Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Once a bastion of free speech, the ACLU faces an identity crisis

nytimes.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

421–430 of 550 posts

Re: Once a bastion of free speech, the ACLU faces an identity crisis

#421

Post by skocznymroczny »

StavrosK wrote: post #420
hallway_monitor wrote: post #371

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Stop the straw man please. No one is going around killing citizens. Something like nine unarmed people per year are killed by US police out of 10 million interactions.

Nice statistic, but killings by police are 28 per million in the states versus 1.3 in Germany/France: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_killings_by_law_enfo...

That's total deaths caused by police. It would obviously be higher in the US because the criminals are more likely to have and use guns, policemen in the US just can't afford the peaceful approaches most policemen in Europe can. That doesn't mean they get away with more.

Re: Once a bastion of free speech, the ACLU faces an identity crisis

#422

Post by d110af5ccf »

peteretep wrote: post #409
d110af5ccf wrote: post #401

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> there’s _plenty_ of legal limits to free speech in the US Not really? The limits are essentially directly inciting violence, directly threatening, and knowingly aiding someone in the commission of a crime (ie literally coaching someone else on how to break the law). That's not "plenty", that's really the bare minimum (and exactly how it should be, from my perspective at least). Edit: Crap, just realized I forgot ab…

Right, apart from incitement to violence, words liable to cause breach of the peace, threatening speech, obscenity, defamation, invasion of privacy, intentional infliction of emotional distress, campaign financing, speech by government employees, many forms of national security related speech, and instruction on how to make weapons, what speech is banned?!?

Defamation - A famously high bar in the US. It has to be a knowing and intentional falsehood and have caused measurable harm if I understand correctly. That really seems like the absolute minimum of limitations to me if we're going to have a hope of maintaining a functional democracy. (We've got laws against false advertising as well ...)

Campaign financing - Notorious for enjoying minimal regulation in the US relative to other developed countries. Again I'm not sure how else a functional democracy is supposed to be maintained?

Invasion of privacy - I'm a bit fuzzy on this one. Are you referring to things like HIPAA, or to something else? Bear in mind that such regulations only apply to the professionals who are already authorized to view the data. To me it seems similar to the confidentiality you enjoy when talking to an attorney.

I already noted that I disagree with the existence of obscenity restrictions. The other ones you mention (national security, government employees, emotional distress) are fairly nuanced and quite limited as far as I understand. The vast majority of restrictions seem to boil down to the generic idea of knowingly and intentionally working to break some law that isn't itself related to speech.

I just can't seem to get too worked up over such a practical set of restrictions myself. Does it bother you that you can't legally incite a mob, or intentionally teach an aspiring terrorist to manufacture explosives? Or do you just object to my characterization of that as being a minimal set of restrictions? But if that isn't minimal, then what is?

Re: Once a bastion of free speech, the ACLU faces an identity crisis

#423

Post by missedthecue »

alfl wrote: post #319
devman0 wrote: post #316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

True, but there is also the Paradox of Tolerance to contend with where defending certain types of free speech may be undermining support for other civil liberties. I honestly think this rift is just the organization trying to figure out which side of the paradox of tolerance they are on and I don't think there is a single correct answer to it.

The "Paradox of Tolerance" is an example of the slippery slope fallacy.

The slippery slope isn't a fallacy. It's another term for Overton Window.

In other words, if the baseline of what is societally acceptable is moved, things that were previously considered extreme are more likely to be seriously considered.

Re: Once a bastion of free speech, the ACLU faces an identity crisis

#424

Post by saila »

stjohnswarts wrote: post #392
throwaway2162 wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder how large the generational divide is there. Are younger lawyers less likely to take cases of clients they deem detestable? The article alludes to some internal rift but the topic may deserve an article all on its own.

It seems more and more millenials and gen z care less about the idea of free speech that differs from theirs, just like the current GOP party.

I don't understand this take. Were Boomers, for example, adamant defenders of free speech (on the whole)? Gen X might be an exception, but it seems to me that all prior generations attempted to squelch speech and other rights more so than Gen Z and Millenials.

Re: Once a bastion of free speech, the ACLU faces an identity crisis

#425

Post by zpeti »

wolverine876 wrote: post #395
simonh wrote: post #361

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's evidence of a fundamental misunderstanding of what free speech is and why it's important at the highest levels. Free speech is the right to say things that others find offensive. If being offended is enough of an excuse to silence others, then anyone, at any time, can silence anyone else with impunity. If this power is only given to marginalised groups, then it becomes a matter of who defines marginalisation and…

I happen to favor the old interpretation of free speech, but I think there's a strong argument that the traditional approach of defending all free speech facilitates a system where black people and others have been denied their rights for generations, and that we must act now to ensure their rights - that waiting any more is criminal.

I believe in free speech but only when it suits my political views.

That's not free speech.

And just to counter your actual point, what about a lousiana white person who's family's been living in poverty for 100 years? Do they get free speech? Or not, because they're white?

Re: Once a bastion of free speech, the ACLU faces an identity crisis

#426

Post by throw_m239339 »

csande17 wrote: post #4

You could write a similar article about a lot of nonprofits, lately. "Once a Developer of Web Browsers, Mozilla Faces an Identity Crisis." "Once a Free Online Encyclopedia, the Wikimedia Foundation Faces an Identity Crisis."

> You could write a similar article about a lot of nonprofits, lately. "Once a Developer of Web Browsers, Mozilla Faces an Identity Crisis." "Once a Free Online Encyclopedia, the Wikimedia Foundation Faces an Identity Crisis."

"Once overtaken by a clique of political activists using it as a the platform to further an agenda unrelated to the org mission's statement, organisation X faces an identity crisis"

This is why tech businesses like Basecamp, Coinbase or Shopify are pushing back against partisanship and political activism in tech.

Re: Once a bastion of free speech, the ACLU faces an identity crisis

#427

Post by dragonwriter »

d110af5ccf wrote: post #422
peteretep wrote: post #409

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right, apart from incitement to violence, words liable to cause breach of the peace, threatening speech, obscenity, defamation, invasion of privacy, intentional infliction of emotional distress, campaign financing, speech by government employees, many forms of national security related speech, and instruction on how to make weapons, what speech is banned?!?

Defamation - A famously high bar in the US. It has to be a knowing and intentional falsehood and have caused measurable harm if I understand correctly. That really seems like the absolute minimum of limitations to me if we're going to have a hope of maintaining a functional democracy. (We've got laws against false advertising as well ...) Campaign financing - Notorious for enjoying minimal regulation in the US relati…

> Defamation - A famously high bar in the US. It has to be a knowing and intentional falsehood

No, it doesn’t. Even the narrow standard applied when a public figure is the subject (“actual malice”) can be satisfied either by the speaker/publisher knowing the material is false or speaking/publishing it with reckless disregard for whether it is true or false.

Re: Once a bastion of free speech, the ACLU faces an identity crisis

#428

Post by zimpenfish »

hallway_monitor wrote: post #371
StavrosK wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This said, European police generally gets away with a degree of prevarication that North Americans would find unconceivable. Not to be inflammatory, but North American police generally gets away with a degree of murder that Europeans find inconceivable.

Stop the straw man please. No one is going around killing citizens. Something like nine unarmed people per year are killed by US police out of 10 million interactions.

From 2015 to 2020Q1, 753 unarmed people were killed by US police for an average of about 145/year or approximately one every 60 hours / 2.5 days.

Key quote: "The victims were unarmed in 1 in 6 (753;16%) fatal shootings."

https://www.bmj.com/company/newsroom/fatal-police-shootings-...

For balance, this 2018 gives lower numbers - hovering around 60ish per year. Although that is still significantly higher than 9.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/fatal-police-s...

Re: Once a bastion of free speech, the ACLU faces an identity crisis

#429

Post by trabant00 »

wolverine876 wrote: post #397

One idea is that the generational change is like all generational political changes: Unsatisfied with the world they've inherited, as they should be, the next generation wants revolution, not reform. They want to tear down the old system and build something new. They see the results of the old system and have little respect for its jaded, corrupt defenders. The older people decry it, saying that the revolution is thr…

If we talk about revolution we could take a look at the French one and see how things can turn up. I see a lot of parallels in terms of terms/narrative: privilege, virtue, reactionaries.

Re: Once a bastion of free speech, the ACLU faces an identity crisis

#430

Post by himinlomax »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #252
himinlomax wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A well regulated militia, perhaps? Tout bad nobody thought of that.

The term "well regulated" in the second amendment means something like "in good working order". (Compare the sense of the word "order" as "command", which is a similar development.) This is very clear if you read the contemporaneous discussion, which often substitutes synonyms. The idea is that you can call for a force from the militia and they will show up, already possessing weapons that they already know how to us…

> The term "well regulated" in the second amendment means something like "in good working order".

I'm sorry, but this is just laughable on the face of it. You see, I'm French (as hinted by the mis-autocorrect of "too"), and "regulated" (well, "régulé") means the same in contemporary French as in contemporary English. And the meaning comes straight from Latin (regula: rule, law), probably by way of 1066 like most legal terms.

The notion that "regulate" means anything but regulate IN A LEGAL DOCUMENT of all places is thus ridiculous. Or at the very least utterly implausible. But maybe you're right; I can't fail to notice you don't provide any proof for this improbable claim.

> Another thing you'll learn immediately by reading that discussion is that one of the primary purposes of the second amendment was to prevent the United States from having a standing army...

Another unsubstantiated claim, and just as improbable on the face of it. In any case nothing in that wording even hints at that.

Post reply on HN