The problem is that this type of action plays into a narrative of an organised conspiracy. Surely we are better to satirise their beliefs? I'm reminded of the Blues Brothers :)
Satire and resistance aren't mutually exclusive. But relying on satire as a response is easier done from a position of safety and distance. People who are in the thick of it probably don't feel they're in that position.
The broader context of this was the real-world provocations of Nazi demonstrations during this period in Skokie, Illinois (which had a significant population of Holocaust survivors). The officer in the scene above comments that "they won their court case" -- this is the case:
I'm all for not doing business with hate and or terrorist groups but I don't think I'd want to ground it on "freedom of association" basis as anyone could make that same claim for not serving a sub-class of people. Maybe protestants refuse to serve atheists, or vice versa, for example.
> Does that same freedom exist for private entities that don't want to bake cakes for gay couples?
I think sexuality should be a protected class. I do not think neo-Nazis or White supremacists should be a protected class. But in the case of the wedding cake, I think it would be fine for bakers, caterers, or photographers to refuse to work at a gay wedding, an event they consider immoral. If a customer happened to be a neo-Nazi and was booking a vacation stay, I doubt AirBnB would have cared. It was the fact that they were using the service to book accommodations for the rally that caused the company to cancel their booking.
> That is why you need to defend the principle, even if you don't like the specifics of what you are defending, and is why, for example, the ACLU is defending Milo
The ACLU is defending Milo from government suppression of his speech. I agree with the principle they are defending. This is not the same as a private entity deciding not to do business with him. The ACLU will not, for instance, help him sue Simon & Schuster for cancelling his book deal.
Reasonable people can disagree on the definition of "Nazi", however, which is the real slippery slope, rather than the slope against freedom of association that we're all well down already. Want to ban people who identify as Nazis? Fine. Want to ban someone who gets called a Nazi just because they donated money to support legislation banning gay marriage? Ehh...
You agree with that until you get labelled a Nazi, then you will find that maybe having private individuals and companies arbitrarily labelling nazis is not a good idea.
I'm fine with the court and the police punishing them, it's not cool to see private companies take matters into their own hands.
If something is just like outright "wrong", why not make laws? It feels more correct to handle things at that level instead of relying on tech companies.
Well, relying on tech companies is even less sustainable since they work for whatever makes them more profit. A govt in contrast is for the people.
Also, Trump is a president of the people and not some dictator. The congress has to pass laws and people on congress are voted for by the people. Trump cannot just ban random things on his own.
Their choice of who to deny services to and why is unaccountable unless they're breaking specific laws. But the standard for punishment shouldn't be "negative" in this way; there should be positive proof and legal justification for punishment, rather than being free to punish barring any specific legal basis against it. And yes, Airbnb denying these guys access is punishment when you're a national entity and the only one of its kind.
The legal justification for Airbnb or any other company to refuse service comes from what you state in your first sentence: they aren't breaking specific laws. Is there a law that private entities have no say in how they want to conduct their business? Should HN mods be taken to court every time they ban users and kill discussion threads?
Airbnb is not "the only one of its kind." If you look up the origin story of the company, or do a google search for their legal battles with cities and states, you'll learn that they very much do have competing alternatives, including the entire hotel industry.
It's interesting when people do and don't cite legal justification as the final consideration. It should be clear that I'm not concerned with the current legality.
It's interesting that you think "legal justification" is being used as the "final consideration", which would imply that legal justifications are ever final in a legal system that is meant to oversee the rights and well-being of 300 million different people.
Moral beliefs change, governmental systems evolve, laws take time to pass. You're complaining about why there is or isn't a law, but then you want to take this debate out of the reality from which laws exist in the first place. That sounds about as fun and productive as arguing computational implementations with someone who doesn't believe in the relevance of time or physics.
edit: replaced "computational theories" with "computational implementations"
You seem to have misunderstood my point. My point was that people cite the law when the law happens to allow their preferred state of affairs, and cite morality when it doesn't. In this case, the worthwhile debate isn't what the law says, but what it should be. When you respond to my argument about what should or shouldn't be by citing the law, you've severely missed the point.
Repeat after me: private companies can regulate their platforms as they see fit, as long as they do not discriminate using the following criteria (which are enshrined in law):
Race
Color
Religion
National origin
Age
Sex
Pregnancy
Citizenship
Familial status
Disability status
Genetic information
If you want to add or remove a class, change the law. But political ideology is not, and should not be, a protected class. Private companies can decide if they want Nazis on their platforms, and this one doesn't. Take your libertarian fantasies elsewhere.
Political ideology is rather highly hereditary, and if democracy benefits from a plurality of views, can you give a good reason why it shouldn't be protected? Especially when religion is?
The reasons for why religion was explicitly protected in the First Amendment have some historical and political complexities. But I don't believe the reasoning, at the time the Constitution was written, nor today, had anything to do with hereditary probability.
But ignoring historical reasons and realities, the contemporary moral argument for why religion deserves more protection than political ideology is because political ideology can be expressed (and protected) through participating in the political process. Whereas being a member of a religion is not seen as necessarily a political activity, especially in religions that do not engage in the political process.
>as long as they do not discriminate using the following criteria (which are enshrined in law)
And how long did it take for this to get enshrined into law, and how many people suffered unjustly in the mean time? Far better would have been for any discrimination of this sort to be illegal across the board, to avoid the need to build up enough political capital to create laws protecting vulnerable classes.
That there is a specific set of classes that it is illegal to discriminate against is the problem: the next class that we currently don't recognize has to suffer until they're capable of building up enough political capital to change laws. Until then they're subject to the tyranny of the majority.
> But political ideology is not, and should not be, a protected class
This the substantive part of this discussion. Why do you think political ideology shouldn't be a protected class?
Despite the existence of laws criminalizing holocaust denial and displaying Nazi symbols, Germany still has holocaust deniers and neo-Nazis. Criminalizing speech isn't a very effective way of diminishing it.
Just because a law hasn't eradicated something, doesn't mean that it hasn't been effective in diminishing it. I wouldn't support the United States to follow the same route as Germany, but I understand that Germany was in a very different situation as a country when it enacted those laws. On what basis do you think neo-Nazi activity in Germany would be less diminished today had Germany not criminalized such speech?
> If something is just like outright "wrong", why not make laws?
Sometimes, the costs/risks of making and enforcing laws outweigh the potential benefit. Not everything wrong should be illegal; not everything morally obligatory ought to be legally mandatory.
I don't know if this does a lot of good for Airbnb, aside from good publicity. Hate groups will go underground. They will still use Airbnb, but they'll hide their activities more.
Let's imagine there is a just future ahead. How do we get there? Suppress white supremecy from public discussion, and hope it dies out from loneliness in a few generations? Good luck with that.
I want white supremacism die out, not white supremacist people themselves. I want their voice in the public dialogue. I want white supremacists to bring their ideology into the public sphere so that it can be visibly argued against. I want white supremacists to experience a change of heart.
> Suppress white supremecy from public discussion, and hope it dies out from loneliness in a few generations? Good luck with that.
Actually, ... yes. White supremacy used to be the norm. Slavery, lynch mobs, KKK, etc. all were considered normal. "To Kill a Mockingbird" was a book that talked about how normal such attitudes were (and still are in parts of the South)
White supremacy has been denormalized and it is dying says that continued denormalization does work.
In Durham, NC a confederate statue was pulled down. In the video, white people were seen abusing it. White people. That is what denormalization looks like.
That strategy worked so well in 1930s Europe (not just Germany).
Extremist views are hard to fight when they are safely hidden away. Like any infection, it's best to expose them to the light of day. It's more effective to point and laugh than to throw projectiles and yell. (Had that strategy been employed in 1923, there would have been no Mein Kampf.)
Riiiiiiight, that's why underground groups on the far left like anarchists and communists were so successful in Poland, Spain, Greece and elsewhere. The far right was normalized and that's how they grew their ranks. It was the editor that published Mein Kampf as well as Hitler. It was the Italian media and the futurists that helped Mussolini gain power. This isn't about censorship, this is about how fascists can co-opt the democratic process and rise to power.
As they should. It's important in Trump's America to demonstrate that this kind of open bigotry still isn't acceptable and that a civilized society will not provide a platform for literal Nazis and their hateful rhetoric.
Good they should hide. We don't want these people preaching radicalism in our public spaces, where they can start recruiting more people. They should be banned from the mainstream internet and go back to the crappy little geosites they were stuck in until 2014.
All I see on facebook these days are apologists and racists as the top comment on any news site. I see them on my twitter feed. I even see them in dating apps. Nobody wants them there, as they usually encourage a long chain of comments expressing the fact that they're unwelcome. Sometimes one or two are flagged and banned. A week later, another little network is built up again and the loud and extreme few are handed a megaphone. We need better filtering algorithms for this nonsense that operate on a macro level. You can call it censorship if you want. I'm not saying to make it impossible for them to communicate their message, they just should be relegated to doing so from one account at a time.
It's been vigilantes doxxing that have had the largest impact, however what they do is illegal and against the terms of service of the apps they're trying to rid of hateful speech.
http://www.haaretz.com/us-news/.premium-1.806719
I would love to see more tech leaders actually build intelligent solutions to weeding out hatespeech on the internet.
Let them go underground, that's where they belong.
I don't like extremist on either side, the issue is with what you are describing is kind of what China and the Soviet Union did/does. Just think about how would you feel if the radical right would adopt this tactic.
If you are cool with companies policing you, you just think about what will happen if some of them become right leaning, would you still agree with them taking a political stance?
In my opinion we have the law and we have legislators, private companies should not try to do their job.
There is a place for boycott and a place for civil rights. Much of the 1964 Civil Rights Act focused on ensuring equal access to public accommodations. Is Airbnb a public accommodation? Absolutely. Is equal access protective of ideology? I'd argue yes, it should be, on the same grounds as speech.
It seems like it'd be clear that AirBnB itself is a public accommodation, but not necessarily so clear that each individual renter on AirBnB would count as such. So while the site itself may not be able to discriminate, individual property owners may. IANAL though, but it seems like an interesting question. (Also, my post should not be construed to be advocating either position, simply contemplating the legal question)
I too am interested in this hinge of the issue, but I don't see any compelling argument (in the link or anywhere else) that Airbnb rentals are unique from motels. For one, the renter's end of the transaction is basically the same. For another, it seems clear that the law is meant to ensure equal access to move about the country. Regulating the market means being skeptical of distinctions without a difference.
1. The 'private club' exception. An individual renter is a small operation, and could maybe argue that their property represents a private club. In the same way that businesses under 15 employees (or whatever the limit is) are exempt from certain civil rights requirements. They're too small to be considered 'public' accommodations.
2. The word 'establishment': "any inn, hotel, motel, or other establishment which provides lodging to transient guests,". Is an AirBnB renter an 'establishment'? The word is a bit poorly defined, but an argument could be made that since most AirBnB renters are not incorporated, they could not be considered to be 'establishments'. It may also turn on the degree to which the renting is a primary use of the home in question. I.e. if you own the house only to rent it out, you are an 'establishment', but if you also live there and only rent it occasionally, you are not.
Correct. To be clear I'm talking about what Airbnb should do not strictly what the law says they must do. I'm not sure that Airbnb is violating the civil rights act, but at the least it's an instructive framework for comparison.
And while I welcome Airbnb's attention to the issue and the basic first-order attempt at doing the right thing, I also see this as an insidious way for Airbnb to shirk the responsibilities that come with public accommodation, and a lack of imagination on the ways they could contribute to a just world.
My point was that you're misunderstanding public accommodation. It only protects against discrimination on specific factors, of which political ideology is not one of them. Private businesses still have the right to deny service to those not protected by these laws, and airbnb is exercising their right as they know how.
The events of the last few days and comments below have made me reconsider whether equal access should protect ideology.
Protected classes have something in common, which is that they are aspects of nature and circumstance that their members don't control in the way that somebody decides to be a white supremacist. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protected_class)
I'm okay with Airbnb's particular move here, though I would strongly argue they are a public accommodation. Those two distinct questions got mixed up in my head.
That's the danger of having consolidation of services into a handful of corporations. The assault on free speech and free thought from private entities is just as dangerous as that from the state.
Nazi-ism, White Supremacy, and in general the Alt-Right do not represent opposing political ideals that the left would just prefer not to deal with in a typical political manor. They represeny hatred and the desire to silence entire groups of people through violence for no reason other than particular facts of birth. They want to carve a place in the world for their race and their race only.
Personally, I embrace the right. I embrace the idea that government should have no place instructing religious leaders on who they can and cannot marry. I embrace the idea that largely leaving individuals to collect their income for their work and spend or donate as they choose rather than mandate taxation has a place in political discorse. I believe my right-leaning family members can have a solid conversation with me about our differences, which may end with my complete rejection of their ideals while still allowing them to have their voice heard, and at the end of the day I enjoy those a hell of a lot more than I enjoy my left-leaning circle-jerks with friends which I get very frustrated with.
What I have a problem with is equating valid opposing ideology with hate speech. These people swarming Charlottesville have nothing to say of value. They are violent thugs spouting false science that has been around for centuries. They have nothing of value to add to political discourse, and the fact that outlets like Twitter and Facebook have allowed them to spread their disgusting ideology on their platforms is nothing short of disgraceful.
It's perfectly fine to criminalize dangerous thoughts. We criminalize many forms of speech already.
You live in the real world, not a theoretical world. The problem with libertarians and other freedom-lovers is they have a simplistic model of the world that doesn't account for all the variables - they don't think their cunning plan through. Probably because they don't experience the world and have a limited understanding of people due to their lack of socialization.
> It's perfectly fine to criminalize dangerous thoughts. We criminalize many forms of speech already.
We criminalize exactly one form of speech: speech that creates exigent danger. What are these 'many' forms that you speak of?
> You live in the real world, not a theoretical world. The problem with libertarians and other freedom-lovers is they have a simplistic model of the world that doesn't account for all the variables - they don't think their cunning plan through. Probably because they don't experience the world and have a limited understanding of people due to their lack of socialization.
Let's ask a simple question: At which point in US (or whichever country)'s history more than 70 years prior to today would you like to implement censorship laws? Maybe in the 1950s, before that pesky civil rights era? How about in the 1800s, before those slaves got themselves freed? Certainly, at those times, civil rights and abolitionism were dangerous, pernicious ideas worthy of censorship. But, surely, you have it all figured out today. You're smarter than them, right? You know what's right and wrong, so much so that you don't even need to hear the other side. This time it's different. /s
> We criminalize all sorts of speech, everything from libel to copyrighted works.
> You live in a country under the permission of government. Never forget that.
You could equally and more accurately say government governs under the permission of the people.
> Don't ever ask simple questions. It shows lack of thought.
No, much better to dodge counter-arguments to which you are incapable of formulating a response.
> You could equally and more accurately say government governs under the permission of the people.
Indeed, which is why we limit freedom of speech. These things don't happen without the public's approval.
This isn't the world where you get to do what you want. This is the world where you get to do what government (= the public in a democracy) allows you to do.
I'm sorry you thought otherwise.
I get the desire to defend free speech, but as everyone is already aware, several people have ALREADY died directly from this horrific and dangerous event, organized by criminals and terrorists.
Be thankful AirBnB has sided with safety.
Welcome to the real world, where people actually die as a result of the words they say, instead of "theory" world.
> This isn't the world where you get to do what you want. This is the world where you get to do what government (= the public in a democracy) allows you to do.
Oh, quite to the contrary. The citizenry of this country and its government are actually quite in agreement with me. That's why we have freedom of speech here - because we believe the principle outweighs the negative effects of subversive speech.
>I get the desire to defend free speech, but as everyone is already aware, several people have ALREADY died directly from this horrific and dangerous event, organized by criminals and terrorists.
So, we should ban anything capable of causing deaths? We don't ban cars. We don't ban airplanes. We don't even ban guns. Why don't we ban these things? Because we believe that the number of deaths they cause is acceptable relative to the value they provide. Yes, that's right. We callously calculate that cars are worth more to us than the thousands of people they kill every year. And if cars are worth that, freedom of speech is definitely worth the tiny handful of people who's live it may end annually.
People insist upon it. As a result, it grows ever more true by the day.
This is going to get ugly.
ETA: I was wrong. It's already ugly. It is going to get much uglier.
I think I'm done trying to convince anyone that it's worth working toward a peaceable resolution. I no longer believe such a thing is possible, or that there's anything to be accomplished at this point, in arguing for it, save to make oneself a target for both sides.
Giving a centralized authority the power to censor whatever someone deems offensive sounds like such a wonderful idea. I especially love the idea of "criminalizing dangerous thoughts". Inside every room we should put a telescreen broadcasting "true-think" and listening on people to prevent "wrong-think".
1. First amendment only applies to government actions.
2. Established case law that businesses offering a public service are not allowed to discriminate based on a protected class. (Hate groups are NOT protected).
3. Businesses are allowed to refuse service if it impacts their ability to serve all their customers (for example, you show up at the coffee house without clothes)
4. AirBnB has entered into consent agreements with California Fair Housing and Employment Department with regards to the landlords discriminating against guests.
5. AirBnB has a ToS that specifies the conditions imposed on guests.
AirBnB is quite correct from a business perspective to cancel the reservations.
Thought experiment if they didn't:
A landlord renting a house is Jewish or any other group that is hated by the "Unite the Right" and gets their house trashed.
... this puts AirBnB in what kind of legal situation.
I don't like speculation based on hypotheticals. Unfortunately, the car attack in Charlotte proves my point.
It became controversial about the time that everyone who questioned affirmative action or didn't vote for Hillary Clinton was labelled a white supremacist or a Nazi. Suddenly the whole nation is filled with Nazis.
It's like the day after the election, half the population started engaging in WW2 cosplay.
There are more Rastafarians in America then there are actual Nazis, and I'd wager very few people in this rally even know the definition of a Nazi, let alone are one.
Oh, come off it. You're creating a strawman - there's plenty of room for political debate around specific issues. And I don't think people who didn't vote for HRC are Nazis are anything like that.
You know what I think? I think you don't actually care about free speech.
A Nazi (a real, card-carrying Nazi) drove a car through a group of leftist protestors and killed an innocent young woman. He took away, by force, her right to freedom of expression.
But I notice you haven't voiced any concern about that - you only care about freedom of speech to the extent that it's used to protect Nazis (and those who associate with them). But when it comes to protecting the free speech of protestors who disagree? All of a sudden, your deep concern is nowhere to be found. Give me a break.
Even if you do not think that, your fellow humans do. If you put power into their hands to decide who should hang, a lot of innocent people will.
What you are talking about is completely orthogonal to the first amendment. Everyone has a right to speech and everyone is protected from vehicular assault & murder by law. I hope that everyone on Hacker News condemns that act of violence.
Could you please point to the source of your claim that he was a "card-carrying Nazi"?
Photos of James Alex Fields before he drove his car through the crowd have him among the Vanguard America group, which (according to Wikipedia) is an American white nationalist group. His high school friends and teacher also say that he had a deep obsession with Nazis. So that makes him a card carrying Nazi in my eyes. There's also more evidence of his ideology if you just google his name.
This is just ridiculous and will do nothing but ratchet up tensions. Now Airbnb is going to be the arbiter of who is a nazi and who isn't? What if a person is merely "alt-right"? What about "alt-light"? Or what if some other marginalized group comes and complains about giving quarter to black supremacists or non-white supremacists? They are out there. And many showed up in Charlottesville. I can't even imagine the cost of running such a program both in terms of manpower, engineering, and PR blowback. Of course it is their business to do what they want, but I don't think it is very smart or sustainable.
If you disagree, that is one thing, but regarding cost: I am willing to bet that a very large number of folks would be 100% OK doing business with a company who refuses to do business with Nazis.
You may not view this as a first amendment issue, but it's certainly a housing discrimination issue. Many localities have laws preventing housing discrimination based on political belief -- for example, D.C.
You can expect that if stuff like this starts happening more often, other jurisdictions will also respond.
In general, "I am free to not rent my property to a certain undesirable element" has a pretty ugly history, as most societies don't view housing as just another optional consumption good.
It's the bigots who are most fearful. People also wouldn't rent to african americans because they were afraid of their daughters being raped, etc.
You know, renting your property is not an existential struggle and not everyone who reads Breitbart wants to have you and yours ethnically cleansed. There are laws to protect you, and you really don't need to be helping out the police with your fears.
Nazis, as a matter of written ideology, espouse ethnic cleansing. African Americans do not. I cannot believe I am having this debate, and on HN of all places. Has the world gone insane?
But who do you trust to decide that someone is a Nazi? Should it be Slate, some government bureaucracy, you personally, AirBnB? What if someone labels you a Nazi?
Should we just throw them into water and see if they float? Or administer a "are you a Nazi" test on a polygraph?
EDIT: This is a problem of the current political climate where words have lost their meaning. A lot of people even remotely right of center have been called a Nazi or "alt-right" or "white-supremacist".
This isn't that hard - Airbnb has the right to ban Nazis from its platform. It has the right to ban anyone it wants to from its platform, with the exception of protected classes laid out in law, because it is a private company. I really, really do not see the controversy here.
Obviously, you can't tell if someone is a Nazi, so only those who openly display their ideology should be banned.
When they run around with torches and swastikas, they're Nazis. What's the problem? When someone steals your car, are you also hesitant to call them a thief because "people have been called thieves for bad reasons before"? Yes, and?
But generally, yeah, let's test people for lack of empathy and other things. That would be much more interesting than what particular ideology they dress the underlying issues up with, and it would also address the "shutting people up for voicing things we can't handle because they're correct" crowd that hide under the mantle of social justice and whatnot.
>"Nazis, as a matter of written ideology, espouse ethnic cleansing"
Yes, the "Nazi ideology" espouses this. But you are renting to actual people, and
1) You have no way of knowing whether _they_ really espouse the ethnic cleansing of you and yours, or whether you just think they do. Lots of people wear swatstikas but they don't actually favor mass extermination. There are holocaust deniers who are called Nazis and maybe even view themselves as Nazis but, pretty much by definition, don't support the holocaust. As another example, elsewhere in this thread you have made characterizations about me that don't have any basis in reality, so who is to trust you to decide whether someone truly wants to ethnically cleanse you and yours?
2) even if they were _actual_ Nazis, which you have no way of knowing, by renting to them, you and yours are not going to be ethnically cleansed. The fact that someone has a political belief is not in and of itself a cause to make them fail to pay rent or fulfill any other of their obligations as tenants. As a result, in many jurisdictions, it's illegal to not rent to them.(a)
3) There is a strong likelihood that landlords will end up refusing to rent to people whose views they don't like. A capitalist landlord can refuse to rent to a communist, because the communist wants to overthrow them. That will turn into not renting to someone who is interested in communism, etc, which will turn into not renting someone who attends a communist rally. Someone else in this thread decided that a Swatstika on a "friend" would be enough evidence, so now we are getting into not renting to someone based on their associating with people suspected of Nazism, etc.
Again, the laws differ jurisdiction by jurisdiction.
Believe me, it's not the leftists who end up owning most of the property. These protections are part of living in an open society in which people are not discriminated against based on their beliefs. As we get more of a housing crunch and in many cities there is a growing population of renters, it becomes more important that your political affiliation not disqualify you from access to shelter. This may mean that some landlords have to rent to those whose politics they dislike, but that's the price of living in a free society. You are free to espouse any ideology you want as long as you don't break any laws.
No, giving Nazi salutes and wearing armbands is Nazi cosplay. It doesn't make you an actual Nazi. Sid Vicious wasn't a Nazi. Biker gangs aren't Nazis. The Nazi ideology is about suppressing your individuality and pledging everything to the state. That's why they had morning to night regimented groups. They controlled the schools, after school programs, hobby organizations, even vacations. It was all state run. It's this type of regimentation that makes it really extreme and virulent, as opposed to just white nationalism as espoused by people like Churchill and FDR. So please be careful when slapping the label Nazi on everything in order to justify your own discrimination against groups you don't like.
People wear transgressive symbols and put on transgressive displays in order to piss others off and show their own independence. But wearing a Che Hat doesn't make you a communist, neither does sporting a hammer and sickle arm band. Neither does singing the International. Please don't confuse performative displays with the real thing: kids dressing up as historical cowboys and indians are not actually cowboys and indians. Stop pretending.
Lastly, we don't live in a society of self-help for this stuff. You are obligated to rent to anyone who can fulfill the terms of the lease, and if you don't like that, then get out of the rental business. Let the police be the ones charged with preventing mass extermination. Petty discriminations don't help protect anyone.
First, by displaying basic civility, we are true to our own values and set an example for those that we want to come around to our way of thinking. Consider the local library, or the post office. They don't require any ideological test. There's a basic requirement for following the minimal set of rules that allows them to function. Beyond that, they serve everyone with no other preferences at all. These are two of the greatest institutions our nation has created.
Second, Airbnb has decided to deny service to Nazis, but not to (say) those who abuse children. How does that fly? If someone scalds an infant numerous times over a period of years, apparently Airbnb is cool with it. Or at least, they're not as concerned as they are with an idiot marching around in Nazi or KKK regalia.
I don't have a problem with Airbnb doing this, they are a private business and should be able to decide how they operate and who they will and won't serve.
However I can't help but think that the reactions would be quite different if they had banned people attending a Sharia rally.
...and in this presumptive Sharia rally there won't be any radical Islamic extremists, just a bunch of different Muslim people with repressed resentment about their lives all of who do not want to kill the infidels, right? See, false equivalence, assumptions and whatabout-ism can be employed in many ways.
> those who are members of the Airbnb community accept people regardless of their race, religion, national origin, ethnicity, disability, sex, gender identity, sexual orientation, or age.
When you are trusting someone to host you in their home, or trusting someone to stay in your home, it is important to have safety policies. For example, AirBnB's policies are related to fire safety, theft/vandalism, and fraud. This is simply one other policy to make both guests and hosts feel safe using the platform.
If it becomes okay to exclude people because of their beliefs, we may feel that sanity has prevailed and a sense of victory. However, the loss of freedom can become perverted in time and AirBnB just set a precedent for deciding which beliefs are not allowed.
When they come for you and your soon-to-be-declared radical beliefs, remember how proud you were today.
IMHO, Airbnb did the right thing and as for your what-ifs, capitalism can take care of that. If the Nazi-uber and hate-van mentioned in the article actually become profitable businesses, then there is something to feel concerned about. Not right now, not with this.
> When they come for you and your soon-to-be-declared radical beliefs
Airbnb is a business. Not the government. They can't come for me. I go to them and if tomorrow they declare my beliefs radical, I will not go to them.
Nazism is today considered by almost everyone a very radical belief, far more radical than almost anything else being commonly discussed in politics.
Nazism is not a case of "right vs. left", "republican vs. democrat", etc. It's not a case where it's an almost 50/50 split, but because the left has more power over media/tech, then the right's views are considered fringe and are "punished".
This is a case where almost everyone agrees that these views are completely outside of standard discourse. Don't conflate this with the common (and IMO somewhat valid) view that a lot of what's been happening lately is "repression" of the right by the left.
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[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 181 ms ] threadhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZTT1qUswYL0
The broader context of this was the real-world provocations of Nazi demonstrations during this period in Skokie, Illinois (which had a significant population of Holocaust survivors). The officer in the scene above comments that "they won their court case" -- this is the case:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Socialist_Party_of_Am...
The problem with limiting freedoms to certain groups is that you have little to no control over who gets to decide which groups are acceptable.
Today it might be a group you don't like. One election later and it might be a group that you are a part off.
That is why you need to defend the principle, even if you don't like the specifics of what you are defending, and is why, for example, the ACLU is defending Milo: https://www.aclu.org/blog/speak-freely/how-could-you-represe...
I think sexuality should be a protected class. I do not think neo-Nazis or White supremacists should be a protected class. But in the case of the wedding cake, I think it would be fine for bakers, caterers, or photographers to refuse to work at a gay wedding, an event they consider immoral. If a customer happened to be a neo-Nazi and was booking a vacation stay, I doubt AirBnB would have cared. It was the fact that they were using the service to book accommodations for the rally that caused the company to cancel their booking.
> That is why you need to defend the principle, even if you don't like the specifics of what you are defending, and is why, for example, the ACLU is defending Milo
The ACLU is defending Milo from government suppression of his speech. I agree with the principle they are defending. This is not the same as a private entity deciding not to do business with him. The ACLU will not, for instance, help him sue Simon & Schuster for cancelling his book deal.
Is this guy a nazi [0]?
And what about all the people who call anyone who voted for or who supports trump a nazi?
That's the slippery slope.
0: https://youtube.com/watch?v=tWFMUIP3lHo
I'm fine with the court and the police punishing them, it's not cool to see private companies take matters into their own hands.
Edit: https://www.quora.com/Is-it-legal-in-USA-to-wave-a-Nazi-flag
In what government has that worked out well?
Also, Trump is a president of the people and not some dictator. The congress has to pass laws and people on congress are voted for by the people. Trump cannot just ban random things on his own.
The president has pretty insane powers. Both directly and his appointments.
This is why the majority of Obama's Executive Orders that were subjected to court scrutiny were overturned.
Airbnb is not "the only one of its kind." If you look up the origin story of the company, or do a google search for their legal battles with cities and states, you'll learn that they very much do have competing alternatives, including the entire hotel industry.
Moral beliefs change, governmental systems evolve, laws take time to pass. You're complaining about why there is or isn't a law, but then you want to take this debate out of the reality from which laws exist in the first place. That sounds about as fun and productive as arguing computational implementations with someone who doesn't believe in the relevance of time or physics.
edit: replaced "computational theories" with "computational implementations"
Race
Color
Religion
National origin
Age
Sex
Pregnancy
Citizenship
Familial status
Disability status
Genetic information
If you want to add or remove a class, change the law. But political ideology is not, and should not be, a protected class. Private companies can decide if they want Nazis on their platforms, and this one doesn't. Take your libertarian fantasies elsewhere.
But ignoring historical reasons and realities, the contemporary moral argument for why religion deserves more protection than political ideology is because political ideology can be expressed (and protected) through participating in the political process. Whereas being a member of a religion is not seen as necessarily a political activity, especially in religions that do not engage in the political process.
And how long did it take for this to get enshrined into law, and how many people suffered unjustly in the mean time? Far better would have been for any discrimination of this sort to be illegal across the board, to avoid the need to build up enough political capital to create laws protecting vulnerable classes.
That there is a specific set of classes that it is illegal to discriminate against is the problem: the next class that we currently don't recognize has to suffer until they're capable of building up enough political capital to change laws. Until then they're subject to the tyranny of the majority.
> But political ideology is not, and should not be, a protected class
This the substantive part of this discussion. Why do you think political ideology shouldn't be a protected class?
Sometimes, the costs/risks of making and enforcing laws outweigh the potential benefit. Not everything wrong should be illegal; not everything morally obligatory ought to be legally mandatory.
I want white supremacism die out, not white supremacist people themselves. I want their voice in the public dialogue. I want white supremacists to bring their ideology into the public sphere so that it can be visibly argued against. I want white supremacists to experience a change of heart.
Actually, ... yes. White supremacy used to be the norm. Slavery, lynch mobs, KKK, etc. all were considered normal. "To Kill a Mockingbird" was a book that talked about how normal such attitudes were (and still are in parts of the South)
White supremacy has been denormalized and it is dying says that continued denormalization does work.
In Durham, NC a confederate statue was pulled down. In the video, white people were seen abusing it. White people. That is what denormalization looks like.
Extremist views are hard to fight when they are safely hidden away. Like any infection, it's best to expose them to the light of day. It's more effective to point and laugh than to throw projectiles and yell. (Had that strategy been employed in 1923, there would have been no Mein Kampf.)
How fascism was covered by the media http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/how-journalists-covere...
The myth of political correctness https://thinkprogress.org/the-phony-debate-about-political-c...
What normalization looks like today https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/normalization-lesson-mun...
It doesn't gain them support. Putting their views in the spotlight demonstrates what sort of people they are, and helps combat them.
For example, the far-right British National Party had two seats in the European parliament from 2009-2014, but it didn't do them any good.
All I see on facebook these days are apologists and racists as the top comment on any news site. I see them on my twitter feed. I even see them in dating apps. Nobody wants them there, as they usually encourage a long chain of comments expressing the fact that they're unwelcome. Sometimes one or two are flagged and banned. A week later, another little network is built up again and the loud and extreme few are handed a megaphone. We need better filtering algorithms for this nonsense that operate on a macro level. You can call it censorship if you want. I'm not saying to make it impossible for them to communicate their message, they just should be relegated to doing so from one account at a time.
This didn't work out so well, http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2016/11/17/twitter_i...
This effort is half hearted at best, disorganized in practice https://www.facebook.com/notes/facebook-safety/controversial...
It's been vigilantes doxxing that have had the largest impact, however what they do is illegal and against the terms of service of the apps they're trying to rid of hateful speech. http://www.haaretz.com/us-news/.premium-1.806719
I would love to see more tech leaders actually build intelligent solutions to weeding out hatespeech on the internet.
Let them go underground, that's where they belong.
If you are cool with companies policing you, you just think about what will happen if some of them become right leaning, would you still agree with them taking a political stance?
In my opinion we have the law and we have legislators, private companies should not try to do their job.
Whether or not it counts as a 'public accommodation' actually seems like a bit of a subtle question. Relevant wiki:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_accommodations
It seems like it'd be clear that AirBnB itself is a public accommodation, but not necessarily so clear that each individual renter on AirBnB would count as such. So while the site itself may not be able to discriminate, individual property owners may. IANAL though, but it seems like an interesting question. (Also, my post should not be construed to be advocating either position, simply contemplating the legal question)
1. The 'private club' exception. An individual renter is a small operation, and could maybe argue that their property represents a private club. In the same way that businesses under 15 employees (or whatever the limit is) are exempt from certain civil rights requirements. They're too small to be considered 'public' accommodations.
2. The word 'establishment': "any inn, hotel, motel, or other establishment which provides lodging to transient guests,". Is an AirBnB renter an 'establishment'? The word is a bit poorly defined, but an argument could be made that since most AirBnB renters are not incorporated, they could not be considered to be 'establishments'. It may also turn on the degree to which the renting is a primary use of the home in question. I.e. if you own the house only to rent it out, you are an 'establishment', but if you also live there and only rent it occasionally, you are not.
And while I welcome Airbnb's attention to the issue and the basic first-order attempt at doing the right thing, I also see this as an insidious way for Airbnb to shirk the responsibilities that come with public accommodation, and a lack of imagination on the ways they could contribute to a just world.
Protected classes have something in common, which is that they are aspects of nature and circumstance that their members don't control in the way that somebody decides to be a white supremacist. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protected_class)
I'm okay with Airbnb's particular move here, though I would strongly argue they are a public accommodation. Those two distinct questions got mixed up in my head.
Everyone on the left, repeat after me: We embrace diversity of thought, as long as I agree with it.
Personally, I embrace the right. I embrace the idea that government should have no place instructing religious leaders on who they can and cannot marry. I embrace the idea that largely leaving individuals to collect their income for their work and spend or donate as they choose rather than mandate taxation has a place in political discorse. I believe my right-leaning family members can have a solid conversation with me about our differences, which may end with my complete rejection of their ideals while still allowing them to have their voice heard, and at the end of the day I enjoy those a hell of a lot more than I enjoy my left-leaning circle-jerks with friends which I get very frustrated with.
What I have a problem with is equating valid opposing ideology with hate speech. These people swarming Charlottesville have nothing to say of value. They are violent thugs spouting false science that has been around for centuries. They have nothing of value to add to political discourse, and the fact that outlets like Twitter and Facebook have allowed them to spread their disgusting ideology on their platforms is nothing short of disgraceful.
You live in the real world, not a theoretical world. The problem with libertarians and other freedom-lovers is they have a simplistic model of the world that doesn't account for all the variables - they don't think their cunning plan through. Probably because they don't experience the world and have a limited understanding of people due to their lack of socialization.
We criminalize exactly one form of speech: speech that creates exigent danger. What are these 'many' forms that you speak of?
> You live in the real world, not a theoretical world. The problem with libertarians and other freedom-lovers is they have a simplistic model of the world that doesn't account for all the variables - they don't think their cunning plan through. Probably because they don't experience the world and have a limited understanding of people due to their lack of socialization.
Let's ask a simple question: At which point in US (or whichever country)'s history more than 70 years prior to today would you like to implement censorship laws? Maybe in the 1950s, before that pesky civil rights era? How about in the 1800s, before those slaves got themselves freed? Certainly, at those times, civil rights and abolitionism were dangerous, pernicious ideas worthy of censorship. But, surely, you have it all figured out today. You're smarter than them, right? You know what's right and wrong, so much so that you don't even need to hear the other side. This time it's different. /s
We criminalize all sorts of speech, everything from libel to copyrighted works.
You live in a country under the permission of government. Never forget that.
> Let's ask a simple question:
Don't ever ask simple questions. It shows lack of thought.
You could equally and more accurately say government governs under the permission of the people.
> Don't ever ask simple questions. It shows lack of thought.
No, much better to dodge counter-arguments to which you are incapable of formulating a response.
Indeed, which is why we limit freedom of speech. These things don't happen without the public's approval.
This isn't the world where you get to do what you want. This is the world where you get to do what government (= the public in a democracy) allows you to do.
I'm sorry you thought otherwise.
I get the desire to defend free speech, but as everyone is already aware, several people have ALREADY died directly from this horrific and dangerous event, organized by criminals and terrorists.
Be thankful AirBnB has sided with safety.
Welcome to the real world, where people actually die as a result of the words they say, instead of "theory" world.
Oh, quite to the contrary. The citizenry of this country and its government are actually quite in agreement with me. That's why we have freedom of speech here - because we believe the principle outweighs the negative effects of subversive speech.
>I get the desire to defend free speech, but as everyone is already aware, several people have ALREADY died directly from this horrific and dangerous event, organized by criminals and terrorists.
So, we should ban anything capable of causing deaths? We don't ban cars. We don't ban airplanes. We don't even ban guns. Why don't we ban these things? Because we believe that the number of deaths they cause is acceptable relative to the value they provide. Yes, that's right. We callously calculate that cars are worth more to us than the thousands of people they kill every year. And if cars are worth that, freedom of speech is definitely worth the tiny handful of people who's live it may end annually.
No, both of those definitely also involve criminal statutes.
Also, another example of criminalized speech is sedition.
And didn't some girl get convicted last week of convincing her boyfriend to commit suicide?
I don't even know why people think there's unlimited free speech...
This is going to get ugly.
ETA: I was wrong. It's already ugly. It is going to get much uglier.
I think I'm done trying to convince anyone that it's worth working toward a peaceable resolution. I no longer believe such a thing is possible, or that there's anything to be accomplished at this point, in arguing for it, save to make oneself a target for both sides.
1. First amendment only applies to government actions.
2. Established case law that businesses offering a public service are not allowed to discriminate based on a protected class. (Hate groups are NOT protected).
3. Businesses are allowed to refuse service if it impacts their ability to serve all their customers (for example, you show up at the coffee house without clothes)
4. AirBnB has entered into consent agreements with California Fair Housing and Employment Department with regards to the landlords discriminating against guests.
5. AirBnB has a ToS that specifies the conditions imposed on guests.
AirBnB is quite correct from a business perspective to cancel the reservations.
Thought experiment if they didn't:
A landlord renting a house is Jewish or any other group that is hated by the "Unite the Right" and gets their house trashed.
... this puts AirBnB in what kind of legal situation.
I don't like speculation based on hypotheticals. Unfortunately, the car attack in Charlotte proves my point.
It's like the day after the election, half the population started engaging in WW2 cosplay.
There are more Rastafarians in America then there are actual Nazis, and I'd wager very few people in this rally even know the definition of a Nazi, let alone are one.
You know what I think? I think you don't actually care about free speech. A Nazi (a real, card-carrying Nazi) drove a car through a group of leftist protestors and killed an innocent young woman. He took away, by force, her right to freedom of expression.
But I notice you haven't voiced any concern about that - you only care about freedom of speech to the extent that it's used to protect Nazis (and those who associate with them). But when it comes to protecting the free speech of protestors who disagree? All of a sudden, your deep concern is nowhere to be found. Give me a break.
What you are talking about is completely orthogonal to the first amendment. Everyone has a right to speech and everyone is protected from vehicular assault & murder by law. I hope that everyone on Hacker News condemns that act of violence.
Could you please point to the source of your claim that he was a "card-carrying Nazi"?
You can expect that if stuff like this starts happening more often, other jurisdictions will also respond.
In general, "I am free to not rent my property to a certain undesirable element" has a pretty ugly history, as most societies don't view housing as just another optional consumption good.
You know, renting your property is not an existential struggle and not everyone who reads Breitbart wants to have you and yours ethnically cleansed. There are laws to protect you, and you really don't need to be helping out the police with your fears.
Should we just throw them into water and see if they float? Or administer a "are you a Nazi" test on a polygraph?
EDIT: This is a problem of the current political climate where words have lost their meaning. A lot of people even remotely right of center have been called a Nazi or "alt-right" or "white-supremacist".
Obviously, you can't tell if someone is a Nazi, so only those who openly display their ideology should be banned.
How about good old fashioned, "Is that a fucking swastika your friend is carrying over his shoulder?"
https://twitter.com/AndyBCampbell/status/896385942495285248
But generally, yeah, let's test people for lack of empathy and other things. That would be much more interesting than what particular ideology they dress the underlying issues up with, and it would also address the "shutting people up for voicing things we can't handle because they're correct" crowd that hide under the mantle of social justice and whatnot.
Yes, the "Nazi ideology" espouses this. But you are renting to actual people, and
1) You have no way of knowing whether _they_ really espouse the ethnic cleansing of you and yours, or whether you just think they do. Lots of people wear swatstikas but they don't actually favor mass extermination. There are holocaust deniers who are called Nazis and maybe even view themselves as Nazis but, pretty much by definition, don't support the holocaust. As another example, elsewhere in this thread you have made characterizations about me that don't have any basis in reality, so who is to trust you to decide whether someone truly wants to ethnically cleanse you and yours?
2) even if they were _actual_ Nazis, which you have no way of knowing, by renting to them, you and yours are not going to be ethnically cleansed. The fact that someone has a political belief is not in and of itself a cause to make them fail to pay rent or fulfill any other of their obligations as tenants. As a result, in many jurisdictions, it's illegal to not rent to them.(a)
3) There is a strong likelihood that landlords will end up refusing to rent to people whose views they don't like. A capitalist landlord can refuse to rent to a communist, because the communist wants to overthrow them. That will turn into not renting to someone who is interested in communism, etc, which will turn into not renting someone who attends a communist rally. Someone else in this thread decided that a Swatstika on a "friend" would be enough evidence, so now we are getting into not renting to someone based on their associating with people suspected of Nazism, etc.
(a) In California, it is illegal to not rent to someone based on "arbitrary characteristics" not related to their ability to fulfill the terms of the lease. See, e.g. http://articles.latimes.com/2014/mar/30/business/la-fi-rentw...
Again, the laws differ jurisdiction by jurisdiction.
Believe me, it's not the leftists who end up owning most of the property. These protections are part of living in an open society in which people are not discriminated against based on their beliefs. As we get more of a housing crunch and in many cities there is a growing population of renters, it becomes more important that your political affiliation not disqualify you from access to shelter. This may mean that some landlords have to rent to those whose politics they dislike, but that's the price of living in a free society. You are free to espouse any ideology you want as long as you don't break any laws.
If they're Nazis, make Hitler salutes, and fly flags with swastikas on them, of course I do! That's practically the point of ideology lmao
People wear transgressive symbols and put on transgressive displays in order to piss others off and show their own independence. But wearing a Che Hat doesn't make you a communist, neither does sporting a hammer and sickle arm band. Neither does singing the International. Please don't confuse performative displays with the real thing: kids dressing up as historical cowboys and indians are not actually cowboys and indians. Stop pretending.
Lastly, we don't live in a society of self-help for this stuff. You are obligated to rent to anyone who can fulfill the terms of the lease, and if you don't like that, then get out of the rental business. Let the police be the ones charged with preventing mass extermination. Petty discriminations don't help protect anyone.
First, by displaying basic civility, we are true to our own values and set an example for those that we want to come around to our way of thinking. Consider the local library, or the post office. They don't require any ideological test. There's a basic requirement for following the minimal set of rules that allows them to function. Beyond that, they serve everyone with no other preferences at all. These are two of the greatest institutions our nation has created.
Second, Airbnb has decided to deny service to Nazis, but not to (say) those who abuse children. How does that fly? If someone scalds an infant numerous times over a period of years, apparently Airbnb is cool with it. Or at least, they're not as concerned as they are with an idiot marching around in Nazi or KKK regalia.
However I can't help but think that the reactions would be quite different if they had banned people attending a Sharia rally.
When you are trusting someone to host you in their home, or trusting someone to stay in your home, it is important to have safety policies. For example, AirBnB's policies are related to fire safety, theft/vandalism, and fraud. This is simply one other policy to make both guests and hosts feel safe using the platform.
- https://www.airbnb.ca/standards
Fascism should be fought, but not in this way.
When they come for you and your soon-to-be-declared radical beliefs, remember how proud you were today.
> When they come for you and your soon-to-be-declared radical beliefs
Airbnb is a business. Not the government. They can't come for me. I go to them and if tomorrow they declare my beliefs radical, I will not go to them.
Nazism is not a case of "right vs. left", "republican vs. democrat", etc. It's not a case where it's an almost 50/50 split, but because the left has more power over media/tech, then the right's views are considered fringe and are "punished".
This is a case where almost everyone agrees that these views are completely outside of standard discourse. Don't conflate this with the common (and IMO somewhat valid) view that a lot of what's been happening lately is "repression" of the right by the left.