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These blasphemy laws are spreading because they're popular. In democracies, majority rules. And when the majority doesn't like what the minority has to say, th

These blasphemy laws are spreading because they're popular. In democracies, majority rules. And when the majority doesn't like what the minority has to say, they can use the government to force their way. It's truly amazing how much the US bill of rights still helps protect individual rights, even in 2017. Truly prescient writing which has impacted both law and culture. It is disconcerting to me how the cultural element of free speech seems to be missing from the UC Berkeley and similar college populations. I hope that the anti-speech movements we've seen at some liberal colleges is just a sign of students coming of age, and not their general attitude toward unpopular speech.

api 9y ago
This is why the US isn't a democracy, and shouldn't be. It's a republic. Democracy is one check in a system of checks and balances.
- vkou 9y ago
  The USSR was a republic. North Korea is a republic. Cuba is a republic. Russia is a republic. Australia is not a republic. Canada is not a republic. France is a republic. A republic is a country that does not have a monarch as a head of state. It has no bearing on how free, or democratic, or representative a country is. The United States is an (arguably weak) representative democracy, that happens to be a republic.
  - lr4444lr 9y ago
    That isn't at all what the parent comment meant. Significant writings from the American founding fathers of the United States warn about the perils of democracy.
    - __jal 9y ago
      Yep. They wanted to keep the lie of democracy alive because it makes the proles feel empowered.
    - vkou 9y ago
      Of course wealthy landed founded fathers were concerned about non-wealthy, non-landed non-persons having political influence. There are a lot more of the latter, and they have little use for the former. Realizing that the peasantry needed to be kept away from power was not some enlightened revelation. It's the divine right of kings by another name.
      - lr4444lr 9y ago
        Maybe you should read Federalist Paper #10, #14, and some of Jefferson's letters before resorting to snide cynicism.
        vkou 9y ago
        If we were to take a more charitable interpretation of them then mine, then I would say that the American experiment failed utterly. "A number of citizens, whether amounting to a minority or majority of the whole, who are united and actuated by some common impulse of passion, or of interest, adverse to the rights of other citizens, or to the permanent and aggregate interests of the community" is a picture-perfect description of the American political landscape, despite all the hubbub about states rights, direct democracy, and how your representatives know best.
  - cestith 9y ago
    You wouldn't say the Kim dynasty are de facto monarchs? Here's a fuller definition of "republic": a state in which supreme power is held by the people and their elected representatives, and which has an elected or nominated president rather than a monarch. Who exactly nominated and elected Kim Jong-Un? "Eternal President of the Republic" doesn't sound much like a representative of the people to me. It sounds like an emperor who's dishonest about his role.
    - vkou 9y ago
      > You wouldn't say the Kim dynasty are de facto monarchs? As in all communist states, Kim Jong-Un was nominated and elected by representatives of the Worker's Party of Korea. Even by Soviet politburo standards, that wasn't a fair election, but formally, the power of the Party Secretary/Grand Poobah/Whatever, is derived from the party. Unlike most communist states, though, his position is de-facto hereditary. Either way, a strong argument could be made that while the DPRK is a monarchy, the USSR clearly was not one.
- guelo 9y ago
  Free speech has less to do with it being a republic and more to do with it being a constitutional democracy. The constitution itself was an elitist project conceived by a few rich landowners. Luckily the elites in question mostly had an enlightened liberal ideology, with the big exception that "All men are created equal" applied only to white men.
  - brightball 9y ago
    All men are created equal lay the groundwork for what would come later. The ideology came from not founding a single country but from negotiating the formation of a federal government around multiple independent states with varying populations. This negotiation forced people to think well beyond simply "majority rules".
- putlake 9y ago
  I don't know why you are being down voted. It is true that America is a republic and not a pure democracy. A republic doesn't just mean no monarch. A republic is different from a pure democracy because it explicitly protects the rights of minorities through a constitution. That is why the Supreme Court can rule that state laws banning gay marriage are unconstitutional, and therefore cannot exist.
  - gnaritas 9y ago
    He's being down-voted because he's wrong; the US is a democracy, and a republic, and it has a constitution. Each of these things means something different but they are all true. > A republic doesn't just mean no monarch. Yes it does. > A republic is different from a pure democracy because it explicitly protects the rights of minorities through a constitution. Not true; a constitutional system does that, but that has nothing to do with being a republic. Many republics have no such protections. You're conflating a constitutional government with a republic. Republic means nothing more than no monarchy. There are lots of republics in the world, they don't all protect minorities through a constitution or even have a constitution because that's not what the word republic means.
    - cestith 9y ago
      "res publica". A republic is a society in which the interests of the people are represented by elected or appointed officials who do not inherit their positions.
      - aaron-lebo 9y ago
        A republic is really whatever someone feels like it means. Madison really liked the term as a way of distinguishing Roman democracy from Athenian, but there's no hard definition, or in practice there hasn't been. Ancient Rome, the UK, Venice, North Korea, the US are all "republics".
      - gnaritas 9y ago
        Yes, that's what it means to say "no monarchy". When positions are inherited that's a royal class.
theseatoms 9y ago
This is why I correct people to "liberal democracy" when they describe our system of government as "democracy". Better yet, a "liberal, constitutional democratic republic". </pendantry> Edit: "Liberal" in the "classic liberal" sense. (i.e. the protection of individual liberty)
- paulgb 9y ago
  If we're going to be pedantic, that's not a correction, it's just greater specificity. The genre of "actually the USA isn't a democracy it's an X" (where X is a subset of democracies) arguments is oddly persistent. I call it the "it's not a fruit it's a banana" argument.
  - theseatoms 9y ago
    You're right. "Correct" is the wrong word. It just seems best to be as specific as possible in political conversations. The point I wanted to stress was the "liberal" piece—the constitutional protection against mob rule.
    - paulgb 9y ago
      Indeed. The second part of my comment was aimed more at api's comment below.
tomdell 9y ago
There's a big difference between being anti-free speech and just not wanting someone to speak on your campus.
- jtuente 9y ago
  The funniest part is that Coulter was invited by a group that disagrees with her views.
  - orblivion 9y ago
    The UC College Republicans?
    - rfrank 9y ago
      Young America's Foundation. http://www.yaf.org/news/statement-young-americas-foundations-april-27-lecture-uc-berkeley/ http://www.yaf.org/news/statement-young-americas-foundations...
      - orblivion 9y ago
        "Young America’s Foundation is committed to ensuring that increasing numbers of young Americans understand and are inspired by the ideas of individual freedom, a strong national defense, free enterprise, and traditional values." Doesn't mean they like Coulter but at least they're not far off.
- kolbe 9y ago
  not really. especially when it's not your campus, and it's just a publicly funded school that you attend, and you express your dislike with violence.
  - drewbuschhorn 9y ago
    Obviously this is political and so shouldn't be hitting HN, but I'll swing at this pitch. "Violence" is always somehow brought into the mix by conservatives. The whole Berkeley-is-against-free-speech talking point falls apart when you see how quick conservative America was drop Milo like a hot potato once he said something that crossed their lines. Ann Coulter is the same way, and the sheer craziness of saying a woman on the New York Times best seller list, on talk shows everyday, somehow is having her right to free speech stopped by not being able to give a lecture on campus at the most crazy liberal college in the nation. You believe in free speech, so long as it's your free speech and don't pretend otherwise. I'm not out protesting at Fox news for giving Coulter a talk show, but we've seen how far conservative belief in free speech goes for Colbert this week.
lr4444lr 9y ago
They can work in reverse too, when the majority is compelled to silence over a few sacred cows. It's been said that man has a natural desire for freedom, but it certainly isn't the natural state of existence. Despite many warranted criticisms against my country, I'm very grateful to be American.
- armenarmen 9y ago
  Nasim taleb wrote a great article in that: https://medium.com/incerto/the-most-intolerant-wins-the-dictatorship-of-the-small-minority-3f1f83ce4e15 https://medium.com/incerto/the-most-intolerant-wins-the-dict...
- deleted 9y ago
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- cgag 9y ago
  Yeah the recent anti free speech movement and fall of free speech in Europe has given me a much greater appreciation for America than I used to have.
  - Certhas 9y ago
    What fall of free speech in Europe? By aggregate score about every EU country ranks ahead of the US in the Freedom House Freedom index: https://freedomhouse.org/report/fiw-2017-table-country-scores https://freedomhouse.org/report/fiw-2017-table-country-score... The US comes in at 48th. That's not because it's score is particularly bad, it's because freedom is highly valued and strongly protected in many countries. The only countries with a perfect score are Finland, Norway and Sweden.
    - cgag 9y ago
      Actual hate speech laws, laws against holocaust denial, getting arrested for saying offensive things on twitter, that kind of thing.
    - areyousure 9y ago
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maxerickson 9y ago
Why smear the whole school with the actions of activists?
- angersock 9y ago
  This logic has never been held to consistently. Why hold gun-owners responsible for a few nutters? Why hold police responsible for a few bad apples? etc.
  - maxerickson 9y ago
    Yes, there are more than 1 human and even 1 human would struggle to be logically consistent. I think your analogies aren't going to work out very well if you try to carefully articulate them though.
- tuna-piano 9y ago
  Good point, I should have been more careful characterizing to broadly. Of course, a counter-protest is just a type of speech that should be protected. It's tough to say what percent of the counter protestors thought that Milo/Coulter/Murray/etc shouldn't have been allowed on campus, and what percent just wanted to voice their displeasure and disagreement. That said, it does seem like a large number of those in the crowd actually didn't want the speakers to voice their opinions at all.
- mason240 9y ago
  I wasn't aware the school's president was just an activist.
  - maxerickson 9y ago
    I wasn't aware that the president of the university was elected by the students and faculty to speak on their behalf.
treebeard901 9y ago
> It is disconcerting to me how the cultural element of free speech seems to be missing from the UC Berkeley and similar college populations. The UC Berkeley controversy is a bad example. It is a manufactured controversy with the intent to paint all colleges as being unwelcome to conservative viewpoints. How receptive would Liberty University be to Planned Parenthood giving a speech to the students? It is a false equivalence and it is another example of manufacturing outrage by shining a light on deep cultural differences.
- enknamel 9y ago
  I don't think Liberty University would riot and literally try to kill the people from Planned Parenthood. They might stand outside with signs and protest. What we are seeing in Berkeley is a much bigger issue. They are literally trying to harm and silence anyone who doesn't get in line or speaks out against their agenda.
orblivion 9y ago
The violent anti-free speech people are not necessarily UC Students. I'd guess they're mostly not. A lot of the action wasn't even on campus.
- TheGirondin 9y ago
  True, some of them like Eric Clanton are professors from nearby colleges.
  - orblivion 9y ago
    I assumed they were assorted anarchists from Oakland.
drewbuschhorn 9y ago
Basically all colleges and populations in the US have a strong subset of anti-free speech feeling, with an equal amount between conservatives and liberals on campus: https://kf-site-production.s3.amazonaws.com/publications/pdfs/000/000/184/original/FreeSpeech_campus.pdf https://kf-site-production.s3.amazonaws.com/publications/pdf... Some questions the poll asked and the responses Do you think colleges should or should not be able to establish policies that restrict each of the following types of speech or expression on campus? How about ... ? Expressing political views that are upsetting or offensive to certain groups Results: % Should be able to restrict: Democrats: 26% Independents: 27% Republicans 25% % Should not be able to: Democrats: 72% Independents: 73% Republicans 75% If you had to choose, do you think it is more important for colleges to [ create a positive learning environment for all students by prohibiting certain speech or expression of viewpoints that are offensive or biased against certain groups of people, (or to) create an open learning environment where students are exposed to all types of speech and viewpoints, even if it means allowing speech that is offensive or biased against certain groups of people]? Results: % Open environment/Allow offensive speech: Democrats: 66% Independents: 70% Republicans 66% % Positive environment/Prohibit certain speech: Democrats: 30% Independents: 24% Republicans 29% As you may know, student protesters on some campuses attempted to prevent members of the media from reporting on their protest. Do you think students should or should not be able to prevent reporters from covering protests held on college campuses? Results: % Yes, should: Democrats: 29% Independents: 29% Republicans 25% % No, should not: Democrats: 69% Independents: 70% Republicans 74%
- ApolloFortyNine 9y ago
  Vast majority? Does 1/4 not freak you out? Especially for: Expressing political views that are upsetting or offensive to certain groups Results: % Should be able to restrict: Democrats: 26% Independents: 27% Republicans 25% That is actually terrifying, since if this rule ever got passed, the US would essentially become a one party state.
  - drewbuschhorn 9y ago
    Which one party? I don't mean that factiously. The fact that the percentage is so similar tells me it's more a human effect than a particular belief system effect, and so the mechanisms that worked in the past to fight it will continue to do so. We still have to do the fighting, but singling out Berkeley is pointless and obscures the issue.
padseeker 9y ago
Protesting hate speech is free speech. You are deliberately conflating protest of free speech with government sanctioned punishment of free speech. In all honesty I'm don't agree with the violent protests against Ann Coulter and Milo out at Berkeley. But what you are talking about is not blasphemy.
- skybrian 9y ago
  Maybe we need to talk about consent here. Should speech where one party doesn't consent to having a conversation at all really be protected? How about disrupting speech between other people who mutually consent to it?
  - rfrank 9y ago
    No, we don't need to talk about consent. If both parties had to consent to a conversation, the civil rights movement would have never happened.
    - skybrian 9y ago
      I don't know about that. Protests often do involve illegal activity. You have heard of civil disobedience?
      - rfrank 9y ago
        No, I've never heard of civil disobedience. Fantastic question. Sure seems to me like people would have been able to say, "I don't consent to listening to these people ask for equal representation, an aggressive violation of my rights." And then the whole movement gets stopped in its tracks when it ceases to be protected speech.
- cjensen 9y ago
  You are wrong: this is the Government-sanctioned prevention of Free Speech. The problem is not that there were protesters. The problem was the the Government (which the University is an arm of) allowed a mob to shut down speech, thereby making the Government complicit in the censorship, which is a blatant violation of the First Amendment. Specifically, the errors made by the University include (1) failing to provide adequate security, thereby permitting fascists to shutdown speech and (2) attempting to require provocative speakers to move their speech to a time when students would be less available to actually listen. A single unexpected incident is not a problem: stuff happens that you don't plan for. The problem came when they failed to accommodate later speakers.
ianbicking 9y ago
> In democracies, majority rules. And when the majority doesn't like what the minority has to say, they can use the government to force their way. It's majority rules, but I don't think you have the right interpretation of why the majority would rule this way. The majority just wants everyone to be calm and cool, and for religion to be personal, and for ideas to stay just ideas. In the great wide world there are many ideas, and the more diversity of ideas there are, the more diversity of people there are, the more the conflict of ideas becomes a problem. Unless ideas are just toys, then everyone can play with their toys in peace. And why do most people want ideas to stay ideas? Because we have a real world to worry about! We all got shit to do. We all have expectations of how the world works, the world in which we have to do our shit. Unless our heads are full of ideas and fantasies, we'd rather a stable world order to operate in. So you get a law like this: if you don't have anything nice to say then don't say anything at all.
- aaron-lebo 9y ago
  Ian! You have too many great libraries to count. Is the majority really like that? Definitely not in Muslim lands (look at surveys for % who support Sharia law), and when you look at Prop 8 California, maybe not in liberal democracies either. Not to opine on human nature too much, but people (perhaps not as individuals but as society) generally seem to accept whatever they can get and if that means someone else is disadvantaged, too bad. It's that whole Madisonian "if people were angels" thing.
- exclusiv 9y ago
  > if you don't have anything nice to say then don't say anything at all. While I agree with that statement in general, I don't agree with making laws to use that to infringe on free speech. We've never made a law to prevent assholes from being assholes. I prefer them being exposed anyway. It makes it easier to hire or to decide who to be friends with when they are allowed by society to do as they wish with their free speech. Apart from that - who decides what's nice? Many things are subjective when it comes to nice. As an example - Is it nice to say that our society is obese and needs to take more accountability? That most people can prevent diabetes? To most people, no that's not a nice thing to say. I wouldn't label it as a malicious thing to say though. It's accurate. Some discussions aren't going to be nice. You can't talk about anything of substance as a society without some groups getting upset. We should aim for pragmatic discussions though.
Goladus 9y ago
In democracies, majority rules. One reason why, until fairly recently, western Democracies were usually called Liberal Democracies. It's more than just voting for leaders or public policy, it's voting for public policy in the context of a FREE society where the free exchange of ideas in pursuit of truth is protected for everyone.
tw04 9y ago
Exactly how is the culture of free speech missing? Freedom of speech doesn't mean you're guaranteed a venue at which to speak...
- Goladus 9y ago
  Exactly how is the culture of free speech missing? Freedom of speech doesn't mean you're guaranteed a venue at which to speak... Prevalence of coercive and even violent tactics to shut down speech, using excuses like "Freedom of speech doesn't mean you're guaranteed a venue at which to speak" Relative paucity of anyone willing to engage with these conservatives honestly in a battle of ideas.
  - Jotra7 9y ago
    The conservatives lost the battle of ideas years ago. They survive solely on appeals to emotion.
- stale2002 9y ago
  Because people go around saying stuff like "freedom of speech doesn't mean freedom from consequences" and then they smash your head in with a baseball bat as their "consequence".
faragon 9y ago
Sure. The problem is that many people is not aware that $democracy != $(tyranny of the majority). E.g. people asking for "voting" in order to crush minorities, e.g. "we want to vote", so we can impose you a freak technocracy or ethnocracy (e.g. in the EU we have lots of micro-nationalisms willing to impose their totalitarian ethnocracy, travestying it as "democracy", with excuses based on "tradition", "language", or even genetic supremacist arguments -"we don't have the same DNA as our neighbors, so we deserve being an independent region", yes, that crazy-). Religion fanaticism, romantic nationalism, and other anti-democratic trends are going to put us again on war. Edit: s/etnocracy/ethnocracy/g
- throwanem 9y ago
  What about democracy suggests that tyranny of the majority is not a very probable failure mode? It's like a fission reactor with a positive void coefficient - the problem is not that it can't be run safely with sufficiently complex controls, but rather what happens when those complex controls themselves fail.
  - faragon 9y ago
    Well, in the EU we have regions ruled by people that explicitly say they'll go against the rule of law (say, and do, with any available law loopholes, wasting citizens money and time). So go figure the "quality" of the democracy in those regions.
- LeifCarrotson 9y ago
  > etnocracy Do you mean "Ethnocracy", a form of government controlled by a particular ethnic group? I would have assumed this was just a typo, but you wrote it this way twice.
  - faragon 9y ago
    Yes, it was a typo (in my mother tongue it lacks the "h"). BTW, for ethnocracy I mean e.g. regions with 55% of people having language A, 35% people having language B, but because being ruled by people having language B (because in some provinces of that region the vote of one citizen is worth up to 3 times than in other more populated provinces) you have mandatory monolingual school and administration in language B (yes, that crazy -if you ask for bilingual/trilingual schools you're told "fascist" or "against the people"-). Go figure. That's the "democracy" we have in some regions in the European Union. That's why I want the EU becomes one unified country, so civil rights get respected, and totalitarian regional governments get forced to respect the rule of law, so citizen's civil rights get respected.
b0rsuk 9y ago
There are at least two basic flavors of a republic: * one that puts emphasis on democracy, * another that puts emphasis on liberalism. I forgot the exact terms for them, especially the second one. The basic difference is that the first one says any action is valid as long as it was democratically chosen. The second says freedom of one person ends where freedom of the next person starts. Otherwise, anything goes. The second one has high respect for laws, constitution and institutions, in an attempt to assure the system doesn't degenerate. Ancient Athens were an example of the first, Sparta - regarded as the realized utopia by ancient Greeks - example of the latter. It is perhaps little known that USA's Founding Fathers had more faith in Sparta's system than the Athenian one. Things we (the western civilization, broadly speaking) owe to Sparta are: strong costitution, president (2 kings in Sparta), ministers (ephors), senate (Gerusia; council of elders had the strongest power in Sparta), the lower house ouf the parliament (Apella, gathering of all citizens above the age of 30), although you might argue Apella was closer to common voting. There's a morbidly fascinating series about Spartans by the History channel. I highly recommend it. They had a really unique political system, resembling BOTH fascism and communism. But I digress. Democracy, without laws and institutions acting as safeguards, is a cruel system. I remember there were only a couple of years Athenians DIDN'T vote to open a year by starting a war. Without safeguards, if someone is disliked enough, he can be sentenced to death and you don't need a proof. Athenians did that to Socrates, because he was unpleasant to be around due to his biting critique. Athenians also had a system where officials and judges were assigned to their posts literally at random, using a lottery machine with marbles. The same person could be charged in a court and some time later assigned as a judge in his own case. Talk about conflict of interest.
- deleted 9y ago
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tryitnow 9y ago
I think it's the latter. I remember being super worried about political correctness when I was in college in the 90s. I thought was terrible and anti-free speech. Considering we just elected the most politically incorrect presidential candidate in modern history my concerns were likely overblown. I don't think the college stuff is really about free speech. As far as I know Ann Coulter et al. have the right to speak anywhere that will have them. It's just that a pretty sizable and vocal segment of the Berkeley student body won't have them. Institutions get to choose - if they want to be closed minded that's their fate. A blasphemy law on the other hand, is a qualitatively different thing. Comparing a college that doesn't want a particular speaker on their campus to a government that literally snatches you up and throws you in prison is a pretty far stretch.
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emodendroket 9y ago
> It's truly amazing how much the US bill of rights still helps protect individual rights, even in 2017. Truly prescient writing which has impacted both law and culture. It's kind of weird that people attribute these superpowers to James Madison when the Bill of Rights was mainly originally intended to be ineffectual but mollify states-righters who opposed the Constitution. Here's Gordon Wood in Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic: > In the early fall of 1789 the Congress passed the amendments and sent them to the states for ratification. By then many Federalists had come to see that a bill of rights might be a good thing after all. Not only was it the best way of undercutting the strength of Anti-Federalism in the country, but the Bill of Rights that emerged, as Hamilton pointed out, left “the structure of the government and the mass and distribution of its powers where they were.” Anti-Federalists in the Congress began to realize that Madison’s rights-based amendments weakened the desire for a second convention and thus actually worked against their cause of fundamentally altering the Constitution. Madison’s amendments, as opponents of the Constitution angrily came to realize, were “good for nothing” and were “calculated merely to amuse, or rather to deceive.” They affected “personal liberty alone, leaving the great points of the Judiciary & direct taxation &c. to stand as they are.” Before long the Federalists were expressing surprise that the Anti-Federalists had become such vigorous opponents of amendments, since they were originally their idea.

api 9y ago

This is why the US isn't a democracy, and shouldn't be. It's a republic. Democracy is one check in a system of checks and balances.

vkou 9y ago
The USSR was a republic. North Korea is a republic. Cuba is a republic. Russia is a republic. Australia is not a republic. Canada is not a republic. France is a republic. A republic is a country that does not have a monarch as a head of state. It has no bearing on how free, or democratic, or representative a country is. The United States is an (arguably weak) representative democracy, that happens to be a republic.
- lr4444lr 9y ago
  That isn't at all what the parent comment meant. Significant writings from the American founding fathers of the United States warn about the perils of democracy.
  - __jal 9y ago
    Yep. They wanted to keep the lie of democracy alive because it makes the proles feel empowered.
  - vkou 9y ago
    Of course wealthy landed founded fathers were concerned about non-wealthy, non-landed non-persons having political influence. There are a lot more of the latter, and they have little use for the former. Realizing that the peasantry needed to be kept away from power was not some enlightened revelation. It's the divine right of kings by another name.
    - lr4444lr 9y ago
      Maybe you should read Federalist Paper #10, #14, and some of Jefferson's letters before resorting to snide cynicism.
      - vkou 9y ago
        If we were to take a more charitable interpretation of them then mine, then I would say that the American experiment failed utterly. "A number of citizens, whether amounting to a minority or majority of the whole, who are united and actuated by some common impulse of passion, or of interest, adverse to the rights of other citizens, or to the permanent and aggregate interests of the community" is a picture-perfect description of the American political landscape, despite all the hubbub about states rights, direct democracy, and how your representatives know best.
- cestith 9y ago
  You wouldn't say the Kim dynasty are de facto monarchs? Here's a fuller definition of "republic": a state in which supreme power is held by the people and their elected representatives, and which has an elected or nominated president rather than a monarch. Who exactly nominated and elected Kim Jong-Un? "Eternal President of the Republic" doesn't sound much like a representative of the people to me. It sounds like an emperor who's dishonest about his role.
  - vkou 9y ago
    > You wouldn't say the Kim dynasty are de facto monarchs? As in all communist states, Kim Jong-Un was nominated and elected by representatives of the Worker's Party of Korea. Even by Soviet politburo standards, that wasn't a fair election, but formally, the power of the Party Secretary/Grand Poobah/Whatever, is derived from the party. Unlike most communist states, though, his position is de-facto hereditary. Either way, a strong argument could be made that while the DPRK is a monarchy, the USSR clearly was not one.
guelo 9y ago
Free speech has less to do with it being a republic and more to do with it being a constitutional democracy. The constitution itself was an elitist project conceived by a few rich landowners. Luckily the elites in question mostly had an enlightened liberal ideology, with the big exception that "All men are created equal" applied only to white men.
- brightball 9y ago
  All men are created equal lay the groundwork for what would come later. The ideology came from not founding a single country but from negotiating the formation of a federal government around multiple independent states with varying populations. This negotiation forced people to think well beyond simply "majority rules".
putlake 9y ago
I don't know why you are being down voted. It is true that America is a republic and not a pure democracy. A republic doesn't just mean no monarch. A republic is different from a pure democracy because it explicitly protects the rights of minorities through a constitution. That is why the Supreme Court can rule that state laws banning gay marriage are unconstitutional, and therefore cannot exist.
- gnaritas 9y ago
  He's being down-voted because he's wrong; the US is a democracy, and a republic, and it has a constitution. Each of these things means something different but they are all true. > A republic doesn't just mean no monarch. Yes it does. > A republic is different from a pure democracy because it explicitly protects the rights of minorities through a constitution. Not true; a constitutional system does that, but that has nothing to do with being a republic. Many republics have no such protections. You're conflating a constitutional government with a republic. Republic means nothing more than no monarchy. There are lots of republics in the world, they don't all protect minorities through a constitution or even have a constitution because that's not what the word republic means.
  - cestith 9y ago
    "res publica". A republic is a society in which the interests of the people are represented by elected or appointed officials who do not inherit their positions.
    - aaron-lebo 9y ago
      A republic is really whatever someone feels like it means. Madison really liked the term as a way of distinguishing Roman democracy from Athenian, but there's no hard definition, or in practice there hasn't been. Ancient Rome, the UK, Venice, North Korea, the US are all "republics".
    - gnaritas 9y ago
      Yes, that's what it means to say "no monarchy". When positions are inherited that's a royal class.

theseatoms 9y ago

This is why I correct people to "liberal democracy" when they describe our system of government as "democracy". Better yet, a "liberal, constitutional democratic republic". </pendantry> Edit: "Liberal" in the "classic liberal" sense. (i.e. the protection of individual liberty)

paulgb 9y ago
If we're going to be pedantic, that's not a correction, it's just greater specificity. The genre of "actually the USA isn't a democracy it's an X" (where X is a subset of democracies) arguments is oddly persistent. I call it the "it's not a fruit it's a banana" argument.
- theseatoms 9y ago
  You're right. "Correct" is the wrong word. It just seems best to be as specific as possible in political conversations. The point I wanted to stress was the "liberal" piece—the constitutional protection against mob rule.
  - paulgb 9y ago
    Indeed. The second part of my comment was aimed more at api's comment below.

tomdell 9y ago

There's a big difference between being anti-free speech and just not wanting someone to speak on your campus.

jtuente 9y ago
The funniest part is that Coulter was invited by a group that disagrees with her views.
- orblivion 9y ago
  The UC College Republicans?
  - rfrank 9y ago
    Young America's Foundation. http://www.yaf.org/news/statement-young-americas-foundations-april-27-lecture-uc-berkeley/ http://www.yaf.org/news/statement-young-americas-foundations...
    - orblivion 9y ago
      "Young America’s Foundation is committed to ensuring that increasing numbers of young Americans understand and are inspired by the ideas of individual freedom, a strong national defense, free enterprise, and traditional values." Doesn't mean they like Coulter but at least they're not far off.
kolbe 9y ago
not really. especially when it's not your campus, and it's just a publicly funded school that you attend, and you express your dislike with violence.
- drewbuschhorn 9y ago
  Obviously this is political and so shouldn't be hitting HN, but I'll swing at this pitch. "Violence" is always somehow brought into the mix by conservatives. The whole Berkeley-is-against-free-speech talking point falls apart when you see how quick conservative America was drop Milo like a hot potato once he said something that crossed their lines. Ann Coulter is the same way, and the sheer craziness of saying a woman on the New York Times best seller list, on talk shows everyday, somehow is having her right to free speech stopped by not being able to give a lecture on campus at the most crazy liberal college in the nation. You believe in free speech, so long as it's your free speech and don't pretend otherwise. I'm not out protesting at Fox news for giving Coulter a talk show, but we've seen how far conservative belief in free speech goes for Colbert this week.

lr4444lr 9y ago

They can work in reverse too, when the majority is compelled to silence over a few sacred cows. It's been said that man has a natural desire for freedom, but it certainly isn't the natural state of existence. Despite many warranted criticisms against my country, I'm very grateful to be American.

armenarmen 9y ago
Nasim taleb wrote a great article in that: https://medium.com/incerto/the-most-intolerant-wins-the-dictatorship-of-the-small-minority-3f1f83ce4e15 https://medium.com/incerto/the-most-intolerant-wins-the-dict...
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cgag 9y ago
Yeah the recent anti free speech movement and fall of free speech in Europe has given me a much greater appreciation for America than I used to have.
- Certhas 9y ago
  What fall of free speech in Europe? By aggregate score about every EU country ranks ahead of the US in the Freedom House Freedom index: https://freedomhouse.org/report/fiw-2017-table-country-scores https://freedomhouse.org/report/fiw-2017-table-country-score... The US comes in at 48th. That's not because it's score is particularly bad, it's because freedom is highly valued and strongly protected in many countries. The only countries with a perfect score are Finland, Norway and Sweden.
  - cgag 9y ago
    Actual hate speech laws, laws against holocaust denial, getting arrested for saying offensive things on twitter, that kind of thing.
  - areyousure 9y ago

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maxerickson 9y ago

Why smear the whole school with the actions of activists?

angersock 9y ago
This logic has never been held to consistently. Why hold gun-owners responsible for a few nutters? Why hold police responsible for a few bad apples? etc.
- maxerickson 9y ago
  Yes, there are more than 1 human and even 1 human would struggle to be logically consistent. I think your analogies aren't going to work out very well if you try to carefully articulate them though.
tuna-piano 9y ago
Good point, I should have been more careful characterizing to broadly. Of course, a counter-protest is just a type of speech that should be protected. It's tough to say what percent of the counter protestors thought that Milo/Coulter/Murray/etc shouldn't have been allowed on campus, and what percent just wanted to voice their displeasure and disagreement. That said, it does seem like a large number of those in the crowd actually didn't want the speakers to voice their opinions at all.
mason240 9y ago
I wasn't aware the school's president was just an activist.
- maxerickson 9y ago
  I wasn't aware that the president of the university was elected by the students and faculty to speak on their behalf.

treebeard901 9y ago

> It is disconcerting to me how the cultural element of free speech seems to be missing from the UC Berkeley and similar college populations. The UC Berkeley controversy is a bad example. It is a manufactured controversy with the intent to paint all colleges as being unwelcome to conservative viewpoints. How receptive would Liberty University be to Planned Parenthood giving a speech to the students? It is a false equivalence and it is another example of manufacturing outrage by shining a light on deep cultural differences.

enknamel 9y ago
I don't think Liberty University would riot and literally try to kill the people from Planned Parenthood. They might stand outside with signs and protest. What we are seeing in Berkeley is a much bigger issue. They are literally trying to harm and silence anyone who doesn't get in line or speaks out against their agenda.

orblivion 9y ago

The violent anti-free speech people are not necessarily UC Students. I'd guess they're mostly not. A lot of the action wasn't even on campus.

TheGirondin 9y ago
True, some of them like Eric Clanton are professors from nearby colleges.
- orblivion 9y ago
  I assumed they were assorted anarchists from Oakland.

drewbuschhorn 9y ago

Basically all colleges and populations in the US have a strong subset of anti-free speech feeling, with an equal amount between conservatives and liberals on campus: https://kf-site-production.s3.amazonaws.com/publications/pdfs/000/000/184/original/FreeSpeech_campus.pdf https://kf-site-production.s3.amazonaws.com/publications/pdf... Some questions the poll asked and the responses Do you think colleges should or should not be able to establish policies that restrict each of the following types of speech or expression on campus? How about ... ? Expressing political views that are upsetting or offensive to certain groups Results: % Should be able to restrict: Democrats: 26% Independents: 27% Republicans 25% % Should not be able to: Democrats: 72% Independents: 73% Republicans 75% If you had to choose, do you think it is more important for colleges to [ create a positive learning environment for all students by prohibiting certain speech or expression of viewpoints that are offensive or biased against certain groups of people, (or to) create an open learning environment where students are exposed to all types of speech and viewpoints, even if it means allowing speech that is offensive or biased against certain groups of people]? Results: % Open environment/Allow offensive speech: Democrats: 66% Independents: 70% Republicans 66% % Positive environment/Prohibit certain speech: Democrats: 30% Independents: 24% Republicans 29% As you may know, student protesters on some campuses attempted to prevent members of the media from reporting on their protest. Do you think students should or should not be able to prevent reporters from covering protests held on college campuses? Results: % Yes, should: Democrats: 29% Independents: 29% Republicans 25% % No, should not: Democrats: 69% Independents: 70% Republicans 74%

ApolloFortyNine 9y ago
Vast majority? Does 1/4 not freak you out? Especially for: Expressing political views that are upsetting or offensive to certain groups Results: % Should be able to restrict: Democrats: 26% Independents: 27% Republicans 25% That is actually terrifying, since if this rule ever got passed, the US would essentially become a one party state.
- drewbuschhorn 9y ago
  Which one party? I don't mean that factiously. The fact that the percentage is so similar tells me it's more a human effect than a particular belief system effect, and so the mechanisms that worked in the past to fight it will continue to do so. We still have to do the fighting, but singling out Berkeley is pointless and obscures the issue.

padseeker 9y ago

Protesting hate speech is free speech. You are deliberately conflating protest of free speech with government sanctioned punishment of free speech. In all honesty I'm don't agree with the violent protests against Ann Coulter and Milo out at Berkeley. But what you are talking about is not blasphemy.

skybrian 9y ago
Maybe we need to talk about consent here. Should speech where one party doesn't consent to having a conversation at all really be protected? How about disrupting speech between other people who mutually consent to it?
- rfrank 9y ago
  No, we don't need to talk about consent. If both parties had to consent to a conversation, the civil rights movement would have never happened.
  - skybrian 9y ago
    I don't know about that. Protests often do involve illegal activity. You have heard of civil disobedience?
    - rfrank 9y ago
      No, I've never heard of civil disobedience. Fantastic question. Sure seems to me like people would have been able to say, "I don't consent to listening to these people ask for equal representation, an aggressive violation of my rights." And then the whole movement gets stopped in its tracks when it ceases to be protected speech.
cjensen 9y ago
You are wrong: this is the Government-sanctioned prevention of Free Speech. The problem is not that there were protesters. The problem was the the Government (which the University is an arm of) allowed a mob to shut down speech, thereby making the Government complicit in the censorship, which is a blatant violation of the First Amendment. Specifically, the errors made by the University include (1) failing to provide adequate security, thereby permitting fascists to shutdown speech and (2) attempting to require provocative speakers to move their speech to a time when students would be less available to actually listen. A single unexpected incident is not a problem: stuff happens that you don't plan for. The problem came when they failed to accommodate later speakers.

ianbicking 9y ago

> In democracies, majority rules. And when the majority doesn't like what the minority has to say, they can use the government to force their way. It's majority rules, but I don't think you have the right interpretation of why the majority would rule this way. The majority just wants everyone to be calm and cool, and for religion to be personal, and for ideas to stay just ideas. In the great wide world there are many ideas, and the more diversity of ideas there are, the more diversity of people there are, the more the conflict of ideas becomes a problem. Unless ideas are just toys, then everyone can play with their toys in peace. And why do most people want ideas to stay ideas? Because we have a real world to worry about! We all got shit to do. We all have expectations of how the world works, the world in which we have to do our shit. Unless our heads are full of ideas and fantasies, we'd rather a stable world order to operate in. So you get a law like this: if you don't have anything nice to say then don't say anything at all.

aaron-lebo 9y ago
Ian! You have too many great libraries to count. Is the majority really like that? Definitely not in Muslim lands (look at surveys for % who support Sharia law), and when you look at Prop 8 California, maybe not in liberal democracies either. Not to opine on human nature too much, but people (perhaps not as individuals but as society) generally seem to accept whatever they can get and if that means someone else is disadvantaged, too bad. It's that whole Madisonian "if people were angels" thing.
exclusiv 9y ago
> if you don't have anything nice to say then don't say anything at all. While I agree with that statement in general, I don't agree with making laws to use that to infringe on free speech. We've never made a law to prevent assholes from being assholes. I prefer them being exposed anyway. It makes it easier to hire or to decide who to be friends with when they are allowed by society to do as they wish with their free speech. Apart from that - who decides what's nice? Many things are subjective when it comes to nice. As an example - Is it nice to say that our society is obese and needs to take more accountability? That most people can prevent diabetes? To most people, no that's not a nice thing to say. I wouldn't label it as a malicious thing to say though. It's accurate. Some discussions aren't going to be nice. You can't talk about anything of substance as a society without some groups getting upset. We should aim for pragmatic discussions though.

Goladus 9y ago

In democracies, majority rules. One reason why, until fairly recently, western Democracies were usually called Liberal Democracies. It's more than just voting for leaders or public policy, it's voting for public policy in the context of a FREE society where the free exchange of ideas in pursuit of truth is protected for everyone.

tw04 9y ago

Exactly how is the culture of free speech missing? Freedom of speech doesn't mean you're guaranteed a venue at which to speak...

Goladus 9y ago
Exactly how is the culture of free speech missing? Freedom of speech doesn't mean you're guaranteed a venue at which to speak... Prevalence of coercive and even violent tactics to shut down speech, using excuses like "Freedom of speech doesn't mean you're guaranteed a venue at which to speak" Relative paucity of anyone willing to engage with these conservatives honestly in a battle of ideas.
- Jotra7 9y ago
  The conservatives lost the battle of ideas years ago. They survive solely on appeals to emotion.
stale2002 9y ago
Because people go around saying stuff like "freedom of speech doesn't mean freedom from consequences" and then they smash your head in with a baseball bat as their "consequence".

faragon 9y ago

Sure. The problem is that many people is not aware that $democracy != $(tyranny of the majority). E.g. people asking for "voting" in order to crush minorities, e.g. "we want to vote", so we can impose you a freak technocracy or ethnocracy (e.g. in the EU we have lots of micro-nationalisms willing to impose their totalitarian ethnocracy, travestying it as "democracy", with excuses based on "tradition", "language", or even genetic supremacist arguments -"we don't have the same DNA as our neighbors, so we deserve being an independent region", yes, that crazy-). Religion fanaticism, romantic nationalism, and other anti-democratic trends are going to put us again on war. Edit: s/etnocracy/ethnocracy/g

throwanem 9y ago
What about democracy suggests that tyranny of the majority is not a very probable failure mode? It's like a fission reactor with a positive void coefficient - the problem is not that it can't be run safely with sufficiently complex controls, but rather what happens when those complex controls themselves fail.
- faragon 9y ago
  Well, in the EU we have regions ruled by people that explicitly say they'll go against the rule of law (say, and do, with any available law loopholes, wasting citizens money and time). So go figure the "quality" of the democracy in those regions.
LeifCarrotson 9y ago
> etnocracy Do you mean "Ethnocracy", a form of government controlled by a particular ethnic group? I would have assumed this was just a typo, but you wrote it this way twice.
- faragon 9y ago
  Yes, it was a typo (in my mother tongue it lacks the "h"). BTW, for ethnocracy I mean e.g. regions with 55% of people having language A, 35% people having language B, but because being ruled by people having language B (because in some provinces of that region the vote of one citizen is worth up to 3 times than in other more populated provinces) you have mandatory monolingual school and administration in language B (yes, that crazy -if you ask for bilingual/trilingual schools you're told "fascist" or "against the people"-). Go figure. That's the "democracy" we have in some regions in the European Union. That's why I want the EU becomes one unified country, so civil rights get respected, and totalitarian regional governments get forced to respect the rule of law, so citizen's civil rights get respected.

b0rsuk 9y ago

There are at least two basic flavors of a republic: * one that puts emphasis on democracy, * another that puts emphasis on liberalism. I forgot the exact terms for them, especially the second one. The basic difference is that the first one says any action is valid as long as it was democratically chosen. The second says freedom of one person ends where freedom of the next person starts. Otherwise, anything goes. The second one has high respect for laws, constitution and institutions, in an attempt to assure the system doesn't degenerate. Ancient Athens were an example of the first, Sparta - regarded as the realized utopia by ancient Greeks - example of the latter. It is perhaps little known that USA's Founding Fathers had more faith in Sparta's system than the Athenian one. Things we (the western civilization, broadly speaking) owe to Sparta are: strong costitution, president (2 kings in Sparta), ministers (ephors), senate (Gerusia; council of elders had the strongest power in Sparta), the lower house ouf the parliament (Apella, gathering of all citizens above the age of 30), although you might argue Apella was closer to common voting. There's a morbidly fascinating series about Spartans by the History channel. I highly recommend it. They had a really unique political system, resembling BOTH fascism and communism. But I digress. Democracy, without laws and institutions acting as safeguards, is a cruel system. I remember there were only a couple of years Athenians DIDN'T vote to open a year by starting a war. Without safeguards, if someone is disliked enough, he can be sentenced to death and you don't need a proof. Athenians did that to Socrates, because he was unpleasant to be around due to his biting critique. Athenians also had a system where officials and judges were assigned to their posts literally at random, using a lottery machine with marbles. The same person could be charged in a court and some time later assigned as a judge in his own case. Talk about conflict of interest.

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tryitnow 9y ago

I think it's the latter. I remember being super worried about political correctness when I was in college in the 90s. I thought was terrible and anti-free speech. Considering we just elected the most politically incorrect presidential candidate in modern history my concerns were likely overblown. I don't think the college stuff is really about free speech. As far as I know Ann Coulter et al. have the right to speak anywhere that will have them. It's just that a pretty sizable and vocal segment of the Berkeley student body won't have them. Institutions get to choose - if they want to be closed minded that's their fate. A blasphemy law on the other hand, is a qualitatively different thing. Comparing a college that doesn't want a particular speaker on their campus to a government that literally snatches you up and throws you in prison is a pretty far stretch.

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emodendroket 9y ago

> It's truly amazing how much the US bill of rights still helps protect individual rights, even in 2017. Truly prescient writing which has impacted both law and culture. It's kind of weird that people attribute these superpowers to James Madison when the Bill of Rights was mainly originally intended to be ineffectual but mollify states-righters who opposed the Constitution. Here's Gordon Wood in Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic: > In the early fall of 1789 the Congress passed the amendments and sent them to the states for ratification. By then many Federalists had come to see that a bill of rights might be a good thing after all. Not only was it the best way of undercutting the strength of Anti-Federalism in the country, but the Bill of Rights that emerged, as Hamilton pointed out, left “the structure of the government and the mass and distribution of its powers where they were.” Anti-Federalists in the Congress began to realize that Madison’s rights-based amendments weakened the desire for a second convention and thus actually worked against their cause of fundamentally altering the Constitution. Madison’s amendments, as opponents of the Constitution angrily came to realize, were “good for nothing” and were “calculated merely to amuse, or rather to deceive.” They affected “personal liberty alone, leaving the great points of the Judiciary & direct taxation &c. to stand as they are.” Before long the Federalists were expressing surprise that the Anti-Federalists had become such vigorous opponents of amendments, since they were originally their idea.