I wouldnt have imagined at the time that the worse part of electronic messages is that they could one day legaly be written in your name. I thought things coudnt be worse than not being allowed to speak (which was already normal at the time)
It's not clear to me that they're guaranteed a platform on their work email, but having been allowed to set a message and then having it removed and then replaced with a different one is not a good look for free speech.
Why is alignment necessary? In our system compromise is the typical alignment sought where no single view dominates the decisions or direction. With enforced alignment no compromise is more than not necessary it’s not possible. That’s the dysfunction of the present because there’s a perception that holding office entails enforcing alignment, and opposing voices not only need not be heard but are forcefully silenced. However the system we have in the US doesn’t allow for that, and explicably, it’s even more dysfunctional than normal. Sooner or later they have to stop and compromise, over throw the system, or be removed. That’s precisely how it’s designed to work.
So, you shouldn’t be silenced, your opinions should be heard, and to the extent they’re reasonable, they should be considered proportional to your ability to influence. The more to which this is prevented or ignored the more unstable the system is.
There’s a difference between forced alignment and rejection of falsehoods. On each of these the response to the questions were investigations in the public space, especially vaccines, but through various processes. This is the opposite of forced alignment - this is deliberately considering opposing views. That doesn’t mean a decision isn’t eventually reached, and the fact we are relitigating all of these year over year even on verifiable facts shows there is no forcing of alignment by the system. I think people don’t realize what forced alignment looks like - that’s Soviet Russia, Maoist China, Xi China, North Korea, etc, where dissent is not tolerated, not allowed, and alignment is forced.
Well, HN isn’t a part of the system I refer to, the system is the constitutional republic under the bill of rights. And you’ll notice as forced alignment is attempted in our system it gets litigated and often fails. The policy system is generally deliberative requiring input and consideration at minimum. Everything is reviewed by many layers of judicial review for fairness, and every six years the entire executive and legislative branch could undergo a total revolution. What i think is false is considered but isn’t by mandate so, no matter who I am - president, senator, HN poster. What is considered true today can be repudiated tomorrow.
I deserve words and actions to align. If people say they believe in free speech, then don't throttle posting rates. What i want is Honest, logical decision making, from a foundation of facts. What I get is tyranny.
If you think free speech is important, then don't flag posts as trolling.
What you say is free speech is important as long as it doesn't disrupt MY community.
Free speech is important unless I label you a troll.
They are not contradictory. Publicly labeling someone a troll is indisputably speech. You mistake the situation as someone denying you your rights, but really you are just failing to recognize the same rights for that person or group.
The communities that are presumably excluding you are exercising their freedom of association.
You may not (indeed, seem not to) realize, but freedom of association is understood to be part of the set of freedoms generally known as freedom of speech/expression.
It's the freedom of people, collectively or individually, to associate with certain others, or not to associate with them.
You are reckoning with the consequences of how you've chosen to exercise your rights, but you have not been denied them. No one is obligated to include you (in the context of public discourse).
Bullshit. I have the right to free association, too. I am not required to let you interact with me; I can block you on Twitter just as I can lock you out of my house.
I think we can all agree on this. It would just be nice if there was consistent enthusiasm for the first amendment when it comes to actual taboo ideas. Are you quoting this when you hear about right wing extremists being canceled or jailed in Europe? In the 1970s, Jewish lawyers at the ACLU defended the American Nazi Party’s right to march in Skokie. Not out of support, but to uphold the principle of free speech for all. What happened to intellectual honesty?
I mean it depends on what we are talking about. The case you mention was about the right to peacefully assemble, and that the swastika does not count as "fighting words" and thus not grounds to say the assembly isn't allowed. In the case of Europe, they don't have the same constitution as the USA so I'm not sure how to compare that, and if those extremists are merely being silenced over swastikas or calls for the deaths of people since you didn't specify.
Plus the comparison to Europe and that specific case is especially untenable because if the specific case in Europe was in Germany, then they have a special relationship with the swastika.
People in Europe are also human beings and so they also have a natural right to free speech. They just happen to live in oppressive governments willing to use violence against them for expressing their natural right to speak their opinion.
People in Europe live in actual democracies (for the majority). The laws restricting speech were born through democratic processes.
Who do you think you are to pretend to know better than these citizens? You seem to want to impose some unbridled "free" speech that seem to have pretty disastrous effects in the only country where it supposedly exists... is this your idea if "freedom"?
We have tested the limits of tolerence at the cost of literal tens of millions of deaths during the last World War in Europe, I don't think we need any lesson on how we should run our societies regarding free speech because we have done a lot of painful learning.
Looking at the direction/unstability of the American system currently it's not impossible that its people will do the same kind of learning soon unfortunately, might be better to focus on this rather that trying export ideas that we democratically rejected, with purpose.
People in USA live in a constitutional republic based on self-evident natural rights given by god. We just have (somewhat) democratically elected representatives.
In an "actual democracy" with no constitutional rights, the majority can (legally) genocide the minority - and that's happened more than a few times in "actual democracies" in Europe in the very recent past.
You should probably think deeper about what you're advocating for.
That's also bad. But two wrongs don't make a right. Natives should have been afforded citizenship and constitutional rights also. The solution isn't to undo progress and take rights away from people again. I thought you were progressive?
> Our president wants to genocide brown people.
This discredits you quite a lot, since I've never heard even the most left-wing public figures insinuate such a wild unsubstantiated thing. If true, that would be deplorable also.
Whether what you're saying is true or false has no bearing on the truth value of what I said. You're just making unrelated angry hyperbolic claims that lack any nuance at all.
Whenever someone uses "we" to refer to a body politic, and doesn't otherwise specify, it's meant to refer to the collective polity throughout its history.
So, the democratic-republican "we". As compared to the royal "we".
As to why no one was behind bars? Because "we" also made those bars.
Their polities weren't then part of the US polity, so they'd have a separate we. Now they are part of the US polity, so they could include themselves in that we.
But to honestly answer your sarcastic question: There were a bunch of them, and they typically didn't include their fellow natives in their collective understanding of "we" until later years. At the time, and even prior to colonization, various tribes did indeed commit, or participate in, genocide on other tribes. Just like the pseudo-collective "Europeans" did among their tribes.
Exactly. It’s interesting that despite many countries sharing classic liberal political attitudes don’t have constitutional protections for free speech that go as far as the US. In my view free speech is the most fundamental requirement for any free society and democracy can’t work without it. But as we see with the UK right now and others, speech is impeded frequently.
Maybe played up slightly for TV? But the impression is given that -in practice- they could not exercise their free speech in person in the US, but were fine broadcasting it in the UK.
Yeah reality TV is not a good source, but it's embarrassing that guests in America even felt slightly uncomfortable expressing their opinions. They're human beings who have the right to peacefully express any opinion they want.
> In the 1970s, Jewish lawyers at the ACLU defended the American Nazi Party’s right to march in Skokie.
Well, that doesn't mean that
a) they were right to do so then, or
b) a better understanding can't have been reached since then.
The Paradox of Tolerance is a very real thing. If you want to make free speech absolutism a religious principle within your own beliefs, go wild, but for those of us who just want to make this world the best place we can to live in, we have to consider what the consequences of different kinds of speech are.
And the consequence of being tolerant of hate speech is that the speech of those being hated diminishes. Their freedom diminishes. Their safety diminishes. Sooner or later, they are driven out of communities that permit hate speech against them.
"Free speech for all", in the sense that absolutely anyone is fully free at any time to say anything they want, and everybody remains equal in this, is a fantasy. And American jurisprudence has rejected that level of "free speech" since very early on—there are laws against libel, incitement to violence, false advertising, and other forms of speech.
This phrase needs to be used (and understood) more often. People who act in bad faith use this to their advantage and make our society worse. Look at the response to the Kirk murder: people were fired for daring to say something negative after his death.
Unfortunately, I wish it were that easy. But in reality, criminalizing certain speech does not suppress it or prevent people from holding those opinions.
Björn Höcke, the leader of Germany’s far right AfD party, was convicted of using Nazi slogans, and Germany has very clear laws preventing Nazi speech.
And yet, AfD is now the country’s 2nd most powerful party.
Sadly, criminalizing bad speech does not change the minds of those who hold those opinions, nor prevent their spread.
We legislate morality all the time. Slightly less so these days, with the reduction of laws against things like same-sex marriage, miscegenation, and such, but what do you think laws against murder, theft, and fraud are?
"That's not legislating morality!" you say. "Those are there to prevent real harms, or damage to society!" Well, so are laws against hate speech. They cause real, measurable harm to the people they are targeted at. The damage they do to society you can see all around you right now.
Our laws and our morals have always been inextricably entangled.
It seems to me that people who make that argument just think that the things they say it about (like hate speech) shouldn't be considered immoral.
Covid policies in a nutshell. The funny part was all those smart people still to this day don’t understand how badly they got played. I guess many didn’t though. Many of the most ardent supporters were the recipients of vast amounts of upward wealth transfer… it takes an immense level of privilege to support any of that nonsense.
It’s gone. The ACLU itself is pretty anti free speech these days and happily looks the other way when censorship on private social media platforms aligns with their ideological views. People have been writing about free speech issues at the ACLU for about a decade now:
Sadly, agreed. The ACLU used to be known as a stalwart on this, fighting for the right of the KKK to hold marches etc. The "their speech might be reprehensible, but we need to fight for all free speech" perspective.
Now, they're uninterested in a lot of these issues.
And I say this as someone very liberal.
You can also separately debate where the line is on the topic of say "absolute free speech", but whatever the ACLU used to fight for, it fights for a distinct subset only, now.
Why is free speech defined by freedom of nazi and never by freedom for left wing people?
Nazi are popular now and sympatisants are political leaders. It is not their defense what defines freedom, it is everybody elses rights that define lack of it.
I'm glad I live in a country where nothing you say or think or do can ever take away my natural right to speak any opinion in a peaceful way. If you don't already have freedom too, I hope someday your government will stop oppressing your people and let them express their opinions in a peaceful way.
You dont live in America then. But that was not my question.
My question was while is it ok to silence progressives, feminists, left wing, critics of nazi and still be considered free speech activist while "not actively defending nazi" is excluding you from that.
Your only benchmark for free speech is "are nazi helped enough in their quest to oppress others". You dont care about anybody elses rights.
You're confused. Silencing people is the thing 1A protects against.
"I'm in favor of gun rights and that's why we need to eliminate the 2A"
I don't think you get it lol. Your arguments are not consistent with you understanding the facts. Who do you expect to convince with unapologetc ignorance?
I am not defining it that way. I am saying that previously, the ACLU fought hard for free speech for both left wing causes and right. i.e., it fought for free speech.
It still fights for free speech for left wing causes, but not for right.
On a deeply personal level? That doesn't overly bother me, because I am fairly far left wing. But it's somewhat antithetical to -their- stated cause, about "protecting all speech, because as soon as you don't protect some, more and more is attacked".
This must be the first time as a far left liberal that you had a comment net downvoted just for saying demonstrably true facts? Frustrating huh? That's how it goes here if you don't conform to what others here would prefer to be true.
Come, come, my good sir! US citizens know that censorship on private social media platforms is NOT a First Amendment issue! While it may be censorship of a sort, it's not done by the US government, and therefor is allowable. This is middle school civics in the USA, old boy! There's nothing, nothing, in the US constitution that says anyone else must pay to promulgate your opinions. Freedom of speech is freedom of government suppression in the USA. But like almost everything else in the USA, it's up to you to pay for it.
It is actually done by the government too. Case in point the Tennessee man who was arrested and jailed for a month. Why? for social media posts critical of Charlie Kirk
That's why the ACLU used to have principles and support extremist groups' right to speech. If they come for them, they'll come for you next. How can you mediate the boundaries of conversation? Every individual must be allowed to peacefully express their opinion. Anyone being attacked for doing so will get support of any classical liberal still around. Call them names if you want, it doesn't work anymore.
It's even worse, IMO. That guy was replying on a thread about Charlie Kirk, but he was critical of Trump, and expressed that criticism with a direct quote from Trump.
Not what I'm arguing, I agree with you. Nobody is compelled to carry your speech, with a rare "common carrier" exception. Which social media is not.
You've got me thinking. I'm sure there's government pressure on social media to not carry certain posts, or allow certain human access. That's a pretty clear 1st Amendment violation. But it shades off. What about say, NSA using it's total information awareness feed of the entire internet to let HN know when a terms-of-service violation happened. Is that OK? What about if the NSA selectively notifies Truth Social of TOS violations? What if the NSA sends an official lawyer around to Facebook to get them to modify TOS a particular way? What if the DoJ sends someone to Paul, Weiss to get them to send someone else around (pro bono!) to hint that modifying TOS a particular way would be beneficial to Bluesky? What if Zuckerberg calls up Trump and asks him how he'd like TOS to read? I'm not sure where the line is.
The line is always where a criminal violation seems likely to occur, including criminal negligence. Otherwise the government has no business butting in, unless subpoenaed as a witness by a court in a civil matter.
Edit: I guess the government also has a right to respond if it, or its policies, are a target of criticism or lies. But it should do this in the court of public opinion, or in an actual court if said speech breaches criminal law or a civil tort. Though in the latter cases it would be held to the highest standard. It has no right to otherwise shut down anyone's speech regardless of where it occurs.
> What about say, NSA using it's total information awareness feed of the entire internet to let HN know when a terms-of-service violation happened. Is that OK?
I don't think so. That's pretty weird that a government agency spending taxpayer money to assist with moderation on a private company's website.
That should have been their hay day. The government pulled enough absolute nonsense to keep them busy for decades. But instead they seemed more interested in some bullshit like prisoners rights to masks or something.
When trump was first elected I gave those guys like $300/month to fight the good fight against something I was told was a threat to my freedoms. The joke was on me though… because they very same set of people I thought cared about that stuff turned out to very much not care at all about literally anything they claimed to. They let the world burn to play politics.
In the end I wound up voting for trumps second term and will never ever vote for a single democrat again in my life. As for the ACLU, what a shame.
Edith Bolling Wilson, Woodrow Wilson's second wife, is sometimes described as America's first woman President because of the role she played after the President's massive stroke in October 1919
https://millercenter.org/president/wilson/essays/wilson-edit...
“ The republic which sinks to sleep, trusting to constitutions and machinery, to politicians and statesmen, for the safety of its liberties, never will have any,” Wendell Phillips 1850
born in 1811 Boston Massachusetts he graduated Harvard law School when he was 16
...and I believe farther that this is likely to be well administered for a Course of Years, and can only end in Despotism as other Forms have done before it, when the People shall become so corrupted as to need Despotic Government, being incapable of any other.
~ Benjamin Franklin, Closing Speech at the Constitutional Convention (1787)
On state funding: Trump tariffs are going to cut deep enough into flexible spending for a lot of countries.
On private funding: I could be wrong, but it seems to me that Asian universities excelled at engineering because the U.S. universities were distracted on too many fronts. If the U.S. schools are forced to focus on STEM, then this whole calculus changes.
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