4 ms·

Assuming we are taking a US centric view here, I feel just the opposite: that speech has scarcely ever been so free. It was less than a decade ago that the U.

Assuming we are taking a US centric view here, I feel just the opposite: that speech has scarcely ever been so free. It was less than a decade ago that the U.S. military had a policy literally called "Don't Ask, Don't Tell". It was only fifty years ago that Martin Luther King Jr. was being investigated by the FBI, for speech that is now broadly considered necessary. About 100 years ago, check out the Sedition Act of 1918. Such a thing would not even pass the smell test today. Sure, we've had some recent setbacks in some areas. The journey is not in a straight line. The destination is pretty clearly in a place of "more freedom".

CamperBob2 7y ago
The US government has rarely been less engaged in censorship than it is today. That much is true, and certainly it's a good thing. The trouble is, any sufficiently-dominant corporation is indistinguishable from a government.
- amalcon 7y ago
  You're not wrong about that. I don't think this is a case of that, though. CBS is one of four major legacy broadcast networks. They are owned by National Amusements, whose other assets basically amount to a lot of movie theaters. This contrasts with NBC (owned by Comcast), ABC (owned by Disney), and Fox (also owned by Disney now). This show is exclusive to the CBS web streaming service, an arena with even more competition. That doesn't seem like a sufficiently-dominant corporation to me. They are a major player, yes, but at best second strongest in their domain.
  - dragonwriter 7y ago
    > CBS is one of four major legacy broadcast networks. They are owned by National Amusements, whose other assets basically amount to a lot of movie theaters. This contrasts with NBC (owned by Comcast), ABC (owned by Disney), and Fox (also owned by Disney now). National Amusements owns Viacom, which kind of undermines the contrast you are drawing. And Disney doesn't own Fox (the broadcast network) it owns 21st Century Fox, which uses to be the corporate parent of Fox Broadcasting, but Fox Broadcasting, Fox News, and a number of other assets were spun out to make Fox Corporation which didn't go with 21st Century Fox to Disney, and which is still controlled by Rupert Murdoch.
    - amalcon 7y ago
      That's all correct. I'd looked at News Corporation for the list of assets not acquired by Disney, and didn't notice the spin-out of Fox Broadcasting. This does rather undermine that particular contrast. National Amusements still does not have anything like a monopoly position in either the broadcast television or web streaming spaces.
dxbydt 7y ago
I think you & the parent are both correct, despite holding opinions that are poles apart. Certainly in the kinds of things we are allowed to watch, we are more free than ever before. For instance, wikipedia says the adult entertainment industry is atleast 50 years old, but the kind of material you can access today without fear of repercussions is beyond precedent. For instance, any adult site will happily serve hundreds of atm clips. Even 20 years ago, the term atm was practically unknown, and certainly you couldn’t get performers to engage in atm, let alone film it & host it online. At the same time, what is and isn’t permissible for discussion in the public sphere has narrowed rather sharply. Especially in academia, this kind of hypocrisy & doublespeak is so blatant & overt, it makes you wonder what else is being swept under the rug. We had an incident at the stat seminar a few weeks back. A Stanford professor was interrupted by one of our professors who simply said “i don’t like lasso”. This became full blown drama, statisticians thumping desks and saying “hear hear” & so forth. What should have been an educational lecture in penalties & their properties got shut down by the moderator! If one can’t even discuss harmless on-point topic like this in an academic setting, what is the point of freedom of speech & rest of the machinery ? Are we so scared of causing offence ?
reaperducer 7y ago
"Don't ask don't tell" wasn't an attempt at censorship. In fact, when it was introduced by the Clinton administration it was hailed by LGBT groups because it allowed gay people to serve in the military. People have forgotten the context in which Don't Ask Don't Tell was created. Today people assume it was some evil, presumably Republican, plan to keep gay people down. It was seen as quite the opposite when it first started. But since many people don't remember, weren't born, or don't bother doing research into their politics, they think of DADT as the opposite of what it was.
- Broken_Hippo 7y ago
  When folks from the LGBT community were in discussions about family life and military duty... these folks couldn't say a word, lest they be dishonorably discharged from the military and possibly be charged with a crime. Folks going to boot camp around '97/'98 were told that oral and/or anal sex were grounds for a sodomy charge, after all. Yes, it was a step in the right direction, but folks still couldn't realistically be open about their love life if you were not in a more traditional relationship. Regardless of intent, it was still censorship.
- philwelch 7y ago
  Agreed, and adding on: DADT was basically a non-enforcement policy. LGBT people were disallowed from military service for decades before 1993. Bill Clinton actually tried to remove that restriction entirely, but ran headfirst into political opposition. DADT was a "temporary workaround" that he could impose at the executive level to make some amount of progress, signify a successful compromise, and make the issue go away. This was a theme of Clinton's early administration: he interpreted enthusiastic political support for him personally as enthusiastic political support for the sorts of progressive reforms he was trying to enact and ran full-speed into a brick wall trying to pass those reforms. Another example was the attempt to pass universal health care. After Clinton faced one of the biggest midterm electoral backlashes of all time in 1994, he changed strategy and never returned to the issue. Clinton's legacy on LGBT issues (and many others) has to be addressed within the context of the times. Clinton faced a heavily resurgent Republican Party for 3/4 of his administration after spending the first 1/4 of his administration pushing for progressive reforms that were too far and too fast for most Americans. Clinton is unfairly remembered and blamed for the compromises he made at the time; in the greater context, Clinton's compromises were calculated holding actions that stemmed the tide of conservative reaction long enough for American public opinion to come around on these issues.
philwelch 7y ago
I actually disagree with you. I think US public opinion is currently swinging very hard in a direction reminiscent of the predominant reasoning behind the Sedition Act and its contemporaries. I like to take a judiciary-centered view; Congress can pass whatever censorious laws they want to, but those laws are toothless without the Court constructing the First Amendment in a way that upholds them. That construction was established in Schenck v. United States, where the unanimous opinion stated: > The most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man in falsely shouting fire in a theatre and causing a panic. ... The question in every case is whether the words used are used in such circumstances and are of such a nature as to create a clear and present danger that they will bring about the substantive evils that Congress has a right to prevent. It is a question of proximity and degree. This is precisely where the "fire in a crowded theatre" meme comes from. In Schenck, this reasoning was used to uphold the conviction of a Socialist Party leader, under the Espionage Act of 1917, who published and mailed pamphlets advocating resistance to the draft. Abrams v. United States used the Schenck standard to uphold the conviction of a man, under the Sedition Act, who disseminated leaflets calling for an end to US arms production and condemning US intervention in the Russian Civil War. Multiple states passed laws against "criminal syndicalism" during this time as well. Whitney v. California in 1927 upheld the conviction, under California's criminal syndicalism law, of one of the founders of the Communist Labor Party of America. The federal Smith Act of 1940 outlawed calling for the overthrow of the US government, and in the 1951 case of Dennis v. United States, the Supreme Court in 1951 upheld the convictions, under the Smith Act, of eleven leaders of the Communist Party USA on the grounds that communism inherently entailed advocating for the overthrow of the government. As a whole, this early-to-mid-century legal reasoning is very similar to the justification for the restriction of "hate speech", even down to the "fire in a crowded theater" meme. The "paradox of tolerance" argument--that a tolerant society can only survive by refusing to tolerate intolerance--is often interpreted these days to justify a very similar Schenck-esque standard. I daresay that many people would agree with every Supreme Court decision I've named if you switched the specifics around such that the defendants were far-right and not far-left people. Another similar argument you see a lot these days is that the private sector should have broad discretion in terms of "no-platforming" "hate speech". This is more or less the same reasoning behind the Hollywood blacklist, with the bogeymen swapped out. The legal standard of "clear and present danger" and the precedents of Schenck, Abrams, Whitney, and Dennis were all more or less overturned in Brandenburg v. Ohio in 1969, where the Court established the standard of "imminent lawless action". Brandenburg himself was a KKK leader convicted of "advocating violence" under Ohio's "criminal syndicalism" law. Brandenburg is an interesting case in a lot of ways, particularly because I suspect many self-described American liberals today would not agree with the ruling. At the time, though, Brandenburg was considered a sweeping liberal ruling, characteristic of the late Warren Court. Liberals in the 60's and 70's were reflexively skeptical of the censorious rationale behind the Schenck, Abrams, Whitney, and Dennis rulings, as well as the Red Scare atmosphere that surrounded the passage of criminal syndicalism laws in general. The fundamental principle of free expression was the cause to be upheld, even if an individual case benefitted a far-right defendant. In 1977, this was exemplified in National Socialist Party of America v. Village of Skokie, where the Nazis sued for their right to hold a protest march. The lead attorney representing the Nazis was the ACLU's David Goldberger[1], himself Jewish. The Skokie ruling was a controversial stand even at the time; it might become unthinkable if current trends continue, especially since many of those criticisms uncritically mirror the reasoning of Schenck and its successive rulings. [1] Goldberger himself has recently spoken out against the growing appetite for suppressing hate speech: https://www.philly.com/philly/opinion/commentary/charlottesville-nazis-freedom-of-speech-aclu-skokie-20180820.html https://www.philly.com/philly/opinion/commentary/charlottesv...

CamperBob2 7y ago

The US government has rarely been less engaged in censorship than it is today. That much is true, and certainly it's a good thing. The trouble is, any sufficiently-dominant corporation is indistinguishable from a government.

amalcon 7y ago
You're not wrong about that. I don't think this is a case of that, though. CBS is one of four major legacy broadcast networks. They are owned by National Amusements, whose other assets basically amount to a lot of movie theaters. This contrasts with NBC (owned by Comcast), ABC (owned by Disney), and Fox (also owned by Disney now). This show is exclusive to the CBS web streaming service, an arena with even more competition. That doesn't seem like a sufficiently-dominant corporation to me. They are a major player, yes, but at best second strongest in their domain.
- dragonwriter 7y ago
  > CBS is one of four major legacy broadcast networks. They are owned by National Amusements, whose other assets basically amount to a lot of movie theaters. This contrasts with NBC (owned by Comcast), ABC (owned by Disney), and Fox (also owned by Disney now). National Amusements owns Viacom, which kind of undermines the contrast you are drawing. And Disney doesn't own Fox (the broadcast network) it owns 21st Century Fox, which uses to be the corporate parent of Fox Broadcasting, but Fox Broadcasting, Fox News, and a number of other assets were spun out to make Fox Corporation which didn't go with 21st Century Fox to Disney, and which is still controlled by Rupert Murdoch.
  - amalcon 7y ago
    That's all correct. I'd looked at News Corporation for the list of assets not acquired by Disney, and didn't notice the spin-out of Fox Broadcasting. This does rather undermine that particular contrast. National Amusements still does not have anything like a monopoly position in either the broadcast television or web streaming spaces.

dxbydt 7y ago

I think you & the parent are both correct, despite holding opinions that are poles apart. Certainly in the kinds of things we are allowed to watch, we are more free than ever before. For instance, wikipedia says the adult entertainment industry is atleast 50 years old, but the kind of material you can access today without fear of repercussions is beyond precedent. For instance, any adult site will happily serve hundreds of atm clips. Even 20 years ago, the term atm was practically unknown, and certainly you couldn’t get performers to engage in atm, let alone film it & host it online. At the same time, what is and isn’t permissible for discussion in the public sphere has narrowed rather sharply. Especially in academia, this kind of hypocrisy & doublespeak is so blatant & overt, it makes you wonder what else is being swept under the rug. We had an incident at the stat seminar a few weeks back. A Stanford professor was interrupted by one of our professors who simply said “i don’t like lasso”. This became full blown drama, statisticians thumping desks and saying “hear hear” & so forth. What should have been an educational lecture in penalties & their properties got shut down by the moderator! If one can’t even discuss harmless on-point topic like this in an academic setting, what is the point of freedom of speech & rest of the machinery ? Are we so scared of causing offence ?

reaperducer 7y ago

"Don't ask don't tell" wasn't an attempt at censorship. In fact, when it was introduced by the Clinton administration it was hailed by LGBT groups because it allowed gay people to serve in the military. People have forgotten the context in which Don't Ask Don't Tell was created. Today people assume it was some evil, presumably Republican, plan to keep gay people down. It was seen as quite the opposite when it first started. But since many people don't remember, weren't born, or don't bother doing research into their politics, they think of DADT as the opposite of what it was.

Broken_Hippo 7y ago
When folks from the LGBT community were in discussions about family life and military duty... these folks couldn't say a word, lest they be dishonorably discharged from the military and possibly be charged with a crime. Folks going to boot camp around '97/'98 were told that oral and/or anal sex were grounds for a sodomy charge, after all. Yes, it was a step in the right direction, but folks still couldn't realistically be open about their love life if you were not in a more traditional relationship. Regardless of intent, it was still censorship.
philwelch 7y ago
Agreed, and adding on: DADT was basically a non-enforcement policy. LGBT people were disallowed from military service for decades before 1993. Bill Clinton actually tried to remove that restriction entirely, but ran headfirst into political opposition. DADT was a "temporary workaround" that he could impose at the executive level to make some amount of progress, signify a successful compromise, and make the issue go away. This was a theme of Clinton's early administration: he interpreted enthusiastic political support for him personally as enthusiastic political support for the sorts of progressive reforms he was trying to enact and ran full-speed into a brick wall trying to pass those reforms. Another example was the attempt to pass universal health care. After Clinton faced one of the biggest midterm electoral backlashes of all time in 1994, he changed strategy and never returned to the issue. Clinton's legacy on LGBT issues (and many others) has to be addressed within the context of the times. Clinton faced a heavily resurgent Republican Party for 3/4 of his administration after spending the first 1/4 of his administration pushing for progressive reforms that were too far and too fast for most Americans. Clinton is unfairly remembered and blamed for the compromises he made at the time; in the greater context, Clinton's compromises were calculated holding actions that stemmed the tide of conservative reaction long enough for American public opinion to come around on these issues.

philwelch 7y ago

I actually disagree with you. I think US public opinion is currently swinging very hard in a direction reminiscent of the predominant reasoning behind the Sedition Act and its contemporaries. I like to take a judiciary-centered view; Congress can pass whatever censorious laws they want to, but those laws are toothless without the Court constructing the First Amendment in a way that upholds them. That construction was established in Schenck v. United States, where the unanimous opinion stated: > The most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man in falsely shouting fire in a theatre and causing a panic. ... The question in every case is whether the words used are used in such circumstances and are of such a nature as to create a clear and present danger that they will bring about the substantive evils that Congress has a right to prevent. It is a question of proximity and degree. This is precisely where the "fire in a crowded theatre" meme comes from. In Schenck, this reasoning was used to uphold the conviction of a Socialist Party leader, under the Espionage Act of 1917, who published and mailed pamphlets advocating resistance to the draft. Abrams v. United States used the Schenck standard to uphold the conviction of a man, under the Sedition Act, who disseminated leaflets calling for an end to US arms production and condemning US intervention in the Russian Civil War. Multiple states passed laws against "criminal syndicalism" during this time as well. Whitney v. California in 1927 upheld the conviction, under California's criminal syndicalism law, of one of the founders of the Communist Labor Party of America. The federal Smith Act of 1940 outlawed calling for the overthrow of the US government, and in the 1951 case of Dennis v. United States, the Supreme Court in 1951 upheld the convictions, under the Smith Act, of eleven leaders of the Communist Party USA on the grounds that communism inherently entailed advocating for the overthrow of the government. As a whole, this early-to-mid-century legal reasoning is very similar to the justification for the restriction of "hate speech", even down to the "fire in a crowded theater" meme. The "paradox of tolerance" argument--that a tolerant society can only survive by refusing to tolerate intolerance--is often interpreted these days to justify a very similar Schenck-esque standard. I daresay that many people would agree with every Supreme Court decision I've named if you switched the specifics around such that the defendants were far-right and not far-left people. Another similar argument you see a lot these days is that the private sector should have broad discretion in terms of "no-platforming" "hate speech". This is more or less the same reasoning behind the Hollywood blacklist, with the bogeymen swapped out. The legal standard of "clear and present danger" and the precedents of Schenck, Abrams, Whitney, and Dennis were all more or less overturned in Brandenburg v. Ohio in 1969, where the Court established the standard of "imminent lawless action". Brandenburg himself was a KKK leader convicted of "advocating violence" under Ohio's "criminal syndicalism" law. Brandenburg is an interesting case in a lot of ways, particularly because I suspect many self-described American liberals today would not agree with the ruling. At the time, though, Brandenburg was considered a sweeping liberal ruling, characteristic of the late Warren Court. Liberals in the 60's and 70's were reflexively skeptical of the censorious rationale behind the Schenck, Abrams, Whitney, and Dennis rulings, as well as the Red Scare atmosphere that surrounded the passage of criminal syndicalism laws in general. The fundamental principle of free expression was the cause to be upheld, even if an individual case benefitted a far-right defendant. In 1977, this was exemplified in National Socialist Party of America v. Village of Skokie, where the Nazis sued for their right to hold a protest march. The lead attorney representing the Nazis was the ACLU's David Goldberger[1], himself Jewish. The Skokie ruling was a controversial stand even at the time; it might become unthinkable if current trends continue, especially since many of those criticisms uncritically mirror the reasoning of Schenck and its successive rulings. [1] Goldberger himself has recently spoken out against the growing appetite for suppressing hate speech: https://www.philly.com/philly/opinion/commentary/charlottesville-nazis-freedom-of-speech-aclu-skokie-20180820.html https://www.philly.com/philly/opinion/commentary/charlottesv...