This assumes "charitable causes" can be apolitical. I guess the ACLU might be closer to what you want then? They have a recent history of criticism for defending the far-right in the name of free speech while generally being thought of as "liberal".
The problem you're facing is that "fighting against power structures" is a political gradient starting short of authoritarianism and ending at anarchism (unless you're Stirner but egoism is a different topic for debate). Because this is a gradient and because most people's political positions evolve over time through lived experience and exposure to other people, it's impossible to pin down a fixed position on that spectrum without eventually veering in one direction or the other.
The EFF generally tries to use the ideal of individual privacy as a fixture for its politics but the recent US Supreme Court rulings have shown the implications of that as e.g. Roe v Wade and other decisions that used to cement various civil justice issues ranging from interracial marriage and the abolishment of anti-sodomy laws to legalizing abortion were apparently literally based on the "right to privacy", which the Supreme Court ruled doesn't exist.
So if the SCOTUS thinks "right to privacy" is intrinsically tied "various agendas around gender/immigration", it shouldn't surprise anyone that the EFF would think the same, no matter what your stance on those issues is.
It's almost like the Overton window has two natural endpoints but will frictionlessly slide in between them if you start pushing, so if you want to prevent it from moving further you have to exert force that will easily cause it to slide back the way you started at.
PS: On a complete tangent, I think this is an apt metaphor for how the Russian revolution overthrowing the monarchy turned into the authoritarian Soviet Union as the Bolsheviks tried to reel in the more anarchist revolutionaries and asserted dominance of the party, insisting on a central command bureaucracy instead of a federated direct democracy. But I digress.
FIRE is primarily funded by conservative and libertarian foundations and pg (much like most VCs) is libertarian. I'm not saying this to dunk on them, but it's unsurprising that pg would tend towards FIRE over ACLU, which is funded by slightly more progressive libertarian foundations (unless you consider George Soros a leftist).
You've seriously misread that paragraph. It's not saying those ideas are absurd, but that they are not civil liberties issues. This is spelled out in the very next sentence.
>Such reasoning expands the ACLU's mission to include pretty much any domestic policy issue.
I wish people wouldn't be so quick to rush to take potshots at political opponents. It lowers the quality of discussion for everyone and will eventually just turn this place into another Reddit.
The word "absurd" doesn't show in the article, that's your characterization.
What the referenced article is saying is that to the extent that these things are "civil rights" issues, everything is thus a civil rights issue, and thus a focus on civil rights is meaningless.
"If X is Y, then all Z are Y" is a kind of reduction to absurdity argument. The GP's characterization is correct, and nitpicking the fact that Reason doesn't actually use the word "absurd" doesn't meaningfully change the argumentative tack they use.
recent US Supreme Court rulings have shown the implications of that as e.g. Roe v Wade and other decisions that used to cement various civil justice issues ranging from interracial marriage and the abolishment of anti-sodomy laws to legalizing abortion were apparently literally based on the "right to privacy", which the Supreme Court ruled doesn't exist.
The SCOTUS decision in Loving (the anti-miscegenation laws, i.e., interracial marriage)[1] doesn't rest on right to privacy. This decision is built (approximately) on the equal protection clause. As such, the reversal or Roe doesn't put Loving on shaky ground at all. A good thing for me, since my wife and I are of different races.
Also Roe's reversal found that privacy implied in the 14th amendment doesn't imply a 3 trimester schedule of first, abortions legal, second states choice and third, illegal. That's it.
The right to privacy wasn't established by Roe so overturning Roe doesn't have any effect on it.
That was my point. Roe didn't establish a right to privacy but it was justified with a right to privacy. Roe was overturned because the SCOTUS now argues that there is no constitutionally guaranteed right to privacy so Roe was invalid.
>SCOTUS now argues that there is no constitutionally guaranteed right to privacy
That's not correct. They found that the right to privacy didn't cover abortion in the exact, specific and detailed manner that Roe set precedent for (see my previous comment about the specific rules for each trimester).
14th amendment "liberty" covers privacy covers abortion, only the abortion precedent was overturned privacy was not. Thomas took aim at privacy in his opinion but that's not supported by the rest of the court.
Stirner could defend literally any politics under his egoistic framework. There's a liberal reading of the unique and it's property buried under the "anarchism" he esposed that resulted from how shitty the 1840s German state was...
The problem you're facing is that "fighting against power structures" is a political gradient starting short of authoritarianism and ending at anarchism (unless you're Stirner but egoism is a different topic for debate). Because this is a gradient and because most people's political positions evolve over time through lived experience and exposure to other people, it's impossible to pin down a fixed position on that spectrum without eventually veering in one direction or the other.
The EFF generally tries to use the ideal of individual privacy as a fixture for its politics but the recent US Supreme Court rulings have shown the implications of that as e.g. Roe v Wade and other decisions that used to cement various civil justice issues ranging from interracial marriage and the abolishment of anti-sodomy laws to legalizing abortion were apparently literally based on the "right to privacy", which the Supreme Court ruled doesn't exist.
So if the SCOTUS thinks "right to privacy" is intrinsically tied "various agendas around gender/immigration", it shouldn't surprise anyone that the EFF would think the same, no matter what your stance on those issues is.
It's almost like the Overton window has two natural endpoints but will frictionlessly slide in between them if you start pushing, so if you want to prevent it from moving further you have to exert force that will easily cause it to slide back the way you started at.
PS: On a complete tangent, I think this is an apt metaphor for how the Russian revolution overthrowing the monarchy turned into the authoritarian Soviet Union as the Bolsheviks tried to reel in the more anarchist revolutionaries and asserted dominance of the party, insisting on a central command bureaucracy instead of a federated direct democracy. But I digress.