7 ms·

Ongoing Death of Free Speech: ACLU Lawyer Cheers Suppression of a New Book

68 points by jelliclesfarm 6y ago

72ha99ahsbc7 6y ago
The ACLU increasingly responds to events reflexively without thoughtful regard to constitutional rights. Example #2 would be the police shooting of Deon Kay which the ACLU immediately called the shooting "murder". This was after video was released showing Kay lifting a gun at officers. For decades, the ACLU has prided itself on its defense of due process and free speech. That time is fading quickly. That this submission was flagged and marked dead after dozens of upvotes, makes the author's points a bit stronger.
_iyig 6y ago
Historically, UC Berkeley was home to the Free Speech Movement. Today, UC Berkeley Professor of English Grace Lavery had this to say about the book in question: >Since some ppl have misunderstood my tone, and censorship is an important matter and as a public educator I have a duty to be precise, let me clarify: >I do NOT advocate defacing library books. >I DO encourage followers to steal Abigail Shrier’s book and burn it on a pyre. https://twitter.com/graceelavery/status/1327743400553172997 https://twitter.com/graceelavery/status/1327743400553172997 As to the burning of books generally: >Remember: all you’re doing is removing a commodity from circulation—much as one might destroy a contaminated crop, or take action if a distributor failed to do so. https://twitter.com/graceelavery/status/1327746546851524608 https://twitter.com/graceelavery/status/1327746546851524608 Not a view I would have ever expected to hear from a public institution of learning. For context, here is author Abigail Shrier’s synopsis of the book in her own words. Judge for yourself whether it constitutes hate speech: https://youtube.com/watch?v=6MYb0rBDYvs https://youtube.com/watch?v=6MYb0rBDYvs
- ratsmack 6y ago
  >hate speech It is amazing that this term is used so frequently while being entirely undefinable. Hate is an emotion that is unquantifiable in the general sense but is used ad nauseam throughout the media without regard to it's undefinable scope. Worse yet, it is used in laws that have incarcerated people base on some perceived level of "hate", again which has never been defined.
  - NikolaNovak 6y ago
    I agree with what I perceive the gist of your point. In many countries though, the "hate speech" IS explicitly defined in law; I find it frequently creates more questions than it answers though ("Why is Group A protected but Group B and C are not"?), while providing meaningful insight into cultural views of the mainstream (ditto). There's any number of western liberal democracies with Blasphemy / Hate Speech laws on books, where strictly speaking an Atheist would struggle to even explain their views. And of course any number of countries of any political persuasion where such laws are meant to stifle and are exercised for suppression of viewpoints. I don't have an answer to this. However we define it, some people/groups genuinely hate, without cause reason or empathy, and they genuinely provoke and exercise violence. Inasmuch as we try to get to a root cause of the problem, I can understand why well meaning people can attempt to define precursors of violence and suffering. I just haven't seen it done well yet :-/
    - ratsmack 6y ago
      >"hate speech" IS explicitly defined I suspect, though, that these laws are a continuously moving target, from what I have observed with various incidents in the UK for example.
- ReactiveJelly 6y ago
  The real miscarriage of justice is that I can't take the tweets of "be gay do crimes" leftists off of Twitter and burn _those_. They are giving moderate liberals a bad name. Censoring the book at this point is going to cause a Streisand Effect. The Tweets cannot be censored, and moderates have very little control over the narrative. What should the narrative have been? If the book is good, "Author encourages you to form a strong relationship with your child so that strangers won't tell them what to do. In this specific case it was something about gender." If the book is bad, "Author says some silly transphobic things, tries and fails to smear trans people. Rebuttal in the top comment." But now that it's censored.... "Stealing things is okay because optics are not a real part of politics!" "I will just do whatever I want, and in 1,000 years history will vindicate me and the moderates will finally stop voting Republican" "The communist revolution is but Two Months away! Never vote in any election! Punch a moderate today!" And on the other end of the horseshoe: "The left wants to burn books!" "Perhaps everyone left of center are the real Nazis!" "When are they gonna start rounding up white people?!" "Why do trans people drink the blood of Christian children?" Nothing but bad-faith arguments and strawmen. Somewhere, Scott Alexander is spinning in his office chair. It's gonna be a shitshow and the best I can hope for is a stop-loss mitigation. Please don't shoot, I'm a centrist and I like private property rights. The only book I've ever burned was an old encyclopedia I found in a dumpster.
floren 6y ago
What happened to this story? It's not marked as "flagged", but it cannot be found in the story listing. Is there some sort of shadow-flagging in HN now?
- ratsmack 6y ago
  Why was user 72ha99ahsbc7's comment flagged dead? I don't know what the merit of the comment is, but if someone has a problem with it, why not just refute it.
  - s9w 6y ago
    submission was [dead] ed but brought back. Maybe that's why it's missing in some databases. 72ha99ahsbc7's comment is [dead]ed. Everyone should enable the setting to see [dead]ed comments. Not rarely those are the best.
    - ratsmack 6y ago
      You can un-dead them in order to read, but not comment.
      - jelliclesfarm 6y ago
        How might one do that?
        crististm 6y ago
        Dead comments remain dead in the hands of mere mortals. I can only assume that the gods of HN have powers beyond that. You can only check 'show dead' option on HN to be exposed to what others have deemed unworthy to be heard or touched by key-presses.
        grzm 6y ago
        When comments (or submissions) accumulate enough vouches, they can be reanimated (as it were).
Yetanfou 6y ago
This trend is one of the reasons why I do not shy away from voicing unpopular opinions, on this site and elsewhere. In the Netherlands there is a monument [1] at a location where the Germans executed members of the resistance. The monument consists of a brick wall with the following text on it: Een volk dat voor tirannen zwicht, zal meer dan lijf en goed verliezen, dan dooft het licht... This loosely translates to People who yield to tyrants will not just lose their lives and goods, they will lose their soul... Giving in to the cancel mob is not an option since that only makes them stronger. Assuming that you're convinced your ideas are just as valid as those espoused by the mob, just different, I see no reason for people to shut up in the name of keeping the peace. Speak your mind, enter discussions with those who are not of like mind. If you are met by nothing but shouted epithets, slurs and attempts to silence you consider this: if the shouters really were convinced they were on the right path they would not need to shout. They would meet your opinions with arguments of their own, they would speak as they are spoken to. Don't let yourself be silenced. [1] https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/H.M._van_Randwijk https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/H.M._van_Randwijk
- ReactiveJelly 6y ago
  > Speak your mind Since you asked. Sometimes I stay quiet because every infight in "The Left" is wasted airtime that allows my political opponents to look calm and normal. Sometimes it's a matter of priority. If I talk about gun control a lot, I'm going to turn off lots of people. I wish the whole Democratic party would stop talking about gun control. I don't think it makes the biggest difference. If they talk about it, they will probably lose voters who would otherwise support issues I care about more. So how does this relate to the book? I don't know. I haven't read the book. I heard it's bad. Let's do an "if by whiskey". If the book is bad... If it's complete misinformation, cherry-picked facts twisted to match bad-faith conclusions, and it's only going to hurt trans people... Then yes, I'm going to stand up brave and say "The publisher should refuse to carry this book, because it is full of harmful lies." Because it is damned expensive to get people to read the truth once they've bought the lies. As a capitalist, I don't want to sell the book about why Nazis are good if it means I have to waste a bunch of money writing a book that refutes it, which many of the readers will not read. Of course, now we've invoked the Streisand Effect. It's far too late for effective good-faith censorship. Censorship at this point means that I, an adult trans woman with no children, am part of the same `#trans` hashtag as the performative-woke cancel-mob that just wants to mutilate children. I wish I could leave that hashtag. But nobody can take hashtags off once someone puts them on you. If the book is bad, then it's too late to censor it. But I wish it had been censored sooner, within the publisher, because I think it's a very bad look for a publisher to (following your analogy) publish Nazi propaganda that they could choose to just not publish. If a book comes out to rebut this one, will it make the same headlines? Will it hit the front page of HN? Is this the replication crisis, but for the Twitter age? And before that book gets published, how much damage is done by people accepting un-rebutted misinformation? If the book is good... If it's mostly true, if it's good-faith concern, and not whataboutism and concern _trolling_, then it still really sucks that people are going to read this headline, maybe even read the book, and come off thinking that I, an adult trans woman with no children, am now part of the same hashtag as the performative-woke cancel-mob that just wants to mutilate children. I wish I could leave that hashtag. But nobody can take hashtags off once someone puts them on you. What's my unpopular opinion? People lack nuance. Especially online. In my opinion the book is dangerous because the median person will spend at most 1 minute per day thinking about trans people. If that whole minute is, "Wow, trans people want children to mutilate themselves and separate them from their parents," then I have lost something. Because now I am vaguely associated with something that we can all agree is terrible. Even if we don't agree whether it's related to me, or how often it happens. I am sure it has happened at least once, I'll grant you that. My unpopular opinion is that I _shouldn't_ care about this book. I _shouldn't_ feel threatened by free speech. The fact that I come here and write long wordy whiney liberal diatribes about this, I think says that something is wrong about how little rationality is really floating around, even in a space like Hacker News. I should be relaxing in my backyard while I take my estradiol pill, not typing away and wondering if someone's going to accuse me of hurting children one day. Free speech works great if everyone is a rational actor who doesn't commit to big ideas without big evidence. Are most people rational most of the time? Consider that the lottery still exists. What about the book? I think people should read it. Don't believe the headline. That's kinda the problem, is that if you have 1 minute per day to think about trans people, please don't spend it on 1 headline that _heavily suggests_ we're _associated_ with monsters. I don't think the author deserves any sales, so please pirate the book, read the whole thing, _and fact check it_. And once the truth has gotten its shoes on, what do I want you to think? I want you to think, "Wow, it _is_ terrible what happened to those children. Those individual doctors _are_ bad. Those individual trans people in the book _are_ bad. But the fact that ReactiveJelly is trans has _nothing_ to do with _any_ of this. What's she gonna do, kick them out? Become Blaire White and constantly emphasize the bad people in a desperate bid to keep her own head above water? Become Contrapoints and write nuanced 2-hour liberal diatribes that no moderate will ever watch? Sit in her backyard and take her pill while quietly accepting that every minority is going to keep catching flack for the crimes of the worst people who happen to share their hashtag?" I hope I don't sound agitated. That would, of course, mean that I'm wrong. /s
hirundo 6y ago
> Abigail Shrier — author of a new book exploring the rapid, massive increase in teenage girls self-identifying as trans boys and undergoing permanent gender reassignment therapies and surgeries in their teens — published an article in Quillette describing the extraordinary efforts by major corporations and various activists to prevent her book from being purchased Sincerely, can someone direct me to a calm, low jargon explanation that I might be able to grasp on why there seems to be a full court press to suppress rather than refute this narrative? What is dangerous about viewing this trend as a social contagion, and what makes stopping people hearing about it trump other civil rights? Why, on this topic is it so often "shut up" rather than "here's why she's wrong..."? Here's the closet thing to an explanation in the article: > The book and the arguments contained within it are fueling a wave of bills in state legislatures to criminalize health care for trans youth including through felony bans on the provision of care and forced outing of trans youth by school officials (an actual serious First Amendment concern). It's a hot legislative issue and therefore wrongthink on this subject should be suppressed? Free speech except about particularly important things? Gun rights have also been on a legislative roll without this treatment. Why is this different?
- gnusty_gnurc 6y ago
  > Why, on this topic is it so often "shut up" rather than "here's why she's wrong..."? Because a certain (seemingly growing) contingent on the left views speech as violence and therefore will not engage in an argument, instead they'll try to make it so that the speech will never be said (resorting to violence, harassing the bureaucracy until they change institutional rules, etc.). One of the funnier phrases I saw recently that I think sums it up: "sticks and stones should break your bones, and words will always hurt me."
- ouid 6y ago
  What on earth does it mean to "out" a trans person? The whole point of transitioning is to be perceived differently. I can't hide my trans status from my parents or a school that I attended pre-transition. This is a totally disingenuous answer.
  - 6y ago
Technically 6y ago
I don't think Glenn Greenwald has actually articulated what his version of "free speech" is. That would probably assist his writing a great deal.
notananthem 6y ago
As with any book released with intentional harm aimed at an already marginalized and discriminated against group, people are going to protest it's existence let alone it's distribution. That's.. literally free speech. They can write the book but people can also call it trash. Advocating for private civilians to burn a book is very different than nazis writing a list of 30,000 books and more artwork to burn because it's subversive to nazi culture. What utter lunacy.
- jelliclesfarm 6y ago
  I don’t think the book was released with ‘intentional harm’. It is about teenagers who are still wards of their parents.
  - ReactiveJelly 6y ago
    The reason it makes such big headlines is that natural puberty is also irreversible. If you really are trans, and your parents won't let you talk to a medical professional, then you will have to suffer for a long time and end up with a body that causes you even more pain. So you have a bad tradeoff between "If we give children autonomy, some of them will make bad decisions," which is true, and "If we don't give children autonomy, some of them will have worse mental health outcomes," which is also true. The current discussion on free speech seems to be: "If we allow misinformation to sprint around the world before the truth has got its shoes on, that causes harm. It's okay to censor obvious misinformation if it will protect people," versus, "Why is it obvious? Why is it harm? Some parts of the book are true. What percent needs to be misinformation before censorship becomes valid?" Those are important questions to ask, but they don't generate enough hype and outrage for Twitter to answer them. Never forget that you are staring into a kaleidoscope which is designed to make you feel any strong emotion that keeps you looking. It is not a place where logic thrives. I probably won't be in this thread long, because I can feel my heart rate spiking, but I hope nobody walks away thinking this is a cut-and-dry problem at all. Every difficult problem has two solutions that are simple, obvious, and wrong.
    - jelliclesfarm 6y ago
jancsika 6y ago
Still reading this, but I wanted to go ahead and offer my objection to a polemic that uses Twitter posts as a jumping-off point. Twitter's use of addictive dark patterns is well-known, and those techniques bring out the worst and and most mindless in people. E.g., compare Greenwald's consistent, well-researched op-ed's to his bitter, nasty ad hominem attacks in his varous Twitter insult-wars. It's as if everyone has decided to get coked up and go talk politics at 2 a.m. at a noisy club. I'm sure it's convenient for journalists to start there since they know everyone is at the club, but it's also lazy if they start every article with shit cokeheads were yelling at each other. (As well as boring for readers.) A significant portion of our population, including journalists, is addicted to social media. As a society we have yet to take steps to curb this toxicity. Now, can we please at least admit this is a problem and quit letting this sludge leak into serious writing for the sole benefit that it's free and easily discoverable? Edit: from Strangio: "it was supposed to be a cheeky response to Bari [Weiss] not something to be taken on its own terms without that context." What's more generous-- that Strangio is secretly against free-speech and intrepid Greenwald caught him before he deleted his true feelings, or that a system that optimizes for dogfights got the better of Strangio?
RickJWagner 6y ago
If this continues, the ACLU will become worthless, another partisan tool. I hope it changes. I'm frequently upset by ACLU actions (I tend to be conservative), but I respect them. I'd be sad if I lost that respect.

68 points by jelliclesfarm 6y ago

The ACLU increasingly responds to events reflexively without thoughtful regard to constitutional rights. Example #2 would be the police shooting of Deon Kay which the ACLU immediately called the shooting "murder". This was after video was released showing Kay lifting a gun at officers. For decades, the ACLU has prided itself on its defense of due process and free speech. That time is fading quickly. That this submission was flagged and marked dead after dozens of upvotes, makes the author's points a bit stronger.

_iyig 6y ago

Historically, UC Berkeley was home to the Free Speech Movement. Today, UC Berkeley Professor of English Grace Lavery had this to say about the book in question: >Since some ppl have misunderstood my tone, and censorship is an important matter and as a public educator I have a duty to be precise, let me clarify: >I do NOT advocate defacing library books. >I DO encourage followers to steal Abigail Shrier’s book and burn it on a pyre. https://twitter.com/graceelavery/status/1327743400553172997 https://twitter.com/graceelavery/status/1327743400553172997 As to the burning of books generally: >Remember: all you’re doing is removing a commodity from circulation—much as one might destroy a contaminated crop, or take action if a distributor failed to do so. https://twitter.com/graceelavery/status/1327746546851524608 https://twitter.com/graceelavery/status/1327746546851524608 Not a view I would have ever expected to hear from a public institution of learning. For context, here is author Abigail Shrier’s synopsis of the book in her own words. Judge for yourself whether it constitutes hate speech: https://youtube.com/watch?v=6MYb0rBDYvs https://youtube.com/watch?v=6MYb0rBDYvs

ratsmack 6y ago
>hate speech It is amazing that this term is used so frequently while being entirely undefinable. Hate is an emotion that is unquantifiable in the general sense but is used ad nauseam throughout the media without regard to it's undefinable scope. Worse yet, it is used in laws that have incarcerated people base on some perceived level of "hate", again which has never been defined.
- NikolaNovak 6y ago
  I agree with what I perceive the gist of your point. In many countries though, the "hate speech" IS explicitly defined in law; I find it frequently creates more questions than it answers though ("Why is Group A protected but Group B and C are not"?), while providing meaningful insight into cultural views of the mainstream (ditto). There's any number of western liberal democracies with Blasphemy / Hate Speech laws on books, where strictly speaking an Atheist would struggle to even explain their views. And of course any number of countries of any political persuasion where such laws are meant to stifle and are exercised for suppression of viewpoints. I don't have an answer to this. However we define it, some people/groups genuinely hate, without cause reason or empathy, and they genuinely provoke and exercise violence. Inasmuch as we try to get to a root cause of the problem, I can understand why well meaning people can attempt to define precursors of violence and suffering. I just haven't seen it done well yet :-/
  - ratsmack 6y ago
    >"hate speech" IS explicitly defined I suspect, though, that these laws are a continuously moving target, from what I have observed with various incidents in the UK for example.
ReactiveJelly 6y ago
The real miscarriage of justice is that I can't take the tweets of "be gay do crimes" leftists off of Twitter and burn _those_. They are giving moderate liberals a bad name. Censoring the book at this point is going to cause a Streisand Effect. The Tweets cannot be censored, and moderates have very little control over the narrative. What should the narrative have been? If the book is good, "Author encourages you to form a strong relationship with your child so that strangers won't tell them what to do. In this specific case it was something about gender." If the book is bad, "Author says some silly transphobic things, tries and fails to smear trans people. Rebuttal in the top comment." But now that it's censored.... "Stealing things is okay because optics are not a real part of politics!" "I will just do whatever I want, and in 1,000 years history will vindicate me and the moderates will finally stop voting Republican" "The communist revolution is but Two Months away! Never vote in any election! Punch a moderate today!" And on the other end of the horseshoe: "The left wants to burn books!" "Perhaps everyone left of center are the real Nazis!" "When are they gonna start rounding up white people?!" "Why do trans people drink the blood of Christian children?" Nothing but bad-faith arguments and strawmen. Somewhere, Scott Alexander is spinning in his office chair. It's gonna be a shitshow and the best I can hope for is a stop-loss mitigation. Please don't shoot, I'm a centrist and I like private property rights. The only book I've ever burned was an old encyclopedia I found in a dumpster.

floren 6y ago

What happened to this story? It's not marked as "flagged", but it cannot be found in the story listing. Is there some sort of shadow-flagging in HN now?

ratsmack 6y ago
Why was user 72ha99ahsbc7's comment flagged dead? I don't know what the merit of the comment is, but if someone has a problem with it, why not just refute it.
- s9w 6y ago
  submission was [dead] ed but brought back. Maybe that's why it's missing in some databases. 72ha99ahsbc7's comment is [dead]ed. Everyone should enable the setting to see [dead]ed comments. Not rarely those are the best.
  - ratsmack 6y ago
    You can un-dead them in order to read, but not comment.
    - jelliclesfarm 6y ago
      How might one do that?
      - crististm 6y ago
        Dead comments remain dead in the hands of mere mortals. I can only assume that the gods of HN have powers beyond that. You can only check 'show dead' option on HN to be exposed to what others have deemed unworthy to be heard or touched by key-presses.
        grzm 6y ago
        When comments (or submissions) accumulate enough vouches, they can be reanimated (as it were).

Yetanfou 6y ago

This trend is one of the reasons why I do not shy away from voicing unpopular opinions, on this site and elsewhere. In the Netherlands there is a monument [1] at a location where the Germans executed members of the resistance. The monument consists of a brick wall with the following text on it: Een volk dat voor tirannen zwicht, zal meer dan lijf en goed verliezen, dan dooft het licht... This loosely translates to People who yield to tyrants will not just lose their lives and goods, they will lose their soul... Giving in to the cancel mob is not an option since that only makes them stronger. Assuming that you're convinced your ideas are just as valid as those espoused by the mob, just different, I see no reason for people to shut up in the name of keeping the peace. Speak your mind, enter discussions with those who are not of like mind. If you are met by nothing but shouted epithets, slurs and attempts to silence you consider this: if the shouters really were convinced they were on the right path they would not need to shout. They would meet your opinions with arguments of their own, they would speak as they are spoken to. Don't let yourself be silenced. [1] https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/H.M._van_Randwijk https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/H.M._van_Randwijk

ReactiveJelly 6y ago
> Speak your mind Since you asked. Sometimes I stay quiet because every infight in "The Left" is wasted airtime that allows my political opponents to look calm and normal. Sometimes it's a matter of priority. If I talk about gun control a lot, I'm going to turn off lots of people. I wish the whole Democratic party would stop talking about gun control. I don't think it makes the biggest difference. If they talk about it, they will probably lose voters who would otherwise support issues I care about more. So how does this relate to the book? I don't know. I haven't read the book. I heard it's bad. Let's do an "if by whiskey". If the book is bad... If it's complete misinformation, cherry-picked facts twisted to match bad-faith conclusions, and it's only going to hurt trans people... Then yes, I'm going to stand up brave and say "The publisher should refuse to carry this book, because it is full of harmful lies." Because it is damned expensive to get people to read the truth once they've bought the lies. As a capitalist, I don't want to sell the book about why Nazis are good if it means I have to waste a bunch of money writing a book that refutes it, which many of the readers will not read. Of course, now we've invoked the Streisand Effect. It's far too late for effective good-faith censorship. Censorship at this point means that I, an adult trans woman with no children, am part of the same `#trans` hashtag as the performative-woke cancel-mob that just wants to mutilate children. I wish I could leave that hashtag. But nobody can take hashtags off once someone puts them on you. If the book is bad, then it's too late to censor it. But I wish it had been censored sooner, within the publisher, because I think it's a very bad look for a publisher to (following your analogy) publish Nazi propaganda that they could choose to just not publish. If a book comes out to rebut this one, will it make the same headlines? Will it hit the front page of HN? Is this the replication crisis, but for the Twitter age? And before that book gets published, how much damage is done by people accepting un-rebutted misinformation? If the book is good... If it's mostly true, if it's good-faith concern, and not whataboutism and concern _trolling_, then it still really sucks that people are going to read this headline, maybe even read the book, and come off thinking that I, an adult trans woman with no children, am now part of the same hashtag as the performative-woke cancel-mob that just wants to mutilate children. I wish I could leave that hashtag. But nobody can take hashtags off once someone puts them on you. What's my unpopular opinion? People lack nuance. Especially online. In my opinion the book is dangerous because the median person will spend at most 1 minute per day thinking about trans people. If that whole minute is, "Wow, trans people want children to mutilate themselves and separate them from their parents," then I have lost something. Because now I am vaguely associated with something that we can all agree is terrible. Even if we don't agree whether it's related to me, or how often it happens. I am sure it has happened at least once, I'll grant you that. My unpopular opinion is that I _shouldn't_ care about this book. I _shouldn't_ feel threatened by free speech. The fact that I come here and write long wordy whiney liberal diatribes about this, I think says that something is wrong about how little rationality is really floating around, even in a space like Hacker News. I should be relaxing in my backyard while I take my estradiol pill, not typing away and wondering if someone's going to accuse me of hurting children one day. Free speech works great if everyone is a rational actor who doesn't commit to big ideas without big evidence. Are most people rational most of the time? Consider that the lottery still exists. What about the book? I think people should read it. Don't believe the headline. That's kinda the problem, is that if you have 1 minute per day to think about trans people, please don't spend it on 1 headline that _heavily suggests_ we're _associated_ with monsters. I don't think the author deserves any sales, so please pirate the book, read the whole thing, _and fact check it_. And once the truth has gotten its shoes on, what do I want you to think? I want you to think, "Wow, it _is_ terrible what happened to those children. Those individual doctors _are_ bad. Those individual trans people in the book _are_ bad. But the fact that ReactiveJelly is trans has _nothing_ to do with _any_ of this. What's she gonna do, kick them out? Become Blaire White and constantly emphasize the bad people in a desperate bid to keep her own head above water? Become Contrapoints and write nuanced 2-hour liberal diatribes that no moderate will ever watch? Sit in her backyard and take her pill while quietly accepting that every minority is going to keep catching flack for the crimes of the worst people who happen to share their hashtag?" I hope I don't sound agitated. That would, of course, mean that I'm wrong. /s

hirundo 6y ago

> Abigail Shrier — author of a new book exploring the rapid, massive increase in teenage girls self-identifying as trans boys and undergoing permanent gender reassignment therapies and surgeries in their teens — published an article in Quillette describing the extraordinary efforts by major corporations and various activists to prevent her book from being purchased Sincerely, can someone direct me to a calm, low jargon explanation that I might be able to grasp on why there seems to be a full court press to suppress rather than refute this narrative? What is dangerous about viewing this trend as a social contagion, and what makes stopping people hearing about it trump other civil rights? Why, on this topic is it so often "shut up" rather than "here's why she's wrong..."? Here's the closet thing to an explanation in the article: > The book and the arguments contained within it are fueling a wave of bills in state legislatures to criminalize health care for trans youth including through felony bans on the provision of care and forced outing of trans youth by school officials (an actual serious First Amendment concern). It's a hot legislative issue and therefore wrongthink on this subject should be suppressed? Free speech except about particularly important things? Gun rights have also been on a legislative roll without this treatment. Why is this different?

gnusty_gnurc 6y ago
> Why, on this topic is it so often "shut up" rather than "here's why she's wrong..."? Because a certain (seemingly growing) contingent on the left views speech as violence and therefore will not engage in an argument, instead they'll try to make it so that the speech will never be said (resorting to violence, harassing the bureaucracy until they change institutional rules, etc.). One of the funnier phrases I saw recently that I think sums it up: "sticks and stones should break your bones, and words will always hurt me."
ouid 6y ago
What on earth does it mean to "out" a trans person? The whole point of transitioning is to be perceived differently. I can't hide my trans status from my parents or a school that I attended pre-transition. This is a totally disingenuous answer.
- 6y ago

Technically 6y ago

I don't think Glenn Greenwald has actually articulated what his version of "free speech" is. That would probably assist his writing a great deal.

notananthem 6y ago

As with any book released with intentional harm aimed at an already marginalized and discriminated against group, people are going to protest it's existence let alone it's distribution. That's.. literally free speech. They can write the book but people can also call it trash. Advocating for private civilians to burn a book is very different than nazis writing a list of 30,000 books and more artwork to burn because it's subversive to nazi culture. What utter lunacy.

jelliclesfarm 6y ago
I don’t think the book was released with ‘intentional harm’. It is about teenagers who are still wards of their parents.
- ReactiveJelly 6y ago
  The reason it makes such big headlines is that natural puberty is also irreversible. If you really are trans, and your parents won't let you talk to a medical professional, then you will have to suffer for a long time and end up with a body that causes you even more pain. So you have a bad tradeoff between "If we give children autonomy, some of them will make bad decisions," which is true, and "If we don't give children autonomy, some of them will have worse mental health outcomes," which is also true. The current discussion on free speech seems to be: "If we allow misinformation to sprint around the world before the truth has got its shoes on, that causes harm. It's okay to censor obvious misinformation if it will protect people," versus, "Why is it obvious? Why is it harm? Some parts of the book are true. What percent needs to be misinformation before censorship becomes valid?" Those are important questions to ask, but they don't generate enough hype and outrage for Twitter to answer them. Never forget that you are staring into a kaleidoscope which is designed to make you feel any strong emotion that keeps you looking. It is not a place where logic thrives. I probably won't be in this thread long, because I can feel my heart rate spiking, but I hope nobody walks away thinking this is a cut-and-dry problem at all. Every difficult problem has two solutions that are simple, obvious, and wrong.
  - jelliclesfarm 6y ago

jancsika 6y ago

Still reading this, but I wanted to go ahead and offer my objection to a polemic that uses Twitter posts as a jumping-off point. Twitter's use of addictive dark patterns is well-known, and those techniques bring out the worst and and most mindless in people. E.g., compare Greenwald's consistent, well-researched op-ed's to his bitter, nasty ad hominem attacks in his varous Twitter insult-wars. It's as if everyone has decided to get coked up and go talk politics at 2 a.m. at a noisy club. I'm sure it's convenient for journalists to start there since they know everyone is at the club, but it's also lazy if they start every article with shit cokeheads were yelling at each other. (As well as boring for readers.) A significant portion of our population, including journalists, is addicted to social media. As a society we have yet to take steps to curb this toxicity. Now, can we please at least admit this is a problem and quit letting this sludge leak into serious writing for the sole benefit that it's free and easily discoverable? Edit: from Strangio: "it was supposed to be a cheeky response to Bari [Weiss] not something to be taken on its own terms without that context." What's more generous-- that Strangio is secretly against free-speech and intrepid Greenwald caught him before he deleted his true feelings, or that a system that optimizes for dogfights got the better of Strangio?

RickJWagner 6y ago

If this continues, the ACLU will become worthless, another partisan tool. I hope it changes. I'm frequently upset by ACLU actions (I tend to be conservative), but I respect them. I'd be sad if I lost that respect.