Whose Free Speech Is It Anyway?
August 20, 2017 4:22 AM   Subscribe

This week the Electronic Freedom Foundation (EFF) posted, Fighting Neo-Nazis and the Future of Free Expression, an essay examining the ramifications of corporate control of free speech.

"It might seem unlikely now that Internet companies would turn against sites supporting racial justice or other controversial issues. But if there is a single reason why so many individuals and companies are acting together now to unite against neo-Nazis, it is because a future that seemed unlikely a few years ago—where white nationalists and Nazis have significant power and influence in our society—now seems possible. We would be making a mistake if we assumed that these sorts of censorship decisions would never turn against causes we love. "
posted by fairmettle (96 comments total) 26 users marked this as a favorite
 
Cloudflare's statement on the matter makes a good point: it is hard for a service provider to remain neutral when "the team behind Daily Stormer made the claim that we were secretly supporters of their ideology."
posted by Phssthpok at 4:54 AM on August 20, 2017 [12 favorites]


Unless all the ISPs banded together to refuse to route traffic to a list of hate sites, I don't really see this as an issue. The Daily Stormer is back online with DDoS protection after a few days of meandering about in search of service providers. It's fun to watch them struggle but I never doubted that they would find someone to host them.
posted by xyzzy at 5:04 AM on August 20, 2017 [6 favorites]


It raises the question: Why don't GoDaddy's and Google's policies allow them to forbid Daily Stormer and their ilk?
posted by oheso at 5:06 AM on August 20, 2017 [2 favorites]


I agree that Google hijacking the domain is a bridge too far. It is one thing to refuse to do business with an entity like Daily Stormer. It is another to take essentially vigilante action to deny them the ability to move to another registrar.

OTOH, none of the parties acted under the influence of a government entity. They made decisions of their own accord, which is their prerogative. They did not discriminate against a protected class and they acted in concert with the overwhelming "community norms" of the public.
posted by grumpybear69 at 5:06 AM on August 20, 2017 [12 favorites]


I agree that Google hijacking the domain is a bridge too far.
Oh, yeah, that was kind of over the top. Domains are kind of weird in that they belong to everyone until they are purchased by someone in particular, and I think just keeping a domain that you'd like to control for any reason is pretty unethical. The power of registrars to snatch up interesting domains is much greater than the general public's ability to do so. Google could fix this by returning TDS to the owner.

In fact, there's actually new news on this (within the last 40 minutes.) TDS has lost control of its .lol domain, which they registered through Namecheap.

So it looks like I might need to revise my statement--if all the registrars are refusing to register TDS, then that essentially is a statement that traffic to TDS is unroutable except through tor. I have more of an issue with that than I do with web hosts or DDoS services refusing to do business with white nationalists, just because the general agreement among registrars has been egalitarianism.
posted by xyzzy at 5:26 AM on August 20, 2017 [2 favorites]


Guess what foundation appears to have an entirely white board?.

I agree that these companies should have specific protocols in place, but I think the reason none of them do is out of white obliviousness. Political speech such as fascist white nationalism carries an implicit threat of violence against people of color. Time and time again we've seen white nationalists act on this violent rhetoric in obvious physical ways, but we also see its impact in our governments, in our justice system and in our education system which all currently enforce white supremacy. That violence was easy for people to ignore. A white nationalist hitting a crowd of protestors with a car hits a lot closer to home for a bunch of techbros who just went to their first protest 5 months ago.

EFF has also written about how troubling it is that ISIS recruitment and news websites are shut down or censored by governments, as if this content didn't explicitly or implicitly support violence against civilians. THAT is the difficult grey area I care about. It's all fine and good to say there needs to be a process. But what are the goals of that process?

Also the way this article ends is fucking stupid. "We have to protect the free speech of white nationalists now, because since its imaginable they could take power they might censor us in the future!" Bad take. Fascists don't give a shit about free speech. If they truly win power that will be one of the very first things to go. And at that point, even the EFF's white obliviousness won't save them.
posted by cyphill at 5:32 AM on August 20, 2017 [57 favorites]


I heard Clooudflare's ceo Matthew Prince interviewed on one of the business channels and he came across very aware and well thought out on the issues. He said that it was his personal decision to shut down the stormfront site (not shut down but remove the CDN facility which allows high volume traffic and reduces DDOS attacks). He did not apologize for his decision but explicitly stated he was not sure if it was correct. He called for some kind of industry wide public/private discussion.

The big I Internet really does have a unique construction, it's very expensive private infrastructure (virtually free at individual economies of scale) of long runs of fiber, huge switches and mind boggling data centers. Rules invented by a very smart oligarchy of nerds. Who gave ICCAN power? Very little government oversight or control. Is this a long term stable construction or is it balancing on a knife point poised to fall into the hands of the strongest state (could a secret cabal of Trump/Putin/Xi "grab" the net)?
posted by sammyo at 6:03 AM on August 20, 2017 [6 favorites]


I am not an expert on public speech, though I have applauded some of the EFF's initiatives in the past as a casual observer. Nice people, good work.

But they seem to be tying themselves into knots trying to cope with dehumanizing propaganda in the face of an absolute commitment to absolute, or near absolute, free speech.

Is that fear that without absolute free speech America will slide down some slippery slope to censorious oppression? I'm confused if this is the objection, because many of the rest of us in other civilized Western nations get along just fine without absolute free speech.

In Germany or Canada or Belgium we don't curtail free speech arbitrarily -- we draw the line at the propagation of ideas that dehumanize. We've acknowledged the corrosive effect they have on society, and we've collectively said, "Shut up about that, pretty much for ever."

Toxic ideas are toxic. Maybe the EFF should consider that the absolute part of absolute free speech is in itself toxic...at least if it renders you toothless in the face of a predator like white supremacists.
posted by Construction Concern at 6:20 AM on August 20, 2017 [65 favorites]


Lord save us all from free speech absolutists. The EFF would rather the world burn so long as we didn't tell nazis to shut up along the way.
posted by tocts at 6:24 AM on August 20, 2017 [18 favorites]


Lord save us all from free speech absolutists. The EFF would rather the world burn so long as we didn't tell nazis to shut up along the way.

If only it were that simple.

Here's the question: Is the Internet, and all the supporting services like DNS, a Common Carrier or Not?

If it ( and the supporting services like DNS ) is a Common Carrier, then it's gotta be 100% Content Agnostic.

Maybe TCP/IP is the "Common Carrier", but DNS isn't? You want to see Daily Stormer? http://127.0.0.1 isn't too hard for people to link to is it?

I think that's where we're at. No-one has problems routing their traffic, but good luck getting DNS...
posted by mikelieman at 6:38 AM on August 20, 2017 [8 favorites]


The EFF would rather the world burn so long as we didn't tell nazis to shut up

There you go confusing speech and action.

make nazis shut up

would be what TFA is talking about.
posted by Taft at 6:38 AM on August 20, 2017 [3 favorites]


There is actual legislation in effect, with more on the way, to criminalize protest and to specifically condone the vehicular murder of protestors, among all the other more insidious threats to progressive dissent. Pearl-clutching cis-het white-dude civil libertarians from the Internet can fuck themselves straight to Nazi hell until and unless they can get their priorities straight for one goddamned minute. As a queer person from the US who made good and moved to Canada ten years ago yesterday, and who's spent an uncomfortable past week in gun-belt southern Ohio, when I cross the border tonight I will be only too pleased to trade freedom of hate speech for a Charter that even nominally values my safety and humanity.
posted by wreckingball at 6:39 AM on August 20, 2017 [35 favorites]


If it ( and the supporting services like DNS ) is a Common Carrier, then it's gotta be 100% Content Agnostic.

So... What about child porn? How about terrorist recruiting videos, a la ISIS?

Large internet companies have been working with governments for some time to clamp down on these things specifically. Ignoring white nationalists would honestly seem more like a racist double standard to me than any kind of strong stance on absolute free speech.
posted by kaibutsu at 6:49 AM on August 20, 2017 [29 favorites]


The thing is, the EFF isn't even arguing in their conclusion that the Daily Stormer and other similarly awful websites shouldn't be banned. They're saying that the process should be transparent and accountable.

"These are methods that protect us all against overbroad or arbitrary takedowns. It’s notable that in GoDaddy and Google’s eagerness to swiftly distance themselves from American neo-Nazis, no process was followed; CloudFlare’s Prince also admitted that the decision was “not CloudFlare’s policy.” Policies give guidance as to what we might expect, and an opportunity to see justice is done. We should think carefully before throwing them away."
posted by Punkey at 7:52 AM on August 20, 2017 [14 favorites]


So... What about child porn? How about terrorist recruiting videos, a la ISIS?

Those are illegal, which makes them readily distinguishable from awful but lawful speech.

I'm of the mind that the companies, being private (and absent some common carrier rule) can ban whomever they want to. But if they're going to draw lines, a legal / illegal line is simple enough to do.
posted by jpe at 7:53 AM on August 20, 2017 [4 favorites]


But... the white nationalists are also terrorists, so why is everyone cool with them being allowed to recruit via internet propaganda?
posted by palomar at 7:58 AM on August 20, 2017 [28 favorites]


So I've discovered the best way to get more fruit and veggies in my diet is to start eating, find a Metafilter debate on my phone, and by the time I've gotten to the bottom I'll have eaten half a container of blueberries.

But if they're going to draw lines, a legal / illegal line is simple enough to do.

What if it's an international company, though? Who's laws do you go by? As has been mentioned, hate speech is illegal in other countries.
posted by brook horse at 8:03 AM on August 20, 2017 [4 favorites]


I normally lean to a free speech absolutist position but I'm just too mad about American Nazis right now to reason about it clearly. I appreciate EFF writing the article they have to write, it seems thoughtful. (Also still astonished the ACLU sees a limit to what free speech they'll defend.)

I've also seen absolutist free speech fail time and time again inside well meaning companies. Inside Google. Inside Twitter. There are always limits on free speech; child porn in the US, Nazis in Germany, too-popular criticism of the government in China, anything at all critical of the government in North Korea. Companies like Google have inconsistent free speech policies in the face of these laws. Even the most free-speech friendly people are making judgement calls at some point.

I'm very curious about Google's client hold on the dailystormer.com domain name. It's one thing to refuse to host them, but holding what I understand to be their property is another entirely. Have they said anything about why they're doing it, or for how long, or with what legal basis? I wonder if like CloudFlare someone at Google just got pissed off enough to act without concern for those details. I'd sympathize.
posted by Nelson at 8:04 AM on August 20, 2017 [3 favorites]


The Daily Stormer is back online .... they would find someone to host them.

And you , the citizens, WANT Then online.

You WANT them using HTTP and not https. You want places for the malcontents to gather.

It makes it simpler for the surveillance state to track them.

It makes it simpler for the roving bands of social justice warriors to gather their versions of data on people they track with their version of Maltego.
posted by rough ashlar at 8:17 AM on August 20, 2017 [1 favorite]


They did not discriminate against a protected class

Now, would they be a protected class if they all became card-carrying members of the American Nazi Party?

(does that party actually have cards? Or dues to GET cards?)
posted by rough ashlar at 8:20 AM on August 20, 2017


Techbro libertarianism, plus the gun nuts, helped give us the neo-Nazis.

The Nazis aren't just speaking. They are murdering people. They are threatening to burn synagogues. They are intimidating ordinary people, cops, and legislators by walking around with machine guns. And the Internet is facilitating their work: they can organize their rallies over it, they can fund them, they can gamergate their opponents. It's not appropriate any more to classify everything on the Internet as "speech".

It's not like these companies have no policies in place now. As someone pointed out on Twitter, PayPal has allowed Nazis and disallowed sex workers for years— which is entirely backwards.
posted by zompist at 8:29 AM on August 20, 2017 [23 favorites]


Pearl-clutching cis-het white-dude civil libertarians from the Internet

Errr, the Libertarian version would be:

Google is a private Corporation. As such they can do what they want.

This is not the argument EFF is making.

And the "private actions" argument can be taken up by the citizens at this point. Nothing stopping you, as a citizen, from shunning a Nazi. Cameras are everywhere, getting smaller, better connected to the databases of facial recognition. The 1st cheap way to scan the face to make a name connection and THEN a connection to a data engine to "the person in front of me is a Nazi" will get used for 'I don't wanna do business with this person'.
posted by rough ashlar at 8:33 AM on August 20, 2017 [2 favorites]


EFF is wrong about Nazis, a thoughtful response.
posted by Nelson at 8:37 AM on August 20, 2017 [10 favorites]


Child porn is explicitly illegal, as is providing material support to terrorists. The latter is under the PATRIOT Act, which definitely includes hosting ISIS recruitment videos and ideally, would also include similar white supremacist material. It's also a horrible shit law and I'm not going to argue for it just because I can think of a good use case for it. It should be replaced with something else that would limit violent speech much more narrowly.

We could make really good arguments for criminalizing certain types of terrorist speech, and I think we should. But they would need to be articulated very clearly and very narrowly.

And while I'm glad that the white supremacists are being shut down right now, I am not comfortable with depending on the free market to do that. The Daily Stormer is low hanging fruit. Almost nobody wants them around, including the EFF, I'm sure.

As long as we're framing this as specifically about Nazis, then sure, everyone is OK with letting the "free market" shut it down. But I don't trust the "free market," in part because it is not actually free and in many areas, not even much of a market, and I'm not going to assume a generalized chumminess with any old body who comes out against Nazis. In other part, because I know that public sentiment is fickle, and there are way too many examples of odious ideas taking hold and becoming the next "common sense" that of course everyone agrees on. If we set a precedent for allowing private industry, including monopolies and near monopolies and companies that should be classified as common carriers, to shut down speech they find offensive based on the fact that, in this case, the offensive speech is coming from actual Nazis, that precedent is there. Internet companies have absolute control over content, based entirely on their oh so sound judgment in saying that they think Nazis are bad. Sure, they're right on this issue, but almost everyone is, including a lot of people whose judgment on just about everything else is horrible.

The ends might justify the means if you're framing this as just a Nazi thing, but once you establish that sort of precedent, it won't be limited to Nazis.

It would be shortsighted not to examine this very critically right now.
posted by ernielundquist at 8:37 AM on August 20, 2017 [15 favorites]


They are intimidating ordinary people, cops, and legislators by walking around with machine guns.

Walking around with Machine guns?

Really?

Do you have actual locations for these machine gun walk-abouts?

I'd like to see pictures of where cops were intimidated by someone walking around with an actual machine gun. Moreso if the cops did nothing. I'd like to know a location where police reaction to provocation is "meh".

The other things all sound like violations of laws on the books. If nothing is being done in your local area read your local statues on how a criminal complaint is commenced. So far as I know all states have a way, on the books, to have a citizen to get a criminal complaint in front of a Judge or a grand jury. Getting the Judge to then DO the thing, well, that is a separate matter.
posted by rough ashlar at 8:41 AM on August 20, 2017


First they came for the Nazis, and I did not speak out,
because I believed in the basic rights of my fellow citizens to live free of intimidation and violence.
posted by kaibutsu at 8:44 AM on August 20, 2017 [12 favorites]


if they're going to draw lines, a legal / illegal line is simple enough to do.

And at one time the United States drew a line with something called The Ku Klux Klan act. Drawing another line - why not?

What's the line drawing plan THIS time and who gets the naming rights to the act? Trump is an ass act? Gno Mur Nazi act? Heck, what Z word is going into the name of the act? Getting the Z word sure seems like the hardest thing here.
posted by rough ashlar at 8:46 AM on August 20, 2017 [1 favorite]


The ends might justify the means if you're framing this as just a Nazi thing, but once you establish that sort of precedent, it won't be limited to Nazis.

Yeah, that's what's so disheartening about this rising tide of authoritarian sentiment on the left advocating suppression of, and violence against, those they disagree with: it's unbelievably short-sighted. It really wasn't very long ago that it was left-wing ideas and speech that was suppressed both officially and by private entities for decades.

It's easy to cheer Google or Comcast or whoever suppressing Nazis, but what about if they decide to suppress anti-capitalist or otherviews these companies think harm their business or market? If you want certain speech banned, look who is in charge of the government right now. What sort of speech do you think Trump & Co. would stand against? You can already see the germs of it in Trump's characterization of the Boston protests.
posted by Sangermaine at 8:49 AM on August 20, 2017 [17 favorites]


We've been critically examining this topic since before the eternal September at least.

ICANN, IANA and the RIR's are the right place to establish this precedent...but yeah it's a hard problem. Perhaps the IETF and the internet society are good places to go to start agitating for better policies and protocols around this.

At any rate the EFF is not saying anything new here and we should be worried about how the daily stormer situation was handled. The ends ultimately justified the means *this time* but they also exposed a critically weak link in the balance of power between the control individual groups have over their existence online and the power of capital over their continued existence.

That said we're also at a point where we all need to be exercising healthy amounts of reflexivity with every critical examination we make.
posted by Annika Cicada at 8:51 AM on August 20, 2017 [4 favorites]


So, those supporting the EFF on this one:
If we went through the process of getting the nazis labeled officially as terror organizations, you'd be cool with taking down the sites? Or is ISIS recruitment different?
posted by kaibutsu at 8:55 AM on August 20, 2017 [2 favorites]


If we went through the process of getting the nazis labeled officially as terror organizations, you'd be cool with taking down the sites?
This "racism gotcha" you're testing out here is problematic because there have already been efforts to get BLM declared a terrorist organization.
posted by xyzzy at 9:02 AM on August 20, 2017 [4 favorites]


The Nazis aren't just speaking. They are murdering people. They are threatening to burn synagogues. They are intimidating ordinary people, cops, and legislators by walking around with machine guns. And the Internet is facilitating their work: they can organize their rallies over it, they can fund them, they can gamergate their opponents. It's not appropriate any more to classify everything on the Internet as "speech".

here's the thing - murdering people is against the law - burning synagogues or threatening to is against the law - and although walking around with machine guns may not be against the law in open-carry states, it is in other places and we can certainly make an argument that it should be

but what is done over the internet IS speech - now if it is speech that helps in coordinating criminal acts then a crime of conspiracy has been committed and can be investigated

the problem is not having too much freedom of speech - the problem is that the laws we have against threats and harassment are not being enforced or even investigated by the authorities

instead of arguing about the finer points of free speech rights, why aren't we asking why no one has been arrested for these threats towards synagogues? why is it that death threats are not investigated more thoroughly? i say that if the police really wanted to find these people some of them could be found - i say that if there are questions of jurisdiction or even rights, that these can be brought before a court in the process of prosecuting these crimes - i say that if a few people were arrested for the threats and the harassment, the rest would be too scared to keep doing it

the problem isn't that the government is being asked to enforce overly strict speech laws - it's that it refuses to enforce the laws it has
posted by pyramid termite at 9:04 AM on August 20, 2017 [25 favorites]


As others noted above, the terrorist label is often used as a censureship mechanism. I argue using the legal system beyond expressly defining white supremacy as terrorism is not going to cut it.

A much more elegant solution is for these companies to clarify what speech they defend and what kind of speech can go suck a bag of dicks. That appears to be the core issue here is that's these companies acted without a clear policy in place to guide themselves in future cases, like if BLM were to be labeled a terrorist organization or Occupy were to spring up again or something of the sort.

A combination of those two measures would effective give the Nazis only TOR/the like to use to gather and propagate their ideology of hate. Put poison at both ends of the tunnel - this way when companies censure the roaches, they can't run to the legal system to defend themselves.
posted by thebotanyofsouls at 9:11 AM on August 20, 2017


>In Germany or Canada or Belgium we don't curtail free speech arbitrarily -- we draw the line at the propagation of ideas that dehumanize. We've acknowledged the corrosive effect they have on society, and we've collectively said, "Shut up about that, pretty much for ever."
>Toxic ideas are toxic.

Sounds lovely. And who's in charge of deciding which ideas are toxic? 'Cause it might not be the same people we got in charge of it here. The right has been selling the idea for thirty years that liberals are the same thing as Eevil Stalinist Mass-Murderers, and people are buying. "The left has poisoned this country's moral discourse to the point where the government sanctions baby murder and unnatural marriages between homosexuals, who are well-known to prey upon children. We must criminalize their hateful speech before they destroy the moral bedrock of our nation." Do you think people are too smart for that kind of shit? If so, take a moment to reflect that DONALD FUCKING TRUMP IS PRESIDENT. You are sadly mistaken if you think the general public can tell the difference between National Socialists and Democratic Socialists, or any kind of Socialists. These guys would LOVE to make it illegal for leftist "hate groups", like your local chapter of Librarians For Literacy And Cookies, to assemble in public or congregate online. They only need a legal pretext for it.

I'm sure whatever you got working in Europe is lovely, but we're dealing with an entire generation educated by Fox News and right-wing talk radio, and it's very possible that slopes are slipperier around these here parts.
posted by Sing Or Swim at 9:12 AM on August 20, 2017 [16 favorites]


I've been trying to articulate exactly why the actions of Internet companies over the past few days have made me a bit uncomfortable, and I appreciate the EFF contributing their thoughts.

On the one hand, I absolutely support the idea that private entities should be able to choose not to support basically anyone for arbitrary reasons, as long as those reasons are legal. Especially not Nazis. No one should support Nazis.

On the other hand, the fact that a few large companies can damage access to publishing on the Internet so easily is really worrying. The Internet's infrastructure is almost all privately owned, operates largely by consensus, and is subject to the whims of a tiny number of people. Soif your views are unpopular but legal, it can be made really difficult to access that infrastructure. Which would be fine, except that almost all public discourse uses the Internet now.

To be honest, what I'd like is for Internet infrastructure to be regulated in such a way as to provide due process and transparency in cases like this. DNS and IP addressing would be a fine place in the stack to impose that regulation. Personally I'd like to make DNS explicitly publicly-owned infrastructure, but I'd settle for explicit legal protections applied to registrars that operate in the US.

At that point we can classify Nazis as terrorists (which they are) and regulate accordingly. While I have some sympathy with free speech absolutism as a philosophical position, ours is an imperfect world and has to contend with the actual effects of such a policy. Government regulation of speech should be extremely fucking difficult, but not impossible. I'm perfectly happy to have that include an ideology which we literally fought a world war to put down.

Absent those regulations, I support the actions of Google, Cloudflare, etc in not hosting Nazis. In our current legal framework, they absolutely made the right call. But the arbitrary power on display should make all of us twitchy, because large Internet companies will act in their own interests, not ours. I just happen to agree with them this time.

tl;dr: Due process and transparency are good. Regulate Internet infrastructure. And fuck Nazis.
posted by fencerjimmy at 9:19 AM on August 20, 2017 [8 favorites]


The 1st Amendment has been a fabulous boon to non-Nazi organisers, which is why COINTELPRO doesn't exist and peaceful uses of the right to free assembly are never broken up by tear gas and riot gear.
posted by tobascodagama at 9:21 AM on August 20, 2017 [14 favorites]


Who gave ICCAN power?

Who said that? Oh, me. Just want to clarify that I think ICCAN is fuck'n fantastic.
posted by sammyo at 9:21 AM on August 20, 2017


Corporations are legally constructed masks that real individual people making choices hide behind. It is perfectly ordinary for corporations to limit or edit what speech they broadcast in a favorable light. That already happens all the time and has been the case since the beginning of corporations that communicated with the public. The problem with corporations isn't that they really do function as impersonal, apoliticial economic actors or blind agents of "market forces" in the real world. It's that in real life, they do reflect the prejudices, biases, and ignorance of the real human beings that operate them like marionettes but the structure of law surrounding liability and corporate governance require us to pretend there's nothing personal about how they do business. There always is. There are civic and social responsibilities that must apply to corporations as much as individuals and that includes the responsible exercise of established legal rights like speech. It's not censorship to refuse to engage in or propagate certain specific forms of speech. To argue otherwise is to injoin every broadcaster to hook up Markov generators that can, overtime, exhaust every possible combination of utterances in every current and future variant of human speech just to guarantee they aren't accidentally "censoring" something by making any deliberate choices about what messages or random verbal expressions to broadcast.
posted by saulgoodman at 9:22 AM on August 20, 2017 [2 favorites]


The machine gun thing is somewhat of a derail, but there were men with 'assault rifles' in Charlottesville - VA is an open carry state. Unless your point was a semantic one about the misnomer 'machine guns,' which would seem a little fatuous.

The cops are in fact somewhat intimidated by large bands of armed men, and iirc the Charlottesville pd was interviewed about this.
posted by aspersioncast at 9:24 AM on August 20, 2017 [14 favorites]


See also: street gangs, as cross-posted by jeather in the Charlottesville thread, which I've excerpted here:
Each of these groups, individually and collectively, from the Ku Klux Klan to the alt-right hate squad of the week, fits the definition of criminal street gang just as neatly as (I’m going to go ahead and argue MORE NEATLY THAN, because I can’t help it) the Crips, the Bloods, the Latin Kings, MS-13, or whatever other group you might care to name. I know, right? I wanted to say terrorist, too. I wanted to make this big and complicated. But it’s not. We might not see their gang tattoos and gang colors right away (mayyyyyybe because they’re white idk just a guess) but go back and flip through some footage or that Vice documentary and things’ll jump out at you.

So what do we do about that? Well, first off, at least out here in California, active participation in a criminal street gang is a felony. “Any person who actively participates in any criminal street gang with knowledge that its members engage in or have engaged in a pattern of criminal gang activity, and who willfully promotes, furthers, or assists in any felonious criminal conduct by members of that gang, shall be punished by imprisonment in a county jail for a period not to exceed one year, or by imprisonment in the state prison for 16 months, or two or three years.” (Cal. Penal Code 186.22(a).)

I know, you’re gonna say it’s just speech, or that their participation is somehow protected. Weird, tho, that you don’t have those qualms when we lock up the Rolling 20’s West Coast Crips for threatening people. Why get squeamish now? I’ve been standing in the way of these laws for the better part of a decade, and trust me, the First Amendment aspect has been litigated to death. It does not work out well for Team Defense.
We've GOT these tools - terrorist and street gang labels - with legal power behind them. And they get used all the time. I would say that /not/ applying these labels to white supremacist groups is absolutely racist. People are going to try to apply the labels to BLM, and BLM will fight that battle (and hopefully win). So if you actually give a fuck, please go take up the free-speech banner for the crips and ISIS, too, instead of concern-trolling on behalf of BLM. Continuing to apply the laws inconsistently isn't going to fix them, if indeed they are broken.
posted by kaibutsu at 9:27 AM on August 20, 2017 [13 favorites]


The 1st Amendment has been a fabulous boon to non-Nazi organisers, which is why COINTELPRO doesn't exist and peaceful uses of the right to free assembly are never broken up by tear gas and riot gear.
tobascodagama

When these kind of comments are made, it's hard to understand how the commenters don't die or irony overdose.

Those things are terrible abuses. It took decades of hard-fought battles, political, legal, and social, to push back against those abuses and their suppression of leftwing/union/anti-racist/etc speech, and that shit still happens to demonstrators. It was horrible that the American government and corporate apparatus was turned to suppression of certain viewpoints.

So recognizing that those were terrible abuses, it's utterly bizarre to see the beneficiaries of those hard-won victories saying, "You know what we need? Those abuses, but in service of our side."

Upthread we have people pointing to attempts to pass anti-protest laws, or laws that protect people who drive cars through protests, or attempts to paint movements like BLM as terrorist organizations that use the exact same righteous rationales posters here are using: these people are dangerous, their views are corrosive, they need to be stopped before they hurt people.
posted by Sangermaine at 9:41 AM on August 20, 2017 [13 favorites]


I think it's important here to recognize that this discussion has been happening since literally the 1970's before TCP even existed. So I think having an opinion on this topic would be best served if by first looking at the multi-decade history of this conversation as opposed to this being the first time you've ever wandered into a conversation about something the EFF said about our contemporary Nazi dickhead problem in the US.

The internet at one time was refuge for people who were beaten and bullied, we made a place online for ourselves and a majority of the decisions we made back then reflected a world that was hostile as fuck to the internet and its citizens.

At any rate the conversation continues and the historical reasons we got here are vast and varied and this conversation had already spilled hundreds of thousand usenet posts, ruined friendship and destroyed online communities before the WWW even existed. So I'm just kinda "meh" on this conversation in general and I honestly feel like the internet we hoped for came and already went to fucking Facebook google hell. And I'm still having the same conversations we had in the 1980's. I'm fucking tired y'all. IMO the global terrorist is neoliberal capitalism. Kick those fuckers off the internet as far as I'm concerned and let the rest of us losers and IRL nobodies and freaks and mental cases have our alt.subculture space back.

Also, Jon Postel is a fucking internet hero and his early death was a tragic blow to the world and I wonder what he would have to say. Jon and I emailed a lot back in the 90's and he was awesome. I guess I wanna be more like him and less crotchety and mean. Hugs.
posted by Annika Cicada at 9:43 AM on August 20, 2017 [5 favorites]


Sing or Swim said, "Sounds lovely. And who's in charge of deciding which ideas are toxic? 'Cause it might not be the same people we got in charge of it here. The right has been selling the idea for thirty years."

Well, after WWII we all got together and pretty much agreed that dehumanization and dehumanizing philosophies were destructive without counterbalancing merits or returns. Did y'all miss the meeting? The UN sent out a reminder memo, from their ditto machine, I'm sure of it.

Why isn't America aboard that boat?

You seem to be suggesting this is a nuanced evaluation, where hairsplitting either side of it might empower dogmatists. But it isn't. It's a simple one, upon which all good people can agree: Dehumanizing your fellow humans is an unacceptably dickish move, always. Shit, we were so sure about it we wrote it into law: it's a dick move to erode the humanity of women, it's a dick move to undermine the humanity of people with sun tans, it's a dick move to pick on Jews, and so on.

These things are not hard to agree on. If a governing process cannot render such decisions, it may be time to go to the store and buy a new one.
posted by Construction Concern at 9:45 AM on August 20, 2017 [5 favorites]


I'm sure whatever you got working in Europe is lovely, but we're dealing with an entire generation educated by Fox News and right-wing talk radio, and it's very possible that slopes are slipperier around these here parts.

What you don't seem to get is that the very reason we have now multiple generations of misinformed misanthropes and a resurgence of right-wing extremism is that we refuse to do anything about it until actual violence breaks out. We (the US, collectively) have prized "free speech" over any concept of the common welfare, to the point where we're willing to see insanely slippery slopes everywhere that make it impossible for us to say "no, you can't go around advocating genocide" because even the tiniest fucking concession to societal welfare (e.g. "no you can't advocate genocide") is OMG SUCH A SLIPPERY SLOPE.

Free speech absolutism is not the cure -- it is the cause of the disease.
posted by tocts at 9:45 AM on August 20, 2017 [24 favorites]


>You seem to be suggesting this is a nuanced evaluation, where hairsplitting either side of it might empower dogmatists. But it isn't.

Not for me it isn't. But I'm not in charge. The guys in charge are Donald Trump, Jeff Sessions, and Sebastian Gorka, among others. We are living in the land of Whatabouts, where we now have to have a lengthy national debate about whether there's any distinction between Nazis and people defending their neighborhoods against Nazis, and where Hillary's emails balance perfectly on the scales with all of Trump's oozing garbage heaped on the other side. We don't do nuance here, not right now.

>What you don't seem to get is that the very reason we have now multiple generations of misinformed misanthropes and a resurgence of right-wing extremism is that we refuse to do anything about it until actual violence breaks out.

No--I DO get that. I'm saying it doesn't matter why we have a government of racists supported by a generously-described-as-misinformed public. That's what we've got, and it makes this a bad time to revisit the rules about who can be made to shut up by the government. The guys writing the new rules, or reinterpreting the existing rules, about who has to shut up will be the same guys who are writing the new health care rules, and the new tax code rules, and we're not gonna like those either.
posted by Sing Or Swim at 9:59 AM on August 20, 2017 [8 favorites]


Why isn't America aboard that boat?
Well, we've got these eight guys and gals who unanimously explained to the rest of the country that there is no hate speech exception to the First Amendment.

From Matel vs. Tam:
Speech that demeans on the basis of race, ethnicity, gender, religion, age, disability, or any other similar ground is hateful; but the proudest boast of our free speech jurisprudence is that we protect the freedom to express “the thought that we hate.”
Short of revolting against the US government, there's not much we can do about the First Amendment.
posted by xyzzy at 10:05 AM on August 20, 2017 [3 favorites]


Well, after WWII we all got together and pretty much agreed that dehumanization and dehumanizing philosophies were destructive without counterbalancing merits or returns.

does that include saudi arabia? iran? russia? china? india? etc etc etc?
posted by pyramid termite at 10:20 AM on August 20, 2017 [1 favorite]


But with the right of free speech comes the responsibility of using it to uphold freedom and democracy. So someone has a right to say hateful things, but everyone has a responsibility to shout them down. And if they're standing on your soap box, you have a responsibility to snatch it from under them.
posted by Zalzidrax at 10:22 AM on August 20, 2017 [4 favorites]


Publicity is justly commended as a remedy for social and industrial diseases. Sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants; electric light the most efficient policeman .... The battlefield has been surveyed and charted. The hostile forces have been located, counted and appraised. That was a necessary first step—and a long one—towards relief .... But there should be a further call upon publicity for service. That potent force must, in the impending struggle, be utilized in many ways as a continuous remedial measure. --Louis D Brandeis
posted by chavenet at 10:23 AM on August 20, 2017 [3 favorites]


I've heard it elsewhere, but this is a anti-trust issue disguised as a free speech issue. No one would give a damn if Bob's discount DNS kicked the Nazis to the curb. The problem is that we have giant monopolistic tech companies making executive decisions about who stays and who goes, unaccountable to anyone.

One of the problems I have with the "it's not censorship when it's a company that does it" line is that it falls into a libertarian fallacy that presumes the only hegemonic organizations that exist are governments. We're at the point where companies like Facebook and Google control huge parts of our daily lives, and can be just as disruptive as the government can, especially in areas where the state abdicates most governance (like free speech).
posted by zabuni at 10:40 AM on August 20, 2017 [29 favorites]


The issue I keep coming back to is, all internet services have a vague "no illegal or otherwise objectionable content" in their TOS - and they never explain what "objectionable" is, and they don't enforce that part unless there's incredible external pressure or personal bias on the part of the judges.

There is no consistency in TOS enforcement. The issue isn't that they cracked down on a neo-nazi site; it's that they host and support thousands of other hateful, violence-supporting, maybe-illegal (coordinating gun sales, etc.) websites - this one just got noticed by enough people that they did something about it.

There's no such thing as neutral, unbiased enforcement of a "no horrible content" rule. Hell, there's no such thing as neutral, unbiased enforcement of a "we only remove content we believe is probably illegal" rule. Given how harassment, defamation, and copyright infringement are a tangled muddy mess in the courts, that comes down to "meh, one time I heard a lawyer say..." (DMCA takes down infringement claims for two weeks. Every host has a different set of rules for what happens after that.)

The solution we deserve is companies being clear about their values and judgement calls. We're not likely to get that, so the next best thing is transparency of process: how do you make a complaint about "content so vile/likely illegal it should be removed," who considers that complaint; what do they do if they believe it's valid; if they've gotten a lot of complaints (which would almost always be the case), what kind of statement do they issue about their decision?
posted by ErisLordFreedom at 11:38 AM on August 20, 2017 [3 favorites]


Fuck it. If someone is arguing that I don't even have the right to exist, I am going to support whatever mechanisms shut that down, because that speech is an immediate and existential threat to me and my loved ones, demonstrated by, oh, you know, history.

If the same rule is used in an attempt to shut down BLM, I will oppose that, because that's garbage.

And, hey, this is how all law works. It can all be misapplied. It can all be used for evil.

But nobody argues against law in general. Nobody slippery slopes laws against tampering with mail because some unscrupulous government official might arrest you for making your own stamp.

No, it's just the laws that might actually protect me and mine from getting deported to camps that must be worried to death.
posted by maxsparber at 12:44 PM on August 20, 2017 [25 favorites]


Well, after WWII we all got together and pretty much agreed that dehumanization and dehumanizing philosophies were destructive without counterbalancing merits or returns. Did y'all miss the meeting? The UN sent out a reminder memo, from their ditto machine, I'm sure of it.

Yeah, tell it to the Roma.

Thing is, I agree with comments up-thread that we could, if we chose, read most of the neo-Nazi/alt-right groups as criminal gangs under present law and treat them the same way. We don't. We pretty much only use those laws, in ludicrously broad ways sometimes, against people of color. That gives me real pause in advocating further extension of the law--not just in a theoretical "oh, what if the tides might turn?" way, but in the way that we can see how such tools are used now. Much of law enforcement is explicitly or implicitly racist. So are many many prosecutors, though usually more on the implicit side. Will putting new powers in their hands actually help?
posted by praemunire at 1:21 PM on August 20, 2017 [2 favorites]


burning synagogues or threatening to is against the law

I'm not actually certain threatening to burn synagogues is against the law. Saying "let's all go down to the synagogue on the corner of 4th street and Main right now and burn it!" is against the law. Saying "synagogues should be burned" actually isn't.

I'm not passing judgment on the wisdom of that distinction here.
posted by Justinian at 1:50 PM on August 20, 2017 [2 favorites]


That's "in the United States" of course, which I believe is the context. It would undoubtedly be illegal in many other places.
posted by Justinian at 1:51 PM on August 20, 2017 [2 favorites]


No, it's just the laws that might actually protect me and mine from getting deported to camps that must be worried to death.

Wait, what laws are those, and who is worrying them?
posted by ernielundquist at 2:18 PM on August 20, 2017


Hate speech laws. Laws that identify neo-Nazis as terrorists. That sort of thing.
posted by maxsparber at 2:20 PM on August 20, 2017 [6 favorites]


Worried in this instance refers to what a cat does with a piece of string, endlessly picking at it until it has been frayed down to nothing.
posted by maxsparber at 2:21 PM on August 20, 2017 [2 favorites]


Well, yeah, we pretty much don't have hate speech laws in the US now, and I asked who, not what, was worrying them. The Supreme Court? Because yes, they are, and that's why we don't have any.

And there's pretty much no chance that's going to change for the better anytime soon. Any changes to federal law, precedent, or enforcement are going to be for the worse under this administration.

For right now, depending on private organizations and local governments to keep things in check is probably the best we're going to do, but we have to be careful not to end up codifying that sort of thing in the heat of the moment.

There is no one clear path to making things better, and the sort of black and white thinking where we let things slide, trust people just because they are willing to come out against actual literal Nazis, is a recipe for disaster. The PATRIOT Act seemed like a good idea to a lot of people at the time too, because emotions were high and people were scared and they had blinders on focusing on the one explicit threat they were facing at the time. The effects of that are not a slippery slope or an unintended consequence. They're literally right in there, for everyone to see. People just let the current situation dominate the discussion, so that pointing out the clear, obvious problems gets cast as concern trolling or contrarianism. It is absolutely not.

Part of the reason we should have been more careful is that that happened under Bush's administration. This one is even worse. Much, much worse. All the more reason to be very cautious.

Yeah, let Google and other private, unaccountable organizations do this now, but only because there's seemingly no better option right now. But never ever start trusting them or stop questioning them. Of fucking course they're better than Nazis. Of fucking course they're better than the Trump administration. That's a ridiculously low bar. It doesn't make them good, it doesn't make them reasonable or capable, and it does not merit permanently putting more power into their hands. They can make reasonable noises about things, but that tech bro culture, they genuinely, in their heart of hearts, believe their system is a meritocracy. They honestly believe that they are better than other people, and they don't think there's anything fundamentally wrong with the fact that they, a bunch of coddled white boys, have so much power. They think they earned that. There's a particular school of Steve Jobs style techbro Buddhism, in fact, where they actually believe that the fact that they are lording over others is some sort of karmic gift. They will say the right things about various forms of bigotry and all, but they think they're being magnanimous doing that. Charitable, even. They legitimately believe that they have some sort of natural right to control and manipulate others. (I'm not pulling that out of my ass. I've had it explained to me.)

And that's just the ones that get all flowery about their apologetics.

They "trust me." Dumb fucks. --Mark Zuckerberg
posted by ernielundquist at 2:47 PM on August 20, 2017 [5 favorites]


Aside from Google hanging on to the domain (assuming they are) and not letting them transfer to some willing registrar, none of this has any implication on free speech. No government, quasi-governmental agency, or monopolistic corporation is preventing them from hosting the site themselves.

One can still buy Internet access from ILECs and others on a common carrier basis, meaning they can only deny service for technical reasons (literally impossible to provide service) or your inability to pay.

A bit of cheap office space, some network equipment, some servers, and several thousand dollars a month could have them hosting their own services, the way many of us have been for decades. Given they found a new DDoS mitigation service, they need not even deal with that hassle (or the hassle of calling the FBI to investigate the source of said attacks), so there isn't even a material impediment to their speech caused by other people refusing to let DS use their printing presses. The only thing stopping them is laziness, or perhaps fundraising, which should present no issue if they are really that popular. If not, a $80 a month business class cable modem would host the site fine.
posted by wierdo at 5:19 PM on August 20, 2017 [5 favorites]


Since I only bothered to ridicule the "their free speech is being abridged by people and companies refusing to associate with them" bullshit, I failed to articulate a complete thought.

Basically, people are upset that these racist fucks aren't getting special treatment. For once, they don't get to do things in easy mode and actually have to put in a marginal amount of effort to bring their speech to the masses, just like people have had to for centuries. I'm not sure why that upsets people so much.

I'll be right there with the free speech warriors the moment the DS folks actually attempt to set up their own printing press and are somehow disallowed from doing so. As of yet, that hasn't happened, so I'll continue to laugh at people getting their feathers ruffled by GoDaddy, Google, and CloudFlare telling them to fuck off somewhere else. All of whom have hate speech clauses in their terms of service, by the way, so the gnashing of teeth over that is even sillier in my view than the rest of it.
posted by wierdo at 5:26 PM on August 20, 2017 [9 favorites]


"I'm sure whatever you got working in Europe is lovely, but we're dealing with an entire generation educated by Fox News and right-wing talk radio, and it's very possible that slopes are slipperier around these here parts."
Good. Let's see if your nation can get its head around the idea that "whatever you got working in Europe" exists precisely because they "had an entire generation educated by [biassed news] and right-wing talk radio" - and, even if it's true that the "slopes are slipperier" in the US, to a large extent it's because they've been greased by those who learned to use it to their advantage after examining the previous failure(s)…
posted by Pinback at 9:38 PM on August 20, 2017 [5 favorites]


The grotesque fetish Americans have for free speech is so disturbing.

Your constitutionalism has led you to defending the genocide of tens of millions of people. All because a piece of paper says that white property owners are allowed to say whatever they want.

Hope you realize that.
posted by Yowser at 10:01 PM on August 20, 2017 [4 favorites]


No one would give a damn if Bob's discount DNS kicked the Nazis to the curb. The problem is that we have giant monopolistic tech companies making executive decisions about who stays and who goes, unaccountable to anyone.

Bob's discount DNS still exists, so why are we wringing our hands and gnashing our teeth over them having to expend a tiny bit of effort to make their website work without the handholding that tools made by private companies would otherwise give them. It isn't as if personal websites did not exist before the days of one click hosting.

There's nothing stopping them from buying their own damn copy machine, and there is no law that says anybody is obligated to lend them theirs. Happily, they are required to lend them dumb pipes, so they are not in any way being silenced, they're just being lazy and/or cheap.
posted by wierdo at 10:02 PM on August 20, 2017 [3 favorites]


And before anyone says "You're not America, you don't know what the fuck you're talking about," you should know that us non-Americans are stuck using American websites that don't follow the laws of other countries - even when those laws require communication across country lines to comply.
posted by Yowser at 10:05 PM on August 20, 2017 [5 favorites]


There's nothing stopping them from buying their own damn copy machine, and there is no law that says anybody is obligated to lend them theirs. Happily, they are required to lend them dumb pipes, so they are not in any way being silenced, they're just being lazy and/or cheap.

My guess is the people running things wouldn't know a bind9 from a unbound nor an apache from a ngnix.

Once they have an IP address people can just enter that. And I bet the people who WANT daily storm'n would just type in that address or click on a link of that address.

But hey, why learn anything when you can go to "the cloud" and buy your service there? If they become talented that will make 'em harder to track. You want them dumb and lazy.
posted by rough ashlar at 11:19 PM on August 20, 2017


Australia had a law on the books that you couldn't advocate for euthanasia for about 20 years. Americans would see this as a free speech violation, but I'd ask them to consider what they fear.

Do they fear an issue being closed off by a tyrannical government? I'd posit that if your government is tyrannical you a) have got bigger problems than the terms of a debate, and b) probably aren't going to be paying attention to the law. It's whether or not the law gets enforced, after all, and under what circumstances.

Do they fear an issue getting closed off by a non-tyrannical government, thus becoming tyrannical? Well that's not what happened either: euthanasia campaigners started attacking the existence of the law itself, and the law is no longer enforced (I can't find where it's repealed but it's clearly not an issue to debate it either). Compare to Australia's discussion of its racial vilification laws; while there was a strong, right-wing condition to fatally weaken the laws, public sentiment was that the only reason to weaken the laws, in practice, was to encourage racial vilification. The government decided not to chance the electorate by ramming it through and potentially losing mainstream support.

Do they fear that weakening a principle with an obvious exception means that it sets a precedent? This is what happens when the only reason for a law is a principle, when your public debate is so weak that it devolves into people shouting 'freedom!' 'justice!' at each other. Laws affect real people and those people should be at the heart of a functioning democracy.

America is not a functioning democracy or a developed nation. This does require some understanding on the part of other developed nations - solutions that work when the government is accountable to the electorate don't work when government is captured by oligarchs. Principles might be all you have when your government is so weak that it can't fix the water or manage an energy transition or convert to the metric system. Similarly, though, it requires some humility from Americans, which I know will be rough, but they do need to remember that most developed countries have tackled these issues from much further back than America has ever been, and they've got a much better idea of how to implement these principles in a way that isn't fatally compromised as soon as the other party wins.
posted by Merus at 11:34 PM on August 20, 2017 [6 favorites]


Americans would see this as a free speech violation, but I'd ask them to consider what they fear.
"Americans" have passed dozens of laws attempting to curtail hate speech. Universities have attempted to implement "speech codes." The USSC strikes these down again and again. I don't know how to explain to the Canadians and Brits and Australians in this thread that one major branch of our government refuses to budge on hate speech and the 1A. They've carved out exceptions for more than half a dozen other types of speech, but not hate speech.
posted by xyzzy at 12:12 AM on August 21, 2017 [2 favorites]


It might seem unlikely now that Internet companies would turn against sites supporting racial justice or other controversial issues. But if there is a single reason why so many individuals and companies are acting together now to unite against neo-Nazis, it is because a future that seemed unlikely a few years ago—where white nationalists and Nazis have significant power and influence in our society—now seems possible. We would be making a mistake if we assumed that these sorts of censorship decisions would never turn against causes we love.

aaaaaaaand if you didn't already need indication white people wrote it, there you go.

White nationalists and neo-Nazis are not new, they are not underdogs, they are not underprivileged, oppressed minorities, they are not brave defenders of free speech. They aren't rising up anew from the waters, having never existed before. They're the violent wing of a system that has existed in this country for centuries, and they are fighting for the status quo. If you cannot differentiate between genuinely marginalized groups advocating for equity, and the thugs who simply want the system to keep kicking the people who are already down, then I don't know what to tell you. I totally agree with them that this process should be transparent. But if you're not someone who's evaluating the power dynamics going on in the rhetoric someone is spouting then I can only imagine you come from a position privileged enough that it doesn't occur to you that these things might matter.
posted by Anonymous at 12:43 AM on August 21, 2017


Similarly, though, it requires some humility from Americans, which I know will be rough, but they do need to remember that most developed countries have tackled these issues from much further back than America has ever been, and they've got a much better idea of how to implement these principles in a way that isn't fatally compromised as soon as the other party wins

which is why americans have had to intervene in the way developed countries in europe handled their political problems twice in the last century and STILL have a garrison stationed there

this whole europe knows better than you viewpoint is a rank falsehood - there are all sorts of arguments that can be made about free speech and hate speech but the superiority of how europe handles things is NOT one of them

Researching my book, I looked into what actually happened in the Weimar Republic. I found that, contrary to what most people think, Weimar Germany did have hate-speech laws, and they were applied quite frequently. The assertion that Nazi propaganda played a significant role in mobilizing anti-Jewish sentiment is, of course, irrefutable. But to claim that the Holocaust could have been prevented if only anti-Semitic speech and Nazi propaganda had been banned has little basis in reality. Leading Nazis such as Joseph Goebbels, Theodor Fritsch, and Julius Streicher were all prosecuted for anti-Semitic speech. Streicher served two prison sentences. Rather than deterring the Nazis and countering anti-Semitism, the many court cases served as effective public-relations machinery, affording Streicher the kind of attention he would never have found in a climate of a free and open debate. In the years from 1923 to 1933, Der Stürmer [Streicher's newspaper] was either confiscated or editors taken to court on no fewer than thirty-six occasions. The more charges Streicher faced, the greater became the admiration of his supporters. The courts became an important platform for Streicher's campaign against the Jews. In the words of a present-day civil-rights campaigner, pre-Hitler Germany had laws very much like the anti-hate laws of today, and they were enforced with some vigor. As history so painfully testifies, this type of legislation proved ineffectual on the one occasion when there was a real argument for it.

of course, the person stating this has done something questionable himself - publishing the infamous mohammed cartoons - but still, if hate speech laws are that effective, shouldn't have they worked against the nazis?

how are they working right now with the anti-immigrant views that are building in european countries?
posted by pyramid termite at 1:28 AM on August 21, 2017 [8 favorites]


"So if you actually give a fuck, please go take up the free-speech banner for the crips and ISIS, too, instead of concern-trolling on behalf of BLM. Continuing to apply the laws inconsistently isn't going to fix them, if indeed they are broken."

Uh, yeah, thanks chief. You know that some of us opposed the Patriot Act specifically because the overbroad definitions could (and did!) lead to the government targeting legitimate dissent under the auspices of anti-terrorist action?

This all smacks of the Politician Fallacy that SOMETHING MUST BE DONE THIS IS SOMETHING THIS MUST BE DONE. That people are dumb and short-sighted about civil liberties when they're scared is something that America is supposed to resist by design, lest we trade liberty for security and receive neither.

"Well, after WWII we all got together and pretty much agreed that dehumanization and dehumanizing philosophies were destructive without counterbalancing merits or returns. Did y'all miss the meeting? The UN sent out a reminder memo, from their ditto machine, I'm sure of it.

Why isn't America aboard that boat?

You seem to be suggesting this is a nuanced evaluation, where hairsplitting either side of it might empower dogmatists. But it isn't. It's a simple one, upon which all good people can agree: Dehumanizing your fellow humans is an unacceptably dickish move, always. Shit, we were so sure about it we wrote it into law: it's a dick move to erode the humanity of women, it's a dick move to undermine the humanity of people with sun tans, it's a dick move to pick on Jews, and so on.

These things are not hard to agree on. If a governing process cannot render such decisions, it may be time to go to the store and buy a new one.
"

This is like the Grade A example of a particularly pernicious strain of logic, and pretty much exactly why it's worth saying "Even for Nazis?" about this shit.

First off, sure, yeah, post-war consensus. Remember that Stalin was a core member of that, and that Mao was right there. So "we all agreed" that dehumanizing was bad, mmkay, but it turns out that we meant pretty different things. Getting all sanctimonious as if all governments agree on what constitutes "dehumanizing" is grandstanding bullshit.

Even beyond the fact that asserting that we can all agree is more wish than reality, it highlights a second big problem when we're talking about how these norms are enforced: The UN doesn't have the authority outside of pretty narrow exceptions to wade into how states adhere to their commitments to universal human rights on a meaningful basis — if Saudi Arabia wants to hang you for being gay, well, the UN isn't going to stop them. Hell, Saudi Arabia just got elected to the UN Council on Women's Rights, so maybe ask a friend to help you off of your high horse when you start declaring the universal principle of opposing dickishness to be a simple matter.

And to end it with such a glib self-confidence to tell people who think that, hey, these things that humans have fought over for at least a couple hundred years, that might be because they're complicated; to say that the answer is to go to the store and get a new system of government — we're not talking about running a sci-fi listserv. Arguing that there's no room for nuance or that we shouldn't be concerned about consistency of principles — or even recognize that EVERY SINGLE LEGAL POWER AND WEAPON that can be aimed at right-wing assholes can and will be used on left wing activists — makes everyone worse off and leads to a stupider and less just government for everyone.

This is specifically true in the current context of WITH-US/AGAINST-US bullshit over resurgent Nazis — arguing that this has to be simple not only encourages dumb non-solutions to problems, it discourages alternate solutions that actually take a bit of thinking through to get buy in and implementation without having shitty knock-on effects.
posted by klangklangston at 2:04 AM on August 21, 2017 [8 favorites]


of course, the person stating this has done something questionable himself - publishing the infamous mohammed cartoons - but still, if hate speech laws are that effective, shouldn't have they worked against the nazis?

I won't argue the substance, but as you rightly remark, Flemming Rose has his own baggage and agenda. The "Weimar also had hate speech laws" is a talking point that I think originates with right-wing commentator Mark Steyn while Jyllands-Posten is what the European Network Against Racism calls a "far-right newspaper". These people benefit when the opposition against their views is weakened and that's why they try to delegitimize hate speech laws.
posted by dmh at 2:25 AM on August 21, 2017 [1 favorite]


"I found that, contrary to what most people think, Weimar Germany did have hate-speech laws, and they were applied quite frequently. The assertion that Nazi propaganda played a significant role in mobilizing anti-Jewish sentiment is, of course, irrefutable. But to claim that the Holocaust could have been prevented if only anti-Semitic speech and Nazi propaganda had been banned has little basis in reality."
Fair point, but it does ignore some significant differences.

Yes, the Weimar Republic did have hate-speech laws. Specifically, they had multiple laws aimed at protecting specific targets from "hate speech" - most notably, the laws against "insulting religious communities". They made a special "protected class" of some - not hard to see that could breed resentment.

Conversely, as I understand it, post-war German law took a different tack. Rather than trying to make specific examples of hate speech illegal*, it (very generally) targets behaviour - fomenting suspicion, inciting hatred, or acting against any group based on [real or imagined characteristic] are against the law.

Now, which of the above two sounds more like the current US** approach?

To quote the linked New Yorker article, "In the words of a present-day civil-rights campaigner, pre-Hitler Germany had laws very much like the anti-hate laws of today, and they were enforced with some vigor".

Yes, they did. And they were very much like the US anti-hate laws of today. Post-war, Germany - specifically, post-occupation Germany - learned that didn't work, and tried another way. Why haven't we learned the same lesson?

* Sure, there are counterexamples - the laws against Holocaust denial & the public display of Nazi symbols, to name just two - but they're sort of understandable given their history. They're also looking increasingly anachronistic.

** Lest you think I'm picking on the US or Americans, I'll point out that most countries - including my own - make the same mistake. They try to stop people from being dicks to certain groups, when the aim should really be to restrict the level to which people can be dicks to anybody

posted by Pinback at 2:54 AM on August 21, 2017 [4 favorites]


if hate speech laws are that effective, shouldn't have they worked against the nazis?

Nobody is claiming that hate speech laws alone will prevent the rise of fascism. It's one tool in a much larger toolbox.
posted by maxsparber at 8:12 AM on August 21, 2017 [4 favorites]


Punching is another tool.
posted by maxsparber at 8:20 AM on August 21, 2017 [4 favorites]


if hate speech laws are that effective, shouldn't have they worked against the nazis?

To follow up from my previous comment, I find no evidence anywhere that "hate speech helped the Nazis" is actually true. The only people I can find who make that argument are right-wing ideologues like Mark Steyn, Joshua Goldberg, and Brendan O'Neill. Given that the Weimar Republic was weak from the very beginning, and could have toppled over for any number of reasons in the period 1918-1933, for all we know the hate speech laws did work and helped delay the Nazi's rise to power.
posted by dmh at 10:18 AM on August 21, 2017 [5 favorites]


aaaaaaaand if you didn't already need indication white people wrote it, there you go.

As the author of that particular sentence, let me provide some background to the intent.

I think you're absolutely right in that white supremacy and neo-nazis are nothing new — but it's also true that much of the reaction post-Charlottesville has been by people who feel that something has changed, and that something needs to be done right now. Hence the bending of a few pre-existing rules and policies in order to eject Daily Stormer.

What I was trying to do there was not to necessarily buy into the idea of an imminent and unexpected power-grab, but to try to speak to people who feel that way, and follow through the implications of their own position. If you think something bad is about to happen if you don't step in, you should be very careful about exactly how you do step in, and what precedents you set.

(Someone earlier up the thread suggested that such precedents don't matter, because right wing extremists will simply ignore them anyway. I don't think that's true, because I think you get more practical push-back when you can point to stable precepts that are being walked over. And the more practice you have shoring up those precepts, the longer they remain.)
posted by ntk at 10:35 AM on August 21, 2017 [2 favorites]


What I was trying to do there was not to necessarily buy into the idea of an imminent and unexpected power-grab, but to try to speak to people who feel that way, and follow through the implications of their own position. If you think something bad is about to happen if you don't step in, you should be very careful about exactly how you do step in, and what precedents you set.

How about if you instead think that something bad is happening, has been for some time, and that perhaps we should finally do something about it? That was the point of the response - that the only way you are just now thinking "maybe it could happen here" is if you weren't looking. This isn't an "imminent and unexpected power grab", but a threatened status quo asserting itself more actively because it feels under attack.

And if you don't think that they won't walk all over norms, customs, and principles to achieve what they want, I'd recommend looking at what's been happening in Congress for the past decade.
posted by NoxAeternum at 12:55 PM on August 21, 2017


Yeah, that's what's so disheartening about this rising tide of authoritarian sentiment on the left advocating suppression of, and violence against, those they disagree with: it's unbelievably short-sighted.

This isn't about disagreement, and that reductio ad absurdam is getting tiresome. When you have a faction that is openly about dehumanizing and abusing minorities and the dispossessed, those groups standing up for their rights and humanity aren't "voicing disagreement".
posted by NoxAeternum at 1:02 PM on August 21, 2017 [5 favorites]


I've come to the conclusion that any discussion of long-term tactics online is probably concern trolling and so I ignore it.
posted by maxsparber at 1:09 PM on August 21, 2017 [2 favorites]


"Australia had a law on the books that you couldn't advocate for euthanasia for about 20 years. Americans would see this as a free speech violation, but I'd ask them to consider what they fear. "

Uh, that people who should have the choice to die with dignity will be kept alive in pain because assholes think that they know better.

"Do they fear an issue being closed off by a tyrannical government? I'd posit that if your government is tyrannical you a) have got bigger problems than the terms of a debate, and b) probably aren't going to be paying attention to the law. It's whether or not the law gets enforced, after all, and under what circumstances."

You know that it's really rare to have a government just become tyrannical overnight. Usually there are a lot of small things that add up to it. So, yeah, what the law is does matter, and the argument that there would be bigger problems elsewhere is not an argument for your approach.

"Do they fear an issue getting closed off by a non-tyrannical government, thus becoming tyrannical? Well that's not what happened either: euthanasia campaigners started attacking the existence of the law itself, and the law is no longer enforced (I can't find where it's repealed but it's clearly not an issue to debate it either). Compare to Australia's discussion of its racial vilification laws; while there was a strong, right-wing condition to fatally weaken the laws, public sentiment was that the only reason to weaken the laws, in practice, was to encourage racial vilification. The government decided not to chance the electorate by ramming it through and potentially losing mainstream support."

I mean, I'd fear people not being able to make basic choices for themselves like they're entitled to, and that campaigners eventually overturned the law doesn't mean that it wasn't a dumb law and not a very good argument against general freedom of speech rights.

"Do they fear that weakening a principle with an obvious exception means that it sets a precedent? This is what happens when the only reason for a law is a principle, when your public debate is so weak that it devolves into people shouting 'freedom!' 'justice!' at each other. Laws affect real people and those people should be at the heart of a functioning democracy."

Uh, it's also what happens in common law systems. Do you maybe not understand how the Australian government works? You don't seem to understand America very well, but are lecturing as if you do, and seem confused about Napoleonic versus common law legal systems. Is it just that you don't understand the basic distinction in constitution between Commonwealth states and America?

"America is not a functioning democracy or a developed nation."

uh, you're starting to get into pretty dubious definition time…

"This does require some understanding on the part of other developed nations - solutions that work when the government is accountable to the electorate don't work when government is captured by oligarchs. Principles might be all you have when your government is so weak that it can't fix the water or manage an energy transition or convert to the metric system. "

Yeah, so, for scale: the state that I live in (California) has about ten million more people than live in all of Australia. In most cases, our government functions pretty well. I mean, you're right: We still don't have popular adoption of the metric system, despite its widespread scientific and business use in America. Despite that handicap, we've managed to walk on the moon; Australia's space program claim to fame is that Skylab debris fell there. I went looking to see if there were any comparative studies similar to the one you're obviously referencing about oligarch capture, but about Australia. I don't have any hard evidence on the relative level of oligarchy in Australia because as far as I can tell, no one has ever found it important enough to study. But given what the study's findings actually were — that moneyed interests (specifically, industry lobbying groups) get successful votes about, what, 5% or so better than non-profits, controlling for a handful of quasi-independent popularity variables, and that much of that is because moneyed interests are better at getting popular support for their initiatives (even when the moneyed interests are the disproportionate beneficiaries, especially those of low general salience) rather than direct legislative capture — given all that, I'd assume that some degree of oligarch capture would be true in Australia, especially given that you're also a bicameral legislature and a federalist system of states, meaning that there are anti-democratic mechanisms built in there too.

"Similarly, though, it requires some humility from Americans, which I know will be rough, but they do need to remember that most developed countries have tackled these issues from much further back than America has ever been, and they've got a much better idea of how to implement these principles in a way that isn't fatally compromised as soon as the other party wins."

Really? "Most developed countries" have tackled these issues? Like, you mean in 1975 for Australia? Like, when "White Australia" was finally repudiated officially? But if the issue was "tackled," I mean, it seems weird to have a proposal to make substantial reforms fail by three votes in the senate just a year or so ago. Hell, One Nation holds parliament seats, Reclaim Australia has regular rallies, and prejudice-motivated crimes occur in Australia at a similar rate to the US. It's kinda hard to regard Australia as so enlightened as to justify condescending lectures to us poor, undeveloped saps.
posted by klangklangston at 1:47 PM on August 21, 2017 [3 favorites]


"If you cannot differentiate between genuinely marginalized groups advocating for equity, and the thugs who simply want the system to keep kicking the people who are already down, then I don't know what to tell you."

Counterpoint: If you cannot differentiate between genuinely marginalized groups advocating for equality and the thugs who simply want the system to reaffirm white supremacy, you could be the goddamned President of the United States.

Do you trust Donald Trump or Jeff Sessions to make those types of distinctions? Have they shown any circumspection about the craven use of any available power irrespective of principle to attack their enemies?

I disagreed with the power that private organizations had over the ability of WikiLeaks to disseminate information, even as I think their handling of the DNC leaks was pretty deplorable and Assange is a shitbag. But corporations are fundamentally unaccountable to the public, and these are discussions about what is in the public interest.

It's also worth remembering that the censorship in China, which is state rather than the corporate that we're talking, but corporations have largely acceded in order to get to the Chinese market, is pretty popular in China. Treating LGBT topics as obscene is pretty popular here in America. Because the US has a fundamentally different orientation in terms of justifying political power — one that is meant to restrain government power over the individual, rather than having a presumption of positive justification for action in the public interest (we're generally a negative liberty rather than positive liberty in our construction of state legitimacy) — questions of content-free symmetry are much more important in talking about legal principles.
posted by klangklangston at 2:03 PM on August 21, 2017


"Conversely, as I understand it, post-war German law took a different tack. Rather than trying to make specific examples of hate speech illegal*, it (very generally) targets behaviour - fomenting suspicion, inciting hatred, or acting against any group based on [real or imagined characteristic] are against the law."

No, it's pretty specific about what's prohibited, and that's propaganda that would support National Socialism, then with a whole bunch of symbols perpetually added to the ban.

"Yes, they did. And they were very much like the US anti-hate laws of today. Post-war, Germany - specifically, post-occupation Germany - learned that didn't work, and tried another way. Why haven't we learned the same lesson?"

Because we didn't have a post-war occupying power that spent a decade de-Nazifying the US?

And for folks who think that Germany's anti-propaganda laws have been a huge success, y'all know that they have been used against anti-fascists there too, right? Like, antifa record labels having their whole stock confiscated because they used specific symbols — even when crossed out — like swastikas?
posted by klangklangston at 2:13 PM on August 21, 2017


Yeah, Jews have been complaining about those crossed out swastikas for ages. Putting a line across it doesn't mean we're still not looking at a swastika. It's one of the many areas where our allies have not thought to ask us or bothered to listen to us.

I'm not familiar with the specific cases you are talking about, but perhaps antifa needs to do better than to add more swastikas to the world.
posted by maxsparber at 2:21 PM on August 21, 2017 [2 favorites]


Do you trust Donald Trump or Jeff Sessions to make those types of distinctions? Have they shown any circumspection about the craven use of any available power irrespective of principle to attack their enemies?

No, but I also don't expect them to respect anything that gets between them and their goals, which is the problem with the argument that principles are going to protect people. The Castille murder was a perfect example of that - look how fast the right tossed aside what they routinely declare, even now, to be sacrosanct when it would protect a minority against an agent of the state and hold the latter accountable.

You can't place this power beyond reach, despite what you might think, so your only option is to make sure it's wielded in a beneficial manner.
posted by NoxAeternum at 2:27 PM on August 21, 2017 [3 favorites]


To add to my previous statement, if the law was used as a pretext to close down antifa, I am opposed to it, but if European countries want to universally ban fascist symbols, I'm all for that. I don't like to see them, and non-Jews seem to enjoy using them willy nilly, as demonstrated by the fact that, thanks to a local newsweekly, I can't walk around the Twin Cities without seeing what looks on first blush like a Nazi graphic.

Warning: Link to what looks like a Nazi graphic.
posted by maxsparber at 2:28 PM on August 21, 2017 [4 favorites]


"How about if you instead think that something bad is happening, has been for some time, and that perhaps we should finally do something about it? That was the point of the response - that the only way you are just now thinking "maybe it could happen here" is if you weren't looking. This isn't an "imminent and unexpected power grab", but a threatened status quo asserting itself more actively because it feels under attack.

And if you don't think that they won't walk all over norms, customs, and principles to achieve what they want, I'd recommend looking at what's been happening in Congress for the past decade.
"

Thanks, chief, but you know that some of us have been dealing with this for a while, and justifying a knee-jerk reaction with tu quoque and a lot of anti-Nazi grar doesn't make your argument better.

"This isn't about disagreement, and that reductio ad absurdam is getting tiresome. When you have a faction that is openly about dehumanizing and abusing minorities and the dispossessed, those groups standing up for their rights and humanity aren't "voicing disagreement"."

Great. Putin says the same thing in his fights against "fascists," which happen to be pretty much anyone opposed to Putin, including the recurrent myth that the US fomented a coup in Ukraine, justifying Russia's revanchist invasion. But it includes domestic laws against dehumanizing and abusing the dispossessed — which there pretty frequently means areas where ethnic Russians are the minority.

Or, hey, closer to home: Peter Singer gets called a Nazi who advocates genocide because of his controversial views on abortion. In fact, plenty of anti-abortion activists use the same language of "genocide," and it doesn't matter that to you or me it's transparently disingenuous.

"No, but I also don't expect them to respect anything that gets between them and their goals, which is the problem with the argument that principles are going to protect people. "

… except that principles do often protect people now. Principles won huge advances in LGBT rights, huge advances in civil rights protections for African Americans, for labor organizers and leftists, for the free press and for political dissidents. Reactively abandoning principles rather than having an intelligent discussion on how to deal with conflicts of rights in the real, practical sense, is something that you don't win by joining the right in doing. Just like violence in general validating fascist framing, the cost is asymmetric and it really feels like stunning historical ignorance to not recognize all of the costs that we have seen again and again in this country through abuses of the very ideas you're advocating.
posted by klangklangston at 3:11 PM on August 21, 2017 [2 favorites]


Or, hey, closer to home: Peter Singer gets called a Nazi who advocates genocide because of his controversial views on abortion.

If by "controversial views on abortion" you mean an argument that is way too fucking close to the logic used to justify the T4 Programme, sure.

In fact, plenty of anti-abortion activists use the same language of "genocide," and it doesn't matter that to you or me it's transparently disingenuous.

Yes, it does matter that it's disingenuous. A large part of why the anti-choice movement has the unearned ground in morality that they do is because we haven't been confronting that disingenuous language, ceding the ground to them.

Not every argument has the same amount of legitimacy, and it's asinine to act like they do, just because yours might wind up on the wrong side of that equation.
posted by NoxAeternum at 3:49 PM on August 21, 2017 [4 favorites]


Those who utter racist speech (as we call it) would not accept that designation. The people that we think of as racist do not wake up in the morning and say to themselves "Today I'm going to go out and spew racist speech". What they say (and it's exactly what we say) is, "Today I am going to go out and tell the truth." Once you realise that racists don't think of themselves as racists but as tellers of the truth, then you realise that hate speech or racist speech as we designate it is not an anomaly, is not a cognitive mistake, is not a correctable error, is not something that can be diagnosed and therefore cured, but is in fact the rationality and truth telling of a vision we happen to despise.


The correct response to a vision or a morality that you despise is not to try and cure it or to make its adherents sit down and read John Stuart Mill's On Liberty, that's not going to do the job. The only way to fight hate speech or racist speech is to recognize it as the speech of your enemy and what you do in response to the speech of your enemy is not prescribe a medication for it but attempt to stamp it out. So long as Critical Race Theory and others fall into the liberal universalist assumption of regarding hate speech as some kind of anomaly which could be recognized as such by everyone, they're going to lose the game. They will win the game only if they really try to win it, rather than falling in with Justice Brandeis' pronouncement that "Sunshine is the best disinfectant".
- Stanley Fish
posted by eustacescrubb at 5:28 PM on August 21, 2017 [5 favorites]


What I was trying to do there was not to necessarily buy into the idea of an imminent and unexpected power-grab, but to try to speak to people who feel that way, and follow through the implications of their own position. If you think something bad is about to happen if you don't step in, you should be very careful about exactly how you do step in, and what precedents you set.

As NoxAeternum said, if you're interested in social justice you'll get a lot farther establishing long-term success if you point out the problem has been existing for some time. It is terribly comforting to believe the Nazis just appeared out of thin air, but it is wholly inaccurate and the sort of attitude that allows people to think "racism is over!" once the Nazi parades have stopped.

You seem to know that the Nazis just didn't appear--but you said you're trying to appeal to people who feel they did. OK, so this basically means you're appealing to white people who are pretty ignorant about the actual history and current state of racism in this country, and are unaffected by the speech themselves. And you want them to be the arbiters of how free speech is treated.

The arguments about stamping out hate speech are being led by members of groups that are targeted by this bullshit, members who have had to endure it and any effects for centuries. Perhaps rather than addressing people who are not getting shat by racists, instead you construct your arguments towards those who are. Targets of hate speech spewed by white supremacists & etc know better than anyone else what it's like to be a target--and they also know what it's like to have their speech repressed because that's kind of what the government and law enforcement has done if you're, say, black and advocating for civil rights. If you're truly interested in an outcome of your principles that protects the marginalized as well as allowing people to say unpopular opinions, then who would be better than a group of people who have been at the shit end of both?
posted by Anonymous at 6:23 PM on August 21, 2017


Perhaps rather than addressing people who are not getting shat by racists, instead you construct your arguments towards those who are.

We have to do both; in particular, given the nature of power and the fact that we are ceding power here to particular, not especially diverse or groups, to block and select as they see fit, I have to provide arguments that catch the ear of those powerful groups.

Talking about the risks of the powerful controlling the means of communication is an easier conversation to have with those who have experienced direct oppression. Persuading those with that power that they, even if they think they are using that power wisely, are part of the problem, is often much trickier.
posted by ntk at 11:35 AM on August 22, 2017 [1 favorite]


I think you're still missing the point. By addressing your arguments to the powerful, you're essentially providing existing power structures more excuses to ignore the oppression of the marginalized, because the privileged can go on telling themselves that it's unethical for them to do anything about the hate groups who are oppressing minority groups under the veneer of "free speech".

You seem to be operating under the assumption that marginalized groups have the upper hand in this conversation, and all they want is for the Nazis to stop talking, period. That they don't care about free speech, or freedom of expression, or recognize that restrictions on free speech can also be used to restrict their own. Of course they understand the danger of restricting free speech, they themselves have been victims of such strictures far longer than neo-Nazis and contemporary Confederate sympathizers.

Your arguments thus far also give the impression that you don't recognize that paying attention to white nationalists and thinking about limiting their speech is an extremely new thing. Racial minorities have been attacked by them for centuries without anyone in power giving a shit. Or worse, those in power actively encouraging it.

It appears you want to remain sensitive to the needs of the oppressed, and that's why I'm saying that you work with them first. Ask the actual victims, the marginalized groups, about the best way to balance the protection of free speech (which they need) while still protecting them from, you know, white nationalist groups organizing attacks on their communities.

Instead of assuming you know the best way to do this yourself, go to the people who would be most affected and talk with them about devising strategies. Then bring these strategies to the powerful and privileged and advocate for their implementation. Because right now, from both your essay and your comments, it doesn't seem you have done that.
posted by Anonymous at 1:20 PM on August 22, 2017


I'm sorry if I'm failing to be clear here. I explicitly laid out what I believe some elements of the power structure are, which I believe match your own description. I described the purpose of one counterfactual sentence in that essay (an essay that had many contributors, and draws from conversations across many groups), and its purpose. I've highlighted that there are other arguments, and other discussions that go on, including the conversations you have suggested (conversations that I have referred to).

I think we have differences about the history of limitations on speech, but I'm happy to accept your advice on the importance of working together to fight oppression. Now, in the interests of moving myself out of the center of that conversation, I'm outa here!
posted by ntk at 1:51 PM on August 22, 2017


Or, hey, closer to home: Peter Singer gets called a Nazi who advocates genocide because of his controversial views on abortion.

If by "controversial views on abortion" you mean an argument that is way too fucking close to the logic used to justify the T4 Programme, sure.


So, I've been thinkg more about this, in light of something I said a while back about the use of euphemism when we discuss free speech. Let's be straight here - Singer does not have "controversial views on abortion", but instead has argued for the justification of infanticide of disabled children. And it's important to note what his position is for two key reasons:

*One, actually acknowledging what his views are shoes that his position is not merely "controversial" (a scope that honestly covers a wide gamut of positions), but is a fringe view that many find beyond the pale, and
*Two, it's an argument that for many strikes too close to the arguments used by the Third Reich to justify the T4 Programme, under which the developmentally disabled and infirm were killed because they were seen as a drain on society. As such, critics may be calling him "Nazi" not out of hyperbole, but out of a genuine feeling that his position is similar to theirs.

More to the point, replacing the euphemism "controversial position on abortion" with his actual viewpoint serves to delegitimize his position and legitimize his critics, and the opposite happens when these views are replaced with euphemisms. And this is something I see happen over and over whenever "free speech" is debated - bigotry and hate get framed as "controversial", or "distasteful", or "unpopular" (and as I keep saying, that particular one I find especially odious because many times it's also a lie.) It's a framing that reframes the opposition as being one of disagreement, of finding something distateful to oneself. And it's this framing that winds up hiding the damage that hate speech does, of how it makes the targeted fear for their safety, how it pushes them out of the public space.

So, as I've said previously, my position is no more euphemisms. You feel that bigotry and hate is something that needs to be protected to ensure free speech, then make that argument, without reframing that speech as being merely "controversial", "distasteful", "unpopular", etc. If the matter is that important, that critical, then it should be possible to do. Of course, my feeling is that these euphemisms are used because that argument is much harder to construct, and even harder to sell.
posted by NoxAeternum at 11:10 PM on August 23, 2017 [3 favorites]


"So, I've been thinkg more about this, in light of something I said a while back about the use of euphemism when we discuss free speech. Let's be straight here - Singer does not have "controversial views on abortion", but instead has argued for the justification of infanticide of disabled children."

If you're against euphemism, you shouldn't employ tendentious phrasing of his views. That's a dishonest paraphrase that leads me to wonder if you've actually read what you're critiquing.

"Two, it's an argument that for many strikes too close to the arguments used by the Third Reich to justify the T4 Programme, under which the developmentally disabled and infirm were killed because they were seen as a drain on society. As such, critics may be calling him "Nazi" not out of hyperbole, but out of a genuine feeling that his position is similar to theirs."

Peter Singer is a Jew whose parents were killed by Nazis in the Holocaust. As such, misrepresenting his views to describe him as a Nazi seems fairly vile.

"More to the point, replacing the euphemism "controversial position on abortion" with his actual viewpoint serves to delegitimize his position and legitimize his critics, and the opposite happens when these views are replaced with euphemisms. "

No, it doesn't. One way you make this obvious is that you haven't actually replaced the "euphemism" with his actual views.

His actual position is that the syllogism:
1) It is wrong to kill an innocent human.
2) Fetuses are innocent humans.
3) Therefore, abortion is wrong.
is incoherent not because of the second point, but because of the first. He ties this in to a larger utilitarian argument that grounds ethical choices in suffering pain, with the explicit intent to argue that what matters for ethical distinction isn't species, but capacity for pain.

From this, he argues that there is nothing ethically wrong with a woman aborting a fetus prior to the point of pain sensitivity if it conflicts with what she wants to do — essentially a stark, pro-choice argument.

This argument is extended to discuss euthanasia, both voluntary and involuntary (in the case of either an inability to consent or an active lack of consent). He extends the argument that the potential of the infant to become a fully realized, conscious, rational human with capacity for pain is irrelevant to whether or not that infant can be ethically euthanized, something pro-choice advocates must accept when holding to the maxim that it's the mother's choice. But the impact on the lives of the mother (and family, writ larger) is a legitimate concern.

From there, he notes that we already allow parents to selectively abort children with severe disabilities up to an arbitrary point that is not determined by the fetus's actual capacity as a human, and points out this is incoherent, and contrary to our generally accepted beliefs in other areas.

But fundamentally, he does not advocate the abortion of disabled children: he says that the parents are the ones who should be weighing the decision, and that if we grant protections to sub-rational humans, we should extend those protections to animals with similar capacity. Because he is most renowned for his extensive animal rights advocacy, it is a perverse reading to think that he doesn't think any protections should be extended.

So, fundamentally, he's DESCRIBING a conflict between something most liberals wholeheartedly embrace — and I assume you do too — that the mother has the right to decide whether or not to carry a fetus, and the practice of arbitrarily limiting that right based on incoherent arguments.

Describing this as "justification of infanticide of disabled children" is dishonest, shows zero engagement with the arguments he does make (and it's not like there aren't plenty of responses that argue convincingly against points that he does make), and the Nazi comparisons are both repugnantly framed as if the critic has more experience with the Holocaust than Singer does, and the worst form of ad hominem argument.

Further, this all rather proves the point that I was making: Attempting to deny Singer a platform, especially on the charge that 'he's a Nazi and we're all against Nazis, right?', fundamentally leaves us worse off than recognizing the ways that we act inconsistently as a society, and interrogating those conflicts. If you had bothered to engage with Singer's work, or even that of his critics, you wouldn't make such baldly dishonest claims about what he has said.
posted by klangklangston at 11:40 AM on August 24, 2017 [1 favorite]


"Yes, it does matter that it's disingenuous. A large part of why the anti-choice movement has the unearned ground in morality that they do is because we haven't been confronting that disingenuous language, ceding the ground to them.

Not every argument has the same amount of legitimacy, and it's asinine to act like they do, just because yours might wind up on the wrong side of that equation.
"

So, you want to keep the "Satanist" monuments from being placed next to Christian ones? Because the Satanist monuments are entirely disingenuous, but make a point that if explicit Christian speech is allowed, Satanist speech must be too.

Having the law adjudicate which beliefs are sincere is a tricky thing, and you don't seem to understand either the benefit of process-oriented, content neutral regulations, nor the relative popularity of liberal and progressive arguments versus traditionalist, conservative arguments. You can't just argue for protections for those you agree with. If you do cede that power, ever mosque in a conservative area will be shuttered, Black Lives Matter will never get another permit for a march (remember, at the Dallas Black Lives Matter march, more people were killed than at Charlottesville), you'll see more corporate control of universities…

I mean, are you just not aware of HUAC or COINTELPRO? When you argue that the state should control speech in America, that's what you have gotten, that's what you will get, and you've basically made zero credible arguments about why this time it would be different.
posted by klangklangston at 12:19 PM on August 24, 2017


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