Rumsfeld, 547 U.S. at 62 (“The compelled speech to which the law schools point is plainly incidental to the [law’s] regulation of conduct, and it has never been deemed an abridgment of freedom of speech or press to make a course of conduct illegal merely because the conduct was in part initiated, evidenced, or carried out. Dale also was decided on freedom of association grounds. Id. at 644. Elane Photography has not argued that its right of expressive association was violated. by means of language, either spoken, written, or printed.” (internal quotation marks and citation omitted)). Elane Photography is compelled to take photographs of same-sex weddings only to the extent that it would provide the same services to a heterosexual couple. See id. at 62 (speech assisting military recruiters was “only ‘compelled’ if, and to the extent, the school provide[d] such speech for other recruiters”).
To get back to the root of the issue, the Civil Rights Commission's decision was only reversed because the majority believed they had demonstrated hostility towards Philips's religious beliefs. The majority actually affirmed the constitutionality of the statute he was originally sued under, and the general constitutionality of anti-discrimination laws that protect gay people. Justice Kennedy explicitly said that the First Amendment does not protect a right to discriminate against protected classes under public accomodations law.
That is a huge misrepresentation of the facts of the case. Of course he refused before they discussed any styling: the same sex couple wanted a wedding cake. It didn’t matter what styling it had, making any such custom cake for them would be an implicit endorsement of their behavior, which was contrary to his deeply held religious beliefs.
> It would be the equivalent of going to a restaurant and asking for something non-standard and off menu (say change a meal to vegan or gluten free), being denied that, and then claiming the restaurant violated your rights.
It would be the equivalent of going to a restaurant and asking for something non-standard and off menu (say change a meal to vegan or gluten free), being denied that, noting that they seem only seem to be denying black patrons off menu orders, and then claiming the restaurant violated your rights.
And? Ethnic restaurants do this all the time with same ethnicity patrons and not me as a white guy. Shoot, they often even have a seperate menu for the right ethnic group that I never even get to see.
I’ve been to restaurants like this, like one where The husband and wife owners were Vietnamese and Cambodian, and the wife used to cook Cambodian dishes for people that wanted it, and had a Cambodian menu.
It wasn’t anything sinister. It just wasn’t something they advertised but found it to be a novel additional income.
It was a Vietnamese restaurant cuz people seek that cuisine out more than Khmer food.
But if even I asked for the Khmer menu they’d hand it to me, even though I’m a brown clearly Indian dude (who grew up with a few Cambodian friends)
They sure do deny it, it's happened to me may times. Or they allow it once or twice, but then later on they told me I can't keep ordering it because it's too much work and not on the normal menu.
I'm not saying it's sinister. Personally, I think it's reasonable. You have a standard business that you provide. And maybe those recipes are more generic to appeal to a larger customer base, but when someone from the home country comes in wanting the taste of home, you make them that special because you want to out of hospitality, and separate from your standard business. Is that illegal? Should you have to make that for everyone?
Some places will accommodate you, but some won't. Maybe because they only make a limited amount of those items, or because they are more labour intensive, or because they include more expensive exotically sourced ingredients and aren't a westernized recipe, or as happened with an ex-girlfriend, because it's a pretty acquired taste, and you should believe them when they say you aren't going to like that, they aren't just being hipstery.
As long as they provide me and everyone else their standard service, I think it's legitimate. But under what is being talked about here it would be considered an illegal racist practice.
Wow, keep voting me down and ignore that this is a real world example that happens all the time. Making accommodations for off menu items at ethnic restaurants is often determined by race but it isn't being done out of racism.
>What the baker was not willing to do was bake them the exact cake that they wanted, claiming that fancier cakes were artistic expression and not the same as the standard priced on their menu cakes, and that forcing them to create an art piece cake they didn't want to make was the equivalent of compelled speech
This is just semantics of a legal argument. It is not some universal truth that ordering off menu puts any additional ethical strain on someone. If the baker would make those customizations for a straight couple and not a gay couple then the civil rights of the gay couple are being infringed.
Come on man, if I list services, and am willing to provide you those services, how did I deny you service? If I am not willing to go above and beyond to make you special creative accommodations that is not a violation of your rights.
If my religion does not allow me to do drugs, and you want me to cover a cake with marijuana flowers instead of the standard roses, I am required to do that? Am I denying you service when I say I will sell you a cake with standard flowers but I'm not spending 16 hours custom making marijuana icing flowers? Putting the standard icing on a cake is a service and should not be denied, but 16 hours making something custom is art and I should have a choice if I want to put that creative energy into what you are asking for.
Service was not denied, commissioning a custom work of artistry was. No rights were infringed.
You're conflating discrimination on the basis of the product being created vs on the basis of whom the product is being sold to.
The cake being commissioned was not materially different from any of the other cakes the baker made. What was materially different was who he was selling it to.
I am a computer geek and suck at words, but I thought that is what I said. If you provide a standard service, you can't deny that service to people. If you have something different, say a wedding cake that takes tens of hours and is a one off custom work of art, that is different.
I do custom software development. What is the line for what work I am compelled to take on versus what projects I can choose not to do? Would I be required to take on making a grindr clone if my only objections was religious?
You don't have to take bad faith arguments at face value.
When the baker says that his wedding cakes are a custom work of art tailored to each client, he's bullshitting you. He simply wants to discriminate against gay people. It really is that simple. There is no material difference between drawing flowers on a cake for a gay wedding and drawing flowers on a cake for a straight wedding, the same as there being no material difference between drawing flowers on a cake for an interracial wedding and a non-interracial wedding. When people make up false pretenses to justify their discrimination, your job as a rational human being is to identify it as such, not be a sucker.
I absolutely guarantee that if a straight couple had came in, commissioned a regular wedding cake, and then once the cake was done said "Oops we're not gonna buy it, can you sell it to our gay friends' wedding instead?", the baker would not have sold them the cake at that point, because again, it's about who he's selling it to, not what he's making.
Dude, have you bought a wedding cake? Mine was $2500. WTF? We had a dedicated time slot where we had our own private cake tasting to determine what cake we wanted and they establish a relationship with you and understanding of what you want and spend days making our cake. I don't see how that isn't a work of passion tailored to an individual's request. I don't think you understand the process and are assuming it's something it's not.
Nice use of a lot of derogatory comments though. That convinces me, I mean I don't want to be a sucker or a non-rational human being. You know people can have a different opinion and you don't have to degrade or otherize them. I'd rather keep my too much good faith in people's arguments that take on your toxicity.
If he refused in your hypothetical situation then yes, that would be discrimination 100%. I don't think your hypothetical is what happened though.
Who cares how long the cake took. I’m a programmer. Most projects take far longer than a cake takes. Maybe you don’t believe coding is partially an art form, but I do. I can’t imagine discriminating against people would make sense as a programmer just because projects usually take dozens upon dozens of hours.
—-
By deciding bad faith people aren’t bad faith, you’re effectively, screwing over the victims of discrimination. Which effectively “degrade or otherize them”.
“I'd rather keep my too much good faith in people's arguments that take on your toxicity.”
What does this mean?
These are the exact sort of stuff that people say to defend bigoted grifters on Joe Rohan’s podcast like Ben Shapiro. Something like “Rogan says Shapiro is a genuinely good dude. Why assume he is speaking in bad faith when he pushes everything his billionaire fracking backers believe and thinks gay or trans people are awful…but that’s just against his Jewish faith which he is not consistent on any way. Since he isn’t consistent in general”
Except one of the (standard) services of the bakery was "custom wedding cakes". And he didn't refuse to make some specific art that depicted homosexuality or whatever, he refused to make any custom wedding cake for a gay wedding. As in, they could have requested the exact same cake as a straight couple - let's say white, three tiers, pink icing - and he would have refused.
Just like if your 'service' is making meals to anyone who comes into your restaurant, you can't deny black customers. This seems like the same thing to me.
But it doesn't seem like the same to me. If he refused to sell a cake out of the display, it's an obvious violation. If he refused to take an order for a wedding cake, obvious violation. It looks like to me he refused to meet for a consultation on making a custom cake, which is something different. Maybe I am convoluting the process I went through with something different.
When I got married we could either fill out an order for a cake, and say we wanted white frosting, white cake with raspberry, to serve 200 people, etc by filling out their standard wedding cake form. Or, we could do a custom cake, where we had our own individual tasting of cakes and talked with the person about the details of what we wanted and design the details of the cake. The second option was not their standard service nor a standard cake, the first was. The first can not be denied, the second can (though your still a shitty person/business if you do). It's no different than an artist with a gallery. Anyone can buy their paintings, but anyone can't commission a piece. The artist has, not regency, I can't think of the word, but they have a say on who they take commissions from.
The point is this is why we need the ACLU. Someone who is willing to take the other side in uncomfortable/ugly discussions, so that we keep our rights. It is easy to give up rights. It's hard to get them back. I'm super uncomfortable with this discussion because I don't agree with the baker or what he did. But I think we need to be willing discuss infringements on rights, even when we agree with them.
It certainly is an uncomfortable discussion, although that often means it's an important one. I suppose I'd question whether the ACLU (or whoever) should push for the rights of the baker or the couple, since they seem to be at odds. Generally I think people have a right to run their business how they want, but also that people have a right to be free from discrimination based on their sexuality/race/gender/etc. I also don't agree with the baker, but I think I'd be uncomfortable with the state forcing him to create specific art.
I do see a distinction between denying a particular commision and denying someone even the option to request a commision though. If he refused to make a cake that said 'Jesus loves gay marriage' I probably think that should be allowed. But refusing to make any custom cake at all for a gay couple seems much different.
And comment is why we need the ACLU in it's old form.
Dude, do you not see no one is arguing for being pieces of crap, but that rights can easily be curtailed long term from an initial starting point of everyone agreeing we shouldn't be pieces of crap. You know, the saying 'the road to hell is paved with good intentions'.
No crap. Which is why we are discussing the boundaries of rights in the context of an organization that's purpose is to ensure that those boundaries don't get pushed to the point of infringing on other rights in either direction. In a free society we need someone willing to stand up for the unpopular side. I support gay marriage. I feel like a piece of crap in this discussion because the person I am defending disgusts me and is garbage. But I feel like there is a larger discussion that should be had.
If political speech is banned in the 6 months before an election do I have free speech?
If I am forced to do work I don't want when I am self employed and affluent enough to choose, do do I have life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness?
Bringing religion into the gay cake thing is just gish galloping. No one should be forced to make any cake, no questions asked. (And no, WElL yUo CoulD jUST sTOp MaKInG ALL caKeS does not work, that's just force with a pretty bow on top.) But by bringing irrelevant religion into it, this gives the slavers - er, excuse me, the people who think it's okay to force other people to do things - the moral high ground of defending against a bunch of fundies. Just fucking stop trying to force other people to conform to your beliefs, even if those beliefs are as morally righteous as LGBT rights. Not making someone a cake is not violence.
No one has a "civil right" to discriminate in the United States. The default law in the United States is that discrimination is illegal. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 spells out protections against discrimination on the basis of race, religion, sex, or national origin.
Sexual orientation is not explicitly protected, but that does not mean you have a "civil right" to discriminate against gay people. You just... have a right to be an asshole.
> The Civil Rights Act of 1964 spells out protections against discrimination on the basis of race, religion, sex, or national origin.
Only in specific, enumerated contexts, such as employment and public accommodations.
You have a civil right to associate with whomever you want to, for whatever reason you want. You also have a Constitutional right to live according to your religion even when participating in the economy.
Public accomodations includes hotels, restaurants, and other institutions open to interstate commerce, per Title II.
The baker in question claimed they were an artist (separate from their bakery/restaurant public accomodation) and that they had the religious freedom to discriminate against sexual orientation based on their religion.
The court ruled that artists are not compelled to create for whomever they want, but did not say that people can discriminate against other protected classes based on their religious beliefs.
A bakery is generally not a restaurant under Title II, which defines that to mean an establishment “principally engaged in selling food for consumption on the premises.”
Only if it also has a restaurant that serves food primarily for eating on premises. The bakery in masterpiece cake shop might have incidentally had a restaurant, I don’t remember, but a wedding cake caterer ordinarily wouldn’t fall under the Civil Rights Act.
The ACLU site explicitly says that they don't recognize the 2A as an individual right.[0]
> Given the reference to "a well regulated Militia" and "the security of a free State," the ACLU has long taken the position that the Second Amendment protects a collective right rather than an individual right. For seven decades, the Supreme Court's 1939 decision in United States v. Miller was widely understood to have endorsed that view. This position is currently under review and is being updated by the ACLU National Board in light of the U.S. Supreme Court decision in D.C. v. Heller in 2008.
> In striking down Washington D.C.'s handgun ban by a 5-4 vote, the Supreme Court's decision in D.C. v. Heller held for the first time that the Second Amendment protects an individual's right to keep and bear arms, whether or not associated with a state militia. The ACLU disagrees with the Supreme Court's conclusion about the nature of the right protected by the Second Amendment.
I am sad about this set of facts about the ACLUs position. Longer than the ACLU has held its opinion, the Constitution and the writings of the Founders, both before and after its ratification, ascribe all of the rights in the Bill of Rights to individuals, including the 2nd Amendment specifically.
I have long been an ACLU member and donor. Despite my differences of opinion on some matters, I have been grateful that they have fought in the name of rights in a great many cases. I do wish they would take a broader view on their mandate on Civil Liberties, today and tomorrow.
Ironically, Hamilton was both wrong and right here. He was right that by enumerating rights in the BoR that it has empowered the government to view those rights as the only ones that are untouchable (and not even that.) However, he was wrong that the COTUS would stand on its own to protect individual rights due to its strict limiting of the government's ability to infringe those natural rights -- which it very much has done.
“The Constitution shall never be construed to prevent the people of the United States who are peaceable citizens from keeping their own arms.” – Samuel Adams, Massachusetts Ratifying Convention, 1788
Later in life, even:
“The Constitution of most of our states (and of the United States) assert that all power is inherent in the people; that they may exercise it by themselves; that it is their right and duty to be at all times armed.” – Thomas Jefferson, letter to John Cartwright, 5 June 1824
> Longer than the ACLU has held its opinion, the Constitution and the writings of the Founders, both before and after its ratification, ascribe all of the rights in the Bill of Rights to individuals, including the 2nd Amendment specifically.
This isn't even remotely true. The 10th Amendment, for example, explicitly concerns the rights of the states and not the individuals within them.
The phrase "well-regulated militia" should be a giveaway to you: individual human beings are singular, not plural, and the concept of a "well-regulated individual" doesn't make much sense either in the language of the framers. We've so profoundly distorted the original language as to effectively erase "militia" entirely[1].
No, if you read the antifederalist papers, you will find the text from which the bill of rights originated which more clearly show that it is an individual right.
> 7. That the people have a right to bear arms for the defence of themselves and their own state, or the United States, or for the purpose of killing game; and no law shall be passed for disarming the people of any of them, unless for crimes committed, or real danger of public injury from individuals;...
* The Address and Reasons of Dissent of the Minority of the Convention of Pennsylvania to their Constituents (December 18,1787)
Both the first and forth amendments also use the wording "the people" to refer to an individual right.
Moreover, the militia is and was intended to be every able bodied male.
> The militia of the United States consists of all able-bodied males at least 17 years of age and, except as provided in section 313 of title 32, under 45 years of age who are, or who have made a declaration of intention to become, citizens of the United States and of female citizens of the United States who are members of the National Guard.
> (b) The classes of the militia are—
> (1) the organized militia, which consists of the National Guard and the Naval Militia; and
> (2) the unorganized militia, which consists of the members of the militia who are not members of the National Guard or the Naval Militia.
There's a reason the anti-federalist papers are not part of our legal and cultural canon: the anti-federalists lost. Their sole victory (a good one!) in our Federal government is the Bill of Rights, and even that was Pyrrhic in nature.
> Both the first and forth amendments also use the wording "the people" to refer to an individual right.
That's because "people" is the plural of "person." "Militia," on the other hand, is not the plural of "person." It's a particular kind of institution, one that the 2A recognizes must be well-regulated. That's why 10 USC isn't the "gotcha" that armchair scholars think it is: the general body of the population is the opposite of a well-regulated militia, even if they are perfectly eligible for service in either a militia or the armed forces.
And note: I'm not claiming that "well-regulated" means that the framers meant "full of regulation." The framers were clasically educated: their understanding of the world "regulate" is the non-personal version of "moderation," meaning something closer to "striking a balance." There is nothing particularly balanced about either a complete ban on arms (you will note that no liberal democracy on Earth actually does this) or our current clown show of private militias showing up to protests strapped with assault rifles.
Sure they lost, but we can look to their writings for aid in our understanding of the meaning. I'm not saying that the quote is binding in itself.
> That's because "people" is the plural of "person." "Militia," on the other hand, is not the plural of "person."
This is a weird take. There is no indication or grammatical reason that "people" and "militia" are convertible.
If you read the various state versions of the 2A many are more clear than the federal that it applies to individuals. There is a state court case
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nunn_v._Georgia
Also the infamous Dread Scott decision mentions it:
> It would give to persons of the negro race, who were recognised as citizens in any one State of the Union, the right to enter every other State whenever they pleased, singly or in companies, without pass or passport, and without obstruction, to sojourn there as long as they pleased, to go where they pleased at every hour of the day or night without molestation, unless they committed some violation of law for which a white man would be punished; and it would give them the full liberty of speech in public and in private upon all subjects upon which its own citizens might speak; to hold public meetings upon political affairs, and to keep and carry arms wherever they went.
10 USC was not supposed to be a gotcha. It is showing that just as at the time of the founding, all citizens were expected to keep and bear arms, and thus also know how to use them so still does federal law reflect that.
Quick note: people are not protesting with "assault rifles" because one is defined as select fire and they are very expensive to acquire. Although I do wish that this was not the case.
And Heller, and non-binding opinions of it from the last 200 years.
If I interpret the first amendment to only apply to brown eyed people, and then defend that very odd interpretation, am I still a defender of the first amendment?
If you interpret the 4th amendment's "papers" to mean only tree-based sheets, not documents which might be electronic, are you really a defender of the 4th amendment?
> The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated…
That page neither argues that, nor supports the view that, "well-regulated" means well armed or well equipped.
The page argues that it means something like "running well", but the examples they give seem to me to fit better with a slightly different meaning that also matches the etymology of the word (in Latin a regula is a rule; it comes from the word meaning to rule or govern). I think "well-regulated" means some combination of: well organized, well governed, well adjusted, well controlled.
In the Second Amendment it may or may not have specifically the sense of "well organized/governed/adjusted/controlled by the nation's government". But it's definitely not just talking about a militia that has enough weapons, or a militia that is good at shooting the people it wants to shoot; a well-regulated militia is one that is well organized and that makes good choices about who to shoot and why.
(It also seems clear to me that "well-regulated" is not there to be any part of the point of the Second Amendment. I think it's mentioned in passing, possibly exactly to reassure people who might otherwise worry that the 2A is trying to set things up so that armed mobs terrorize everyone. "For a free state to remain secure, it needs a militia -- yes, yes, of course it has to be a well regulated one -- and so the people must be able to have weapons.")
> It also seems clear to me that "well-regulated" is not there to be any part of the point of the Second Amendment.
That's how I read it as well. In fact, I consider the whole first part of 2A ("A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State,") as more of a quick justification that has no legal bearing on the actual right that follows ("the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.")
So, essentially, "A well regulated Militia being necessary to the security of a free State [begets that] the right of the people to keep and bear Arms shall not be infringed."
> It also seems clear to me that "well-regulated" is not there to be any part of the point of the Second Amendment.
Well, it's critical to the point in that a working militia can serve a purpose, and a broken militia can't.
Contemporary documents make the point of the Second Amendment very explicit - its purpose is to prevent the United States from maintaining a standing army. But that's not what it does or what it claims to do; that's just the reason it exists.
> Contemporary documents make the point of the Second Amendment very explicit - its purpose is to prevent the United States from maintaining a standing army.
It's worth noting here that this is frequently cited and correct, but misses a critical point: this was before permanent paramilitary police forces, and one of the main reasons for fearing the establishment of a standing army is that this armed force with a distinct and insular culture from the citizenry would inevitably be used for internal security as well as against external enemies; the fear of standing armies is perhaps most accurately understood as a fear of permanent, insular domestic security services extending so far as to fearing permanent defense forces that could be turned to that purpose.
I mean, you don't have to tell me. I'm on the record stating that the police are, by all definitions that do not refer to the actual word "police", a military body. Calling a soldier an "officer" doesn't mean he's not a soldier.
> not there to be any part of the point of the Second Amendment
Given how few words the Constitution uses to describe things, I have to assume there is a point of some kind to every word in the document. We've chosen to interpret all of these words in 2A to be irrelevant, but if the writers of the document intended that, why did they put them there to begin with?
> The right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed; a well armed and well regulated militia being the best security of a free country: but no person religiously scrupulous of bearing arms shall be compelled to render military service in person.
Then, the next time it appeared, it was reworded as
> A well regulated militia, composed of the body of the people, being the best security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed; but no person religiously scrupulous shall be compelled to bear arms.
Before being whittled down to nix religious exemption and leave ambiguous who runs the militia
> A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the People to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.
Judging from the Congressional record nobody focused on the fact that the militia clause got flipped between meetings, so take from that what you will.
The thing that no one seems to remember about the 2A is that it was meant to establish a militia as opposed to a standing army, which was seen as an inherent threat to liberty. Obviously opinions on that subject have changed over the years, particularly after the militia let DC burn.
That does seem like a justifiable interpretation, and I'm inclined to agree. They mentioned militia for a reason. And it makes sense -- if the point of arming the citizenry is as a check on federal tyranny, then a militia is how it will have to happen. The idea that the 2A is about self-defense seems a very recent interpretation.
> 7. That the people have a right to bear arms for the defence of themselves and their own state, or the United States, or for the purpose of killing game; and no law shall be passed for disarming the people of any of them, unless for crimes committed, or real danger of public injury from individuals;...
* The Address and Reasons of Dissent of the Minority of the Convention of Pennsylvania to their Constituents (December 18,1787)
I don't think it's actually just arms and equipment. It means 'well-ordered.' It's the ability to call up organize and elect leadership from the people at need, among many other things.
For example, Article I Section 8 provides Congress the power
"To make Rules for the Government and Regulation of the land and naval Forces;"
It's in a similar manner that the 2nd should treat 'regulated' militias.
More like 'appropriately armed' or 'properly equipped', no? "well-armed" and "well-equipped" imply a surfeit of arms and equipment, whereas well-regulated connotes balance or homeostasis
Remarkable. The Founders totes protected the right to bear arms because of "racism," and not because they had just used the right to bear arms to found for themselves a new country free of the British monarchy. That makes total sense.
Collapsing the entire history of a nation into a narrative about a minority within the nation.
You forgot the part about it dating to the English bill of rights of 1689, a country that never had slavery on its shores and no non-whites to oppress.
American white southerners (and white northerners for that matter) were scared out of their minds about the possibility of a rebellion comparable to the Haitian Revolution, which was contemporaneous with (edit: to clarify, took place during the ratification of) the Bill of Rights. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haitian_Revolution
A guarantee that “well regulated” militias under local control would not be taken down by the federal government was certainly related to slavery. Maintaining wealthy landowners’ power and protecting from slave revolts or other uprisings of disempowered people was perhaps the #1 purpose of those local militias.
> American white southerners were scared out of their minds about the possibility of a rebellion comparable to the Haitian Revolution, which was contemporaneous with the Bill of Rights. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haitian_Revolution
Wasn't a war for independence in which widespread civilian firearm ownership played a part in winning also kind of contemporaneous with the Bill of Rights?
Played a part in winning? Yeah and I'm sure the tens of thousands of French troops, muskets, the entire French Navy, and a billion livres had something to do with it too. The militia fared so well in 1815, as well.
>American white southerners were scared out of their minds about the possibility of a rebellion comparable to the Haitian Revolution, which was contemporaneous with the Bill of Rights. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haitian_Revolution
That's not accurate. The Bill of Rights was passed by Congress two years prior to the Haitian Revolution.
Virginia voted the Bill of Rights into effect in November/December 1791. The Haitian Revolution was in August.
Both (a) worries about a national government changing the status of slavery against local landowners’ wishes and (b) worries about slave revolts were important for Virginian antifederalists. Maintaining a local militia was a hedge against both.
You are right that the ideas in the Bill of Rights come from earlier. The Virginia Declaration of Rights (1776) was the main source of the text of the 2nd amendment: “That a well regulated militia, composed of the body of the people, trained to arms, is the proper, natural, and safe defense of a free state; that standing armies, in time of peace, should be avoided as dangerous to liberty; and that in all cases the military should be under strict subordination to, and governed by, the civil power.”
Likewise, the Haitian Revolution was not the first slave revolt.
When Virginia finally ratified, they didn't modify the words. The words were the same from years earlier.
I read her book, by the way; I ended up also reading two others over the last week that I think were more compelling, and made her points in a more definitive way. She's totally right that, especially in the Carolinas, slave revolts were one fear that led people to want guns; in fact, a part of the revolution becoming so bloody there was due to that fear; the British governor took the powder away.
The people interpreting her (this was not something she said, at all) are not correct in thinking that this created the full foundation of antifederalist thought, but there was definitely an undercurrent of it in the deep south and to a lesser extent in Virginia.
Unfortunately, she misrepresented some things that appeared to support her conclusion, including the data around gun ownership in the 18th century. No fabrications, just not telling the whole picture. It's a problem endemic to pop history.
I'm still going through my old notes from the letters between the major political players from 1785-1790 and looking for references there so I'm not ready to concede the Henry stuff or that this is the reasoning behind the 2nd's inclusion.
It’s not “funny”. But to borrow your phrasing, it’s almost as though gun access, gun control, gun violence (and threats of violence), gun rights advocacy, and gun-related law enforcement were and continue to be racist, along with quite a lot of the rest of US policy and society. If you read (or even read about) the book you are lazily mischaracterizing you would see that the racism of gun control is discussed there at length.
There is indeed a consistent principle there – white supremacy (and more generally, rich straight white male supremacy). All of the rest – “public safety”, “free markets”, “job creation”, “economic growth”, “liberty”, “equality”, “patriotism”, “justice”, “respect for the law”, “meritocracy”, “republicanism”, “accountability”, “fiscal responsibility”, “originalism”, “family values”, “Christianity”, “truth”, etc. – are secondary, swappable, and dispensable smokescreens. At a glance these post-facto “principled” justifications seem contradictory and hypocritical, but that’s only for listeners who take any of them at face value.
Those who quick-change their claimed fundamental philosophical principles whenever convenient routinely turn around and (to use your term) smear anyone opposed to them.
> gun rights advocacy, and gun-related law enforcement were and continue to be racist, along with quite a lot of the rest of US policy and society… There is indeed a consistent principle there – white supremacy (and more generally, rich straight white male supremacy).
As a non-white immigrant to American, this uniquely American form of self flagellation is remarkable to me. Of all the things I find noteworthy about America and its history, I think of those other things you listed. The “racism” is among the least notable of characteristics. Historical slavery and dominance by the ethnic majority is what America shares with countries in Africa, Asia, and the Middle East—not what sets it apart!
Sometimes, though, I feel guilty for pushing back on this sort of thinking. This depredation of one’s own history and cultural heritage is incomprehensible to me as a foreigner, but maybe this zealous self loathing is actually what drives America’s distinctive capacity for self improvement.
Ah yes, we should all instead celebrate mass murder, slavery, mass incarceration, torture, etc. Hooray for the Battle of Wounded Knee!
While we are at it we should be cheering for children to be shot at school mass shootings, women to die in dangerous pregnancies they were forced to carry to term, innocents to rot in prison after crooked cops planted drugs on them, transgender teenagers to be lynched, and elderly homeless people to die on the street after being defrauded of their life savings.
Because caring about what happens to other people would be “self flagellation”, a deep waste if we could instead spend that attention on working for a big suburban McMansion packed with servants where we can train our own children to be entitled little shits, to prepare them to come out at the top of the coming social turmoil when global warming starts to really wreak havoc. Just don’t let those kids get near public school teachers, Tucker told me they are all pedophiles.
>But they recognize that the second amendment was written with racist intent
That's a pretty weird argument; I get the Patrick Henry thing with the Virginia Declaration of Rights but that doesn't even establish the 2nd amendment as we know it.
Hell, we actually have the reasoning here in Federalist 46:
"Besides the advantage of being armed, which the Americans possess over the people of almost every other nation, the existence subordinate governments to which the people are attached, and by which the militia officers are appointed, forms a barrier against the enterprizes of ambition, more insurmountable than any which a simple government of any form can admit of. Notwithstanding the military establishments in the several kingdoms of Europe, which are carried as far as the public resources will bear, the governments are afraid to trust the people with arms. "
I'll read her book to see what she thinks I suppose because she's a prominent historian and surely knows more than me but it still feels strange.
Sure, but did they write the first amendment with racist intent? It isn't as if everything a racist does is motivated by their racism, they aren't putting the kettle on to make some tea to really show those [insert racial minority here] what for, or buying new jeans to put [insert minority here] in there place. There aren't racists planting bushes in their garden specifically to be racist. They are just racist people planting bushes because they want bushes in their garden and the racism is entirely unrelated.
You're quoting the Nevada chapter of ACLU, now the parent organization. ACLU itself has consistently taken the position that the Second Amendment does not confer an individual right to own firearms.
1a issues have gotten a lot more complicated in recent years as people try to use 'free speech' as cover to rally for causes that marginalize, harass, and ultimately remove rights from others that the ACLU also wishes to protect.
They are basically experiencing a "Paradox of Tolerance" problem at an organizational level and still haven't really figured it out, and to be fair it's a tough problem.
If someone says they don't want millions of illegal immigrants pouring into the country, are they "rallying for causes that marginalize, harass, and remove rights from others?" If someone says they don't support gay marriage on religious grounds, are they engaging in hate speech?
What issue is free from being percieved as an attack on someone else?
Want to put price controls on rent? You're stampeding on property rights. You are marginalizing landlords!
Want to create a company and hire people you want to hire? You're discriminating against those you don't want to hire.
So on, and so forth. All contentious issues involve granting the advantage to one party over another. That's why they are incendiary.
If we don't have free speech, then people will go underground and you'll have subterranean political battles with a banal surface counterpart. In other words, public speech will become completely insincere and everyone will be holding a knife behind their back while they wear big gregarious smiles and say the nicest things.
This has already happened. Free speech has already been effectively eliminated by dumbing down the population. We cannot expect any nuanced public debate. All political speech is reduced to slogan after slogan, "hope and change," laws that have catchy names like "the Patriot act," etc.
It's practically already gone and the underground pressure that one would expect in such a dysfunctional political climate is already at an eruption point.
I don't know what free speech means when most people are too stupid to understand anything above grade school level.
For free speech to serve its function, certain conditions must be met. One such condition is that the population must be educated. If this condition is not satisfied, demagogues can easily abuse free speech by playing on people's weaknesses and lack of understanding. Another condition is that the people must be moral. If they are purely self-serving and not interested in pursuing truth and moral judgments, then free speech will just be used for vicious partisan wars.
We may still "have free speech," but the conditions that make it functional aren't being met.
It's like a marriage where one spouse is secretly unfaithful. Sure, they are "married," but the foundational condition of fidelity has been violated. It's a marriage in name only, an empty formalism.
We have free speech in name only. The conditions which allow free speech to be an effective regulatory mechanism of public tensions are unsatisfied--just like a wife or husband that cheats.
how is it any more complicated now than during skokie or brandenburg v. ohio? the aclu threaded the needle, successfully in my opinion, for decades and it is only in the trump era where they seem to have reneged on a maximal commitment to preserving civil liberties based on the 'who' of the case. i believe that change has been to the detriment of everyone.
I don't accept that this is new. This has always been the tension in this debate. It was the tension when they supported the Nazi's right to march in Skokie and it was the tension for 200-years-worth of arguing about it before that.
And it's a tension that the ACLU once took a clear (and extremely controversial) position on.
I hear the Paradox of Tolerance whipped out in discussions of how best to curb free speech before it harms others. I'm always genuinely curious about this, since it seems to me that this curb is already really well-defined: free speech does not imply free action inspired by that speech.
We already have laws against speech which causes imminent and material harm (e.g. libel laws, incitement of violence), and beyond that it seems like the Paradox of Tolerance doesn't actually apply here: nobody is advocating that we should tolerate the whole slippery slope of action, most advocates (myself included) carve out tolerance explicitly for speech alone.
Speech inspires action. There is a lot of legally allowed action that can still cause plenty of harm, and speech can stimulate that action.
I don't have a solution, but we can't pretend that speech isn't much more powerful in today's society - if it were the profession "social media influencer" would not exist.
IMO we have systems today (social networks) that make previously unspreadable speech pathological by creating a brain-virus-spreading environment (which is why things go viral, literally). Furthermore the environment favors evolution towards short, poorly thought out, poorly reviewed, "engaging" (and enraging) yellow-press like content.
I really think it's true that speech isn't much more powerful in today's society. We just don't remember how powerful it was in the past, because the problems caused by free speech are precisely the kinds of problems that the grand narrative of history tends to smooth out. We talk about pathological Internet speech causing political violence, for example - but do you know about the years-long bombing campaign by the Weather Underground in the 70s, or the time in 1954 when five congresspeople were shot on the floor of the House?
It is more powerful because it reaches more people - and furthermore it has exponential amplifiers (social networks) that encourage the most pathological kinds of it.
Pathological medical misinformation causing widespread damage certainly isn't a new phenomenon. Do you know about the lobotomy trend, where 40,000 Americans had their brains sliced apart for no good reason? (Have you seen the news clippings of deniers and snake oil ads for the Spanish Flu?)
Precisely, and this is genuinely scary. At the time, there was no sophisticated evolutionary environment that spreads "information" at lightning speed with a fitness function tuned for "engagement" and bad ideas still found ways to spread.
Nowadays a random tweet can (sometimes accidentally) mobilize a mob with pitchforks.
What I'm trying to say is that there was such an evolutionary environment. The 60s were full of deadly riots mobilized by some minor rumor - the Watts riot, for example, killed dozens of people in response to rumors of police misconduct in a drunk driving arrest. We just don't normally think about it this way, because when we look back at history the Watts riot is always interpreted as a facet of "race relations in the US, 1960-1970" rather than a standalone event.
Are you saying we had systems for spreading rummors that were just as efficient and sophisticated as today's, 40 years ago?
I'm not sure I have the right words to explain what kind of environment I mean. A platform such as twitter is a directed graph with billions of connections, all operating instantly. Tweeting is effortless, retweeting even more so. For many people this means sending something to thousands (sometimes millions) of others to see needs less than a couple of seconds of effort.
My claim is that the radical increase in efficiency and volume comes with radically new problems of scale.
I'm saying that it was easy to get a rumor seen by thousands of people if you wanted to (just tape a poster to a local utility pole), and the slightly lower startup costs in a social media world don't seem to be producing any radically new problems. This makes intuitive sense; any rumor exciting enough to provoke a real problem is gonna be exciting enough that people are willing to make flyers for it. There are certainly things I see on social media that I don't like, but none of them seem like they fundamentally couldn't have happened without social media.
Is that irony, though? Not that I downvoted the parent comment or anything, but inasmuch as downvoting is saying "I don't think your comment is of high quality", that's totally not inconsistent with free speech.
There's a difference between saying "I think XYZ is wrong" and saying "I don't think people should be able to say XYZ", and downvoting feels much more like the former.
Yeah, I'd prefer engagement instead. Thought on these things must be refined, and we should probably do it fast because the knee-jerk solution (censorship) is taking over really fast.
Its the same problem as the yellow press, and we'll probably arrive the same solution (people learning to completely ignore random bullshit they read on social media)
> I don't have a solution, but we can't pretend that speech isn't much more powerful in today's society
I am not actually convinced of this: speech is a lot more spreadable today, but there is also a lot more of it from a lot more angles. Just as a greater supply of currency drives price inflation, a greater supply of opinions drives speech inflation: your opinion can spread across the world in seconds, but people give far less of a damn than they used to.
> Furthermore the environment favors evolution towards short, poorly thought out, poorly reviewed, "engaging" (and enraging) yellow-press like content.
I can think of no period in history where this wasn't the case. Bread and circuses have been the go-to of those in power since the dawn of history.
Social media is an environment for spreading brain viruses. Here is how it works (with Twitter as an example, even without an algorithmic timeline):
A person tweets something. They have N followers
A subset of those followers may see the tweet (the equivalent to getting close to an infected person), and a further subset of those will click retweet (the equivalent to getting infected)
The proces then repeats with their follower's followers and so on (exponentially)
As such, Twitter is an environment where various ideas and their mutations are generated in a similar manner to viral organisms, and the "fittest" ones survive and spread exponentially. You could probably even calculate the R0 of a tweet (i.e. average number of retweets, quote tweets etc caused by a previous tweet)
All of this in turn means that the fitness function of the environment is incredibly important. Now, would you say Twitter as an environment encourages carefully checking information with other sources or for contradictions before clicking retweet? Or does it favor tweets that provoke a quick emotional reaction and a retweet within a couple of seconds of reading them?
Note: for specific harm, I posted an example of what social media can do to people (link is on threadreader https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1458881015917678594.html). I realize its long, but its really hard to explain the problem without seeing the effect in its entirety, especially given how we all (me included) hold free speech in high regard. (Yes I still do, but I now also understand how easily it can be abused to cause immeasurable harm in our new social media environments, and I think we must be at least aware of this)
Nah, you're just making things up and haven't provided any valid evidence to justify restrictions on free speech. Stupid people have always believed stupid things since long before social media. Remember the days of forwarded hoax email chains?
Words are not harmful, unless they're a specific and credible threat or incitement to violence. People claiming otherwise are defining down "harm" to such an extent as to make the term meaningless.
Once people start saying speech is violence I exit the conversation. Generally said by the most white bread privileged people because they've never experienced actual, real violence.
The ironic thing here is that the main reason you've seen that kind of claim is because social media tends to spread the most outrageous / novel / radical kinds of speech (in turn further causing radicalization among the recipients of it)
More discussion about vulnerability to cognitive biases, speech that abuses and exploits them. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jzzjbSkrLCQ and how social media design supports and reinforces this kind of speech over others.
To see what I mean by harm, read the threadreader link.
My best idea so far is similar to the solution we had for yellow press and tabloids. We learned to recognize and be aware of manipulative kinds of journalism. If we are all careful, more aware and more skeptical - especially on social media - there will be less opportunity to be duped.
But this is a very old game of indirectly signaling one's pretensions of superior human quality by implying that things others consider harmful are do not qualify as harms to themselves, and thus less important than the freedoms that they desire to have, some of which may inflict those harms on others.
Welcome to the Dungeon (c) 1986 Amjads (pvt) Ltd VIRUS_SHOE RECORD V9.0 Dedicated to the dynamic memories of millions of viruses who are no longer with us today - Thanks GOODNESS!!! BEWARE OF THE er..VIRUS : this program is catching program follows after these messages....$#@%$@!!
Yes. And you can prevent whoever you want from posting on your website. Legally, social media platforms are under no obligation to uphold free speech.
There are two discussions happening about this, though. One is simply a critique of the social media platforms, i.e. they may be legally entitled to do this, but is it actually the right way to behave? The second is a question regarding whether or not it should be legal. To be clear: it is legal. But given that these are functionally monopolistic entities, and they do operate as the de facto town square, should they be made to accommodate broader speech?
I think ISPs are supposedly regulated by net neutrality. But again, are you trying to talk to me about what is legal, or what should be legal, or what should be encouraged? Because those 3 aren't the same, and I'm a little bit annoyed at the fact that you seem to be leading me to your point an inch at a time with the implication that I haven't bothered to think this through.
Well, it still is an extremely easy concept. The examples you gave about businesses and magazines is that they can decide to not adhere to freedom of speech and they aren't obliged to do so legally. If they ban content the dislike they are not practicing freedom of speech. Still simple.
But you’re ignoring their own freedom of speech. If party A wants to voice something through party B, and party B does not want to express it, their freedoms of speech are in conflict. You cannot resolve this without one party not being allowed their freedom of speech.
And if the answer is it’s always in party B’s court, then you make the situation very difficult when it comes to social media and even direct messaging platforms between two private entities.
I have specifically said that they have no obligations. But if they silence an opinion because they don't like it they don't adhere to the principle of freedom of speech.
I don't think social media platforms have any legal obligation to allow anyone to state anything. It was a culture that had formed on the net in most places. I has no relation to the law or the US first amendment in any way. It was a foundational rule for the exchange of ideas and that always requires freedom of speech.
Also, almost every institution that want intellectual exchange has to adhere to the principle because it is a fundamental part of dialectic. Many educational institutions are falling short here lately, but at least most are improving again. But that is a completely different topic.
People that silence others without a justification are rightfully looked down upon in my personal opinion because they are not capable of intellectual exchange. And these ideas are also enshrined in human rights for a reason, although these are sadly also not really legally binding.
"people try to use 'free speech' as cover to rally for causes that marginalize, harass, and ultimately remove rights from others" Isn't that the point of the article? The ACLU used to promote free speech for Nazis. Now its political.
To be fair to the ACLU, the interpretation of the Second Amendment as granting an individual the right to have personal guns independent of a militia is a very recent interpretation (Heller, 2008). It's also had disastrous consequences. It would be like expecting the ACLU to soon advocate against women's bodily rights in a few years because a new Supreme Court decision changed the long-held interpretation of the Constitution.
It’s not a “recent interpretation.” There was a long period during the 20th century when a narrow view of the second amendment was favored, but in earlier eras it was regarded as a personal right. It was actually liberal scholars like Akhil Amar that did critical work laying the foundation for Heller: https://newrepublic.com/article/73718/second-thoughts
> The key subject-nouns were simply different ways of saying the same thing: at the Founding, the militia was the people and the people were the militia. Indeed, the earlier draft of the amendment linked the two clauses with linchpin language speaking of “a well regulated militia, composed of the body of the people.” The linchpin was later pulled out as clumsy and redundant. A modern translation of the amendment might thus be: “An armed and militarily trained citizenry being conducive to freedom, the right of the electorate to organize itself militarily shall not be infringed.”
Recall that the Constitution bars maintaining a standing army in peace time. The Framers obviously thought that the way to go was to round up a bunch of armed yokels (sorry, citizens) in times of war, instead of maintaining a permanent army. That is, in fact, what they did during the Revolutionary War.
There's contours to that--I kind of think that the Swiss system where you're required to have guns, but there are measures for keeping them secure in peace time would be Constitutional. But random individuals need to be able to own guns without belonging to a formal "militia" because random individuals are supposed to be the militia.
Correction: until 2008 in Heller, the Supreme Court had never clearly and definitively ruled the 2A is an individual right. It had previously referred to the 2A as an individual right in dicta (non binding opinions) that date back to the 19th century, and many courts and legislators back to the 19th century had also done so.
The interpretation of the 2A as a “collective” right associated with membership in the national guard/militia is largely a creation of 20th century lawyers.
That said, I personally believe the 2A as intended by the founders is likely no longer suited for the modern world and some amendment to limit its scope would be reasonable.
I personally believe the 2A as intended by the founders was to protect against an orwellian government which is why it’s more important now than ever. Most recent example: Ministry of Truth. Who’s truth? Well whoever happens to be in power. This is called the rule of man not the rule of law.
> I personally believe the 2A as intended by the founders was to protect against an orwellian government...
Orwellian is an anachronism here.
It was probably meant to protect to right of the people to engage in a violent revolution when required, and enacted by people who had literally done so to create the United States.
> It was probably meant to protect to right of the people to engage in a violent revolution when required, and enacted by people who had literally done so to create the United States.
This is how I learned 2A. More or less, no government can last forever and at some point governments will need to be overthrown and set anew. Sound familiar?
> We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.
They even provided some basic criteria for when might be a good time:
> Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.
I was taught that 2A was the tool that ensures that this section of the Declaration of Independence would still be relevant to their new government.
If you believe this, does the 2A give people individual rights to own tanks, missiles, nukes, chemical weapons?
If not, why? Where are the limits in the constitution on the types of arms a person can own?
This is especially relevant if the goal of the 2S is to be able to stand up to the US armed forces.
Or is it your view that the goal of the 2A is for a poorly armed mob to be able to rise up in collective suicide against better armed better trained government forces?
> Or is it your view that the goal of the 2A is for a poorly armed mob to be able to rise up in collective suicide against better armed better trained government forces?
You need to define the hypothetical 'sides' here a little better. Is this armed mob fighting for principles that many members of the 'government forces' agree with? Would this government force be willing to kill large numbers of their neighbors and fellow countrymen?
A surprisingly effective resistance can be made by an outnumbered/outgunned 'mob', assuming they have some basic weapons. Home field advantage and guerrilla warfare go pretty far. See: Vietnam, Afghanistan, Ukraine.
As a follow up - If Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Ukraine are related to the 2nd Amendment necessary rebellion theory, then the implication is that the insurgent weapons in those wars are covered by the 2A.
Very interesting.
A personal right to fully automatic weapons, SAMs, tanks, anti-tank, etc.
Yeah, I don't think so.
Militia is used 6 times in the Constitution and collected amendments. I tend to think that it means the same thing in the 2A as in the 5 places.
You and I actually believe the same thing, I just believe 2A is linked to early militias, and in the event that there were infighting in the US that early component would be needed again. I also believe 2A reinforces state power with respect to federal power, and balancing them is important.
You on the other hand are an egotistical ass with 220 karma and behavior to boot.
> If you believe this, does the 2A give people individual rights to own tanks, missiles, nukes, chemical weapons?
Yawn.
But I suppose you want an answer, so how about this: infantry weapons that a regular citizen can reasonably afford and practice with (i.e. shoot on a regular basis).
So military-style automatic rifles, machine guns, etc.
> If you believe this, does the 2A give people individual rights to own tanks, missiles, nukes, chemical weapons?
This question seems loaded, especially after how you started it with "if you believe this" when I already stated the foundational belief I have, but I'll take your question in good faith.
Citizens can already own rockets and missiles? Yes, they can, which is why there's private space companies. That has very little to do with 2A. As far as I'm aware an FFL (Federal Firearms License) would not give you access to chemical weapons. It's also not that hard for citizens to produce chemical weapons with household cleaners, but that also is beside the point.
2A, and pretty much anything below an FFL, is mainly the subject of my discussion. With an FFL a citizen can purchase pretty much any weapon, including a tank, or explosive.
> Where are the limits in the constitution on the types of arms a person can own?
Various states have attempted to circumvent the federal governments monopoly on this law, but I guess you could start to form some specific criteria by looking here: https://www.atf.gov/firearms/apply-license You'd have to cross these with state laws; some are very permissive, others not.
> This is especially relevant if the goal of the 2S is to be able to stand up to the US armed forces.
I mean, it's not that hard. The Taliban did it and they mostly had assault rifles, REX, grenades, and rockets (the anti-tank kind, not the artillery kind). I'll also address this in the next answer.
> Or is it your view that the goal of the 2A is for a poorly armed mob to be able to rise up in collective suicide against better armed better trained government forces?
There are several types of militias, two predominately in the US [2]. The first is a private militia [3]; to my knowledge in current day most of these are just extremists, but in a scenario that necessitated separating from the federal government I would assume people would start forming their own legitimate militias. How effective a militia would be would likely depend on their knowledge of tactics that the US military would employ. The second type is the state national guard [1]. State guards are trained by federal military but serve the states and are under the states command. National guard numbers, when fighting a federal power, would not be sufficient though. Supply lines would likely be disrupted and choked as well, so citizens and their weapons would be needed.
The short of it is no, I don't think it'll be just some randos running around fighting and causing an insurrection. It'd be coordinated state action alongside citizen militias if things came to that. To me, though, all these things help keep the government in check because the power of the federal government is not larger than the sum of collective state action.
Edit:
I also don't really appreciate the "fantasy" comment. I'm a U.S. citizen, I don't want any of that to happen. History shows that the influence of militias and participation was key in forming the US and was key throughout the politics of staying together as a country. Private citizens having access to weapons was key to early militias and you can't really separate the two at any point in history. For a more contiguous history: https://angrystaffofficer.com/2017/03/20/a-short-history-of-... (this does leave out that states actually have laws regulating private militias, though that's the only thing I could find wrong with it)
> It was probably meant to protect to right of the people to engage in a violent revolution when required, and enacted by people who had literally done so to create the United States.
If this was the actual interpretation being promulgated legally then there's all sorts of weird follow ups to it: i.e. any ruling or law which increases the level of security and protections of government institutions against some definition of an armed citizen militia would be against the spirit of the 2nd amendment because you're reducing the ability of the citizenry to engage in a successful violent insurrection.
This is a perfectly sensible precedent: if the Second Amendment is interpreted as an intent to allow armed revolution, then for some legal definition of a "just" revolution the arms of the citizenry must allow them to fight and win, and this could be reasonably interpreted therefore as "the government may implement no security measures which make it so safe it could not be overthrown".
> If this was the actual interpretation being promulgated legally then there's all sorts of weird follow ups to it...
Not really. You can only go places like that if you use an interpretive framework were words can be stretched past the breaking point and speculations piled one on top of the other to take you anywhere where you want to go. A lot of people think that's not a reasonable way to interpret the law, and they do have a point.
> This is a perfectly sensible precedent...
If that's "perfectly sensible precedent," cite the case that established it.
The entire concept of judicial review is built on this benchmark - "if this, then why not that?"
That it is not established is because the SC has definitely not interpreted the 2nd to mean "power to overthrow the government" - but it has mostly managed to do that by completely disregarding the first half of the 2nd's wording in favor of "citizens may own small arms" - which is oddly specific given the rest of the phrasing, but that was the conclusion they drew from Heller[1]
I'm responding to the claim that the "founders" intended it for armed insurrection: did they? Because the Court does not interpret it that way, and if it did then you do in fact have to answer questions about why any limits on owning hardware sufficient to overthrow the government are allowed.
A claim about Founder's intent in the constitution isn't some idle statement: the purpose and reason for the Supreme Court is to carry through interpretation of that the intent of the constitution for law of the land, otherwise why bother saying it? If we're going to ignore law and precedent then none of this matters.
> The entire concept of judicial review is built on this benchmark - "if this, then why not that?"
Even so, your interpretation had another fatal flaw: you weren't balancing any interests.
But in any case, it's still a nonsense straw man.
>>> This is a perfectly sensible precedent...
>> If that's "perfectly sensible precedent," cite the case that established it.
> That it is not established is because...
Then it's not a precedent.
> I'm responding to the claim that the "founders" intended it for armed insurrection: did they?
The founders literally committed armed insurrection, and IIRC it's pretty well documented that the understood the necessity of armed revolution in certain circumstances. I believe there are even some direct quotes in this thread. I can also recall off the top one that spoke positively of a rebellion every 20 years:
> God forbid we should ever be 20. years without such a rebellion.... And what country can preserve it’s liberties if their rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance? Let them take arms.
I was very clearly referring to the fact that if the 2nd amendment were to be taken as an intent to allow citizens to revolt against the government then it is not clear on what grounds the seemingly absurd corollaries of that, as a legal position, would be dismissed. Which you haven't addressed at all except to say "but it's not actually precedent yet!"
It is not - because the Supreme Court has very obviously in Heller not interpreted it that way. So I don't know of what value anyone can argue this was the intent because the body defining the law of the land and the interpretation of the constitution does not agree with you.
But even if we grant the SC is not the be all and end all, you still haven't managed to actually address why that position would be absurd? What use are firearms against a Federal government which, to take an extreme example, gives itself Dune-style shields for all officers and personnel, but not civilians. Why are limits on arms, actually suitable to overthrow the government - so say, maybe a whole lot of Javelin anti-tank missiles as they are currently proving useful - not within the remit of the 2nd?
How so? It's not a word that would have been known to the founders, but neither is "2A". It makes no sense to claim that when we talk about the founders, we can't legitimately use our own language but must instead use theirs.
> How so? It's not a word that would have been known to the founders, but neither is "2A".
"Orwellian" is specifically modern ideological term with a lot of specifically modern connotations (e.g. a technological surveillance state) that are misleading when talking about people from the 18th century. My sense is it's a whole lot narrower than what the founders had in mind.
On the other hand, the Second Amendment was literally written by one of the founders.
> It makes no sense to claim that when we talk about the founders, we can't legitimately use our own language but must instead use theirs.
Use anachronisms all you want, no one's stopping you. It just that by leaning on them, you're likely spout nonsense and either confuse yourself or confuse others.
Also, there's important differences between "modern language" and "anachronism."
One person's "Orwellian" is another's "Law and order".
Civil asset forfeiture is pretty Orwellian, IMO, not to mention a direct violation of your Fourth Amendment rights, yet I haven't heard of anybody using their Second Amendment right to protect themselves from it.
Generally speaking, the word for people who try using their Second Amendment rights to protect their Fourth Amendment right against civil asset forfeiture is "corpse".
I thought my implication was fairly clear, but to be explicit: If you brandish guns against police who are attempting to seize your property through civil asset forfeiture, they will shoot you, and most likely kill you.
The founders idealized the Roman Republic and sought to create a system where the central government would never have the power to seize control as Julius Caesar did.
But I don’t think turning out to the streets with AR-15s is an appropriate response to the government forming an ineffective propaganda office (ministry of truth). We’ve seen the awful cost of civil war both here at home in 1861-65 and recently in countries such as Syria and Libya. Violent revolution should be the absolute last resort especially in a world where total war is practiced and not the relatively civilized and small-scale warfare of the American revolution or the 1688 English Revolution.
In practice, the US government has committed atrocities throughout history against citizens and the 2A did little to help (genocide of native Americans, discrimination against Germans in ww1, Japanese internment in ww2, Jim Crow and slavery, the civil war itself where armed citizens just joined whatever side they lived on, etc.)
> But I don’t think turning out to the streets with AR-15s is an appropriate response to the government forming an ineffective propaganda office (ministry of truth).
I don't think the founders envisioned that at all. Your rifle is for sitting behind your door and waiting for the tyrannical government to break down your door and realize that the first person to breech is probably going to die. It's a deterrent to ensure that law enforcement is willing to do the bidding of said corrupt government. Guns are not meant to be for menacing the public. They're for defending life and property. And yeah, property.
If "Disinformation Governance Board" bothers you more than "Department of Homeland Security" did, you may be responding to what "they" want you to more than you think you are.
I love how government is obviously incompetent, but only until something they do sounds conspiratorial.
> The interpretation of the 2A as a “collective” right associated with membership in the national guard/militia is largely a creation of 20th century lawyers.
This is Daughters of the Confederacy "states rights" levels of historical revisionism. The origins of the Second Amendment were rooted in quelling a potential slave uprising [1]:
> The Virginians were slave-owners. Jefferson had inherited 175 slaves and had purchased a few more. Henry ultimately had 76 slaves. Madison had dozens of slaves. Militia was necessary because from them, “slave patrols” were formed to keep order. Virginians also wanted to avoid what had happened during the Revolutionary War: slaves were invited to join the Continental Army and thereupon became free. Henry even feared that abolitionists would find a way to use the Constitution to manumit all slaves. “In this state,” Henry emphasized, “there are two hundred and thirty-six thousand blacks, and there are many in other states.” It, therefore, was of paramount importance that State rights to maintain militias unregulated by the federal government be included as an amendment, if Virginia were to ratify the Constitution.
> So the Second Amendment was born. Not to protect individual rights from encroachment, but to guarantee states the right to keep armed militia free from federal interference, in order to maintain control over black slaves. Not the noble motivation one might have hoped for. But the truth about the need for a state Militia and the intent of the Second Amendment.
“That it is the right of the subjects to petition the king, and all commitments and prosecutions for such petitioning are illegal;
That the raising or keeping a standing army within the kingdom in time of peace, unless it be with consent of Parliament, is against law;
That the subjects which are Protestants may have arms for their defence suitable to their conditions and as allowed by law;”
> So the Second Amendment was born. Not to protect individual rights from encroachment, but to guarantee states the right to keep armed militia free from federal interference, in order to maintain control over black slaves.
This is completely unable to explain why Free states in the north had a similar provision in their state constitutions recognizing the right to keep and bear arms. For example, was no need for slave patrols in Massachusetts, whose 1780 constitution contained this clause “The people have a right to keep and to bear arms for the common defence. And as, in time of peace, armies are dangerous to liberty, they ought not to be maintained without the consent of the legislature; and the military power shall always be held in an exact subordination to the civil authority, and be governed by it.”
True, but those who say the 2A is a “collective” right for the militia would not usually say that any male aged 17 to 45 should be able to purchase an AR-15 via their membership in the unorganized militia and Selective Service card.
The collective right concept attempts to turn the 2A right into the idea that Congress shouldn’t pass a law to take away weapons from its own soldiers and army, which makes very little sense.
> The collective right concept attempts to turn the 2A right into the idea that Congress shouldn’t pass a law to take away weapons from its own soldiers and army, which makes very little sense.
Very well said. The utter incoherence of the concept makes it clear that the interpretation is wrong. It's like interpreting the First Amendment as protecting Congress from preventing itself from assembling and not the people's right to protest it.
> To be fair to the ACLU, the interpretation of the Second Amendment as granting an individual the right to have personal guns independent of a militia is a very recent interpretation
I'm sure they've heard about it, though, so that's no defense. The question raised in that article is: should they be picking and choosing which rights they defend? The admirable thing about the ACLU was that they would always defend civil liberties, because the loss of any of those is worse in the long run than the distastefulness of supporting someone you may disagree with in the short run.
>...because the loss of any of those is worse in the long run than the distastefulness of supporting someone you may disagree with in the short run.
This argument doesn't hold water when we are talking about 2A though. Kids getting their heads blown off isn't the same as having an uncomfortable conversation with a Nazi.
Personally, I don't really care about gun rights. But I care very much about trying to deny the 2nd Amendment without a Constitutional Amendment. If that right can be cast aside as being outdated or inconvenient, what about our other rights?
Which one is next to be discarded? Free speech? (That's under constant assault today.)
Constitutional Rights were changed in 2008 when Heller became the law of the land, no Constitutional Amendment. We all lost our freedom from guns. Hundreds of thousands of Americans have died as a result. All on the whim of the court? All because a single kid with an AR-15 that he stole from his aunt was somehow envisioned by the founders of the US?
> the interpretation of the Second Amendment as granting an individual the right to have personal guns independent of a militia is a very recent interpretation
IIRC, in colonial America, the militia was understood as basically "all male citizens," and its members typically used personal weapons.
That makes the text and structure of the Second Amendment make a lot of sense: if a militia is necessary for security, and an armed populace is required for a militia, then to protect the militia you have to protect the right of the populace to be armed.
When you remove the immediate context of the sentence and squint real hard you can almost read a "well regulated militia" to mean a completely unregulated individual.
Considering the outlet, if the Atlantic thinks that the ACLU is too aligned with Democratic Party politics, it probably is. I don't even know how this got published unless there's some behind-the-scenes jostling going on to replace the leadership, staged internally or by whale donors.
When the ACLU rewrote a Ruth Bader Ginsburg quote ("The decision whether or not to bear a child is central to a [person's] life, to [their] well-being and dignity..."[1]), all I could think of was The Onion ("I've always believed that one [homosexual] really can make a difference."[2]).
RBG is being misquoted and misremembered a lot again in the past week or so. She publicly stated on many occasions that she thought Roe vs Wade was bad law. Now her name is being invoked to defend it.
Not for you, and not for anyone else engaged in such obvious sea lioning. Just Google it, or at least pretend to write a substantive comment before going, "Sauce? Sauce? Sauce?"
(And for anyone else doubtful of parent commenter's intentions: seriously, try googling it.)
Try this on for size, as abhorrent as you’ll initially find it: speech doesn’t matter. Marketing does. Ideas aren’t about debate. They’re about memetics.
Why ban speech when you have Fox News? Why worry about climate change when you can just… not ever talk about it.
When you lose free speech, there won't be any debate about losing the rest of your rights. You won't hear about any rights violations. You won't be able to talk when your rights are violated.
How many FB memes have you seen that say “annoy a liberal, turn off CNN”, or something similar? Why attack free speech when you can use marketing to convince people to censor themselves, and encourage others to do so?
There’s already no debate. Don’t need the power of the state when you have consent being manufactured every day by bad faith actors.
I suppose that's why the ACLU didn't want to get involved with the rights violations I reported a couple years ago. I suppose if i had $3.5M it could have been different.
It's funny in prison. So many guys come in thinking the ACLU is going to help them. The ACLU will not take on prison cases. You can try local chapters, but they don't even refer you to them. Check out this joke:
If you have been assaulted by an officer in prison, they want you to file a grievance through the prison process. Thanks for having people's backs ACLU. No reason people who has been assaulted by those in power in the system should fear reporting that assault to those people in power. So the ACLU doesn't see themselves as protecting Eighth amendment rights. But if you keep reading...
If you have religious discrimination, you should contact the ACLU.
Sexual abuse and torture in a prison? Trust the prison administrators, they will take care of resolving it. But if they violate your religion, oh man, that's when the high power ACLU lawyers are needed.
Vague memory is that the ACLU ran off into the organization disfunction weeds quite a few years ago, with the CEO and Board suing each other, and other fun.
But at least from a quick skim of their Wikipedia page, there's no sign of that being true.
Anyone else have a similar memory? Or "true story, but it actually was {name of some other organization here}"?
You might be thinking of the Southern Poverty Law Center -
"In 2019, founder Morris Dees was fired, which was followed by President Richard Cohen's resignation. An outside consultant, Tina Tchen, was brought in to review workplace practices, particularly relating to accusations of racial and sexual harassment. Margaret Huang, who was formerly the Chief Executive at Amnesty International USA, was named as president and CEO of the SPLC in early February 2020."
I mean the fact that they can run a false flag in order to incite hatred towards a major political party, get caught, and get away with it with zero consequences is just mind-blowing.
They're exercising their right to free speech (specifically free political expression, which is more or less the same thing under US law).
If you think that's a bad thing, you're arguing that there should be limits to it, which is counter to what seems to be the majority opinion of... well, the members the Lincoln Project oppose, judging by this thread.
I'm not just pointing this out to be smug, but because I genuinely believe a majority of the people on the right who claim to be free speech absolutists in this thread would agree with you upon reading your comment, because it's a reasonable concern to have. Almost no one is actually a free speech absolutist, when push comes to shove it usually comes down to an objection to which speech is being censored, and how often.
You could also interprete the downvotes as a community indication that your comment is lacking in content or insight, or is some other way insufficiently interesting.
When you start labeling non-violent political interest groups as "domestic terrorists" for the simple reason of "we disagree with them morally", you should lose all legitimacy.
yeah the guy who made them a big deal "ira glasser" basically chose some guy he had known for not that long as his successor. mostly because he was gay and latino. and that guy ended up not believing anything that the ACLU stood for and taking it to just be an arm of the democratic party. (Anthony d romero)
Not sure if directly relevant but they are focusing on DEI so this is across staff. That has led to some tension between the old guard (white supremacist / civil rights supporters depending on view) and new guard (equality / human rights focus).
They had bylaws historically which emphasized "wholly without political partisanship" as well, though I think that's probably long gone by now.
I don't think there were ever white supremacists at the ACLU. Who would that have been? I think DEI is a heavy mistake to pursue. I get the incentive but the method is lacking and everyone will lose.
Sorry, the view is more that traditional civil liberties reinforces white supremacist power structures (I think the ACLU actually has a page on this?). So that those in the ACLU perusing what were some of those "traditional" civil liberties things (free speech etc) were supporting white supremacy. The ACLU has moved away from that towards some of the speech = violence approach which then basically allows a violent response.
I continue to support the ACLU and I agree with the argument that even if it's lost its way on some things, its overall mission remains important, and it continues to do a lot of really great work.
However, if you feel you can't support the ACLU, there are a couple of related organizations you can and should support instead:
Would love to hear from people here who might know of others. My personal criteria would just be that they're genuinely non-partisan (no "the ACLU but for people I agree with), and that they fill a niche the ACLU doesn't already fill (though a more general "competitor" might be a good thing too).
The Rutherford Institute [0], which defended Brandon Raub against forced psychiatric "treatment" (imprisonment) after he posted naughty FaceBook messages [1], is the best civil liberties organization today.
John Whitehead hosts 10-minute podcasts about every other week. [2]
Wendy Kaminer has written WSJ articles and even a book, Worst Instincts, about the ACLU's illiberal decline. [3] [4] [5] [6]
The Institute for Justice - https://ij.org/ - a "libertarian" ACLU
I consider their core focus to be on issues that are universal and non-partisan like Free Speech, Police Abuse, Civil Forfeiture, while also veering into more partisan issues like Educational Choice. I haven't found any truly non-partisan organizations like you are asking for, but feel that the IJ fills in some gaps in cases that ACLU used to or should be focusing on, and the areas where I disagree with it "balances" out the areas where I disagree with the ACLU.
I realized that the ACLU had lost its way many years ago, and went looking for alternatives. The most direct alternative I could find at the time was the Bill of Rights Defense Committee, which has since merged with another group to become Defending Rights and Dissent.
While their tight focus on individual rights might appeal to those who identify as libertarians, I personally favor organizations that acknowledge the existence of threats to liberty other than government, and that consequently balance their concern for individual/corporate rights with concern for things like justice and equality. In that context, I find the Center for Constitutional Rights much more amenable and perhaps others will too.
If you go to their college free speech rankings page [0] most of the comments are about how conservative students don't feel comfortable on colleges and universities (private and public, to my slight surprise).
I can see how someone might make take that as conservative friendly since they are mostly featuring conservative students expressing fear about talking about conservative ideas.
Disclaimer, I have no context about FIRE. But, I feel there are a few possible reasons for this:
If the culture on a college campus has little-to-no bias towards sharing or suppressing conservative ideas, them singling out conservative ideas being suppressed would give you enough of a signal that they are conservative leaning.
If the culture on a college campus biases towards sharing conservative ideas, them singling out conservative ideas being suppressed would give you enough of a signal that they are conservative leaning.
If the culture on a college campus biases towards suppressing conservative ideas, them singling out conservative ideas being suppressed wouldn't generate enough of a signal to justify calling them conservative leaning.
TL;DR: whether or not you consider their stance as conservative leaning will be strongly influenced by how you perceive discourse on a college campus.
That's just due to the nature of who finds themselves on the wrong side of college administrations. They are non-partisan though, see some of the sources posted in this thread.
College administrators themselves, are typically hostage to the views of students/donors/board of directors/governors, etc. these days- otherwise they don't last too long. They walk a fine line.
the ACLU has been historically associated with nazis and terrorists.
FIRE, to my knowledge has not discriminated in their advocacy for the plaintiffs in title ix disputes which is one of their primary areas of focus so it seems like a reach to call them a conservative-aligned organization
The ACLU is a sad case. When I was growing up they were a bipartisan organization that were fierce advocates for free speech. Now it seems they only defend the speech of those on the Left side of the aisle.
Here's a critique of those currently running the ACLU by their legendary former leader Ira Glasser (edited):
Can't it simply be a bad tabloid that leans heavily conservative, rather than a cartoon villain for children? Calling it a Nazi paper is inarticulate and condescending to your audience.
No, during the 1930s they were actually publishing articles calling for the rounding-up of "undesirables" like Jews and homosexuals, and imprisoning them or killing them.
I was a long-time ACLU supporter until a couple of years when they pivoted away from their free-speech mission. Is there any organization that carries that mantle now?
The Trump era really broke something in people's brains. Politics started invading everywhere at a level much greater than had ever existed before. I don't go to work, watch sports, or share pictures with the intent to engage in politics.
How do you know they're fake? If you were to be convinced they were real, would you then share the EFF's opinion, or do you believe Stallman shouldn't be judged on this?
> Is there any organization that carries that mantle now?
It depends on whether you're willing to support an organization which also cares about other rights too. If you can stomach the defense of property rights, ij.org and pacificlegal.org both defend free speech rights alongside other rights.
> The Trump era really broke something in people's brains.
The mainstream media did a great job of outraging liberals because whenever trump said anything even remotely controversial, it was covered nonstop until he said the next thing. I think a lot of people ended up being outraged for 5 straight years, and came to the conclusion that the idea of free speech is "a danger to our democracy".
I appreciate the sentiment, but I humbly ask that you don't comment about votes. It's against the guidelines, and imo it's just a waste of an indentation level. But the worst part is that you cannot know what the number of votes will be in the future, so your comment is only relevant the exact moment you post it.
Fine. I'll just say. "Some may not like your opinion" - also it's a bit rude to suggest someone's thoughts are not 'worth an indentation level' mr. HN elite.
Makes me really miss the days when the biggest outrage in media was which flavor of ice cream Obama liked. It felt like people were a lot more open to just laughing at things back then. Now so much political discourse is about calling the opposition evil in some way.
Could also just be the fact that I was a young teen then with little care for the world beyond school and friends.
It was an intentional distraction from the real story, which was the vast theft of trillions of dollars through bullshit tax cuts and pointed neglect for the key things that keep society functioning, like boring stuff--infrastructure, education, generational investments, rule of law, international politics, energy policy, environmental issues, etc. Nope, the rage grabbed eyeballs. Eyeballs meant ads. Ads meant dollars. Dollars meant kaching for the media powers. And the stock market! So much shareholder value!
While 2016-2020 did seem particularly crazy in how every little thing got outrage coverage, I remember similar things from Obama's presidency. Things like the week long outrage over him asking for dijon mustard on his burger. I also felt a lot of parallels between Trump and his tax returns / ties with Russia and Obama with his citizenship conspiracies/outrage.
I don't know if recency bias plays into the Trump stuff feeling way more covered, or if it actually was, but I'm not sure media did particularly more this time around compared to last. Maybe it was just who the target audience for outrage was this time, instead of the amount of coverage.
Not really sure of my point, but food for thought to the lurkers I guess.
I don't disagree that our media sucks and chooses to cover things that I don't think are important.
I have a very clear memory of a fox news headline disparaging obama for taking his jacket off in the white house, because apparently that was against the custom or whatever. And I thought, who cares, and it was then I knew that I shouldn't take fox seriously. But then, when trump was elected, I saw cnn spend a whole day talking about how trump got two scoops of ice cream and everyone else only got one, and had the same realization.
But I have to disagree with the idea that these stories were spread to the same degree. Go on twitter, go on facebook, go on snapchat - name a platform, and that platform will promote ideas against a republican significantly more than stories against a democrat. And you can argue that "that's just the algorithm" or whatever, but it is what it is, which is biased.
> Go on twitter, go on facebook, go on snapchat - name a platform, and that platform will promote ideas against a republican significantly more than stories against a democrat.
I had always rationalized this with the thought that these platforms had larger Democrat populations than Republican, which explains the broadcast bias. Maybe that is an incorrect assumption.
I don't think anything during the Obama years comes remotely close to the 2+ years of wall-to-wall coverage of Russian collusion that failed to materialize... and that's just the most obvious case.
Except it did materialize. There were indictments that arose from that investigation, and we know they were interested in acquiring Russian "dirt" on Clinton. If you expected something more dramatic or obvious, that's uninformed and naive.
It was two years of incessant media coverage, fully including open discussion of whether or not Trump or his family members would be indicted. If you expected anything less, you were not consuming mainstream media [1].
There was a lot of debate over whether Trump even could be indicted, whether Mueller would even if he had the evidence, etc., and such discussions did make it into coverage by the "mainstream media" (I am generally wary of people who use that term tbh).
It's bizarre to simultaneously criticize them while also blaming them for setting your incorrect expectations. Should have listened to and read Lawfare.
It's also simply morally blameworthy to excuse the relevant behavior on the part of Trump and his associates, whether they were indicted or not.
> "mainstream media" (I am generally wary of people who use that term tbh).
It's just a shorter phrase than "ABC, CBS, CNN, MSNBC, all late night comedy shows, SNL, and nearly all newspapers." It becomes a bit of a mouthful. It's the most neutral form of phrasing all of this media that seems to lean toward the same political party, though I'll accept recommendations if you have a better term.
> It's bizarre to simultaneously criticize them while also blaming them for setting your incorrect expectations. Should have listened to and read Lawfare.
It wasn't just my expectations, and I absolutely do expect news media saturation of a story to correlate with its actual relevance. Instead, they over-hyped and sold outrage day after day until the rubber hit the road. And then they just moved on. The idea that one should have simply ignored all the supposed journalists and reporting to read one guy's legal blog (???) seems bizarre to me. This is a very revisionist view of those 2+ years.
> It's also simply morally blameworthy to excuse the relevant behavior on the part of Trump and his associates, whether they were indicted or not.
I'm not excusing anything. I'm saying the media hyped this up as "Watergate times a thousand" over a two year stretch, and it ended up being nothing near that.
Lawfare is not an obscure legal blog, it's a highly regarded legal publication featuring a lot of expert analysis. The fact you dismissed it as "one guy's legal blog" is a good indication you're not very adept at assessing and processing information about any of this, including the full import and seriousness of the actions at issue.
I think you're completely right. There are, in fact, numerous topics for which I don't have the resources or expertise to fully comprehend and make judgments about. That's why I, like most people, ultimately depend on news media to keep me informed.
...and that's why it's a big problem when they spend 2+ years building up hype around a story whose ramifications are far less than we were led to believe.
This is just because you didn't watch Fox. Fox and Limbaugh had been milking the idea that news should be about invoking outrage and gaslighting for a very long time. MSNBC copied the model starting about 2010, and then every single news outlet realized it was the best business model by the time Trump came into office.
I don't think there's a particular left/right/whatever bent to running this business model. It's just that there isn't a lot of news that engages people in this world, so you cannot sustain a 24/7 media empire unless you wrap them up in a conspiracy or create a false narrative that there's some evil group that their news is fighting against with the truth. Then, all of a sudden, some random person's Tweet about mixed sex bathrooms becomes an hour's worth of news to engage people with.
While Fox does have large market share it was the only major media company that was constantly critical of Obama. When it comes to Trump NBC, ABC, CBS, MSNBC, CNN, and whoever else were all critical of Trump. It felt far more widespread when it came to Trump.
There were times when that was going on that I honestly wondered whether Trump was a genius. I can't thing of anything he did from a legislative perspective that was really problematic but he exerted almost total control of the media cycle 140 characters at a time.
Huge tax cuts for the ultra-wealthy without cutting services would be the first thing I'd ding his administration on.
Not stopping the family separation at the southern border.
Sending bad medical advice and politicizing response to a national healthcare crisis with COVID-19.
Abandoning Puerto Rico after a devastating Hurricane.
Not offering a replacement for Obamacare as promised, instead only gutting the process to make it more expensive for people who still try to get insurance. Especially for not implementing a single payer healthcare system like the entire rest of the civilized world uses to offer much more efficient healthcare to the populace.
Not fixing the Social Security deficit.
Engaging in a trade war with China without an apparent exit strategy.
> Huge tax cuts for the ultra-wealthy without cutting services would be the first thing I'd ding his administration on.
Agreed. The lack of accompanying service cuts really kept this from being as effective as it could have been.
> Abandoning Puerto Rico after a devastating Hurricane.
Yea, that was really bad.
> Engaging in a trade war with China without an apparent exit strategy.
I was actually pretty happy with how that went. A lot of progress was made, including stopping China from being able to abuse our own postal service to undercut local vendors on shipping. Before Covid hit, I was most looking forward to seeing continued progress there.
> Sending bad medical advice and politicizing response to a national healthcare crisis with COVID-19.
I'm not going to go deep into this, but suffice it to say it was an election year and everything was politicized by everyone.
Everything below here is just maintaining the status quo. I wouldn't call any of these Trump specific.
> Not stopping the family separation at the southern border.
This is admittedly horrifying, however, the amount of people coming over the border without any identification combined with the potential for trafficking makes it a complicated problem to solve. Not solving it was also just maintaining the status quo.
> Not offering a replacement for Obamacare as promised, instead only gutting the process to make it more expensive for people who still try to get insurance. Especially for not implementing a single payer healthcare system like the entire rest of the civilized world uses to offer much more efficient healthcare to the populace.
Agreed and disappointing. It's also an incredibly hard problem to solve without turning the entire country upside down. Dangling the carrot is easier (for both parties).
> Not fixing the Social Security deficit.
Been a problem for years that neither party is willing to make the hard decisions to correct.
> whenever trump said anything even remotely controversial, it was covered nonstop until he said the next thing.
Which was typically the next day. Trying to follow the Trump White House was exhausting.
Trump knew how to play the media like a fiddle. Say something outrageous, get loads of coverage, before anybody has time to really think about it or offer rebuttals he says something else outrageous and the first statement is instantly old news and forgotten.
News organizations made huge profits while Trump was in office, and their ratings have slipped considerably since electing President Biden and especially since Trump was kicked off of Twitter.
> The mainstream media did a great job of outraging liberals because whenever trump said anything even remotely controversial, it was covered nonstop until he said the next thing.
To be fair, I bet you could measure the average interval of those events in hours.
Yeah sure, but so what? Was him getting two scoops of ice cream really worth covering? Something I like to ask people is, how did any of it actually effect your life? The only noticeable change in my life from his presidency was that I paid less in taxes.
I'm just tired of pretending any of it means anything anymore. Both parties won't fix the roads, both parties won't give us healthcare, both parties are pro-war. Why should anyone care who the president is?
What is this ice cream strawman? Dude popped off with lies and idiotic remarks routinely, was proud of an inhumane immigration policy, wanted to yank people's healthcare, cozied up to dictators, etc. It's disgusting how much some people defend him.
This is a pretty strange week to say that: The president nominates supreme court judges, and the rulings of those judges can make a big difference in your life: For instance, whether there's a right to abortion in the US or not.
Whether you are in favor or against, it's easy to argue that a whole lot of people care about that issue, and not only in purely theoretical grounds.
And that's just the topic of the week: A justice is, on average, going to be making rulings for about 30 years, and is probably going to be able to retire strategically, to be replaced by a like-minded judge. So even if it's just due to the power of electing supreme court justices, presidents matter.
So I don't think it's hard to argue that, because of Trump's presidency, we'll have a very conservative supreme court for, very likely, our entire lifetimes, while if Clinton had won, we'd instead have a liberal majority in the court for at least another 20 years.
Even without the abortion decision, the court will make a big practical difference to a lot of people. I think it's fair to expect wide sweeping decisions that would never have happened without Trump being able to build a 6-3 court.
> This is a pretty strange week to say that: The president nominates supreme court judges, and the rulings of those judges can make a big difference in your life: For instance, whether there's a right to abortion in the US or not.
i'm sorry, but what the supreme court DRAFT said was: "there's no constitutional right to abortion. also this should've been decided by representatives of the people".
i'm not sure why that's a bad thing -- supreme court justices should not legislate and, if abortion is such an important thing for one side of the isle, they should fight, tooth and nail, to get laws (actual laws, not flimsy decisions by non-elected officials) passed.
Yes. Even this week, we have the news that his supreme court nominees are voting to strike down abortion protections, and I have female friends and family in states with trigger laws.
Personally, it's a huge red flag when anyone in any sort of leadership position in the american military is against any kind of conflict, because they are usually all for it. I also can't help but wonder how this would be reported if these leaders did this to obama. I really wish they did!
This is nonsensical. What the article is describing is political trash talk, with absolutely nothing to back it up. Typical article published during that time period, and emblematic of the media circus that surrounded Trump.
I recall when Trump was elected a huge amount of money went to the ACLU and that is when they really took a turn towards who was paying them. Recall this was the organization that would represent white supremacists as an absolutist for free speech.
Conservatives have historically had problems with free speech when it came to things they view as contrary to "family values", and later on with Trump branding the press as "The enemy of the people". But in the last 5-10 years liberals have as well had a problem with free speech with things they determine is "hate speech".
So now there aren't many people left that support the cause of absolute free speech regardless of whether you agree or disagree, and we have the ACLU catering more towards liberal causes and less on free speech cases.
> The Trump era really broke something in people's brains.
It was mass experiment in what specific types of rage they love subjecting themselves to, fueled by an ungodly amount of computational power, in order to prop up and expand a vast ad-delivery network that masquerades as news.
The daily rage was hugely profitable for all media participants and don't let them tell you anything different. The internet found its crack cocaine and us poor subjects are just tweaking for another hit.
I'd really love an answer to this question myself as I was similiarly a moderate supporter of the ACLU. Also I completely agree on your thoughts on the Trump era.
I heard this quote (I think from PG) that said something like this: “the ACLU should split into groups; the old-ACLU that defends civil liberties, and the new-ACLU that fights against them.”
I stopped giving to ACLU years ago when it became clear their mission to champion a grab-bag of lefty causes had superseded their free-speech defending goal. This pivot has lead them, at times, to actually defend the government against citizen requests for public records! I never thought I'd see the ACLU fighting on the government's behalf against FOIA/open records type requests but here it is: https://www.womensliberationfront.org/aclu-lawsuit-public-re...
In the above case, some female prisoners in Washington state wanted to know how many male prisoners had been transferred to women's prisons. The state didn't want to share that information (even in aggregate) and the ACLU defended the state's assertion that this information should be kept secret from the public, including from the imprisoned women whom this policy impacted directly.
Why the government would want to keep this secret is a good question, but the main point here is: did people donating to the ACLU realize their money is being used to fight private citizen information requests & defend government secrecy? How the mighty have fallen.
>Why the government would want to keep this secret is a good question
It's because if the public found out, it would be either be considered illegal or unethical or ultimately make them look bad. That's the general rule of why anyone in government keeps an action secret. Now consider how much stuff the government wants to keep secret.
I guess the follow up question would be why the government transferred biological men to a women's prison, especially if it could be illegal, unethical and make them look bad?
Not a follow-up for the ACLU, who should be concentrating solely on records release (on the opposite side than they took.)
The modern disease is that everyone seems to be running a keynesian beauty contest, trying to figure out what side the truth is better for, and pretending it's a lie if it's against their side. Principles aren't a means, they're an end.
It's a world of propagandists (public relations professionals.)
IIRC, FOIA does not grant you a right to personal information collected on citizens. The agencies have the right to redact that in whole or in part from the records sought. I don't deny your main concern about left wing issues potentially derailing the ACLU's chief mission, but that isn't the example I'd cite.
How is releasing raw statistics about inmates based on demographics creating "a target list"? I don't see where they are asking for a list of individual identities.
The public records act doesn't include personal information:
> personal student or patient information, employee files, and some investigative records are exempt.
You could silence tons of scientific studies with this sort of broad rejection of data collection simply because you deem a subset of the group 'vulnerable' (including just as many studies that benefit these groups). It could be applied in many other ways beyond state prisons.
Some of the requests are directly for the names and ages of individuals, but the government doesn't have the statistics requested and want to "provide records from which requestors may derive answers to their own questions" for the statistics requests as well. The ACLU is objecting to this to the extent that it would "include highly sensitive information" that identifies individuals. The ACLU is not asking the court to block the government from releasing raw statistics. They want to prevent them from releasing a literal list of transgender and gender non-conforming individuals.
There are also requests for infractions, complaints, reports, etc. If you think this is agienst the law, then you agree with the ACLU.
WoLF are representing Andrea Kelly. The ACLU's own filing, that you linked to, confirms that she requested only statistical data, not personally-identifying information:
> 4.8 On March 19, 2021, Requestor Andrea Kelly made a public records
request to Defendant Washington State Department of Corrections that sought the
following records:
> - "The number of transgender individuals currently incarcerated broken out by facility location."
> - "Number of incarcerated individuals who have been transferred from a
men's facility to a women's facility since January 1, 2021."
> - "The number of male incarcerated individuals who identify as female, non-
binary or any other gender identity who are currently housed at a Women's
prison facility."
> - "The number of incarcerated individuals who have transferred from a
Women's facility to a Men's facility since January 1, 2021."
> - "The number of female incarcerated individuals who identify as male, non-
binary or any other gender identity who are currently housed in a Men's
prison facility."
I do wonder if you read past that first paragraph you quoted, because the above section supports the facts of WoLF's article that you erroneously called out as "outright lying".
> “The names and ages of the transgender or gender non-conformists inmates moved to Purdy and the convictions they are serving time for.”
> “The names of all transgendered incarcerated individuals who have requested, received or are scheduled for gender reassignment surgery.”
However, even with only the requests made by Andrea Kelly, the DOC indented to provide private information about individuals in order to allow the requester to derive answers to their questions, as it doesn't have the statistics requested. This is what ACLU sued to prevent. See:
> 4.20 The Attorney General, on behalf of DOC, has indicated in discussions with DRW that DOC does not create records in response to requests for aggregate numerical information. Instead, the Attorney General explained that DOC will identify as responsive and provide records from which requestors may derive answers to their own questions. DOC has not provided DRW a list of what records have been identified by DOC as responsive to the requests. Based on DRW’s knowledge of DOC records, such records will likely include highly sensitive information about transgender, non-binary, gender non-conforming, and/or intersex inmates and former inmates.
The ACLU never asked the court to stop the government from responding with statistics, but the government doesn't have the statistics requested.
No, I think they are lying when they say the ACLU is suing to "prevent the public from receiving public records from the Washington State Department of Corrections on the number of inmates in state custody who identify as transgender and the number of male inmates who are housed in women’s facilities" because there are no such records and they are actually suing to prevent the release of people's identities. They are also lying by omission and competently misrepresenting the case by not mentioning what other kind of information was requested and how the government intends to respond to the request for the statistics it doesn't possess.
How about a more charitable interpretation, rather than accusing people of lying: ACLU's position is that these shouldn't be public records, WoLF's is that the government should release whatever public records are required to fulfil the request.
Please reread my comment, I don't use the terms "man" or "men" once. It seems you object to the idea that imprisoned female people should be allowed to have an opinion on being forced to share a jail cell with a male person.
Personally, I think female people are well within their rights to voice concerns about this. If you see it differently, I'd be grateful to hear your rationale on why the government should be able to move males into women's prisons in secret, as the ACLU asserts.
In general "male" refers to sex, "men" to gender. While I agree the comment could be written more kindly, this comment was referring to biological sex, not gender identity.
No matter how nasty the reason was for the FOIA request - why should an organization who historically has defended free speech in most if not all circumstances going to such lengths to defeat it? What happened to defending the Westboro Baptist Church and skinheads re: freedom of speech?
Let's say there was a hypothetical corporation looking to identify employee participation in a protest. Would you defend that corporation making an FOIA request to identify who might've participated?
Who's freedom of speech do you think deserves to be defended, the corporation or the individuals in question?
Now apply that logic to this scenario, where the group in question is looking to identify individuals in order to make a scapegoat out of them for their own private decisions. Who's freedom deserves defending?
>IIRC, FOIA does not grant you a right to personal information collected on citizens. The agencies have the right to redact that in whole or in part from the records sought.
These are citizens private healthcare information. You shouldn't be able to foia this anymore than my medicare records. Citizens don't lose their right to privacy because they're in prison. Goodness.
Aggregate counts are not private healthcare information when released in a way that limits reidentification. The Privacy Act (and HIPAA) allows for deidentified data to be shared broadly.
Anyway, prisoner gender is not healthcare data, it’s administrative data that describes prisoner population demographics.
I would agree with you if the request was for individual medical information on treatment or procedures or something.
> Aggregate counts are not private healthcare information when released in a way that limits reidentification. The Privacy Act (and HIPAA) allows for deidentified data to be shared broadly.
Possibly, but you're almost assuredly looking at a sample of N=10 or fewer, so the answer would be "*" anyway.
Not if it’s just a count. Because, even with a low count it wouldn’t be used to identify someone.
Let’s say there were 3 transgender people in the state, or even a facility. If they reveal that number it doesn’t identify an individual or divulge any confidential information.
The low counts have to be suppressed when coupled with other data or linked to other data.
If you included count by age group, then you would need to change from a low count to a suppressed marker.
For example 3 transgenders in the 80+ age group might reveal their identity because there aren’t many 80+ inmates.
But just having a small count with no other info is not really a cause to remove the value.
It sounded like aggregate numbers were being requested, not names. (Though, the link is only one side of the story.) Assuming that is correct (that it is merely an aggregate count), does that not maintain medical privacy, while allowing public access to the information on how the state is running prisons?
I don't think your sex is "private healthcare information." How would sharing the total number of males in various facilities violate an individuals privacy rights? (sidebar: if you think you retain your right to privacy in prison... all I can say is you've clearly never been to prison :)
Regarding the right to privacy, what's your take on the privacy rights of the (female) women who are being physically forced to house & sleep in a cell with males?
>I don't think your sex is "private healthcare information."
Your sex is private information under GDPR. Why would the GDPR be stricter than than HIPAA in this case?
>Regarding the right to privacy, what's your take on the privacy rights of the (female) women who are being physically forced to house & sleep in a cell with males?
"But what about the children?" is never a good argument for taking the away the rights of others.
You're assuming male prisoners have a "right" to be housed with female prisoners, and that female prisoners have no right to sex-segregated facilities. Whether the former "right" exists is far from a settled question.
Assuming the former right does exist, then there is a conflict of rights (between the wishes of males who want to be housed with females, and females who want to be housed without males). Rights conflicts like this are not solved by simply telling one group (in this case, women) to shut up and stop complaining.
This is nonsense that serves only to obfuscate. Normally this sort of stuff is put forward by people trying to confuse and befuddle the reader.
We segregate prisons by sex. Primary and secondary sex characteristics are observable characteristics that indicate one's sex.
Your argument is like saying "You don't buy a Mazda. You go to the Mazda dealership and buy a car that says Mazda on the back, interior, and on the manual. You don't actually know the car is a Mazda."
No, my argument is people mistake a used car lot for a licensed dealership. Just because the salesman says its a Mazda and it has a little logo in the front doesn't tell you much about its history, modifications, etc. Intersex people are in fact pretty common, so much so that there are more intersex olympic athletes than there are trans ones.
Using "males" and "females" here is irrelevant and actively seeking to confuse.
People typically consider that women (cis or trans) have a right to be housed together, and separately from cismen.
If anything, the biggest problem of policy are trans-men, who would likely feel much more concerned by being housed with cis-man prisoners, but who would also make women uncomfortable.
> A woman is, quite simply, an adult human female.
So an adult human female (XX phenotype) who is taking masculinizing hormones and thus has a beard, body hair, a heavy voice, and perhaps has had his breasts surgically removed, or even had penile reconstruction surgery, is, in your opinion, a woman?
If he is not naked and you do not have a genotypic test result, how would would you know? Do you think a woman seeing him in a women's locker or in a women's bathroom would feel comfortable? Or would she feel more comfortable with a male that has a female body and clothing presentation (say, Caitlyn Jenner)?
Also, your definitions of course leave no room for people with various biological conditions that leave them with an uncertain biological sex - hermaphrodytism, XXY genotype, chymerism (multiple genotypes in different tissues), testosterone resistance (natural female phenotype despite a male genotype) etc.
> So an adult human female (XX phenotype) who is taking masculinizing hormones and thus has a beard, body hair, a heavy voice, and perhaps has had his breasts surgically removed, or even had penile reconstruction surgery, is, in your opinion, a woman?
Yes. She's a woman who has taken masculinizing hormones, and had cosmetic surgery. She is not changing her sex. She remains female, and is therefore a woman.
Consider this: the women athletes who have doped with testosterone, did they become men? No, of course not. What if they got breast cancer and had to have a double mastectomy? Also no - they're still women.
It's so odd to me that liberals, who seem to care a lot about women's rights, just flat out dismiss women who are genuinely concerned about being raped in prison by males who were secretly transferred to female prisons.
>"But what about the children?" is never a good argument for taking the away the rights of others.
I also hope that you don't point to school shootings to argue against the second amendment then.
Why is that surprising? There is no proof that transwomen are any more likely to rape ciswomen than other ciswomen are.
On the other hand, it is well known that transwomen are much more often the victims of rape by cismen, if living in men's prisons.
If anything, I would think the biggest problem here is the fate of transmen. I doubt a ciswoman would feel very comfortable sharing a cell with a transman, but a transman also has much higher chances of being abused if sharing a cell with a cisman.
Do you think a cis woman would fear being raped more by Natalie Wynn[0] or by Buck Angel[1]? I would bet that its the latter.
To be clear: not accusing either of those above of being an actual rapist! Just asking which would be more likely to inspire this fear in someone who doesn't know them.
> Why is that surprising? There is no proof that transwomen are any more likely to rape ciswomen than other ciswomen are.
Here's an analysis of data from the Ministry of Justice in the UK, demonstrating that trans-identifying males have similar patterns of criminality to other males, including sexual assault: https://fairplayforwomen.com/transgender-male-criminality-se...
> There is no proof that transwomen are any more likely to rape ciswomen than other ciswomen are.
There is no proof males who identify as trans (transwomen) are any less likely to commit rape than males who do not identify as trans. The rape risk of being housed with a male is real regardless of how the male identifies with regards to gender. If you have data to the contrary (data indicating that trans identifying males are less likely to commit rape than other males) please share.
The article notes that the relationships were consensual. Like, do you think no one in prison would want to have sex? (The article could be misleading, but also there's presumably lots of consensual sex in prison, much as there is quite a bit of non-consensual sex).
>It's so odd to me that liberals, who seem to care a lot about women's rights, just flat out dismiss women who are genuinely concerned about being raped in prison by males who were secretly transferred to female prisons.
Really? Are there actual women who are genuinely concerned about this or is this a strawman invented by other people? You see this same issue with transwomen in sports. There is massive concern-trolling for women "who want a level playing field", but when you actually _ask_ women who compete with them (like in the case of Lia Thomas), they don't have a problem with it.
You are masking your transphobia in coddling for women who aren't even complaining about these issues. Women in prison are far more likely to be raped by law enforcement; but somehow the 3 or so transwomen who might sleep in the same cell as a woman is a bigger mark for the ACLU.
>I also hope that you don't point to school shootings to argue against the second amendment then.
That's actually pretty simple for me, I don't think gun rights are inalienable rights, no more than I think I have a right to own a playstation.
> what's your take on the privacy rights of the (female) women who are being physically forced to house & sleep in a cell with males?
Keeping penises out of the same room with vaginas will not magically eliminate sexual assault because sexual assault is based on power and willingness to harm another, not whether not tab A physically fits into slot B.
If you think keeping penises away from vaginas will eliminate prison rape then clearly you don't know much about rape in mens' prisons.
I am having trouble following your line of thinking. You're saying that because rape is common in mens' prisons* we should not be concerned about putting males in women's prisons? Wouldn't it make more sense to say "men rape in mens prisons, so women's concerns about being housed with males is reasonable"?
In any event, I still don't see how any of this justifies keeping this whole topic in the shadows and making public discourse impossible by keeping the scope of the question secret from the public.
* I'm taking your word for this, haven't looked it up.
The goal (I assume! You haven't spelled this out.) is to reduce the rate of sexual assault between cellmates in prison.
The system has to determine who can end up in the same cell. Prison wardens have access to some data about prisoners. The question is which data is used to partition prisoners.
Your claim appears to be that one prisoner having a penis and the other having a vagina is a strong predictor of an increased odds of sexual assault.
My point is that that claim requires some level of supporting evidence since the widespread accounts of prison rape in same-sex prisons implies that simply avoiding penises and vaginas in the same cell does not appear to be sufficient to lower the chances of rape.
Implicit in your comment is only looking at this from the perspective of the woman in the cell who doesn't have a penis. But the other cellmate has to end up somewhere and the overall goal should be to reduce the rate of sexual assault for all prisoners, not just cis ones.
So, if you don't allow trans women into women's cells, where do you put them? And do you really think putting a trans woman in a cell with a male prisoner is going to lead to a lower incidence of assault?
The "penis and vagina" characterization is too reductive. What's at issue is that males are generally bigger, stronger, and more sexually aggressive than females. These factors in aggregate create increased risk when forcing proximity between men and women while in vulnerable contexts. But none of this needs extra demonstration, this is all common knowledge.
hrt is effectively chemical castration by another name. one of the primary effects of estrogen and anti androgens is erectile dysfunction combined with the shrinking & atrophy of the genitals along with a typically highly diminished sex drive.
on balance, this issue, just like sports, is incredibly optically poor for trans people regardless of the facts at hand. the suggestion that mtf trans create an elevated risk for rapes and assaults is a deeply unfair cultural bias that is probably not going away for at least a generation. similarly putting mtf trans into the male prison system seems likely to subject them to incredibly high risk. there are other nations & cultures that have had a legally recognized 3rd gender for much longer than trans rights have been an area of focus in the west, i imagine we could learn a great deal from them on these issues in particular.
Not all trans-identifying people use HRT. Indeed some deliberately make no bodily interventions whatsoever - see e.g. Alex Drummond, a 'trans woman' with beard, moustache, and his intact male body.
Third gender in the cultures you allude to is typically just a way of othering gay man, of the "you can't be a real man" variety. It's nothing positive to emulate.
> Your claim appears to be that one prisoner having a penis and the other having a vagina is a strong predictor of an increased odds of sexual assault.
> My point is that that claim requires some level of supporting evidence.
The DOJ says 99% of rape and sexual assaults are by males, and that 91% of victims of rape & sexual assault are female and 9% male [1].
This is generic data, not trans specific or prison specific. But in the absence of specific data, it seems pretty relevant.
I’d argue if prisons have significant rates of sexual assault that prisons are doing little to prevent then prisoner’s should have a right to a private cell. You don’t get to engage in huge rights violations against people who can’t defend themselves for budgetary reasons.
> Your claim appears to be that one prisoner having a penis and the other having a vagina is a strong predictor of an increased odds of sexual assault.
If you don't think this is an issue, can you explain why we should have any sex segregation in prisons at all?
It sounds like you're arguing for mixed sex prisons, even within individual cells.
> If you don't think this is an issue, can you explain why we should have any sex segregation in prisons at all?
Historically, mostly patriarchal misogyny; specifically, the belief that while women were inherently more virtuous, those who had “fallen” a state subject to imprisonment had fallen further, and less correctibly than men, and that they were a corrupting influence that would impair the rehabilitation of imprisoned men (that's also why imprisoned women, originally segregated within prisons rather than in separate prisons, were often given fewer meals, not encouraged to socialize, and otherwise treated worse than male prisoners.)
More recently, in order to avoid reexamining the actual policy of segregation, societies have tried to retcon a more modern rationalization, but that rationalization is not actually the reason for the policy, just an excuse for it.
That is not universally true, even if it may have applied to some parts of the US prison system in the past.
In particular, influential British prison reformers of the 18th and 19th centuries, such as Elizabeth Fry and John Howard, promoted sex segregation as a means to prevent the sexual exploitation of women prisoners. They also pushed for many other reforms to make prisons safer and more rehabilitative environments in general. Nothing to do with patriarchal misogyny.
More recently, the UN's Standard Minimum Rules for the Treatment of Prisoners, first adopted in 1955, states as one of the standards that "men and women shall so far as possible be detained in separate institutions; in an institution which receives both men and women the whole of the premises allocated to women shall be entirely
separate". Their rationale was not patriarchal misogyny either, but rather how to maintain a safe and dignified environment for inmates.
Let me take a step back and look at this another way. The initial comment I replied to looked at the issue only from the perspective of the woman in the cell. It treated it as "should a trans woman be with her: yes/no?".
But that's not the actual choice prisons have to make. The choice they have to make is "which cell does the trans woman go into"? Given that there likely aren't enough trans women prisoners to put them only with other trans women, the choice is "with a cis man or with a cis woman." And I believe pretty strongly that putting a trans woman in a cell with a cis male is more likely to result in assault than putting a trans woman with a cis woman.
I could be wrong. But given what I've read about trans women being the target of sexual assault outside of prison and sexual assault among males in male prisons, I think it's a fairly safe bet.
I guess the question hinges on whether you imagine a trans woman to be more "like a man" (stereotypically stronger, aggressive, and more prone to perpetrate assault) or "like a woman" (stereotypically weaker, passive, and more prone to being the victim of assault). What I know about trans women suggests the latter more than the former.
Obviously, individual behavior trumps all. Any particular woman (trans or not) who has a history of violence or sexual assault towards women should not be housed with another woman. The same should be true for men (again, trans or not).
The name of the game should be keeping perpetrators away from victims, and my belief is that "has a penis while other has a vagina" is a relatively poor proxy for that. Yes, there is a strong correlation, but that's a Simpson's paradox from combining the much smaller trans population with the very large cis population. If you were to separate out the datasets and consider cis men and women separately from trans men and women, I suspect you would see no or the opposite correlation.
In summary: women in prison are being raped and sexually assaulted by trans-identifying males, who should never have been locked up in women's prisons in the first place.
It really is well beyond time for authorities to reverse these ridiculous policies that elevate claims of gender identity above all other concerns, and return to segregating prisons by sex like we had previously.
Three news articles about three isolated incidents, regardless of how horrific they are, are not sufficient to design good policy. In the US in 2012, "an estimated of 4.0% of state and federal prison inmates and 3.2% of jail inmates reported experiencing one or more incidents of sexual victimization by another inmate or facility staff since their admission to the facility or in the past twelve months".
Those three articles are a drop in the bucket.
Consider that there are N trans women convicts and you're trying to decide where to house them. The relevent number is not "how many women do they rape if you house them with other women"? It's "What is the relative difference in rape stasticics between housing them with men versus women?"
Obviously, any number of sexual assaults is unacceptable. But if housing trans women with men leads to thousands of rapes while housing them with women leads to only dozens, it's still a better policy. The only reason you could argue against that is if you consider a trans woman being a victim somehow more acceptable than a cis woman being victimized.
It's not just those three articles though. When you consider these in the context of other data, such as this from the UK - https://fairplayforwomen.com/transgender-male-criminality-se... - which shows that trans-identifying males have similar patterns of criminality to other males, including sexual assault, the reality of the situation becomes clear: these inmates are not some special type of women who happen to have been born male, but men like any other.
So then the argument is just around the question, should women and men be housed in the same prisons, without any sex segregation? And we already know the answer to that.
> And I believe pretty strongly that putting a trans woman in a cell with a cis male is more likely to result in assault than putting a trans woman with a cis woman.
Why do you believe this?
Anyway, I believe women have a right to dignity and privacy and to set some boundaries against males in refuges & places they are especially vulnerable. Female prisoners should absolutely be allowed to refuse to share sleeping quarters with males. Frankly think it's nuts that this should be considered a controversial stance.
> Anyway, I believe women have a right to dignity and privacy and to set some boundaries against males in refuges & places they are especially vulnerable.
I believe everyone has a right to dignity and privacy and the right to set some boundaries against others in refuges and places where they are especially vulnerable.
What I don't understand is people that thinks that this right disappears just because the “other“ is of the same gender (whether that's gender socially ascribed at birth, or gender identity really is a side issue.)
The simplest answer is to segregate by sex, it's not clear why gender identity should require moving to another facility.
Regarding the supposed issue of safety of trans identifying male prisoners in male prisons (I haven't seen data around this but let's assume it's an issue), it's still not clear the answer is housing with women. If a gay man is more likely to be abused in a male prison, or a small or young man, does that mean men with any of these characteristics should be put in women's prison to improve their safety conditions? This doesn't scan.
Its notable to me that as concerned as you are about prisoner safety, I don't see you or other advocates of males in womens prisons mention the safety of the female prisoners should men be added to their cells. Does their safety not rate?
> Its notable to me that as concerned as you are about prisoner safety, I don't see you or other advocates of males in womens prisons mention the safety of the female prisoners
Strange that despite the much higher rates of sexual assault (inmate on inmate and staff on inmate) for women in the sex segregated prison system we have, the only time safety of women prisoners gets brought up is as an argument for preserving sex segregation against the fairly minor tweak of gender-identity segregation and not about trying to figure out why a system adopted specifically to isolate and impose harsher punishment on women because they were viewed as incapable of rehabilitation once they had fallen into crime continues, despite recent retcons of it's supposed justification, to disproportionately sexual victimize women.
> And I believe pretty strongly that putting a trans woman in a cell with a cis male is more likely to result in assault than putting a trans woman with a cis woman.
Why do you believe this?
And, more importantly, why is it somehow the responsibility of women to be used as a mitigation for male on male violence?
If a male attacks a trans-identifying male, or there is a risk of this happening, that is entirely a male issue. So why should incarcerating the trans-identifying male amongst women be the solution?
> If a male attacks a trans-identifying male, or there is a risk of this happening, that is entirely a male issue.
No, if a prisoner attacks a prisoner with whom they were placed, due to reasons which are reasonably foreseeable and preventable, it's a prison system issue, not an issue for the gender class of the attacker or victim, whether they are the same or different, irrespective of the basis in which gender is ascribed.
Even moreso than with restrooms, it's very clear that gender segregation, whether based on ascribed gender at birth or gender identity, is not even approximately an effective protection against predatory behavior [*], so the safety issue:
(1) Isn't a good defense for any model of gender segregation, and
(2) Needs addressed by mechanisms other than gender segregation (one of the more effective of which is probably imprisoning fewer people, at lower levels of crowding), which, surprisingly, pretty much no one that is using the danger to argue for their preferred model of gender segregation even pretends to be concerned about.
[*] Edit: and this is particularly true for women in our segregated system who face twice the incidence of inmate-on-inmate assault, as well as higher rates of staff-on-inmate assault, and far less social attention to the problem of such assaults. If anything, it's more defensible based on outcomes to say our system of segregation exists to protect sexual assault against women prisoners than to say it exists to protect against sexual assault for anyone.
So are you advocating for entirely mixed-sex prisons or what? That's an extremely radical view.
An important part of addressing these issues of violence in the prison system has been, up until recently, the segregation of inmates by their sex. This is in addition to other policies regarding the prison environment.
If you want to undo that policy of sex segregation, you should have a very good reason, and proof that it won't cause harm to the sex who, in general, have lesser physical strength and can be impregnated by the other.
> An important part of addressing these issues of violence in the prison system has been, up until recently, the segregation of inmates by their sex.
No, it hasn't.
That's an after the fact rationalization for preserving the policy invented long after segregation on fairly explicitly misogynistic grounds was established, when the original motivation was no longer something people felt comfortable saying overtly in government.
Preventing assaults (and sexual assaults specifically) in prisons is not a major motivator for the structure of our prison system; if it was, there'd be a lot fewer sexual assaults in it.
It doesn't matter that the segregation was originally pushed for with the benefit of male prisoners in mind. If you look at the conditions for women in prison before and after sex segregation, it was an improvement.
We shouldn't be regressing back and allowing men to be incarcerated alongside women again, unless there is a provably good reason for this - which, so far, no-one has demonstrated.
> why we should have any sex segregation in prisons at all?
Or age segregation. Just because a 50 year old man has a penis and is 3x the weight of a 13 year old girl doesn't mean that they shouldn't be locked in a cell together. That's just your bigoted assumption that he's a violent person, you don't even know him.
Ironically, a lot of the arguments I've seen could be construed as misandrist because they're operating under the presumption that men are rapists and thus transgender people in women's prisons must be rapists. That's why the argument always focuses around transgender women while failing to address that their same argument would send transgender men to the far less safe male prison.
The actual problem is that prisons are unsafe for everyone and there's little done to make them safer. But they'd rather use transgender people in their culture war because they don't care about the actual violence problems.
You mean they'd rather fix the problem that is entirely an own goal than tackle the problem of reorganizing the entire penal system in a deeply unpopular and expensive way?
Once prison is organized like a summer camp with a 2:1 guard to prisoner ratio, we can do them co-ed.
One would assume surgery or hormones are required to change your gender designation in Washington State, but in fact this is not the case (neither is required). Here's the form to change gender designation on your driver's license in WA, anyone living in washington state can do it today: https://www.dol.wa.gov/forms/520043.pdf
It's all about 'gender identity' these days, not hormones and surgery.
Indeed, in trans circles, expecting the latter as a required factor is often considered highly offensive. This, and the notion that a person needs to experience gender dysphoria to be trans, is now derisively known as the 'truscum' point of view.
I think the vast majority of binary trans people consider gender expression to be an integral part of gender identity, and at least a majority also consider HRT or surgery to be a significant component. I think there are close to 0 people walking around with a beard and wearing masculine suits that identify as transwomen.
Non-binary people are another discussion, and how they should fit into male/female spaces is of course unclear.
Overall, I would agree that prison assignment should depend on more than reported identity. Especially since it is conceivable that people in prison are likelier to lie about their internal identity if they believe they can get something out of this lie. This is much less relevant for lower risk environments, such as bathrooms (in my country at least, unisex bathrooms are anyway quite common) or gym lockers.
> Regarding the right to privacy, what's your take on the privacy rights of the (female) women who are being physically forced to house & sleep in a cell with males?
Any argument here about privacy is entirely independent of sex and gender. Prison is dehumanizing, address that. Don't be a transphobe.
Edit: There's a bunch of mistaken comments here assuming that this will protect women prisoners in some capacity. That's totally wrong! Women in prison are sexually assaulted, raped, and even impregnated by men all the time and have been for years. Those men are guards[0]. And this happens at a vastly higher rate per capita and overall than any assault by trans inmates. Anyone here with a legitimate interest in protecting women in prison would be attempting to address that harm, because it is far more dire for numerous reasons.
Is a woman a transphobe for not wanting to share a jail cell with a person who has a penis? I think most people would consider safeguarding female prisoners from males common sense.
I think you should take a moment to consider the (female) women in this situation. Imagine you're a woman 100% at the mercy of the state, and the state locks you in a cell with a male person. Put yourself in their shoes, and try to extend some empathy to them.
I never made any comment about women in prison. I have empathy to anyone in prison. Like I said, its deeply inhumane.
I think people in prison should be protected from other people in prison if they are dangerous, and I think prisons fail to do that today. I don't accept your presumption that having a penis makes someone inherently more dangerous.
Again: if your goal is to protect women in prison, the best way to do that is to advocate for reform that makes prisons safer for everyone. Not by being transphobic, which you're doing instead.
> people in prison should be protected from other people in prison
I strongly agree; if you deprive someone of their liberty, then you take on the responsibility of protecting them - because you've deprived them of the ability to protect themselves.
I'm not aware of any prison regime that takes the safety of prisoners as a key objective. [Edit] Nor do I know of a state that handles the deliberate negligence of prisoner welfare as a criminal offence.
The data showing 99% of perpetrators are male doesn’t count forcible envelopment as rape. In order to rape a man a woman has to penetrate him in some way for example sticking a finger in his ass.
Men share more than the possession of a penis, of course. But saying the possession of a penis doesn't make men more dangerous in the face of male rape is like saying that a pistol doesn't make a man more dangerous.
>"Again: if your goal is to protect women in prison, the best way to do that is to advocate for reform that makes prisons safer for everyone. Not by being transphobic, which you're doing instead. "
Perfect is the enemy of good and while it's hard to disagree with the sentiment of "reform that makes prisons safer for everyone ", we have no idea what that actually entails and that's so much of a monumental task that it's basically a non-starter. I feel like the sentiment here is "this wouldn't be a problem if we changed everything, so why don't we?"
> Women in prison are sexually assaulted, raped, and even impregnated by men all the time and have been for years. Those men are guards.
Indeed and this is why feminist organizations, and others with an interest in women's rights and safety, push for policies of only employing female prison guards in women's prisons.
It's no stretch to see why they don't want male prisoners to be incarcerated there too, no matter how such males identity.
If the male guards can't be trusted not to sexually abuse women, how can you expect the same from cohabiting males?
If you read his link, it states the request is for counts, not individual names.
1. A complete and accurate count of inmates who identify as transgender (gender identity differs from sex identified at birth) in the custody of the Washington Department of Corrections [please break this information down by location]
2. Number of inmates that have been transferred from a men’s facility to a women’s facility since January 01, 2021
3. Total number of male persons who identify as female, non-binary, or any other gender identity that are currently housed in a women’s facility
4. Number of inmates who have transferred from a women’s facility to a men’s facility from January 01, 2021 to March 18, 2021
5. Number of female persons who identify as male, non-binary or any other gender identity that are currently housed in a men’s facility
For some the issue so sensitive that even a broad and impersonal question is hugely offensive. And negative intent is immediately assumed of the questioner.
It breaks down the N by location, which... what defines a location here? Is it a state? Is it a single prison? For a small N, narrow location is definitely a de-anonymization factor.
How would knowing "1 Transwoman is currently housed in a female prison on the territory of Washington state" in any way risk causing harm to that transwoman, or help you identify her in any way?
It doesn’t. I think GP is confusing small cell counts in micro data (a real problem) with small numbers in aggregate data (sometimes a problem).
In this case, just a count and prison is not a privacy issue as someone would have to already know the individual is trans to identify them. And that’s the only information contained in the data release.
this FOIA request arbitrarily mixes sex and gender, which actually does show a lack of understanding towards trans and non-binary people (as well as willingness to understand, materialized as fear. fear is the phobia part of transphobia)
so even though GP tried to be accurate and progressive-enough in their admonishment of the ACLU to find a way to have a rational way of expressing and discussing their fear, the people involved have made a malformed FOIA request and are expressing their calcified opinion conflating sex and gender identity.
What does that have to do with denying a FOIA request? Sorry, you used the wrong pronouns, you are denied FOIA? Intent of the FOIA request is irrelevant, otherwise the government could deny FOIA for people who want to make the government look bad, which honestly is probably the case here.
its not about a pronoun, so looks like you're also conflating concepts
no pronouns need to be added or used to correct the malformed FOIA request
it conflates sex and gender, I said what I said, its accurate that it is doing that.
> Total number of male persons who identify as female, non-binary, or any other gender identity
The request would be "Total number of male persons that identify as women". The sex doesn't change, the gender does. The FOIA request would say invalid, or zero, and be accurate, regarding the ones identifying as "female". The "other gender identify" may cover it, but not necessarily. Males identifying as men wouldn't have been transferred. So "other than what"? "Female" is not a gender, unless we are accepting that any arbitrary identification is valid, but would that be grounds for transfer?
But yes that can just say "males transferred", because they remain male.
Its a conditional argument because legal circumstances follow conditional logic. So if it seems obtuse, oh well, thats how it works.
> The request would be "Total number of male persons that identify as women". The sex doesn't change, the gender does. The FOIA request would say invalid, or zero, and be accurate, regarding the ones identifying as "female".
Actually a lot of them now do identity as female, and claim to have literally changed their sex from male to female.
The old idea of "man/woman refers to gender, male/female refers to sex" no longer applies these days.
Not content with colonizing the word "woman", they've now done the same to "female".
This is contemporary trans discourse for you, erasing women and trampling all over women's rights.
from what I can tell, consensus hasn't been made and there is a lot of regional consensus. For example, I see US English honing in on "man/woman refers to gender, male/female refers to sex" while some Commonwealth English not having that exact distinction. On the internet, this makes things very confusing because its not clear where consensus is, and its not clear if someone is saying something exclusionary when they're critiquing the nomenclature. obviously, if you are fearing something that doesn't make sense, this ambiguous regional discourse masquerading as consensus only will validate your suspicions.
"Why the government would want to keep this secret is a good question"
That's an easy one - they always hide anything that could be controversial. This is definitely a hot topic in recent years.
"did people donating to the ACLU realize their money is being used to fight private citizen information requests & defend government secrecy?"
Due to the scope of the ACLU's actions and the variability of its members personal beliefs, it's almost guaranteed that they engage in things that some member disagree with.
> some female prisoners in Washington state wanted to know how many male prisoners had been transferred to women's prisons
This is such an incredibly bad-faith and transphobic representation of the case that I can only conclude you are intentionally trolling. Even if you believe that trans women should not be housed in prisons with cis women, it is beyond bad faith choose the words you chose to use.
I'm not following you at all. From the text of the request, the petitioners want to know: "Number of inmates that have been transferred from a men’s facility to a women’s facility since January 01, 2021" This is almost identical to what I wrote.
I would appreciate it if you would explain to me and others what part of my argument you disagree with rather than simply saying "incredibly bad-faith" "transphobic" "you are trolling" "beyond bad faith" without any explanation of what you think I did wrong or would prefer I do differently.
For what it's worth, I think you are acting in bad faith by calling me names and speculating unkindly about my motives without actually explaining what assertion or argument you object to and why. What you're doing is just bullying.
It's wrong to say "male." You're supposed to come up with some euphemism, like "bedicked." Literally nothing to do with the content of the argument; you're supposed to concede the ground before you step onto it.
While I really prefer the term “bedicked,” what is the term for people with penises regardless of gender? Is there a term that won’t result in someone being called a transphobe?
I’ve heard the term “sex assigned at birth” but that’s not accurate in this situation because I’m interested in people with penises and if someone was born male and had their penis removed surgically I wouldn’t want them included in my population of interest.
> what is the term for people with penises regardless of gender? Is there a term that won’t result in someone being called a transphobe?
No, there is no universally accepted term that won't get you called a transphobe by anyone (correct me if I'm wrong). If terms of the discussion are set by the most extreme genderist views, it's becomes literally impossible to discuss things like male violence against women or sexism in the workplace, because there's no permissible language to describe the groups involved.
I just go with "male" and "female" which are objective, observable facts. If people object to these terms, they are really objecting to having a discussion at all.
> “sex assigned at birth”
Sex is not "assigned" at birth it is observed, frequently well before birth via ultrasound or some other technology. Midwives and doctors don't go round flipping coins that say "boy" on one side and "girl" on the other, this whole concept of "assigned" sex is silly.
While that’s true, it’s such a rare occasion that it wouldn’t really factor into any general terminology. In that there’s not much benefit in altering any words to take into account the 1:100,000 situations where that’s true.
I think it would be like avoiding saying “people have two legs” because some people are born without legs or with only one leg. Yes, it occurs, but not so much as to matter in regards to population generalizations.
> In that there’s not much benefit in altering any words to take into account the 1:100,000 situations where that’s true.
Please explain where you got that number. You are off by three orders of magnitude. About 1:100 of births have ambiguity of gender at birth.
> I think it would be like avoiding saying “people have two legs” because some people are born without legs or with only one leg. Yes, it occurs, but not so much as to matter in regards to population generalizations.
Please explain why you feel that the description "assigned gender at birth" is not apt to describe people who have unambiguous genitals. Yes I understand that the description "observed gender at birth" is a subset of the description "assigned gender at birth", I understand the difference between these expressions. But it seems to me like one expression nicely covers the other expression, e.g. you can say for any birth where gender was "observed" at birth that it was also "assigned" at birth. It seems to me like you are the one stretching language to weird places to achieve political goals.
That doesn't mean it's impossible to observe the sex in most of these cases though, it just takes more than a quick visual check to determine.
The really tricky cases are where the individual has reproductive organs of mixed types, particularly where it involves some sort of genetic mosaicism or chimerism. These ones are where we could reasonably say that sex is only assigned and not observed, but it's very rare. Rarest of all is where someone could be plausibly regarded as both female and male.
Generally, I think it's best to avoid the terminology of "assigned at birth", because it comes with the implication that sex can be arbitrarily reassigned. Something like "incorrectly observed" would be better, in cases where a mistake has genuinely been made.
Exactly this. Even using the phrase 'trans woman' is a concession, implying that these men are a subcategory of women, rather than of men. And that it's possible to 'trans' into this category.
(This is why in radical feminist circles, they are typically referred to as 'trans-identifying males' instead.)
…since Trump’s election, according to The New York Times, the organization’s annual budget has grown threefold and its lawyer staff has doubled—but only four of its attorneys specialize in free-speech issues, a number that has not changed in a decade.
Instead, the ACLU has expanded its services—and filled its coffers—as it takes partisan stances or embraces dubious causes. Meanwhile, when it comes to the red-hot culture-war issues squarely within its wheelhouse, such as the right to free, albeit hateful, speech on campus, the ACLU has stayed largely on the sidelines.
It seems our corrupt political class has rotted one of our most venerable institutions.
Those who want to be rich, however, fall into temptation and become ensnared by many foolish and harmful desires that plunge them into ruin and destruction. For the love of money is the root of all kinds of evil. By craving it, some have wandered away from the faith and pierced themselves with many sorrows. But you, O man of God, flee from these things and pursue righteousness, godliness, faith, love, perseverance, and gentleness.
I'm not an overly religious person, but this seems to ring true as much today as it ever has.
I think it's more than just the political class. It seems like the entirety of american culture revolves around the idea that everyone should want to get rich by any means necessary.
It's like those pictures of bulldogs from the early 20th century. They look like real dogs, they don't have the health problems, and they just seem to be better. But then it becomes a competition. There is a public standard for success. And now we have flat faced monsters that can't breed on their own and need surgery just to breathe.
We're just seeing the natural progression of American individualism. What used to mean - be strong in the face of adversity, work toward a positive goal, and bring others along once you make it, has become a monstrosity. Winning means amassing resources, regardless of the steps you take to get those resources. Oh, and don't forget to pull the ladder up after you, because if someone else wins, you lose.
What we're seeing is the evolution, the simple, natural evolution of stoic individualism taken to the nth degree.
I completely disagree. I think this is the result of the war on the middle class and how expensive it has become just to stay alive in america. Social media platforms also promote the hell out of "grindset" accounts, or accounts that are just rich people doing expensive activities, and I refuse to believe that these trends that appear overnight are actually organic at all.
It feels like we're being conditioned to hate poor people.
I think the timeline of mass media, public relations weaponizing psychology, and consumerism being the focus of media messaging are relevant to that change — rather than it being the inevitable outcome of stoic individualism.
I think those are just further extensions. When all that matters is winning, and my own winning, the psychological outcomes of weaponized marketing literally don't matter. When my corporation selling things is what matters, and my success is what matters this quarter, rampant consumerism and the inevitable impacts on society/the planet don't matter.
Honestly, I do believe it all comes down to the cultural individualism as the prime component of success. Other countries have the same PR, mass media, and consumer goods, but don't seem to have the same cut-throat attitude to absolutely everything in their lives.
>The heart of Depp’s claim is that Heard ruined his acting career when she published a 2018 op-ed in The Washington Post describing herself as “a public figure representing domestic abuse”—a thinly veiled reference to much-publicized accusations of assault she made against Depp in court filings toward the end of their short-lived marriage. But Heard hadn’t pitched the idea to the Post—the ACLU had. Terence Dougherty, the organization’s general counsel, testified via video deposition that the ACLU had spearheaded the effort and served as Heard’s ghostwriter in exchange for her promise to donate $3.5 million to the organization. The promised donation also bought Heard the title of ACLU “ambassador on women’s rights with a focus on gender-based violence.” When Heard failed to pay up, Doughtery said, the ACLU collected $100,000 from Depp himself, and another $500,000 from a fund connected to Elon Musk, whom Heard dated after the divorce.
I have not been paying much attention to this case (I actually thought it was just a messy divorce case), but man, fuck the ACLU. How is anyone supposed to take any of this seriously anymore? She didn't even write the piece herself? How was the ACLU able to "collect" money from both Johnny Depp and Elon Musk??
What a disgrace the ACLU has become, and unfortunately I think most people still see them as the freedom-fighters they used to be.
It's a mess. Looks like that Miss Heard promised $3.5m to ACLU and $3.5 to a children hospital but didn't pay anything to the hospital and only donated like $350k herself to the ACLU. It's pretty wild when Miss Heard told on public television that she donated the full $7m to both parties (in 2018). You wonder what else she is lying about.
Sorry, I meant $3.5m for the hospital. The amount that Amber received was $7m tax free that would be split between the two, $500k for attorney fees, and ~$14m communal labilities to be paid by Depp. $7m + ~$14m + $500k + taxes is quite a lot for a 15 month long marriage
Ah, okay, thanks for the clarification! That actually makes it kind of funny. I guess there's the possibility of some kind of blackmail, but I don't think musk would let himself be blackmailed quietly.
But still, it doesn't seem like the ACLU should be involved in this.
The ACLU was trying to cash in on #metoo (which was timely, when this was published) — and published Heard’s defamation of Depp, apparently ignoring the numerous flags everyone else could see that Heard was the one abusing Depp.
But during the height of #metoo, we weren’t “allowed” to ask those questions because we needed to “believe all women”.
This seems to imply that Depp did not abuse Heard, which was not the view of the judge in the UK defamation trial (he ruled that 12 out of 14 incidents of abuse perpetrated by Depp had been proven to a civil standard).
It looks like Heard also abused Depp on at least a few occasions. But there seems to be this online sentiment at the moment that Heard is a compulsive liar and that she did not suffer abuse at all. There seems to be clear public evidence to the contrary.
> There seems to be clear public evidence to the contrary.
I would encourage you to examine the evidence.
Heard’s claims weren’t critically examined in the UK — who took her statements at face value while discounting both physical evidence and testimony of others.
By contrast in Virginia, where Heard is the subject of forensic analysis, both forensic psychologists have stated that Heard abused Depp — while there has been zero evidence (except Heard’s wild claims) to support that Depp ever acted similarly.
There is only evidence that Heard abused Depp.
A lawyer on YouTube has been streaming the Virginia trial and posting daily recaps, LegalBytes.
> there has been zero evidence (except Heard’s wild claims) to support that Depp ever acted similarly.
I'm a bit confused about this point - didn't Depp & his witnesses go first? I'd expect the majority of Heard's evidence in this trial to come out (and be examined) over the next couple of weeks.
If she calls witnesses that corroborate what you call her 'wild claims', would that change your opinion?
We already have the witness list and know roughly what to expect. The main thing going against Amber is that we've heard from the officers that responded to a couple incidences and each officer has testified as to not observing any injuries nor any damage to the penthouse. There are also zero medical records reporting the injuries she claims to have sustained.
Her witness list does not include anyone that will refute those points and is mainly filled with people whose only account of what happened between Johnny/Amber is what they've heard from Amber.
Just a sample of her claims thus far:
> Walked across a tile floor covered in glass shards from broken bottles and wine
> Sexual assault with a (potentially broken) wine bottle
> Thrown across a room by the neck
> Beaten on top of a bed so forcefully as to have broken the timber bed frame
Yes — that’s why I’m watching the trial: to see the evidence.
Though, Heard’s case has already started: the second forensic psychologist was hired by Heard and called as her witness and Heard herself is currently giving her testimony (which, watching it in full I find unconvincing and in conflict with evidence already presented).
> When Heard failed to pay up, Doughtery said, the ACLU collected $100,000 from Depp himself, and another $500,000 from a fund connected to Elon Musk, whom Heard dated after the divorce.
It doesn't really specify what the ACLU said or did to get that money. I'm curious what those methods were and if Depp (or Musk) were aware of the ACLU's involvement or the pay to play relationship between Heard and the ACLU.
In Depp’s case, he paid the first $100,000 of the $7M divorce settlement directly to the ACLU — and she flipped out and demanded the money go to her, rather than directly to the charities she pledged it to: the ACLU and a children’s hospital.
Heard never donated the balance of her divorce settlement she publicly pledged.
Trump's election handed them an extra ~$100m a year, but advocating for free speech in Charlottesville put that all at risk.
Their Director, Anthony Romero, implemented a new ideological and political backlash test for those they represent. It was his decision. His interviews show he'd much rather be in charge of sprawling, well funded partisan organization than a smaller crotchety one.
I see the appeal. He's becoming a Democratic power player, funding campaigns and helping define the Democratic agenda. Why would he ever go back? He has more personal impact than he ever could under the old ACLU, can become much wealthier, fraternize with celebrities and politicians, and all while being consistent with his personal politic views.
I used to support the ACLU and I support progressive causes. Now that they are one and the same, I'd rather donate to candidates and causes directly instead of letting Romero pick for me.
It reminds me a bit of what happened to the National Rifle Association honestly. The money is in being hyper-partisan, not being objective and standing for some principle. The NRA is now basically a far-right Republican lobby group that is only incidentally about second amendment rights.
Seems true in media too. Look at what happened to Joe Rogan when he got his big deal. His move down-market and toward a more partisan position is just going where the money is, I'm sure at the behest of his new owners.
Objectivity doesn't pay. Standing for principles doesn't pay. Selling out to partisan or corporate agendas pays.
There are gun advocacy groups which are issues-focused and compromise far less than the NRA, which is kind of a joke among younger gun advocates. Gun Owners of America is one who frequently supports legal funds for gun advocacy issues. Occasionally, a state gun rights group escalates a case up through circuit courts to the supreme court and deserves financial support. This past year, the California Rifle & Pistol association fought a case around standard-capacity magazine bans, and the New York State Rifle & Pistol Association fought a case regarding restrictions on carrying and transporting firearms. I believe CRPA is a 501(c)3 organization so donations are tax-deductible. I am sure there are others but I would be fine if the ACLU focused on the 1st amendment and left gun advocacy to other more focused groups (although I would appreciate if those groups also got 501(c)3 certification)
>The NRA is now basically a far-right Republican lobby group that is only incidentally about second amendment rights.
As someone who has extensively followed the missteps of the NRA under Wayne LaPierre… I don’t believe you understand what Far-Right is, nor the actual details of the NRA.
Allow me to give you a primer that isn’t built off of media fear mongering…
NRA is very much Establishment Right. That’s part of the problem. They wanted to snuggle with McConnell and Graham and hated Trump just as much as the afore mentioned do. The NRA wants status quo. Don’t actually do anything because we can’t campaign on that. Go to galas, make important calls and meetings in DC, have the company buy a house for you.
As both sides have abandoned compromise solutions, the NRA is still playing the 2A game as if it was bowling pin matches and skeet clubs.
Guess what though? The young people that make up modern gun owners have different concerns. The Hearing Protection Act and National Reciprocity should have gone through on Trump Day 1. But the NRA didn’t really care about either. Almost every gun owner in the county was pissed off when NRA didn’t storm the fucking gates when Philando Castile was killed by a twitchy cop. That was a fucking home run to prove gun ownership isn’t about skin color and they did absolutely nothing. GOA and SAF took an immediate stand despite many members and groups being police affiliated.
GOA and SAF have been building their ranks with young, motivated, and politically active members. The NRA Old Guard is dying of age, not by bullets real or political, by bloat.
Anyone that is anti-gun should not be celebrating the slow dissolve of the NRA. And likewise, if you (seriously!?) think the NRA is “Far Right” you really aren’t going to like the ambitious and motivated direction of the new guard. They’ll compromise when it makes sense, but real compromise, where you give something up for something they want.
Side note: For anyone who doesn't know, they are available on Amazon Smile as a charity so you can support them with a few cents from every purchase you make at no additional cost to you.
Consider what the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) had to say about pandemic management in 2008:
“The notion that we need to ‘trade liberty for security’ is misguided and dangerous. Public health concerns cannot be addressed with law enforcement or national security tools.”
13 years later, in a guest essay in The New York Times, the ACLU proclaimed that:
“the real threat to civil liberties comes from states banning vaccine and mask mandates”.
Think what you want about these policies, but the shift in ACLU values is real.
The Rutherford Institute [0] is much better than the ACLU on civil liberties issues these days, even though its founder, John W. Whitehead, was formerly associated with the Religious Right, and has since disavowed it [1].
"I used to be a proud card-carrying member of the ACLU. Today, when its fundraising mailers and pleas to re-enroll arrive in my mailbox, I toss them in the recycling."
Glad someone else noticed this. The ACLU has worked against several causes (such as freedom of the press and free speech) that it would have supported once upon a time. The question is why. Possibilities I can think of are: (A) it's become controlled opposition, the leaders are secretly libertarians (unlikely) (B) it's become bloated with bureaucrats who just want to collect a paycheck and are guided by trails of money (meh) (C) It's become bloated with trend-chasers who are passionate about the latest cause de jure, and don't think about or care about other causes (D) the organization is holding on for dear life, donations are down, and they can't afford to be picky with what causes they support, whatever keeps the justice ship afloat
The principles on which the organization was founded are not (at least not to the same degree) the principles of the people who now comprise it. Leaving aside why this is the case, I think it is clear that the ACLU trades on a reputation that they no longer entirely deserve.
Well, and they also disagree on where the censorship should occur.
One side is trying to prevent kindergarteners from having teachers discuss gender and sexual identity issues with them. The other is openly claiming free speech is problematic on widely available public discussion platforms, with thought leaders claiming that strict moderation of these platforms is necessary to preserve democracy.
But yes, arguably both sides are supporting some degree of censorship.
Also if we allow teachers to teach about any topics due to freedom of speech. Is that necessarily a good thing or even something we want? This could lead very varying things being taught and probably some that one side agrees and some that other side agrees with...
I think age appropriate centrally planned general plan what should be taught is entirely reasonable. Anything else just leaves to mess and unevenness.
Wow. There's literally legislation intended to have a chilling effect on certain kinds of speech - outlawing it - and you "don't think it's censorship" because you happen to disagree with said speech. It would be difficult to conjure a more prototypical example of censorship.
It's definitely censorship, just in the same way that a police department might also have rules about officers not swearing at children. Yes it restricts speech, but no, it's not inappropriate or stifling of discussion.
A more prototypical example of censorship would be government-sanctioned banning of the selling or distribution of books critical of its policies... and not just in libraries at schools for children.
You probably saw the video of Russian protesters being taken away by henchmen immediately after speaking out [1], or the video of the Chinese police interrogation for the guy who criticized them on WeChat [2]. It'd be a little obtuse to compare these to controlling what sexual education topics kindergarteners are exposed to.
I concede that your examples are more prototypical examples of censorship. That said, a law banning what teachers can or can't teach is also censorship. While it's not appropriate for teachers to teach to kindergarteners about sexual identity topics, it really shouldn't be lawmakers making those decisions (what schools should or shouldn't teach).
Of course - when everything is made into this "battle for America", everything matters, censorship becomes "justified" and the further the division grows.
I do genuinely wonder what it is in humans that makes them seem to inherently want a 'strong' (read: a flavor of fascist but with views that agree with mine personally) leader.
my impression is that some chapters/local offices are more focused on traditional civil liberties than others. but fashion is oh-so-hard to resist, especially in places like CA or TX that see themselves as being at the forefront of culture.
side note: "de jure" (by law) should be "du jour" (of the day). i just used this phrase in another post, a funny little coinky-dink (coincidence).
IMO the answer as to why is that Ira Glasser was replaced by Anthony Romero as executive director in 2001, and Romero substantially reoriented the organization.
No, the phrase "controlled opposition" implies that they're for these ideals, and take up losing cases against them as a means of advancing them.
It's not very plausible, but it's a theory :)
For example, if I—a dyed-in-the-wool free speech advocate—bring a weak case against someone who wrote something unpopular, I can control the opposition within the case and ensure that I lose (and therefore my ideals are upheld).
Again, not very plausible with respect to the ACLU's drift, but that's what parent seems to be suggesting as one of the possibilities.
That's some extreme 4D chess. An organization originally founded to support free speech is infiltrated by people who support free speech who start promoting anti-free speech ideals or cases in order to weak man the anti-free speech argument.
Not when it comes to the second amendment. They cherry-pick the Bill of Rights to suit their donors’ politics. They also seem to ignore the 10th as well.
Not particularly. For example their policy document "A Pro-Liberty Case for Gun Restrictions" is very much the opposite of the libertarian take on the issue. Their support of net neutrality laws & regulations is also un-Libertarian, although maybe you could make the argument that net neutrality is only necessary because ISPs don't operate in a true free market.
I suppose if you critically examine the definition of Liberty / Libertarian you could say they are such an organization. You could also get creative with definitions and claim that because they want to maintain and preserve constitutional rights they are actually a 'conservative' institution.
However in general perception they are firmly "on the left" politically and socially whereas Libertarians are perceived as "on the right" in America. Therefore I don't think the label Libertarian is fitting in this case.
Interesting, thanks. I know that people who identify as 'libertarians' in the USA tend to be right-wing, but I thought that the definition was much closer to that of 'liberal', as in 'favoring the rights of the individual'.
There has been a significant shift in what "liberal" means in the vernacular. I suspect this is because there is a habit of reducing everything down to either "liberal vs conservative" - in the US at least. I know many libertarians have started qualifying themselves as "classical liberals" in order to try and distinguish their ideology.
What does “further right” mean? Positions the left would have never taken 10 years ago are now commonplace. The idea that a Supreme Court nominee is too afraid to even define what a woman is (due to her lack of biology credentials apparently) — that would have been laughable 10 years ago. The Democrat position on abortion, during the Clinton admin was “safe, legal, rare.” Now it’s “abortion for any reason at any stage of pregnancy, even up to the moment of birth.” That’s an extreme position. And on illegal immigration — Barbara Jordan’s position is identical to the position republicans have maintained for decades. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=3qjdZUx7fUw
So a world without Roe v Wade (for example) with the threat of Dred Scott style extradition for those who cross state borders, isn't a further-right position than when Roe was still in place? Immigration policies/attitudes aren't further right than in the days when "bring me your tired" meant something? You don't remember the days when finance and media and airlines were more tightly regulated? When unions were stronger? Do you really need me to cite the many studies from actual political scientists and sociologists showing the rightward trend, vs. your cherry picked anecdata? I thought this was all well known, but perhaps it's not so obvious behind HN's own rightward shift.
I live in the southeast and talk to a lot of right wing people. Nothing has really changed in my lifetime as far as right wing view points go. At least to the degree that I can't find anyone around me who supports the crazier stuff I see online.
In other news, we're in 21st century, there's this new thing called "internet" that is getting popular, and Generalissimo Francisco Franco is still dead.
I mean, it's good they finally noticed, but it didn't happen recently. ACLU has turned from "CL" to just "L" (meaning "Left") years ago, by now probably a decade ago.
The author's main complaint is that the ACLU has prioritized "immigrant rights, LGBTQ rights, reproductive freedom, and racial justice." But the opposition to these issues (aka the Republican party) is rolling in dark money. The forces against social progress are doing just fine without the ACLU.
It has but I keep donating because they do some good work as well. I'm also a member of EFF, NRA, Planned Parenthood, and TFTP and contribute semi-annualy to the causes. You'll never agree with everyone's full point of view, but there are groups fighting for liberty still.
Holding a desire to do violence is even more protected than saying it out loud or writing it down, which are also generally protected if they aren’t imminent incitement.
Also, by now I've seen so many breathless statements by leftists who are literally shaking rn that so-and-so "denies my right to exist" and "wants me dead" that it doesn't even look like anything to me anymore. It's just a slogan. Letters of the alphabet strung together.
If you're so completely devoid of empathy that you have no reaction to hearing that someone is afraid for their for their life, that says a lot more about you than it does about them.
I have tons of empathy, but I won’t coddle strangers on the internet over their dramatic rhetoric. It’s not sincere, it’s polemical, and I’m not buying it. If it is sincere, they need therapy not empathy. Get some perspective on your situation and don’t cry wolf.
Nice try with the “you must be a monster!” tactic.
I don't think you have enough info to really judge OP. There's a reason everybody learns the boy who cried wolf story as a kid - it's human nature to become desensitized to something after frequent false alarms.
It's worth considering how recent advances in things like gay rights are, and how much more is left for things like trans rights. Why should I care more about debate club than about being able to make medical decisions for my significant other? It's one thing to consider a situation from afar, but having it bear down on you directly gives you a very different perspective.
I mean sure, but you're making the discussion about a different (albeit related) issue than I was trying to address.
For one thing, your comment states concrete concerns that could directly affect you, as opposed to the vague "fear for my life" sort of comments OP was referring to.
But more importantly, my question is not whether OP was correct, it is whether stating this opinion on an internet forum with little other context is somehow enough info to make a judgement about his empathy/morals.
> Why should I care more about debate club than about being able to make medical decisions for my significant other?
Because for every loud/news visible minority like some LGBT folks there are others like Southeast Asians who nobody is caring about. By focusing on laws we can uplift _all_ minorities, not just the ones we identify as. The victories of a Neo Nazi's ability to publicly demonstrate can help Southeast Asians or African Americans demonstrate against police brutality or fight for equity in hiring, pay, and crime.
Not all minorities have hugely visible movements advocating for their rights. The modern LGBT movement is very visible and very online. My dark-skinned PoC parents are poor, speak bad English, and need a lot of help to navigate the US. Nobody is focusing on them.
If you’ve been paying any attention to US politics over the last few years, it is pretty clear they’re talking about police killings of black people and/or hate crimes directed at Asians and LGBT folks
Yes these are certainly problems that should be addressed. School shootings are also a problem that should be addressed, but it would be hyperbolic to say you feared for your life going into school every day. Some of the language that is used surrounding those other issues creates unnecessary anxiety IMO.
But that's not really my main point, I'm certainly open to debate on the topic. I just don't agree with the character judgement of OP - we have no idea how his circle talks.
I've personally encountered two people that were clearly attention seeking or perhaps had an anxiety disorder with the way they talked about such issues. One example was a black female born into the upper middle class, working from home as a SWE in a gated community during the pandemic, saying quite literally that she actively feared for her life due to police violence.
To be clear, I do not think the existence of that extreme invalidates the legitimate underlying concerns at all. They've also been a minority of the voices in my experience. I'm just saying that language starts to lose its meaning if you encounter too many of these types, and I have seen with my own eyes that they exist.
The right response is probably not to outright dismiss a statement about fearing for one's life, but some amount of skepticism is normal if it's been a false alarm in the past. Especially on an internet forum with random strangers.
As a counterpoint, accusations of "violence" get thrown around with little restraint. "Silence is Violence" but I've also found that disagreements can equate to "denying my right to exist".
That was the point of Ira Glasser's stance. Him and other ACLU members defended the right of Neo-Nazis to march in Skokie, Illinois. Glasser himself and many of the other attorneys on the case were Jewish. They were protecting the rights of people demonstrating to advocate for doing violence against people like them.
Viewpoints like this are mostly gone these days in the US. Liberalism has become unpopular on the Left (and it's always been just a suggestion on the Right in my experience).
Most liberal countries have restrictions on outright hate speech. It's definitely possible to be a liberal and also oppose the right of Nazis to advocate for mass genocide.
Free Speech isn't a "liberal" or a "conservative" value, it's an American value.
The reason "hate speech" exists in European countries is because they have unresolved baggage from WWII, and rather than confront the problem, they decided to put a boot down and curtail civil liberties instead. None of that is relevant to the USA or has any bearing on our politics.
Who defines hate speech? Do you need agreement from 100% of citizens or can a few politicians decide what a country can and cannot say legally before running afoul of hate speech laws?
Who defines what constitutes murder, what food safety regulations are, or any of a million other laws? It really doesn't seem like an unsolvable problem
The word "liberal" has been mangled to the point where it is essentially meaningless. As far as I'm concerned, anyone who believes the government should have the power to regulate the content of your speech, at the point of a gun, is in no way "liberal".
There we have a case of prominent Jewish lawyers defending the right of Neo-Nazis, a group of people who advocate for violence against Jews, to protest. Here we have people suggesting we need legal restrictions around hate speech. Do you see the difference of values?
Liberalism is about guaranteeing individuals' rights in the face of the State. My point is that the Left in the US has lost interest in it and are more interested in pursuing their policies regardless of how it affects freedoms. The Right has never really cared for Liberalism and so it's falling out of favor.
That tweet is almost as bad as people who bring up the paradox of tolerance.
Morals have always and will always be relative to who’s alive at the time. Dril is just speaking power to truth, since their morals are winning for now.
How did this article get published? I always thought that the Atlanta was a yellow journalism outlet, but this article defies that belief. Bravo Atlantic for pointing out this important issue and its detrimental effects on the freedom of speech.
The Atlantic publishes things like this pretty frequently. People on their staff who are not liberals: Connor Freidersdorf, David Frum (eww), and (well, she is a liberal but has some edgy feminism takes) Caitlin Flanagan.
It's a fairly enjoyable magazine, that used to have a (really ugly and hostile) comment section that the writers would actually engage with. Which was pretty cool. In a truly embarrassing ethical mistep a former editor allowed Hillary's campaign to dictate some details about his coverage (he had to use the word muscular lol) in exchange for giving him access to a speech ahead of time so he could start writing his article early, IIRC. That was less cool.
I’m personally blown away by the weird shit that went on and the Amber Heard case. I’m reticent to call that inherently politically “left” and more of “an incredibly scummy cash grab that apparently didn’t even work very well but happened to appeal to a slice of left-leaning people”
Whoever came up with, pitched and signed off on that whole silly scheme should be excised from the organization immediately.
As for them deciding not to help out the Unite The Right folks after their blatant violent rhetoric and blatant violent (if vague) plans led to an actual death… uh, so what?
I’m kind of amused by the “both sides are equal!” rhetoric — as if the nazis somehow are lacking funding, political goodwill and sympathetic judges.
Anyway, serious question: Is everyone entitled to ACLU resources? For example, if I organize a rally about how it’s cool to kill people that I think are subhuman and one of the attendants goes ahead and follows through with that line of reasoning, is it a violation of my rights if the ACLU doesn’t trip over themselves making sure that I can do it again?
If I’m entitled to ACLU money then I’ve got free legal representation for life, right? Disregard the fact that in this scenario I’m maybe in the hook for criminal incitation of violence — it doesn’t matter. Incitation is speech and speech is a civil liberty and that’s in the name of the organization. checkmate, losers.
I do think funding silly leftist causes is about as dumb as funding certain righty causes, but at the end of the day the ACLU is an organization that has, and has always had, the civil liberty of free speech themselves, including the right to pick who and what they work with and on.
Anyway, I’m glad the author is an experienced federal defense attorney. Maybe she can spend her personal time helping out the members of Christopher Cantwell’s various Telegram channels since she cares more about their wellbeing than her own feminist and Democrat ideals.
I've been a member of the ACLU since probably 1996, and have always admired the ACLU, so I'm not some johnny-come-lately GenZ wanting the ACLU to be something different than a past ACLU I don't like.
And I still love the ACLU. I don't think they have lost their way or changed their values. I don't agree with every thing the national or state ACLU's do (never have), but I think what they are doing now is upholding and further the core values they have always had, I don't see it as a departure, and in fact I think the things they are doing that look like changes are steps to better uphold their fundamental core values, I think they are steps in the right direction, I'm very happy with the direction they are going.
I'm not even sure I entirely follow what this article is complaining about.
You’ve said a lot of words - but have said mostly nothing other than “I disagree”
> And I still love the ACLU. I don't think they have lost their way or changed their values. I don't agree with every thing the national or state ACLU's do (never have), but I think what they are doing now is upholding and further the core values they have always had, I don't see it as a departure, and in fact I think the things they are doing that look like changes are steps to better uphold their fundamental core values, I think they are steps in the right direction, I'm very happy with the direction they are going.
What made you originally love the ACLU? What things have you disagreed with? What changes have you seen? What core values? How do those changes better uphold those core values? What is the right direction you’re referring to?
Why shouldn't ACLU be involved in politics? Isn't Civil Rights all about politics? If you are fighting for civil rights you must also support politicians who support civil rights. No?
The ACLU has often made voting easier for me. I live in a state with mail voting. We get a big booklet with all the issues to be voted on spelled out with pros and cons submitted by people and organizations. Typically I just flip through each one to see if the ACLU is for or against it, then I vote the opposite. There has only been a single time that I agreed with them and voted the way they want me to vote. They are a great litmus test of most issues.
'Free Speech' a bit of an American term, I wish people would start using the broader term 'Freedom of Expression', and, thinking outside the bounds of 2cnd Amendment, which is fairly specific.
Also, the term 'Free Speech' in 2022 feels a bit as though it's been usurped by specific libertarian-ish hardliners, even just using the term 'Freedom of Expression' just feels more inclusive to groups that aren't 'libertarian' etc..
The ACLU lost its way a long time ago and that's not really news because it's in the "good" company of most non-profits.
We all "know" they are rotten but we are still "shocked" when we learn exactly what they do - aka "How the sausage is made".
It reminds me that time ( possibly now ) when Politico's "journalists" went around the World asking money from Governments and other public institutions in order for them to write good things about them ( visibility!! ) but also "asking" money to not write bad things about them..
Sometimes the drunk bums around the corner are 100% right: this shit stinks!!!
Can you remember where you read the allegation about Politico? It isn’t in the “controversies” section of the Politico Wiki page [0] and a couple of Google searches for things like “politico corruption” and “politico pay for articles” weren’t helpful.
The ACLU made the decision to change. You can agree with that or not; if you dont like it... dont give them your money. That isn't the biggest concern.
The bigger concern is 'who the nazis are'.
Google has an employee who wrote:
“Today it is often 1 or 2 steps to nazis. If we understand that PragerU, Jordan Peterson, Ben Shapiro et al are nazis using the dog whistles you mention in step 1. I can receive these recommendations regardless of the content of what I’m looking at, and I have recorded thousands of internet users sharing the same experience..”
The problem with the political polarization is that you attribute your political opponents as being 'the worst'. There's plenty of examples of right-wing folks calling people nazis. Elon Musk called Trudeau Hitler. So did lefties, Bill Maher, russel brand, and several others: https://globalnews.ca/news/8627659/elon-musk-justin-trudeau-...
It's not that the ACLU lost their way or for that matter all those people calling everyone nazis. It's that virtually all of north america has lost their way. We need to get back to talking to each other again.
In the Trudeau case the comparison is at least not 100% wrong, as is usually the case when the N-word crops up. Hitler famously engaged in forced medical experiments on people who were deemed disposable classes of society, and he brooked no dissent or resistance. Regardless of how you personally feel about the COVID vaccines they were and are based on experimental new medical technology, which was then forced on people against their will including on people who thought it might harm them. And as we saw, the protestors were then destroyed by a leader who gave so few shits that he didn't even bother to turn up and talk to them, and who then engaged in vengeful financial attacks on family members or anyone who tried to support the protestors.
Obviously that doesn't make Trudeau literally Hitler, but the point of talking about WW2 is to try and learn lessons so it never repeats. If you're only allowed to notice similarities by the time there are no differences left at all, it's already far too late. That's why the comparisons are always so tricky and fraught with controversy. On one hand, comparing everything to the Nazis is a tired rhetorical trick designed to shut down thought. On the other hand, to ensure something like that never happens again, people have to be willing to say -wait. That looks bad. That looks like something the Nazis did. That shouldn't be happening and maybe the people who are making it happen are bad people, they should be stopped. But the bar for it has to be high.
> Regardless of how you personally feel about the COVID vaccines they were and are based on experimental new medical technology
This is not technically true. They were based on research from 1984, which started development in 2005 and was more or less ready and waiting for an application by 2010. They were much less experimental than the Polio or Smallpox vaccines were when they were introduced.
It is very obviously true. Reductio ad-absurdum arguments like that could be applied to argue no technology is ever experimental.
COVID vaccines are the first mRNA based vaccines ever produced, they were produced in absolutely record-breaking time and rushed through trials under emergency authorization. That's pretty much the definition of experimental technology.
The COVID vaccines are not the first mRNA vaccines. I'm not sure where you are getting your information. There are mRNA Ebola vaccines in use in Africa.
By "in use" you mean never progressed beyond the trial stage? Your article literally says in the opening paragraph, "why did it take until the global COVID-19 pandemic of 2020 for the first mRNA vaccine to be brought to market?"
The COVID vaccines are so poorly understood that the manufacturers claimed 95% efficacy against infection, a claim which evaporated within months as that number dropped through the floor. They have never even tried to explain why their trial results were so badly wrong, meaning they don't understand their own products. A product so new even its own makers can't explain its behavior is at best experimental, and that's being generous in the extreme. A more accurate assessment would be that COVID vaccination was a mandatory medical experiment forced on vast sections of humanity often against people's will, in which the people doing the forcing then turned a blind eye to any negative effects.
Even the WEF denounced Trudeau for totalitarian antidemocratic behaviors.
This is the past though. We must work together in the present and get back together as team Canada. The liberals had many greats like Chretien despite his handshakes... lol. There was other good leaders even during the ottawa protest like joel lightbound who is a quebec liberal mp. He said exactly what was needed. He said we just needed a date for when these human rights are returned. A roadmap to normal.
We still don't have this. Practically the whole world has opened up and given this responsibility to the individual where it belongs. We are the only country that disallows their citizens to leave. Worse yet those Canadians are mocked and told to leave.
It feels to me trudeau's quebec sovereignty has taken to a new tactic. Become hostile to your fellow Canadians and make us hate quebec and want you out of Canada. Trudeau doesn't understand economics. He doesn't know that if Quebec became their own country they would have such a huge deficit they would not be able to afford an education or healthcare system. Bombardier and SNCLavalin basically own the country and you're fighting to keep them in Quebec. Terrible. You would have immediate revolution to return to Canada.
This is such a bad thing. We need to unite again. We are obviously stronger together. No matter the past, you can't change the past, we need to get working and talking together again.
If we look back on US public health policy it wasn't really a liberal democracy until maybe about 1970 given such strong government institutions that shut down dissent. It turns out that the US back to the polio vaccine forcibly vaccinated many, many populations. The demographic differences in the groups affected were interesting - the primary resistance came from the black community that distrusted the government. We can go back to the Spanish Flu period and it turns out that we had the same exact problems of 2020 in terms of popular public health policy debate as well with anti-maskers and pro-maskers.
The problems I see is that public discourse has become the same thing as the old Internet in all the bad ways from decades past with almost none of the good parts. Bad faith arguments, Godwin's Law everywhere, slippery slope fallacies everywhere, etc. are now _standard_ and expected making all but the simplest discussions impossible.
The debacle with the Depp/Heard case is really concerning, I'll say that right up front. That whole event is a good argument for the article's point. But many of the other criticisms are the same ones that didn't convince me the first few times I saw them.
The author says that the ACLU can't be beholden to a political ideology, but that's an obvious contradiction. Support for civil liberties is an inherently political position. If a political party adopts policies that limit civil liberty, then defending CL becomes a partisan issue as well. If one candidate in a race for office is in favor of CL and the other is opposed, which one could easily argue for in the case of the Abrams Vs. Kemp race, [0] then it is entirely appropriate for a CL organization to support one candidate over the other. To claim that the ACLU ought to be, that it could be, apolitical, is to categorically refuse to prepare for or fight against the most powerful attacks on civil liberties.
In general, I've come to value neutrality and apoliticality less and less. What's "political" and what's not is loosely defined and socially constructed, and I suspect it's occasionally deliberately constructed and redefined by the media to shut down certain discussions or criticisms as "inappropriate". Neutrality is likewise poorly defined, and it's often just a form of cowardice from media groups unwilling to take an obviously correct stance because they're afraid to lose subscriptions from people who disagree with the evidence.
Plus, one should note that it's the American Civil Liberties Union, not the American Free Speech Union. The author implies that it is somehow inappropriate for the ACLU to fight for civil liberties other free speech. "Immigrant rights, LGBTQ rights, reproductive freedom, and racial justice" as named by the article are all as much civil liberties as the right to free speech, and thus it is within the organization's mission to champion them. Yet the author describes the ACLU as unable "uphold its core values" by supporting these causes.
Plus, there's this:
> But in 2018, following the ACLU’s successful litigation to obtain a permit for white supremacists to march in Charlottesville, Virginia, which ended in death and disaster, the ACLU issued new guidelines.
There's good logic to the idea that an attack on the free speech of Nazis could weaken the rights of the rest of us, but an organization that regularly defends Nazis (a group of people noted for their desire to commit genocide) will eventually have something like this happen. It's an area where the cost-benefit analysis may well not turn out in its favor.
> In general, I've come to value neutrality and apoliticality less and less. What's "political" and what's not is loosely defined and socially constructed, and I suspect it's occasionally deliberately constructed and redefined by the media to shut down certain discussions or criticisms as "inappropriate". Neutrality is likewise poorly defined, and it's often just a form of cowardice from media groups unwilling to take an obviously correct stance because they're afraid to lose subscriptions from people who disagree with the evidence.
I take your point about some values potentially running counter to a political party's platform. But the piece you have glossed over here (and why political neutrality is important) is because those values generally aren't applied consistently between political parties.
Claiming to support free speech, only to turn around and demand the censorship of someone who says something you don't like is a disgusting practice that we should call out and shame. These sorts of double standards are quite common in the modern political sphere, unfortunately.
I'm referring to neutrality in the sense of not taking a side in a disagreement, and I think you're referring to neutrality in the sense of having a single, consistent standard applied to everyone equally. They're slightly different concepts. We should certainly hold everyone to the same standard, but I'm what I'm saying is that, for example, a standard isn't unfair just because it affects one political group more than another; it might be unfair, but it could also be the case that the more affected group is just worse.
Has it? That is the charitable view. The uncharitable view is that their stated ideals were conditional on advancing their unstated goals. Once they started jeopardizing those goals instead, they were selectively abandoned.
When I am weaker than you, I ask you for freedom because that is according to your principles; when I am stronger than you, I take away your freedom because that is according to my principles.
> Terence Dougherty, the organization’s general counsel, testified via video deposition that the ACLU had spearheaded the effort and served as Heard’s ghostwriter in exchange for her promise to donate $3.5 million to the organization.
This is interesting, especially given the interest in the trial, but largely irrelevant.
First, no matter who actually ghostwrote the op-ed piece in WaPo, Amber Heard put her name on it.
Second, charities engage in fundraising activities. It doesn't surprise me at all that the ACLU was actively involved in the op-ed piece. You have to remember that prior to the current trial, Depp's reputation was really in tatters. Heard was seen as the victim so getting broader circulation for her story probably seemed both a good idea and consistent with the ACLU's perceived values.
> When Heard failed to pay up, Doughtery said, the ACLU collected $100,000 from Depp himself
So here I believe the article has made a factual error. I can't find an exact date for this but from watching the trial, the check Depp sent to the ACLU for $100,000 was part of the divorce settlement, which would put it more than 2 years prior to the op-ed piece.
> Progressive causes are near and dear to my heart. I am a feminist and staunch Democrat.
This is a contradiction. Democrats not only aren't progressives, they do their utmost to eliminate and ostracize any actual progressives from their ranks. Consider right at the time the Supreme Court draft was leaked, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, one of the 3 most powerful Democrats in the country, was in Texas campaigning for the only anti-choice Democrat in the House in a primary over progressive candidates [1].
The author doesn't really explain what issues they have with the ACLU other than some off-the-cuff statements about supporting Stacy Abrams. Given Georgia's voter suppression bill [2] that her opponent ultimately signed into law, this actually does seem consistent with protecting "civil liberties".
The author meanders about the point that the ACLU should be protecting "free speech" without saying how it isn't. It's really a complaint about other causes but remember it's the American Civil Liberties Union not the American Free Speech Union. Voter rights, as an example, fall directly under the umbrella of civil liberties.
More often than not, when someone has a take like this, it usually means they're a TERF but I can't find anything she's publicly written that's obviously transphobic so I'm scratching my head as to what the actual issue is here. I've found some complaints about Kamala Harrais being more progressive as a prosecutor than VP (which is legitimate) but nothing obvious.
As for her complaints about ACLU opposition to Title IX, I honestly don't know a lot about this but the ACLU's original suit seemed to be to opposed a higher standard for sexual harassment investigations and claims [3]. That seems a legitimate complaint, no?
Whatever the cause, it doesn't seem like the author is explicit about what her actual issue is.
> More often than not, when someone has a take like this, it usually means they're a TERF but I can't find anything she's publicly written that's obviously transphobic so I'm scratching my head as to what the actual issue is here.
Sorry the witch hunt didn't work out like you'd hoped.
Ignoring actual disagreement about what the 2nd amendment means and what policy should be, why would the ACLU invest in 2nd amendment rights in a world where there is already a a strong lobby dedicated to them.
That "strong" lobby is dangerously corrupt and currently bleeding membership because of it. They've also turned themselves into a form of religion and not capable of being a rational actor.
Please let’s not rehash that 2008 Heller and 2010 McDonald have settled that 2A has absolutely always been an individual right - even if you don’t like that outcome.
But apparently trying to hide a fact might make it change!
Ummmm fact check time! Actually they were never convicted of terrorism so even though they murdered people and bombed government offices they're technically not terrorists. Stop spreading misinformation!
I totally agree that the ACLU is getting into things that seem silly, but it seems equally silly to claim they are 'losing their way' based on that.
This article complains the ACLU is not taking right-wing speech cases but admits they still do take cases and lists no examples where they refused. It cites the ACLU reacting to the protest where a protester was killed by nazis as anti-speech, but the ACLU was not saying they are against legal speech! They reflected, correctly, that backing groups that seek to silence (and kill) others is not straightforward. Considering the number of people in here who are decrying a "movement against freedom of speech" I would think people would support that policy!
If the article is to be believed and the ACLU has gotten a lot more money in recent years - wouldn't it make sense that they get into new areas?
Should the ACLU have more speech lawyers? Maybe! Are there cases they couldn't take? I would love to see some examples.
Should the ACLU stay out of politics? It's worth debating and I'm glad the article brings it up - but given the anti-democratic (and anti-individual rights) policy goals of the republican party I understand the approach. The article doesn't even ask what we do when one party is against proportional representation!
In general I just don't feel like this is actually responding to the ACLU's positions. She accuses the organization of hypocrisy around Title IX because they criticized changes but then later said they supported some updates - but of course it is perfectly coherent to criticize overall changes AND support parts of them. Here is their statement:
> We filed comments on Education Secretary Betsy DeVos’ Title IX rule that supported fair process requirements for live hearings, cross-examination, access to all the evidence, and delays in proceedings if the student accused of wrongdoing also faced a student criminal investigation, even as we criticized the rule for reducing the obligations of schools to respond to reports of sexual harassment.
Like seriously, I encourage everyone to check the case selection guidelines linked in the article[1]. Here are the things that might lead them to not take an otherwise suitable case: the group seeks to engage in violence, the group seeks to carry weapons, if the speech would lead to direct harm, if the ACLU support would appear to damage the orgs' overall mission. These aren't even vetos. They're areas of concern, and they seem pretty reasonable - especially considering this article criticized the ACLU for getting involved with Amber Heard because she sees their support for Heard as damaging to the ACLUs' mission! Which is exactly their concern.
Sure, but people have to fight for their rights. The world doesn't swing towards freedom automatically. The rise of authoritarianism around the world (China, Russia, etc.) makes that clear.
It's really a shame that my options right now are either the anti-freedom "no abortions, no weed, and absolutely no criticizing us" party, or the anti-freedom "no critical thinking, no guns, and absolutely no criticising us" party. Unfortunately under first past the post tribalism is rewarded, and moving to the center only gives room for a more radical same-party challenger to appear making you both lose. In my opinion, the greatest boost to freedom in current American politics would be the introduction of a better voting system[0] to allow third parties to exist and encourage them to work together to legislate.
[0] I prefer score voting, but I'll vote for anyone who will get any alternate form of voting out there. For an easy explanation of the different voting systems, look at https://ncase.me/ballot/
Come to slovenia... we just had an election which was (a bit simplified), "a bad guy we have now, and most people hate, but right leaning grandmas like" vs "a guy we didn't know existed two months ago, but media propped him up, and he's the only chance to take on the current guy".
Because of the voting systems, parties need 4% of the votes to make it into the parliament, and all the votes for <4% parties are basically "lost".
The end effect was people not voting for the "new guy" because they liked the new guy, but because they didn't want the new guy to stay, causing a huge discrepancy between the the parties they actually wanted to win vs the voting results.
I'm outside the US, but I see similar issues everywhere. I think it's time modern democracies stoped having "representative of the people" voting on laws. Laws should be considered each on their own value, and everybody should be able to vote for/against them.
Unfortunately, United States has a population of ~330 million and that would mean a House of Representatives with 33,000 members. There's no way it would be able to effectively deliberate topics with that many people. Just imagine how little time each representative could be allocated to speak, given there are only 8,760 hours in a year. Additionally the individual power of each representative would be so watered down as to be practically meaningless.
It's an unacceptable solution but it seems to me that the US is just too big and splitting it up would make more sense.
Why do people need to debate on the house floor? Do such debates actually change anyone's mind or how they vote? Let them debate in an electronic forum with written arguments, let them debate in public and on social media (a good portion of political debate already happens on social media). Debate on the floor isn't so sacred we can't do without it.
And yes, the power of individual representatives would be watered down, that's ok. It would be much closer to the direct democracy the parent comment suggested (and the reason I brought it up).
It allows representatives to deal with boring bills the public doesn't care about, but there are enough representatives that I can reasonably expect to be on a first name basis with my representative if I care enough to get involved.
Debate on the floor of the House and Senate is largely faked for TV cameras already in the current era.
CSPAN camera angles are limited on purpose to hide this, but most speeches are given to an empty or nearly empty chamber. Actual floor debate that might change viewpoints is rare to non-existent now - the real debate and discussion happens off of the floor in private intra-party meetings and lunches, or in 1:1 meetings between leadership.
In my country a law saying "you don't have to work, but you still get 10k eur from the government" would win by a huge margin... how this would actually work, noone cares...
Sadly, an average person is stupid, and half are even stupider.
There are countries that do something close to that, and it does in fact work. In many, many ways. Basic Income is a very real and powerful thing.
Reduced crime, increased economic strength, increased education and skills, better overall wellbeing, a stronger economy, better health.
Whichever European country you're in, I'd wager that the .1% are using tax loopholes and straight up fraud to fleece more taxpayer money than 10k per citizen would cost.
Sounds a bit like you're a victim of class war propaganda. Try looking into BI and how it actually works.
Then specialists will explain that to be able to spend this, other budgets will have to be cut, like healthcare.
If people are stupid and we need to be ruled by elites, then why do we have democracies? Why popular vote? Shouldn't we have PhD's decide who are rulers are?
Lookup "sortition", experiences show that common people tend to make better decison for the good of society, while any "club" (politicians, elites) end up working towards expanding their power.
The "citizens", the people who could vote, did pretty well. Not surprisingly, laws were not so good for slaves and other non-citizens, laws were not good for the people who could not vote.
Look how favourable our current laws are to politicians!!
It shifted because the powers that be saw an actual unified, targeted movement aimed against the ultra rich (occupy), and got scared. So now, instead of fighting against the people who own the government, we are fighting each other based on skin color. So progressive!
Nothing really shifted to the left, certainly not the DNC. We just gave Bezos a $10B bailout. The rich are getting richer and richer. Roe is being overturned. There is not "far-left" presence in the US with any actual power. The right-wing (and Elon) freakout about the "far-left" is about people expressing their gripes with the state of things online, much of it being actual, salient criticism that gets handwaved away as "communism."
There isn't a single far-left politician in the federal government. There are a few that are maybe left of center, but "far-left?" Absolutely not.
Show me a rep or senator calling for public ownership of the means of production and then we have a conversation, but there simply isn't one. Nobody with a say is advocating for abolishing money, the state, class, etc. Even the list of politicians that support worker unions is really short. The furthest left US politicians go is social democracy, which is just democracy with strong safety nets to help keep as many people as possible from rock bottom.
Banning people from Twitter, App Store, AWS, VISA being cancelled, kicked out of distribution etc...
Private institutions are narrowing their versions of what was considered normative 'crude' behaviour into 'hate speech' which has implications. Netflix, Hulu etc. spend a lot of time defining what's appropriate and not in their programming, and someone uttering something 'counter narrative' is problematic for them (unless it makes them a lot of money).
That said, with Trump lying about the election, and others lying about vaccines, and foreign actors 100% trying to influence electoral outcomes (these are real things), it's an actual problem.
I mean, I don't care if RT.com is punted from anywhere, it's not relevant, but it's a slippery slope.
Those are examples of private companies not platforming certain speech. But how is that a modern change? Are you saying that decades ago, the big media companies at the time (say, NBC, CBS, ABC) platformed a greater variety of speech than now? I don't think you can earnestly claim that.
Did VISA, in the 1970s, kick people off of their network 'because speech'?
Did ABC Shipping refuse customers, 'because speech'?
That's not 'platforming' - those are just businesses that do business.
Second - what happened in the past is irrelevant.
Businesses should not really vetting customers unless there's a material reason.
Certainly banks, telcos, retail - should be barred from this. VISA is not 'platforming' anyone, that's ridiculous.
Twitter, Appstore - because they are directly related to the content, this is more arguably 'platforming' and there's more likely to be some kind of content management, but we have to be very careful about it.
Notable examples include kicking people who post white supremacist articles off of Twitter and Facebook. Or DirectTV dropping OAN from their lineup because their ratings have tanked after Trump left office. Or when Marjorie Taylor Green lost her committee assignments for merely stating her belief that white genocide is a major problem that Congress must take action against the Jewish space lasers immediately before they cause more wildfires that kill white people.
Because freedom of speech has never been quite what it says. It is basically only immunity from consequences for the rich and powerful. Only they're allowed to have substantive influential speech without consequences, and only they are allowed to reclassify bribery as "speech".
Anybody not in that set saying something the rich and powerful don't agree with gets sued into oblivion and/or gets their soap box taken away.
All that is happening is that people want everyone to live by the same rules. Either nobody has consequences or everybody can have the soapbox taken away if the general public doesn't agree with them.
Billionaires have been too blatant with media manipulation for everyone else to be OK with the rules as they are.
BTW I'd also note that "free speech" American style is almost like a religion, you can't argue against it. I'd just note that no other country Europe (or the world) subscribes to this absolutist version of free speech. So it is reasonable that questions ensue questioning how great this "free speech" really is. Is lying by corporations really speech?
> It is basically only immunity from consequences for the rich and powerful. Only they're allowed to have substantive influential speech without consequences, and only they are allowed to reclassify bribery as "speech".
This is simply not true and I'm curious if you have any examples to support this.
> Anybody not in that set saying something the rich and powerful don't agree with gets sued into oblivion and/or gets their soap box taken away.
Again that is simply not true. In fact compared with the UK for instance it is _far_ harder to sue for libel or defamation in the US.
> Billionaires have been too blatant with media manipulation for everyone else to be OK with the rules as they are.
Rich people have access to resources the poor don't. That's not new.
> BTW I'd also note that "free speech" American style is almost like a religion, you can't argue against it. I'd just note that no other country Europe (or the world) subscribes to this absolutist version of free speech.
In general we are free speech absolutists. Honestly along with fast food, very entertaining movies and our love affair with guns it's quintessentially American.
This is a great post illustrative of the currently widespread misunderstanding of freedom of speech in the US. It's not about the powerless wanting to control the speech of the rich and powerful. It's about the powerful of one side wanting to control the speech of the powerful of the other side by weaponizing ignorant masses of the populace to do their fight for them in defeating the ability of their opponents to have speech.
It's a scary precedent and even more scary that so many don't see what's happening.
> Billionaires have been too blatant with media manipulation for everyone else to be OK with the rules as they are.
The powerful have controlled the media in the past WAY more than they do now or even in recent decades. Even the people gaining control of the media recently are outside of the normal historical rich as they're all of the nouveau riche class.
This is all one more example of the recent trend of not wanting to bring UP the less privileged but to tear DOWN the privileged to the level of the less privileged. The former is beneficial for society the latter is self-destructive.
The result of lack of speech is violence. If people (parts of the rich) can't voice their opinion with words they do so with actions by galvanizing people into violent actions.
Could you please provide specific examples of how this current trend of wanting to outlaw hate speech, "disinformation", etc., applies to billionaires, rather than the common people?
"Free speech absolutism" is a nonsensical slur. There are sensible restrictions on the freedom of speech that have been engrained into American jurisprudence. There actually used to be more exceptions (for instance, anti-war speech was illegal during World War 1) but, to their credit, the political left pushed for expanding those rights.
But yes, we do take our free speech with religious seriousness. That is because many of our ancestors came here to escape religious persecution from Europe (and other places). We do not wish to return to the bad old days where our beliefs could again be criminalized.
They were attorneys on the Timbs case (not ACLU) which they won at the Supreme Court. They've had lots of success in this in lower courts with some crazy cases.
ACLU used to do a lot to improve policing (ie, look at how line-ups are conducted etc). Some other groups taking that on - this is less about defunding / abolishing police and more about improving accuracy of policing (ie, still catch a murderer but do it in ways with less collateral damage / fewer false allegations).
I'm actually trying to explore the question of other groups as I've been an ACLU member since the 90's so just know so much more about them! I was drawn to some of their earlier policing work (I volunteered in some prisons) in particular because certain approaches just result in real problems in policing (project innocence helped prove I think many of the ACLU's earlier points here).
That said, I think no question a change with Romero. I might describe it as a change from a "civil liberty" type org to a more traditional "human rights" type org more along the lines of NAACP, Sierra Club etc? And a LOT more politically focused than in the past from a feeling standpoint? They do things like anti-trump ads etc. Historically they might have cheered some of the due process protections in Title IX, now they denounce them.
Internally worth noting that some efforts around free speech issues are seen as "white supremacist" - that may make it harder for folks there to take on classic campus type free speech issues just internally. Speech = violence type stuff.
DEI is a big push. They are doing interesting work around trying to push employers to take identity characteristics into account when making employment decisions, including numerical goals / targets which historically folks were cautious about. They have some good examples here, like reserving 50% of new hire slots for black workers only as still being in compliance with non-descrimination law as long as black workers are not equally represented etc.
> They are a nonpolicial (required by charitable status) group running ads like this
They're a 501(c)(4), not a 501(c)(3). They aren't nonpolitical and have no obligation not to engage in politics. In fact, engaging in politics is the entire point of the ACLU
A 501c4 is a social welfare org. Political activities are generally prohibited
"Political or social activities. The promotion of social welfare does not include direct or indirect participation or intervention in political campaigns on behalf of or in opposition to any candidate for public office."
I think this is a fair confusion currently however given their strong dem tie-in recently and their current approach of taking on individual politicians (for and against) by name.
Note: If you are active in the ACLU they have a related ACLU Foundation they use to collect 501c3 money, is run by the same people out of the same offices, and actually brings in more money I think than the c4 if that matters.
You are correct about the letter of the law. The Supreme Court disagreed in Citizens United v. FEC and ruled that the government cannot restrain corporations from making independent expenditures for political campaigns. It definitely applies to 501c4 orgs, as Citizens United itself is one!
Don't disagree - the "dark money" c4's have (ironically) been a complaint on the left for a while.
That said, this is still a real shift for the ACLU - this type of campaigning is not something they historically really did. So the push to actively campaign more is newish for them.
It's def where the money is though - the MAGA orgs, the NRA, the ACLU - in some ways they are just following the money.
“Terence Dougherty, the organization’s general counsel, testified via video deposition that the ACLU had spearheaded the effort and served as Heard’s ghostwriter in exchange for her promise to donate $3.5 million to the organization.”
Sorry but a donation is either free (donare: give as a gift) or it is no such thing. What a travesty.
Thats not how donations work in the New Age / Arts community. If you go to a "free" yoga class, they "suggest" a "donation" of $10.
You see, they're suggesting because being explicit about the cost puts a ceiling on how much they could receive while using shaming as the tactic for the price floor. Being explicit also makes them come across as capitalists, and capitalists are evil.
Calling it a donation makes it a favor. They're doing you a huge favor .. a priceless service. Won't you donate a little bit of your money to support the greater "mission"?
In India there is something called "donation fee". It is paid in exchange for admission to a university (as opposed to admission by merit for free). It's pretty ironic
Also an interesting way in which the rich avoid taxes. If she had paid for the writing, it would have been taxed as a service, but instead there was a wink/nod service then donation.
>I view the ACLU’s hard-left turn with alarm. It smacks of intolerance and choosing sides, precisely what a civil-liberties organization designed to defend the Bill of Rights is meant to oppose.
The ACLU has clearly been infiltrated and coopted by the same authoritarian ideologues running amok in almost all of our other institutions. Manufactured by degree mills where children take on tens of thousands in debt for the privilege of progressive indoctrination.
>Progressive causes are near and dear to my heart. I am a feminist and staunch Democrat. As a federal public defender turned law professor, I have spent my career trying to make change in a criminal legal system that is riven with racism and fundamentally unfair to those without status and financial resources
The author is complicit but in typical progressive fashion totally oblivious to her role in the rise of this activist class. She made her bed and now we all get to lay in it, surrounded by irrational diversity propaganda while forced to keep quiet in the face of genuine systemic racism under implicit threat of retaliation.
Overt discrimination against straight white males? Mandated by investors through ESG contingent funding and pushed down the chain by C-suite executives who have attended mandatory "diversity" reeducation seminars (literal racial/gendered propaganda), implemented by (overwhelmingly female) degree mill graduates in HR who viciously suppress any dissent against this particular systemically sanctioned discrimination.
That would fit the bill for systemic racism/sexism and it isn't merely alleged like that of D&I proponents.
Discrimination against straight white males? Presumably everyone would agree straight white males were given huge privileges in the long tail history of America. (That's a pretty easy reading of history.)
So, if your claim is that they are now discriminated against- what was the inflection point where they were treated with no net bias?
Perhaps the reason it feels like discrimination is because those privileges are eroding?
>Presumably everyone would agree straight white males were given huge privileges in the long tail history of America. (That's a pretty easy reading of history.)
No, that's a biased, agendad reading of history which ignores that the vast majority of these unfairly privileged white males were competing with other males who shared the same privilege. It does not justify discrimination against individuals today. It also does not demonstrate how a 90% majority benefited from workplace discrimination against the minority. Those inconvenient details are handwaved away with accusations of bigotry.
>So, if your claim is that they are now discriminated against- what was the inflection point where they were treated with no net bias?
Given the rate with which this cultural shift has progressed, there may not have been an obvious inflection point. But that's irrelevant to my argument.
In typical fashion you are simultaneously rationalizing discriminatory hiring practices (as though historic privilege requires modern correction) and denying that they are being mandated (as though D&I initiatives do not put implicit and explicit pressure against hiring white males). And the dishonesty is infuriating.
Perhaps the reason it feels like discrimination is because those privileges are eroding?
It feels like discrimination because it is discrimination.
Stop being so USA centric anyway. This crap gets exported around the world. Even if you accept the evil "corruption of blood" type propositions, people who live in countries that never had any of the racial history of the USA end up suffering from your racist and sexist nonsense.
But this particular sub-thread is about the ideology the ACLU is pushing, which unfortunately gets propagated by American companies, American employees, and dumb locals who imitate what they see on TV.
If you're talking about the op-ed I don't even think that was Heard's idea. It really sounds like she wasn't involved in it at all. They sold her the ambassadorship title I guess, but after that they were just trying to cash in on me too. Heard was a useful figure because they already had a relationship with her and she had a public messy divorce.
This makes sense to me. They've basically bought into the idea of the Paradox of Tolerance.
That still doesn't explain why they are involved with the Heard/Depp case. Or why they were supporting Stacey Abrams' campaign or campaigning against Brett Kavanaugh.
I don't much care about the Heard/Depp case, it's a tabloid sideshow. The story the Atlantic author presents seems bad to me, maybe the ACLU made a mistake there.
Supporting Stacey Abrams makes absolute sense; she's done more work on the ground for voting rights than any politician at her level. As for Kavanaugh, the ACLU's explanation for their opposition satisfies me. https://www.aclu.org/blog/civil-liberties/executive-branch/w...
I think the argument in the Atlantic piece is roughly that these “one-off” exceptional blog posts justifying their decision is largely just-so stories with little principled reasoning. For example, this is their defense for why they opposed the justice nomination:
“Board members were clear that if the same concerns were raised about a Democratic Supreme Court nominee — inadequately investigated credible allegations of sexual assault supported by credible testimony and met by nominee testimony showing angry partisanship — we would similarly oppose that nominee.”
That’s a lot of qualifiers! Would they do the same for any potential crime? What about other crimes whose severity, from a social perspective, has changed in the other direction in the years since they were committed? For example, smoking weed was probably considered, contemporaneously, as less forgivable than making unwanted sexual advances. Should we try to dig into whether a nominee passed a blunt in college, since surely that’s a sign of poor past judgment?
By wading into these waters, the ACLU should have airtight argumentation, ideally proactive not reactive. It hasn’t offered much of that, which is why its integrity is being credibly questioned.
A fairly short piece that makes the same points that have been made a million times about the ACLU’s apparent changes, using the typical examples of the group defending the freedom of assembly rights of neo-nazis during the 1970s (other articles often mention they were well known for simultaneously defending the same rights for communists). The 2021 NYT article linked within is a more interesting read.
What I’d be curious to see on this topic is a review of what the ACLU was up to during the 90s and 00s, when anti war and environmental activism were the biggest targets for suppression, and privacy and LGBT rights became major issues. Would people today see the ACLU’s activity in those periods as still too focused on “partisan” causes, or is this really a post-Trump phenomenon?
Just look up ACLU's response to the federal government's effort to describe environmental groups like the Sierra Club as "mainstream organizations with known or possible links to eco-terrorism" in the Bush-Cheney Era, c.2008. They definitely seem to have lost their minds and their historical agenda post-Trump. For example, it's worth reading their response to the 2001 attacks:
My own view is that the leadership of both parties really would like to install Chinese-style mass surveillance practices, and the motivation primarily seems to be the desire to contain popular anger over declining standards of living across the USA. The creation of the Rust Belt via the implementation of neoliberal trade policies played a key role in the rise of Trump, and leaders of both parties pushed that through on the behalf of their corporate masters. Of course, Trump did nothing about it, so the populist anger is still smoldering.
If implementing draconian mass surveillance is the plan, then buying off the ACLU is a step in that direction.
>In 1978, the ACLU successfully defended the right of neo-Nazis to march in Skokie, Illinois, a community populated by Holocaust survivors.
Is it any surprise that the ACLU has succumbed to the tide of public opinion? Their support of free speech in 1978 meant supporting the rights of literal neo-Nazis. Do people understand how unpopular that is? Their adherence to higher principles (free speech), when it results in those actions, cannot be tolerated in the modern era. The ACLU simply wouldn't survive.
Your attitude is completely wrong in the same way the ACLU has gone wrong. Defending speech _as a right_ means defending it for everyone in all cases, most especially when it is unpopular. Otherwise you're not acting as a defense of free speech, but as an amplifier of speech you agree with. You become the Committee In Favor Of Speech We Like, which is pretty worthless.
I think I miscommunicated my point. I agree with you, I am merely providing my perspective as to why they no longer hold those principles: because it "cannot be tolerated" in the modern era. We're still in an era of "punch people whose views i don't like."
We see such bias within the Twitter sphere - but outside of that people are still a lot more reasonable. There is a fair bit of fear, I think, that mainstream allowance of neo-nazi groups is empowering recruitment but the real core of the issue is extremism being fed by a lack of general education.
> Their adherence to higher principles (free speech), when it results in those actions, cannot be tolerated in the modern era.
Why not?
I remember when the definition of supporting free speech was supporting speech you find repugnant and I really can't think of a group who's speech I find more repugnant than Nazis, both conceptually and contextually.
It cannot be tolerated because people are willing to commit and support acts of violence against those that use repugnant free speech. Whether it can be tolerated is orthogonal to whether or not it should be tolerated. I am merely commenting on the observation that more people than ever cannot tolerate free speech.
Understood. I read your comment as "I can not tolerate" or "we should not tolerate" when you meant more that society doesn't seem capable of tolerating it, when it should, which I strongly agree with.
Have they gone against those on the left who advocate and even perform violence against certain groups? Why haven't they taken active stance against these monsters who want attack others?
> In 1978, the ACLU succcessfully [sic] defended the right of neo-Nazis to march in Skokie, Illinois, a community populated by Holocaust survivors. But in 2018, following the ACLU’s successful litigation to obtain a permit for white supremacists to march in Charlottesville, Virginia, which ended in death and disaster, the ACLU issued new guidelines. Citing concerns about “limited resources” and “the potential effect on marginalized groups,” the organization cautioned its lawyers to take special care when considering whether to represent groups whose “values are contrary to our values.”
First off. A professor writes a mere 1,000 word article for a major publication and it has typos. Yikes.
Second, the author points to action the ACLU took to defend the right of white supremacists to march in Charlottesville in 2018 and then tries to say they've changed position but doesn't demonstrate that with any proof of similar action or inaction -- just words. IMO actions are more important than words and if the ACLU's actions are still in line with the mission you say you agree with, this is much ado about nada.
It's interesting that the author refers to unspecified "partisan stances". Many of the political positions of the last year that have been described as partisan are actually globally regarded as human rights.
Human rights are nonpartisan. The ACLU has stuck to it's guns on that, despite the the overwhelmingly biased political climate.
I think it's silly that this thinly sourced hit-piece is on the front page of hacker news.
If it truly were nonpartisan, I would have absolutely no ability to guess which way you lean politically. Right? And yet I can tell with a near 100% certainty that you lean left. Can you explain to me why is that, and how that's consistent with your claim?
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What an incredibly level headed take. It's so level headed that it seems fake when projected onto the landscape of modern political discourse.