It's great to read such eloquent defense of such an important idea. I would ask that anybody with terrible ideas be allowed to speak at length and convince all the peaceful tolerant listeners of the terribleness of the ideas. Sadly, the importance of freedom of expression seems dead in the minds of many Americans.
Perhaps, but then we have effective safeguards over here that the US doesn't have. Particularly, we have a truly independent and non-politicised judiciary. That's a big deal.
We don't have the absolute and uncompromisingly worded constitutional rights of the US, but we're also far less likely to suffer erosion or elimination of those rights in practice that we see in the US. E.g. If the UK government wanted to have National Security Letters they'd just pass a law allowing them to do so. But there's no way the judiciary would allow them to create and apply such letters otherwise, the way it happened in the US. So yes the security state here does go too far IMHO but it's much more explicit and open to public debate and challenge.
> Indeed, also EU member nations are subject to European Court of Human Rights.
Council of Europe members. Russia is a Council of Europe member, so the UK isn't leaving that. On the other hand, it also isn't as effective as you might think.
In the near-term (10-15 years), fortunately, the Supreme Court is very likely to shield freedom of speech from this latest cultural assault.
The primary question is what direction the authoritarian types will attack it from legally / politically. The main vehicle has to be the intentionally vague hate speech approach, which they've been readying and building up for decades. To regulate it into action, they'll have to argue the Internet (the primary medium that matters now) is under FCC broadcast control just as with traditional radio and broadcast TV. Then they'll task any Internet content publishing platforms with obeying and enforcing the new hate speech limitations. Those new rules will vary with the political winds and be aggressively abused by each administration and major political shift in DC. It'll become a form of shifting thought terror brought down upon the American people (what can/can't I express changing every 4 to 8 years); by the time the public realizes what has happened, it'll be far too late, their speech - their last line of defense - will be gone.
The approach they are using right now, and very successfully, is to force the large companies to censor for them. Internally to the company they will say "this and this and this should be deleted". They accuse anyone that disagrees of creating a hostile work environment (illegal per anti-discrimination laws). Without anyone left to disagree, they can get basically all they ask for.
They then disingeniously say "this is the decision of a private company, free speech only applies to the government" even though they were the ones that forced the company's hand.
Complete censorship is not possible with this strategy, because there will always be other ways to get the speech out, but it may well be censored from as large a percentage of people as in a dictatorship.
How is the government forcing large companies to censor? I've not come across any instances of this. Pressure maybe, but there's a world of difference between pressure and force. See Apple's refusal to assist in decrypting the contents of their phones.
Personally I agree with the ACLU position on this, but also believe that privately owned publishing platforms should be free to establish their own policies on what they will or will not carry. That's their right as private entities.
Excepting explicit regulation such as common carrier. I don't think anyone is saying it would be OK for the phone companies to cut off KKK members phone service.
Agree... but cloudflare was basically arguing that they should be considered something like "common carrier" because very few companies have the technology and network to build DDoS resistant websites.
I don't know how true that is, but if so... it stands to reason that free speech on the internet could be in danger. But who knows, maybe we'll get better DDoS protection technology in the future :)
> Personally I agree with the ACLU position on this, but also believe that privately owned publishing platforms should be free to establish their own policies on what they will or will not carry. That's their right as private entities.
Are you opposed to net neutrality, then? If not, why the different standard for ISPs vs other tech oligopolies?
Not OP, but I think publishing platforms should be able to decide policies who to carry, infrastructure companies on the other hand should at most differentiate by usage patterns, never by ideology.
I count ISPs clearly in the infrastructure category, same with cloudflare, domain providers and AWS.
Personally, I think there is a difference between publishing companies that develop their own content and social media companies that only provide a mechanism for others to communicate.
I'd count the latter among the infrastructure companies.
I wouldn't. Even just the design of the tools they provide to facilitate communication influence what content can be created and how it is created. How can Facebook be a common carrier when it has age restrictions on accounts and makes choices about what languages and scripts it supports? If it were a common carrier, it would be unable to filter or limit the dustribution of pornography, for example. Should the be coerced by legislation to drop all such restrictions? If they should then what about private forums and bulletin boards? They provide essentially the same kinds of service? I just don't see how that approach is at all tennable.
Every platform limits the content based on the design of the tools. Being a common carrier wouldn't mean Facebook would be forced to support particular scripts any more than the phone company was required to develop video calls.
If there are some restrictions we want as a society, like age or porn, those could be made exceptions.
Regarding private forums, I'd distinguish between forums that seek to serve 99% of people and those that serve less than 1%. The first are public; the latter are private.
Facebook is just the last platform in a stack of platforms people use to communicate. Why would Facebook be allowed to restrict content while those who provide the services Facebook is built on wouldn't?
I already explained exactly why. They already have responsibility for the content on their platform simply due to the nature and design of the platform.
That's completely beside the point. They are required to do that by law, in exactly the same way that the phone company can be required by law to cut of service or trace calls by the law or the courts. Its got nothing to do with common carrier status, which is about the discretion of the company not the government.
I'm in favour of net neutrality, and believe that ISPs should be common carriers just like phone companies. Physical infrastructure should be covered by common carrier rules as not discriminate (in the broad sense) between content. Maybe content types, for efficiency purposes, but not the content itself.
Publishing platforms explicitly manage content. They provide tools to create, edit, transform and manage content. They provide facilities to control content distribution and subscription. That's clearly a different class of service. You can't reasonably argue that a service that actually facilitates the creation and routing of content can't influence what content is created or routed. They already do so explicitly in their choice and design of tooling.
ISPs also "facilitate the creation and routing of content". We just don't think of them that way because they exist at a lower layer and we don't directly interact with them. Instead, services like Facebook use the services ISPs provide.
Thats some pretty contorted reasoning. ISPs only carry content after it has been created and they do not route traffic based on it's data payload, only it's addressing metadata set by the sender. The protocols they implement were specifically designed not to care about the data payload and just do what the sender told them to do regarding addressing and delivery. Internet users rely on them to do what they are supposed to do, as clearly laid down in the protocol specifications.
Various social networks use 'relevance' metrics, keywords in the text, timeliness and all sorts of criteria to choose how to distribute or sort and highlight content and they change these algorithms over time. They are part of the value the service provides and clearly their responsibility.
We're taking about private companies. Title IX only applies to federally funded services. Federal agencies anti-discrimination policies are a completely different subject.
I realize I'm risking downvotes with this one, but I think it's worth acknowledging. While Charlottesville was a tragedy, and the time is not right imo to discuss it with the public at large precisely because it was a tragedy and people are still mourning, the event was overall as peaceful as any severely political protest ever is. The deaths and injuries that occurred should not be simply discounted as if the people are simply disposable, but the majority of activists on both sides did not cause those deaths and injuries. Unless there is a major point of information that I am ignorant of, the driver who has catapulted the event into the national spotlight acted essentially in isolation even if his ideology was not held in isolation at the event. He acted heinously, and now is not the time for taking easy solace, but I think there's some merit in the reality that by and large people on both sides were able to demonstrate with the -relative- peacefulness of a generic controversial American protest with orbital counter protests.
This is why I couldn't believe that terrorism was invoked. (for a second, before accepting the unscrupulous cleverness of it)
Terrorism is when a message is sent to the people at large, not what happens between warring protestors. Terrorism is what Theresa May wants to tap internet communications for.
to me the key difference is terrorism is premeditated. this violence was the act of one individual and is blown out of proportion.
what was not communicated is that only these "alt-right" groups had permission to march and demonstrate and the police were told to not intervene when counter groups who assembled in similar manner without permission were allowed free reign to incite the issue.
I am all for letting these "alt-right/left" groups march to their hearts content provided their faces are visible. it gives them an outlet and lets the rest of us know who they are. so while their message may be repugnant they have the right to march.
the ACLU recent preening/posturing/etc is shameful compared to their past actions. far too many groups are piling on declaring how they are against violence which is non declaration. Of course violence cannot be supported.
the real danger is if we force these groups underground that some of their members may act out with much more terrible violence.
Snopes does cite the tweet, and does say there were brawls and that some people blame the police for not having intervened enough. Which facts have they missed?
> I am all for letting these "alt-right/left" groups march to their hearts content provided their faces are visible.
You do know what happens once neo-Nazis get photos of your face? People are getting harrassed online, then offline, rounded up, beaten and occasionally murdered. Masking is self-protection.
And yes there IS a difference between lefties and Nazis masking up: Lefties, generally, don't kill. Worst you get as a Nazi is a beating. Nazis do kill (50 or 68 alone due to terrorist attacks since 9/11, per https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right-wing_terrorism#cite_ref-...).
Source: know a couple "outed" activists, got my face distributed by a local Nazi party leader on Youtube.
> if it were true, every media outlet in America would be reporting it.
LOL as if the mainstream press would care about right-wing violence. As long as it can be swept under the rug or it's only minorities who suffer, they don't care - simply because the majority of customers are white men, and they are not interested if PoC or minorities get hit. Charlottesville only got attention because the terror victim was white, what happened the day before at night or with the PoC nearly beaten to death in a garage was shadowed by the murder.
There are many sources proving my point, when it comes to the facts. For example:
- The number of violent attacks on U.S. soil inspired by far-right ideology has spiked since the beginning of this century, rising from a yearly avarage of 70 attacks in the 1990s to a yearly avarage of more than 300 since 2001. These incidents have grown even more common since President Donald Trump’s election. (per http://www.newsweek.com/2016/02/12/right-wing-extremists-mil...)
- They and untold thousands like them are the extremists who hide among us, the right-wing militants who, since 2002, have killed more people in the United States than jihadis have. In that time, according to New America, a Washington think tank, Islamists launched nine attacks that murdered 45, while the right-wing extremists struck 18 times, leaving 48 dead. (per http://www.newsweek.com/2016/02/12/right-wing-extremists-mil...)
Are you seriously parroting Donald Trump right now? The lefties at Charlottesville were peaceful (and in those cases where it did turn violent, the Nazis began with assaulting). Most weren't even Antifa, they were ordinary Charlottesville citizens protesting against Nazis from all over the USA taking their city over!
I was at G20. We did not initiate the violence, it was initiated by the police on Thursday by attacking the peaceful demonstration (which had even unmasked in the majority, as ordered by police).
Source: Witnessed everything from a bridge above the watercannons.
> which had even unmasked in the majority, as ordered by police
Honestly I find such an order repugnant. Anonymity is crucial to free speech, especially when protesting a group as powerful as G20. I'm sure no-one thinks they should be forced to report their political activity to their employer (at least judging from the outcry when the Trump administration requested all those IP addresses), but such an order is effectively exactly that.
> They would exist without Nazis. In fact, Charlottesville may be the first time they've actually fought Nazis.
> The first German movement to call itself Antifaschistische Aktion was proclaimed by the German Communist Party (KPD) in their newspaper Rote Fahne in 1932 and held its first rally in Berlin on 10 July 1932, then capital of the Weimar Republic. During the early 1930s amidst rising tensions between Nazis and the communists, Berlin in particular has been the site of regular and often very violent clashes between the two groups.
According to that, either Muslim or left-wing (anti-white or anti-police) extremists were responsible for all the fatalities in 2016, save one attack for which the motive is unknown.
> According to that, either Muslim or left-wing (anti-white or anti-police) extremists were responsible for all the fatalities in 2016, save one attack for which the motive is unknown.
First off, you're taking liberties in assigning those to left-wing extremism without a basis.
Here's some more data, over a longer period:
Quoting ADL's Murder and Extremism in the United States in 2016 report [1] (focus on domestic terrorism):
Left-wing violence is on the rise. All of those 8 people killed by the left were in 2016 (Dallas and Baton Rouge attacks on police officers), none of the people killed by the right were (unless the ADL is mysteriously counting the killing of an Imam in NYC by a Hispanic man whose motive is unknown as "right-wing").
That's assuming the ADL's numbers are right and none of the other people the GTD called "anti-police extremists" were left-wing, which appears to be incorrect. [1]
The "rise of the violent left", as The Atlantic called it, is a depressing trend.
Anyway, I have to go and won't be able to respond until tomorrow. Have a great day.
> All of those 8 people killed by the left were in 2016,
8 police officers shot by radical BLM activists. I don't like that kind of action either, but given that PoC are routine walking target circles for police, I certainly get how the two activists were motivated - and there is a difference between taking revenge on murderers versus murdering people just because they're black/jewish/...
And: according to ADL (https://www.adl.org/education/resources/reports/murder-and-e...), however, Nazis did commit two triple-murders (bringing their tally for 2016 to 6), and it's the first year that Nazis were not the absolute dominator on the murder statistics since over 30 years (9/11 was not domestic terrorism). This one year is nothing to prove a trend turn.
> Anti-government extremists and white supremacists were responsible for only a minority of extremist related deaths in 2016, though they did commit two triple homicides.
Unfortunately they don't identify those incidents. The GTD doesn't list any triple homicides by the right. Let me know if you can find out what they're talking about here.
These nazis/white supremacists/etc glorify the holocaust, meaning they want to, once again, kill all those they consider inferior: jews/blacks/muslims.
Those protesting against them are the people that think it's not a great idea to kill all the jews/blacks/muslims. Because being anti-Nazi doesn't make you a communist terrorist or whatever.
That really shouldn't be so hard to understand, considering the US once fought a war against those people whose flag is now making a comeback. And I really didn't get the feeling that all those GIs were anarchists and communists.
Additionally, I'd wager that many antifascists would rather not use violence and rather have police take care about that matter.
However, even flying f..ing Nazi swastika flags and thereby create a sphere of threat for minorities (because, what else than "I will kill you when you come here" does a Swastika flag say to a Jew?!) is legal in the US - so in order to create a safe space for minorities of all kinds, Nazis must be driven away. And yes, this includes violence in some occasions (e.g. at Charlottesville, where a gang of white supremacists nearly beat a PoC to death).
If anyone is not fine with Antifa protecting minorities, then by all means lobby your politicians that Nazi symbolism, hate speech and other ways of threatening minorities gets banned. Until this happens, either stand in yourself when you see minorities threatened or at least don't stand in the way of those willing to protect minorities when no one else wants to!
They were violent at the presidential inauguration, the G20 summit, and in attempts to prevent countless people from speaking at colleges. Please don't try to pretend they only fight Nazis.
> what was not communicated is that only these "alt-right" groups had permission to march and demonstrate and the police were told to not intervene when counter groups who assembled in similar manner without permission were allowed free reign to incite the issue.
It could be because both of those statements are lies. You might need to rethink which outlet you go to for news.
Although one of those outlets happens to be the POTUS, which is unfortunate.
People protesting against Nazis aren't the left-wing equivalent of them. Nazis want genocide. If you don't want to kill all the jews/blacks/muslims you're anti-Nazi, and should, when given the chance, make your opinion known by protesting against them.
That means the victim of this terror attack probably wasn't some sort of left-wing "warring protestor", but an actual, rather normal, person.
But anyway... The definition of terrorism is politically motivated violence. Not calling this terrorism, when it's using literally the same method as ISIS has been using in the last years, is starting to make it really hard to believe that all these free speech advocates aren't just trying to hide their sympathies for the skinheads they're defending.
I mean: there were militia in fatigues with rifles chanting threats outside a synagogue in Charlottesville. The congregation inside could have used some of these people professing their willingness to give their life in the defence of others. But nobody showed up, not even the police, and it's also never mentioned. I wonder why?
Replying to matt, not sure why his post was flagged (aside from veering off my topic):
>People protesting against Nazis aren't... >That means...
You theorise a lot about the opposing side on this one occasion, that is contrary to what we've seen for a year from american political clashes.
>But anyway... The definition of terrorism is politically motivated violence. Not calling this terrorism, when it's using literally the same method as ISIS has been using in the last years, is starting to make it really hard to believe that all these free speech advocates aren't just trying to hide their sympathies for the skinheads they're defending.
Drunk drivers "use the same method" to kill people. What's really depressing is the fact that lights a bulb in people's head that says terrorism. It means they don't have actual definitions of words in their heads. I'm not a nazi sympathiser at all, thank you. And believe any of those at Charlottesville truly concerned with white heritage and statues failed themselves by association (nevermind carrying torches..).
Many groups radicalize "lone wolves" precisely to do the things that they want done, but want to keep their hands clean.
You saw this particularly during the 90s, when people were radicalized to attack and kill abortion doctors. It was rarely called terrorism, but the tactics were the same.
The folks who sent hoax anthrax packages to Planned Parenthood offices where mostly lone actors, picking up on their group's radicalizing messages.
One could also say Eric Rudolph and Timothy McVeigh were "lone wolves" in that they believed the radicalizing talk, but acted essentially alone.
If you're an avowed Hitler fan at a #UniteTheRight alt-right rally, and you drive multiple blocks at high speed into a crowd of people, and then drive multiple blocks in reverse at a similar rate of speed in order to evade capture, I think there's enough room to indict.
the boundaries for freedom of speech will always be tested, and as the document reveals this the first time freedom of speech is debated.. and won't be the last either.
But I for one don't believe there is any serious efforts to limit freedom of speech in America, we're still far from that point :)
You and the ACLU have been tripped up by the paradox of tolerance: there is a time and place to analyze ideas destructive to open society, but that is not the same as what happened in Charlottesville or Germany in the '30s
> there is a time and place to analyze ideas destructive to open society
I hope you realize this is the type of speech we should expect from a totalitarian regime.
Who determines whether something is destructive to society? Always and everywhere should be the time and place to analyse any ideas regardless of whether anyone thinks they're destructive or not.
>>Who determines whether something is destructive to society?
This is a key question people want to avoid
Every group has their own idea as to what is destructive to society, Ask Anti-fa they will tell it is the White Supremacists, Ask the White Supremacists and they will tell you it is Anti-fa
Ask me and I will tell you it is both...
Ask Christians and they will give you a whole list of speech that is destructive,
Ask Atheists and they will give you a whole list of speech that is destructive,
Ask <insert group>, and they will give you a whole list of speech that is destructive,
So who is right? None of them.... not even me.
What is actually destructive to society is Censorship... Both by government and by society at large
> there is a time and place to analyze ideas destructive to open society
Just like there's a time and place to question the war effort, right? Besides, some people want closed borders, not an open society - why should only ideas that favour openness be allowed?
Hitler didn't take over Germany because he had the best words. He was enabled, among other things, by complicit Bavarian judges who refused to lop off his head for treason.
It is a noble sentiment that bears remembering. Although, we should ruminate on what it means in a world of attention span saturation, where competing ideas are essentially DDoSed. If you look in depth at cult deprogramming techniques, there is a danger to isolation and concentration of ideas.
I am kinda confused, facebook was criticized for not weeding out "fake news" (same for twitter/ Instagram not controlling trolling/hate speech), and Cloudflare is criticized for not being content neutral... damned if you do, damned if you don't
I think there's a meaningful difference between a media company (Facebook/Twitter/etc.) and an infrastructure provider.
I expect the electric company to provide electricity to everyone on a non-discriminatory basis. I don't expect publishers to print everything that gets submitted to them.
Facebook claims to provide service to 25% of the world population. I think it's worth considering whether they are communication carriers at this point.
Real-world concepts of common carriers are centered around the concept of natural monopolies arising from local effects. That does not take networking effects into account which can work non-locally.
Facebook should be careful about the news they're promoting (in the "trending articles" part). But they should remain neutral when they're acting as a pipe for people's posts.
Note that the ACLU has (just today) announced a slight modification to this policy.
They will continue to defend Fascist groups right to hold marches, but not if they plan to carry guns.
The American Civil Liberties Union will no longer defend hate groups seeking to march with firearms, the Wall Street Journal reported on Thursday, a policy change that comes on the heels of protests by white nationalists and counter-protesters at the weekend in Virginia.
Edit: I don't usually complain about this, but it's weird to see the voting on this. It's pretty clear some people don't like it, and decided to shoot the messenger I guess.
I'm thinking this is an example of the original statement in the pamphlet that says "overt acts of interference of others' rights" will not be supported.
Open carry of firearms during protests is _intended_ to intimidate others' free speech rights. It's an overt act of interference of others' rights.
Hm; to me this sounds rather in line with the following quote from page 4 of the OP document:
"Against drilling with arms, as testified to before a Congressional committee,
the Union will also fight—even for the enactment of laws, if necessary, to prohibit arms in the hands of political organizations."
Is there some subtle (?) difference I didn't notice between this sentence and the reported change in policy?
Quote: An ACLU spokeswoman confirmed the policy shift and said the concern over weapons was not something the group has had to contend with in the past.
So I'm assuming the ACLU knows what their policy was, and this was a change.
I guess sometime between the 1934 document posted and yesterday the ACLU's policy changed to defend protests where guns were carried, and now they are looking at that again.
Notably they went to court to defend the Charlotteville protest, and they knew open-carry milita were planning to come.
"Further, we point out the inevitable effect of making martyrs by persecution. Persecute the Nazis, drive them underground, imitate their methods in Germany - and attract to them hundreds of sympathizers with the persecuted who would otherwise be indifferent."
Most of the people & corporations screaming for suppression on all kinds of speeches across spectrum of opinions do not get this. The best way increase toxicity of any discourse is to try and suppress it, this is is evident from recent examples of Google, Cloudfare, FB, Charlotesville, University of Berkeley and many more.
While I have no hopes from corporations, I hope that people realize that dialogue & free speech are perhaps the most non-violent & non-toxic ways of resolving any issues. Suppressing opinions be of any side just widens the chasm between groups and benefits narrow political agendas.
This mechanism of any form of blowback against extremists only making them stronger keeps being repeated, but there is absolutely no data supporting it.
There is, however, plenty of data supporting the opposite: almost all other democracies have strikter limits on hate speech, and none of them have devolved into dictatorships.
Indeed, one could argue that the US ran a pretty successful campaign to suppress Nazi hate speech almost immediately after it was invented.
>There is, however, plenty of data supporting the opposite: almost all other democracies have strikter limits on hate speech, and none of them have devolved into dictatorships.
does that mean all "hate speech" is eliminated? Please share the data.
The other problem is who decides which free speech to suppress? Who has that moral right?
Of course it's difficult to name the exact test that draws a bright line between legal and illegal speech, because speech exists along a continuous spectrum.
But the law has literally hundreds of years of experience with such problems. The line between marketing and fraud, or porn and art is just as hard to define.
So, for example, bringing Swastikas to a protest in Germany would get you thrown in jail, and so would guns, or slogans such as "gas the jews".
It's been like that for 70 years, and you're still free to say really nasty things about Merkel without any fear of prosecution.
The quote is not about making extremists stronger, but to "attract to them hundreds of sympathizers with the persecuted who would otherwise be indifferent".
I do believe that this polarization was a factor in the last US election, for example.
How about this: In principle I am quite sympathetic with the goals of the left but do not consider myself part of it. My preference ranking puts sustainability higher than equality of opportunity and far higher than equality of outcome. My observation is that society in practice does not value equality that much anyway see capitalism and IQ. Trying to force the issue might be a misallocation of resources. Plus as a white male living on mostly white neighborhoods struggles with inequality seem distant and abstract to me, far outside my monkeysphere. Other policy issues will have an easier time appealing to me directly.
And that brings us to the "expense of other things". Open discourse, rationalism, free speech are also part of humanism, not just treating people as individuals.
If "deplatforming", online lynch mobs and other authoritarian instruments become part of the left's arsenal then my sympathy for the left shrinks and my tolerance of the right grows simply on balance. If some well-organized nazi came around and offered me a party program with infrastructure projects that aim for sustainability as long as I turn a blind eye to some stricter immigration policy or undoing protections for certain classes which are a minority of the population anyway then on balance I might be a little more tempted to vote for them than before. Or maybe just not vote against them. Because on balance the left is just declared it is willing to suppress people on the other end of the overton window. So why not?
This is not likely to happen in the US anyway, so take it more more of a thought experiment to illustrate my point, but I am trying to show that not everyone has the same value-system. Whenever I vote I have to choose between a set of value-systems where none of them are perfectly aligned with my own. So if progressives make a "small sacrifice" in values to promote a greater goal for themselves then this may have a radically different effect on their position in the energy-potential landscape as computed from my perspective. What to them might be an insignificant alteration to a very steep slope can be a significant flattening of the landscape which makes it a lot easier to just roll rightwards. Or just not roll to the left.
There are many good examples in history of oppression making a movement stronger. Think of the Boston massacre, Rosa Parks, or British treatment of Ghandi. That said, the plural of anecdote is not evidence.
That said, the above arguments are against government oppression of a movement. Actions by localities to remove statues or by private companies to not provide a platform for hate speech are a different ballgame. It's not obvious they lead to blowback.
As I understand it, Germany in the 1920s and 1930s was one of those democracies with stricter limits on hate speech, including crackdowns on the Nazis. We all know how that turned out.
I feel that "free speech" isn't a right as much as censoring speech is an active crime; you are forcefully prohibiting the processing of information. It's like forcing lobotomies on people.
What do you think about the German suppression of Nazis and it's success then?
If your mind is so open to ideas that you think public advocacy of genocide is a freedom that needs defending then your mind is so open that your brains have fallen out. It must be done with great care and restraint, but there should be no doubt that certain speech is basically incompatible with a free society and must be silenced. Your society has a great sickness if you ever must use that power of suppression, but that sickness can, has, and does exist. Ignoring it and letting it happen in the past had tragic results.
If the increasingly bold radical right in America isn't controlled quickly, there is going to be widespread civil disorder bordering on war. It will be a great opportunity for a few people in power to abuse the population for their own goals, and it wouldn't be at all surprising if that was the whole idea.
You're not offering any arguments, just various restatements of your premise: "very bad speech must be silenced, or very bad things happen".
Edit: I also think arguments should be viewed with extra skepticism when accompanied by phrases like "your brains have fallen out" or "there should be no doubt that". It's a lazy way to try and add force to your argument without putting in the logical work of doing so.
His argument is in his first sentence. How do you account for Germany suppressing Nazism while being an open democracy? And as far as I know, they've been successful at it. The premise of the OP is that it just creates more support for it, that doesn't seem to be the case in Germany.
And yet poland, which was heavily affected by the nazis and WW2 has a nationalist conservative government and austria almost elected a similar president. I'm not sure if europeans are really that much more successful. The US is simply more polarized due to the two party system and the divide between the coasts and flyover states.
As far as I know no one in Charlottesville was calling for genocide. You assume that because they brandished Nazi flags, and that's not an unfair assumption to make, but making laws about what we assume a group of people will do is a dangerous path to go down.
And now, as you can see today, we greatly outnumbered the anti-white, anti-American filth.
And, at some point, we will have enough power that we will clear them from the streets forever—that which is degenerate in white countries will be removed.
They're calling for expulsion, not genocide. And if that "send them back to Africa" rhetoric is the most extreme you can find, then it's comparatively much more humane than the opposition:
Not defending their views, but your statement isn't accurate. You could also get there through deportation, or in the long term, through banning immigration and reproduction by minorities.
Obviously horrible beyond words, but not fair to say that murder is only option.
Unless you can come up with a scenario where all minorities line up to get on airplanes willingly that aren't accomplishing their goal without massive amounts of violence. They know this, which is why they are heavily armed.
Whether they try to deport them all or murder them all they are going to have to kill millions to accomplish their goal.
Given how oppressed by whites they supposedly are, you'd think they would be chomping at the bit to get away from us. Yet "white flight" continues to be a thing, while "black flight" strangely does not...
Yeah, and I don't disagree with you. If they were successful, that's where this ends up. But in the specific context of this discussion (should speech be banned), saying that speech should be banned if it indirectly leads to violence is a very hard standard to enforce.
Should communist speech be prohibited because establishing a communist state probably requires a dictatorship of the proletariat? Should BLM be restricted from speaking because one of their members views their plight as hopeless and decides to take violent action? Should left-wing organization supporting a "diversity of tactics" be banned because it explicitly allows for violent acts without suggesting or condoning them?
I want to be very clear that it's possible to think these groups should not exist and to disagree as strongly as possible with their message, while still believing they should not be legally restricted from making an argument that does not explicitly call for violence.
Well the same can be said of the radical left; ANTIFA, BLM, etc.. They riot, destroy and burn property, assault and kill people who disagree with their views, with a total disregard for constitutional protected rights.
Sorry, but that's ridiculous. Do you want every movement and viewpoint you support to be held 100% responsible for the actions of anyone who aligns themselves with that group?
As to charlotte, I haven't been following this closely, but the protesters shouldn't be held accountable for the driver's independent action, unless they encouraged it. If they didn't denounce it after the fact, that's a black mark against them too.
I feel the sentence following the one you quoted is just as thoughtworthy:
> "The best way to combat their propaganda is in the open where it can be fought by counter-propaganda, protest demonstrations, picketing--and all the devices of attack which do not involve denying their rights to meet and speak."
This ACLU document is talking about the government banning Nazi meetings, which is not remotely the same as the current situation. The modern Nazi 'martyrs' are people being banned from Twitter and fired from their jobs. They are definitely all being allowed their first amendment-protected free speech, nobody is trying to throw them in jail.
Companies are exercising their free speech rights to refuse to associate with Nazis. The Nazis can feel free to start their own companies and refuse to associate with Communists or whatever other ideological groups they don't like.
My morals are fairly independent of the laws of the US. I don't think peoples lives should be ruined because of their beliefs, however stupid I find them.
As a non-American it strikes me as somewhat imbalanced that travellers to the US have to deny any affiliation with Nazi Germany (a conflict that ended nearly 80 years ago) every time we sign a US visa waiver form, and yet these people seem to be allowed to preach what they do without much consequence.
In Europe it's far more accepted that Nazism is more dangerous than simple 'beliefs' and that there are boundaries where speech ceases to become acceptable in society. See Karl Popper's Paradox of Tolerance. Try waving a Nazi flag in Germany and your feet won't touch the floor.
(a) Being a protected class only changes the level of scrutiny applied to the case. Not being a suspect class simply means that you get to use lowest standard, which is "Rational Basis."
(b) Most people being called Nazis are not Nazis.
Rational Basis is a fairly easy standard to meet, but if your only rationale is "he's a Nazi" and he's not actually a Nazi, then you have no rational basis for discrimination.
There is a world of difference between firing somebody for being a Jew (which is rightly illegal) and firing somebody for going around and saying "I hate Jews".
People get fired for being hostile to coworkers all the time and this is no different.
If they are actually hostile to coworkers, fire them, no problems, but if their personal beliefs don't interfere at work, you absolutely should not fire them.
To be clearer of my perspective: So if they are nice to their coworkers(jew, PoC, or whatever) but then after work goes and hangs out a sign that says "I hate Jews(or PoC, or whatever)" they should still be allowed to work the next day, assuming they continue to not let their personal beliefs interfere with work.
Clearly this person is a moron, and needs to change their personal beliefs, but that's a totally separate issue, unrelated to work.
What if the Nazi's work is unaffected by his or her personal beliefs, but the knowledge that they are working alongside a Nazi is affecting everyone else? Should the company fire everyone else or is it OK to fire the Nazi?
While I agree factually, I do have a vague feeling that we're too focused on details that, in context of this particular argument, aren't really relevant.
Twitter/google/facebook are so central to modern society that being banned from them isn't all that different from being banned by the government, at least from the perspective of said nazis and sympathisers.
> Is it not clear that free speech as a practical tactic, not only as an abstract principle, demands defense of the rights of all who are attacked in order to obtain the rights of any?
This latest leftist push (or putsch) against freedom of speech is telling. If they really were confident that they could prevail in open debate against their opponents on the relevant issues--such as whether diversity really is a strength, the existence of race, the existence of differences in intelligence, temperament, and other traits between races and their appropriate degree of attribution to underlying genetic differences, and race and crime (and interracial crime in particular)--would they be this desperate to silence the opposition?
And do they seriously expect to be given carte-blanche power to silence anyone they brand a Nazi? Especially when they construe that term so broadly as to include any racially-conscious white person, including those who just want whites to have the right to form their own racially homogeneous communities without being sued or having the federal government air-dropping Somali refugees into it, communities free from those precious people of color whites are said to be horribly oppressing, but who for some reason still insist on living amongst us in our neighborhoods anyway... The left is overplaying its hand, and if they persist in this effort to censor white speech advocating for white interests, I expect a nasty backlash.
Race is shared ancestry, just like family, but broader. It's as real as family, and just as fuzzy at the edges. It needs no tricky-to-measure differences in intelligence, or claims of superiority, to attest to its existence.
I think it's always useful to define exactly what sort of speech you want to suppress when you discuss additional restrictions on free speech. I think the idea of free speech as an absolute right is already a pleasant fiction - there's many exceptions, and adding additional ones doesn't seem like a huge problem.
But I get the impression that people mean "the initial rally in Charlottesville shouldn't be allowed" when they're discussing this, and that doesn't seem realistic with any sort of free speech restrictions. I'm sorry to parrot a Donald Trump argument, but not everyone in that crowd was waving a Nazi flag, and very few were directly calling for violence (I won't go as far as to say they're good people or historical statue enthusiasts). Do you outright ban any sort of racist sentiment? That seems overly broad and potentially capable of being used negatively against minorities.
I think there's two free speech restrictions that I could get behind:
1. Widening the definition of "incitement" to relax the imminent and direct requirements. I don't see why "kill all blacks" should be protected while "kill this black with this gun" shouldn't be.
2. Banning specific iconography that has a long history of being used for hate (the swastika, white hoods, etc.)
2 may have had some marginal utility in Charlottesville (you'd have no Nazi flags, but still plenty of Nazis). I don't think 1 would have made a lot of difference. As far as I know (I'm happy to be corrected on this), most or all of the crowd was not calling for violence, direct or indirect. How do you restrict the speech of people calling for border walls, muslim bans, restrictions on legal and illegal immigration, and other racist but non-violent positions?
If you visited India you will find "Swastikas" on the doors of many of the Hindu & Jain households. It is a symbol of auspiciousness and good luck, the association with hatred is very recent and perhaps limited to western world.
It's this sort of completely irrelevant, shallow, bad-faith argument that makes me afraid of what the future holds.
Within the context of this debate, the Swastika is a symbol of genocide, and fascism, and nothing else. To suggest that you can't tell, and that these people chanting "Jews will not replace us" may have just been buddhists is ridiculous, and sad.
This is a solved problem though, context and reasonableness can always be taken into account when someone is charged for a crime. For example, Swastikas used in a Hindu / Jainist context are perfectly legal in Germany where the "Nazi swastika" is banned.
> 2. Widening the definition of "incitement" to relax the imminent and direct requirements. I don't see why "kill all blacks" should be protected while "kill this black with this gun" shouldn't be.
If they have their way, it will be widened that much and more, until eventually purely factual information like the American Renaissance's Color of Crime report will be illegal on the grounds that it could potentially incite whites to commit racial violence against blacks just by detailing how disproportionately whites are victimized violently by blacks (85% of interracial crimes involving blacks and whites are black-on-white).
So, a lot of Americans think that if they ban incitement to hatred based on sex, race, and religion than they have to ban communists, republicans, and democrats in a few years. I really don't get how is it related. Especially if it didn't happen in other countries.
It's an interesting position: the paper says they defend the right of their assembly, but even then, at the end says if they cross the line, they should be held legally accountable. What's interesting is that their stated goals are in fact against the law. The paper sort of does a dance about this issue. You're allowed to hate. You're not allowed to act upon that hate. Where does that leave us? In my thinking, they're the ones who have to change. How to bring that about? We watch the watchmen. By "we", I mean the world. It's not the same situation we are in now as back when this paper was written. Should we now then, knowing what are the fruits of their assembly when they did so before, tolerate even the scheming of their purposes? I like one thing that happened this last time: the pictures of them all over the social networks asking if their employers would tolerate them. I say, let them assemble. Take note of them, now that they are emboldened to show their faces. And if they take one step to fulfill their agenda, then unleash hell on them.
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[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 232 ms ] threadWe don't have the absolute and uncompromisingly worded constitutional rights of the US, but we're also far less likely to suffer erosion or elimination of those rights in practice that we see in the US. E.g. If the UK government wanted to have National Security Letters they'd just pass a law allowing them to do so. But there's no way the judiciary would allow them to create and apply such letters otherwise, the way it happened in the US. So yes the security state here does go too far IMHO but it's much more explicit and open to public debate and challenge.
Even if the UK leaves the EU, it's not unlikely you'll maintain a relationship to some of that. Depending on how hard/soft brexit turns out to be.
Council of Europe members. Russia is a Council of Europe member, so the UK isn't leaving that. On the other hand, it also isn't as effective as you might think.
The primary question is what direction the authoritarian types will attack it from legally / politically. The main vehicle has to be the intentionally vague hate speech approach, which they've been readying and building up for decades. To regulate it into action, they'll have to argue the Internet (the primary medium that matters now) is under FCC broadcast control just as with traditional radio and broadcast TV. Then they'll task any Internet content publishing platforms with obeying and enforcing the new hate speech limitations. Those new rules will vary with the political winds and be aggressively abused by each administration and major political shift in DC. It'll become a form of shifting thought terror brought down upon the American people (what can/can't I express changing every 4 to 8 years); by the time the public realizes what has happened, it'll be far too late, their speech - their last line of defense - will be gone.
They then disingeniously say "this is the decision of a private company, free speech only applies to the government" even though they were the ones that forced the company's hand.
Complete censorship is not possible with this strategy, because there will always be other ways to get the speech out, but it may well be censored from as large a percentage of people as in a dictatorship.
Personally I agree with the ACLU position on this, but also believe that privately owned publishing platforms should be free to establish their own policies on what they will or will not carry. That's their right as private entities.
Excepting explicit regulation such as common carrier. I don't think anyone is saying it would be OK for the phone companies to cut off KKK members phone service.
I don't know how true that is, but if so... it stands to reason that free speech on the internet could be in danger. But who knows, maybe we'll get better DDoS protection technology in the future :)
Are you opposed to net neutrality, then? If not, why the different standard for ISPs vs other tech oligopolies?
I count ISPs clearly in the infrastructure category, same with cloudflare, domain providers and AWS.
I'd count the latter among the infrastructure companies.
If there are some restrictions we want as a society, like age or porn, those could be made exceptions.
Regarding private forums, I'd distinguish between forums that seek to serve 99% of people and those that serve less than 1%. The first are public; the latter are private.
Facebook is just the last platform in a stack of platforms people use to communicate. Why would Facebook be allowed to restrict content while those who provide the services Facebook is built on wouldn't?
Publishing platforms explicitly manage content. They provide tools to create, edit, transform and manage content. They provide facilities to control content distribution and subscription. That's clearly a different class of service. You can't reasonably argue that a service that actually facilitates the creation and routing of content can't influence what content is created or routed. They already do so explicitly in their choice and design of tooling.
Various social networks use 'relevance' metrics, keywords in the text, timeliness and all sorts of criteria to choose how to distribute or sort and highlight content and they change these algorithms over time. They are part of the value the service provides and clearly their responsibility.
Title IX and broadly written anti-discrimination regulations.
what was not communicated is that only these "alt-right" groups had permission to march and demonstrate and the police were told to not intervene when counter groups who assembled in similar manner without permission were allowed free reign to incite the issue.
I am all for letting these "alt-right/left" groups march to their hearts content provided their faces are visible. it gives them an outlet and lets the rest of us know who they are. so while their message may be repugnant they have the right to march.
the ACLU recent preening/posturing/etc is shameful compared to their past actions. far too many groups are piling on declaring how they are against violence which is non declaration. Of course violence cannot be supported.
the real danger is if we force these groups underground that some of their members may act out with much more terrible violence.
You do know what happens once neo-Nazis get photos of your face? People are getting harrassed online, then offline, rounded up, beaten and occasionally murdered. Masking is self-protection.
And yes there IS a difference between lefties and Nazis masking up: Lefties, generally, don't kill. Worst you get as a Nazi is a beating. Nazis do kill (50 or 68 alone due to terrorist attacks since 9/11, per https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right-wing_terrorism#cite_ref-...).
Source: know a couple "outed" activists, got my face distributed by a local Nazi party leader on Youtube.
Source?
Neo-Nazis rounding up and beating Americans is such an outrageous story that, if it were true, every media outlet in America would be reporting it.
LOL as if the mainstream press would care about right-wing violence. As long as it can be swept under the rug or it's only minorities who suffer, they don't care - simply because the majority of customers are white men, and they are not interested if PoC or minorities get hit. Charlottesville only got attention because the terror victim was white, what happened the day before at night or with the PoC nearly beaten to death in a garage was shadowed by the murder.
There are many sources proving my point, when it comes to the facts. For example:
- The number of violent attacks on U.S. soil inspired by far-right ideology has spiked since the beginning of this century, rising from a yearly avarage of 70 attacks in the 1990s to a yearly avarage of more than 300 since 2001. These incidents have grown even more common since President Donald Trump’s election. (per http://www.newsweek.com/2016/02/12/right-wing-extremists-mil...)
- They and untold thousands like them are the extremists who hide among us, the right-wing militants who, since 2002, have killed more people in the United States than jihadis have. In that time, according to New America, a Washington think tank, Islamists launched nine attacks that murdered 45, while the right-wing extremists struck 18 times, leaving 48 dead. (per http://www.newsweek.com/2016/02/12/right-wing-extremists-mil...)
That photo shows a mob of white supremacists with sticks, beating a black man who is on the ground.
Are you seriously parroting Donald Trump right now? The lefties at Charlottesville were peaceful (and in those cases where it did turn violent, the Nazis began with assaulting). Most weren't even Antifa, they were ordinary Charlottesville citizens protesting against Nazis from all over the USA taking their city over!
Some of them came armed with pepper spray, urine bombs, baseball bats, shields, helmets, etc.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation-now/2017/08/12/pr...
Some of them attacked reporters.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jufZItpL3o0
A NY Times reporter said:
> The hard left seemed as hate-filled as alt-right. I saw club-wielding "antifa" beating white nationalists being led out of the park
https://twitter.com/SherylNYT/status/896575560650035200
It's deeply unfortunate that peaceful people were caught in the middle of that, but both sides share responsibility for the violence.
> Rethinking this. Should have said violent, not hate-filled. They were standing up to hate.
They are not the same. First off: disclaimer: I'm not condoning any violence, but this is a fact:
There would be no antifa without far right extremists. There would be far right extremists regardless.
One is an admittedly on occasion violent antibody, but an antibody to a disease nonetheless. They might share blame, but extremely far from parity.
They weren't fighting "far right extremists" at the G20 summit.
Antifa is violent. Full stop. That's independent of the equally bad people who are sometimes on the other side.
Source: Witnessed everything from a bridge above the watercannons.
Honestly I find such an order repugnant. Anonymity is crucial to free speech, especially when protesting a group as powerful as G20. I'm sure no-one thinks they should be forced to report their political activity to their employer (at least judging from the outcry when the Trump administration requested all those IP addresses), but such an order is effectively exactly that.
This doesn't negate anything I said.
> Antifa is violent. Full stop.
On occasion, their ideals aren't.
> That's independent of the equally bad people who are sometimes on the other side.
Again, not equal, and again, wouldn't exist without Nazis.
Antifa is also "anticapitalist".
https://twitter.com/NYCAntifa/status/882475842802262016
They would exist without Nazis. In fact, Charlottesville may be the first time they've actually fought Nazis.
> The first German movement to call itself Antifaschistische Aktion was proclaimed by the German Communist Party (KPD) in their newspaper Rote Fahne in 1932 and held its first rally in Berlin on 10 July 1932, then capital of the Weimar Republic. During the early 1930s amidst rising tensions between Nazis and the communists, Berlin in particular has been the site of regular and often very violent clashes between the two groups.
There's no direct connection between those people in 1932 and these people in 2017, except using the same name.
> There's no direct connection between those people in 1932 and these people in 2017, except using the same name.
And you're basing this on what?
Also, read this post by Daniel Sieradsky. It perfectly sums up why ANY comparison between Nazis and Antifa is totally invalid: https://twitter.com/NYCAntifa/status/898528286325723136
A quick look at the Global Terrorism Database for 2016 (the most recent year available) calls that into question:
https://www.start.umd.edu/gtd/search/Results.aspx?page=1&cas...
According to that, either Muslim or left-wing (anti-white or anti-police) extremists were responsible for all the fatalities in 2016, save one attack for which the motive is unknown.
First off, you're taking liberties in assigning those to left-wing extremism without a basis.
Here's some more data, over a longer period:
Quoting ADL's Murder and Extremism in the United States in 2016 report [1] (focus on domestic terrorism):
Killings between 2001-2010 by:
Left-Wing Extremists | Right-Wing Extremists | Domestic Islamic Extremists
2 | 24 | 0
Between 2011-2016:
8 | 10 | 1
[1] https://www.adl.org/sites/default/files/documents/MurderAndE...
That's assuming the ADL's numbers are right and none of the other people the GTD called "anti-police extremists" were left-wing, which appears to be incorrect. [1]
The "rise of the violent left", as The Atlantic called it, is a depressing trend.
Anyway, I have to go and won't be able to respond until tomorrow. Have a great day.
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2014_killings_of_NYPD_officers
8 police officers shot by radical BLM activists. I don't like that kind of action either, but given that PoC are routine walking target circles for police, I certainly get how the two activists were motivated - and there is a difference between taking revenge on murderers versus murdering people just because they're black/jewish/...
And: according to ADL (https://www.adl.org/education/resources/reports/murder-and-e...), however, Nazis did commit two triple-murders (bringing their tally for 2016 to 6), and it's the first year that Nazis were not the absolute dominator on the murder statistics since over 30 years (9/11 was not domestic terrorism). This one year is nothing to prove a trend turn.
> Anti-government extremists and white supremacists were responsible for only a minority of extremist related deaths in 2016, though they did commit two triple homicides.
Unfortunately they don't identify those incidents. The GTD doesn't list any triple homicides by the right. Let me know if you can find out what they're talking about here.
I'm sorry, you're saying that you're ok with beatings and violence as long as nobody dies?
These nazis/white supremacists/etc glorify the holocaust, meaning they want to, once again, kill all those they consider inferior: jews/blacks/muslims.
Those protesting against them are the people that think it's not a great idea to kill all the jews/blacks/muslims. Because being anti-Nazi doesn't make you a communist terrorist or whatever.
That really shouldn't be so hard to understand, considering the US once fought a war against those people whose flag is now making a comeback. And I really didn't get the feeling that all those GIs were anarchists and communists.
However, even flying f..ing Nazi swastika flags and thereby create a sphere of threat for minorities (because, what else than "I will kill you when you come here" does a Swastika flag say to a Jew?!) is legal in the US - so in order to create a safe space for minorities of all kinds, Nazis must be driven away. And yes, this includes violence in some occasions (e.g. at Charlottesville, where a gang of white supremacists nearly beat a PoC to death).
If anyone is not fine with Antifa protecting minorities, then by all means lobby your politicians that Nazi symbolism, hate speech and other ways of threatening minorities gets banned. Until this happens, either stand in yourself when you see minorities threatened or at least don't stand in the way of those willing to protect minorities when no one else wants to!
They were violent at the presidential inauguration, the G20 summit, and in attempts to prevent countless people from speaking at colleges. Please don't try to pretend they only fight Nazis.
It could be because both of those statements are lies. You might need to rethink which outlet you go to for news.
Although one of those outlets happens to be the POTUS, which is unfortunate.
http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2017/aug/...
http://www.snopes.com/were-police-told-stand-down-charlottes...
People protesting against Nazis aren't the left-wing equivalent of them. Nazis want genocide. If you don't want to kill all the jews/blacks/muslims you're anti-Nazi, and should, when given the chance, make your opinion known by protesting against them.
That means the victim of this terror attack probably wasn't some sort of left-wing "warring protestor", but an actual, rather normal, person.
But anyway... The definition of terrorism is politically motivated violence. Not calling this terrorism, when it's using literally the same method as ISIS has been using in the last years, is starting to make it really hard to believe that all these free speech advocates aren't just trying to hide their sympathies for the skinheads they're defending.
I mean: there were militia in fatigues with rifles chanting threats outside a synagogue in Charlottesville. The congregation inside could have used some of these people professing their willingness to give their life in the defence of others. But nobody showed up, not even the police, and it's also never mentioned. I wonder why?
>People protesting against Nazis aren't... >That means...
You theorise a lot about the opposing side on this one occasion, that is contrary to what we've seen for a year from american political clashes.
>But anyway... The definition of terrorism is politically motivated violence. Not calling this terrorism, when it's using literally the same method as ISIS has been using in the last years, is starting to make it really hard to believe that all these free speech advocates aren't just trying to hide their sympathies for the skinheads they're defending.
Drunk drivers "use the same method" to kill people. What's really depressing is the fact that lights a bulb in people's head that says terrorism. It means they don't have actual definitions of words in their heads. I'm not a nazi sympathiser at all, thank you. And believe any of those at Charlottesville truly concerned with white heritage and statues failed themselves by association (nevermind carrying torches..).
You saw this particularly during the 90s, when people were radicalized to attack and kill abortion doctors. It was rarely called terrorism, but the tactics were the same.
The folks who sent hoax anthrax packages to Planned Parenthood offices where mostly lone actors, picking up on their group's radicalizing messages.
One could also say Eric Rudolph and Timothy McVeigh were "lone wolves" in that they believed the radicalizing talk, but acted essentially alone.
But I for one don't believe there is any serious efforts to limit freedom of speech in America, we're still far from that point :)
> as the document reveals this [IS NOT] the first time freedom of speech is debated.. and won't be the last either.
I presume that's what you intended to write?
I hope you realize this is the type of speech we should expect from a totalitarian regime.
Who determines whether something is destructive to society? Always and everywhere should be the time and place to analyse any ideas regardless of whether anyone thinks they're destructive or not.
This is a key question people want to avoid
Every group has their own idea as to what is destructive to society, Ask Anti-fa they will tell it is the White Supremacists, Ask the White Supremacists and they will tell you it is Anti-fa
Ask me and I will tell you it is both...
Ask Christians and they will give you a whole list of speech that is destructive,
Ask Atheists and they will give you a whole list of speech that is destructive,
Ask <insert group>, and they will give you a whole list of speech that is destructive,
So who is right? None of them.... not even me.
What is actually destructive to society is Censorship... Both by government and by society at large
Just like there's a time and place to question the war effort, right? Besides, some people want closed borders, not an open society - why should only ideas that favour openness be allowed?
Can you prevent violence by preventing speech? Yes, for sure, but where do you draw the line?
If nothing else, I hope trump's presidency teaches us all that the government should not be the one to decide what's ok to say.
those who willingly give up freedom for safety will end up with neither.
I expect the electric company to provide electricity to everyone on a non-discriminatory basis. I don't expect publishers to print everything that gets submitted to them.
Real-world concepts of common carriers are centered around the concept of natural monopolies arising from local effects. That does not take networking effects into account which can work non-locally.
They will continue to defend Fascist groups right to hold marches, but not if they plan to carry guns.
The American Civil Liberties Union will no longer defend hate groups seeking to march with firearms, the Wall Street Journal reported on Thursday, a policy change that comes on the heels of protests by white nationalists and counter-protesters at the weekend in Virginia.
Edit: I don't usually complain about this, but it's weird to see the voting on this. It's pretty clear some people don't like it, and decided to shoot the messenger I guess.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-virginia-protests-aclu-id...
Open carry of firearms during protests is _intended_ to intimidate others' free speech rights. It's an overt act of interference of others' rights.
Showing up armed to a protest not about bearing arms is just asking for things to go south fast.
"Against drilling with arms, as testified to before a Congressional committee, the Union will also fight—even for the enactment of laws, if necessary, to prohibit arms in the hands of political organizations."
Is there some subtle (?) difference I didn't notice between this sentence and the reported change in policy?
So I'm assuming the ACLU knows what their policy was, and this was a change.
I guess sometime between the 1934 document posted and yesterday the ACLU's policy changed to defend protests where guns were carried, and now they are looking at that again.
Notably they went to court to defend the Charlotteville protest, and they knew open-carry milita were planning to come.
"Further, we point out the inevitable effect of making martyrs by persecution. Persecute the Nazis, drive them underground, imitate their methods in Germany - and attract to them hundreds of sympathizers with the persecuted who would otherwise be indifferent."
Most of the people & corporations screaming for suppression on all kinds of speeches across spectrum of opinions do not get this. The best way increase toxicity of any discourse is to try and suppress it, this is is evident from recent examples of Google, Cloudfare, FB, Charlotesville, University of Berkeley and many more. While I have no hopes from corporations, I hope that people realize that dialogue & free speech are perhaps the most non-violent & non-toxic ways of resolving any issues. Suppressing opinions be of any side just widens the chasm between groups and benefits narrow political agendas.
There is, however, plenty of data supporting the opposite: almost all other democracies have strikter limits on hate speech, and none of them have devolved into dictatorships.
Indeed, one could argue that the US ran a pretty successful campaign to suppress Nazi hate speech almost immediately after it was invented.
does that mean all "hate speech" is eliminated? Please share the data.
The other problem is who decides which free speech to suppress? Who has that moral right?
But the law has literally hundreds of years of experience with such problems. The line between marketing and fraud, or porn and art is just as hard to define.
So, for example, bringing Swastikas to a protest in Germany would get you thrown in jail, and so would guns, or slogans such as "gas the jews".
It's been like that for 70 years, and you're still free to say really nasty things about Merkel without any fear of prosecution.
I do believe that this polarization was a factor in the last US election, for example.
And that brings us to the "expense of other things". Open discourse, rationalism, free speech are also part of humanism, not just treating people as individuals.
If "deplatforming", online lynch mobs and other authoritarian instruments become part of the left's arsenal then my sympathy for the left shrinks and my tolerance of the right grows simply on balance. If some well-organized nazi came around and offered me a party program with infrastructure projects that aim for sustainability as long as I turn a blind eye to some stricter immigration policy or undoing protections for certain classes which are a minority of the population anyway then on balance I might be a little more tempted to vote for them than before. Or maybe just not vote against them. Because on balance the left is just declared it is willing to suppress people on the other end of the overton window. So why not?
This is not likely to happen in the US anyway, so take it more more of a thought experiment to illustrate my point, but I am trying to show that not everyone has the same value-system. Whenever I vote I have to choose between a set of value-systems where none of them are perfectly aligned with my own. So if progressives make a "small sacrifice" in values to promote a greater goal for themselves then this may have a radically different effect on their position in the energy-potential landscape as computed from my perspective. What to them might be an insignificant alteration to a very steep slope can be a significant flattening of the landscape which makes it a lot easier to just roll rightwards. Or just not roll to the left.
In the similar domain of terrorism, the following highly cited study finds that military occupation is the leading cause of suicide bombing: http://www.ir.rochelleterman.com/sites/default/files/pape%20...
So that's good evidence for a blowback effect.
That said, the above arguments are against government oppression of a movement. Actions by localities to remove statues or by private companies to not provide a platform for hate speech are a different ballgame. It's not obvious they lead to blowback.
If your mind is so open to ideas that you think public advocacy of genocide is a freedom that needs defending then your mind is so open that your brains have fallen out. It must be done with great care and restraint, but there should be no doubt that certain speech is basically incompatible with a free society and must be silenced. Your society has a great sickness if you ever must use that power of suppression, but that sickness can, has, and does exist. Ignoring it and letting it happen in the past had tragic results.
If the increasingly bold radical right in America isn't controlled quickly, there is going to be widespread civil disorder bordering on war. It will be a great opportunity for a few people in power to abuse the population for their own goals, and it wouldn't be at all surprising if that was the whole idea.
Edit: I also think arguments should be viewed with extra skepticism when accompanied by phrases like "your brains have fallen out" or "there should be no doubt that". It's a lazy way to try and add force to your argument without putting in the logical work of doing so.
Quote:
And now, as you can see today, we greatly outnumbered the anti-white, anti-American filth. And, at some point, we will have enough power that we will clear them from the streets forever—that which is degenerate in white countries will be removed.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UEqa90XpPw0
https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2017/04/18/documents-sho...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iYkvZodBRuY
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2002/sep/4/20020904-0846...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bmryazwfenw
http://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2017/08/muslim-professor-ca-...
Obviously horrible beyond words, but not fair to say that murder is only option.
Whether they try to deport them all or murder them all they are going to have to kill millions to accomplish their goal.
Or are you saying L.A. became minority white[0] through the murder of ~600k whites?
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Los_angeles#Demographics
Should communist speech be prohibited because establishing a communist state probably requires a dictatorship of the proletariat? Should BLM be restricted from speaking because one of their members views their plight as hopeless and decides to take violent action? Should left-wing organization supporting a "diversity of tactics" be banned because it explicitly allows for violent acts without suggesting or condoning them?
I want to be very clear that it's possible to think these groups should not exist and to disagree as strongly as possible with their message, while still believing they should not be legally restricted from making an argument that does not explicitly call for violence.
https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2017/07/09/us/lawsuit-black-lives-ma...
The ones carrying confederate flags should not be aligned with the nazis either.
And of course all Muslim terrorists are lone wolf, and have no connection to Islam.
As to charlotte, I haven't been following this closely, but the protesters shouldn't be held accountable for the driver's independent action, unless they encouraged it. If they didn't denounce it after the fact, that's a black mark against them too.
> "The best way to combat their propaganda is in the open where it can be fought by counter-propaganda, protest demonstrations, picketing--and all the devices of attack which do not involve denying their rights to meet and speak."
Companies are exercising their free speech rights to refuse to associate with Nazis. The Nazis can feel free to start their own companies and refuse to associate with Communists or whatever other ideological groups they don't like.
In Europe it's far more accepted that Nazism is more dangerous than simple 'beliefs' and that there are boundaries where speech ceases to become acceptable in society. See Karl Popper's Paradox of Tolerance. Try waving a Nazi flag in Germany and your feet won't touch the floor.
I'll refrain from discussing if it's a good position. The ACLU already laid out the pros and cons.
(b) Most people being called Nazis are not Nazis.
Rational Basis is a fairly easy standard to meet, but if your only rationale is "he's a Nazi" and he's not actually a Nazi, then you have no rational basis for discrimination.
People get fired for being hostile to coworkers all the time and this is no different.
To be clearer of my perspective: So if they are nice to their coworkers(jew, PoC, or whatever) but then after work goes and hangs out a sign that says "I hate Jews(or PoC, or whatever)" they should still be allowed to work the next day, assuming they continue to not let their personal beliefs interfere with work.
Clearly this person is a moron, and needs to change their personal beliefs, but that's a totally separate issue, unrelated to work.
Decent People refusing to employ anyone who thinks Jews, among others, are subhuman is NOT the same thing as Indecent People refusing to employ Jews.
Basis For Arguments Matter™
Twitter/google/facebook are so central to modern society that being banned from them isn't all that different from being banned by the government, at least from the perspective of said nazis and sympathisers.
And do they seriously expect to be given carte-blanche power to silence anyone they brand a Nazi? Especially when they construe that term so broadly as to include any racially-conscious white person, including those who just want whites to have the right to form their own racially homogeneous communities without being sued or having the federal government air-dropping Somali refugees into it, communities free from those precious people of color whites are said to be horribly oppressing, but who for some reason still insist on living amongst us in our neighborhoods anyway... The left is overplaying its hand, and if they persist in this effort to censor white speech advocating for white interests, I expect a nasty backlash.
Isn't that irrelevant? Would you allow immigrants to displace you from your homeland, as long as they were smarter and calmer?
It attests to the reality of race, something leftist free speech haters deny.
How many in 1934 have foreseen what was to come?
But I get the impression that people mean "the initial rally in Charlottesville shouldn't be allowed" when they're discussing this, and that doesn't seem realistic with any sort of free speech restrictions. I'm sorry to parrot a Donald Trump argument, but not everyone in that crowd was waving a Nazi flag, and very few were directly calling for violence (I won't go as far as to say they're good people or historical statue enthusiasts). Do you outright ban any sort of racist sentiment? That seems overly broad and potentially capable of being used negatively against minorities.
I think there's two free speech restrictions that I could get behind:
1. Widening the definition of "incitement" to relax the imminent and direct requirements. I don't see why "kill all blacks" should be protected while "kill this black with this gun" shouldn't be.
2. Banning specific iconography that has a long history of being used for hate (the swastika, white hoods, etc.)
2 may have had some marginal utility in Charlottesville (you'd have no Nazi flags, but still plenty of Nazis). I don't think 1 would have made a lot of difference. As far as I know (I'm happy to be corrected on this), most or all of the crowd was not calling for violence, direct or indirect. How do you restrict the speech of people calling for border walls, muslim bans, restrictions on legal and illegal immigration, and other racist but non-violent positions?
If you visited India you will find "Swastikas" on the doors of many of the Hindu & Jain households. It is a symbol of auspiciousness and good luck, the association with hatred is very recent and perhaps limited to western world.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swastika
Within the context of this debate, the Swastika is a symbol of genocide, and fascism, and nothing else. To suggest that you can't tell, and that these people chanting "Jews will not replace us" may have just been buddhists is ridiculous, and sad.
If they have their way, it will be widened that much and more, until eventually purely factual information like the American Renaissance's Color of Crime report will be illegal on the grounds that it could potentially incite whites to commit racial violence against blacks just by detailing how disproportionately whites are victimized violently by blacks (85% of interracial crimes involving blacks and whites are black-on-white).