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> As some one who lives under a blasphemy culture, I think American greatly take for granted their freedoms of speech, and it boggles me that this is not a corn
by GeekyBear 4y ago
> As some one who lives under a blasphemy culture, I think American greatly take for granted their freedoms of speech, and it boggles me that this is not a corner stone of the American Left.
It absolutely was a cornerstone value for American liberals in the past.
A documentary about the director of the ACLU, back before the ACLU abandoned it's principles, looks at how far the organization went to protect the speech of literal Nazis. The ACLU winning a Supreme Court case for their right to hold a public protest march was widely celebrated by those on the left.
>[The First] Amendment assures that even the most odious among us (with “odious” being the term that we apply to those we loathe, but who might view us as odious) the right to express themselves either orally, in writing, or by demonstrating or marching.
It was the freedom to march that caused a major flare-up back in the late 1970s, when members of the American Nazi Party, in uniform and bedecked with their decorative swastikas and stormtrooper boots, applied for a permit to march through the town of Skokie, Illinois...
To Glasser and the ACLU leadership, including David Goldberger, who headed the local Illinois chapter, freedom of speech is meaningless if it is not accorded across-the-board to all those along the ideological spectrum.
https://www.wgbh.org/news/commentary/2020/10/22/mighty-ira-a-documentary-about-the-man-who-defined-american-civil-liberties https://www.wgbh.org/news/commentary/2020/10/22/mighty-ira-a...
- hotpotamus 4y ago[flagged]
- joxel 4y agoExactly. It’s really this simple. The American rights inability to reconcile their love of “free speech at all time for everyone” with “businesses have the right to refuse to associate with anyone they don’t like regardless of anti discrimination laws” is probably the front cover for American Hypocrisy.
- GeekyBear 4y agoYou think the ACLU in the 70's was staffed by people on the right? Has everyone forgotten that America used to do things like imprison anti-war protestors? You fight for free speech for everyone because you may find that you are the person being targeted by the state for unpopular speech.
- sixQuarks 4y ago>Has everyone forgotten that America used to do things like imprison anti-war protestors? Basically yes. The left has now become the war party, it’s the right that has more anti-war protestors so it’s totally cool to censor them now.
- roflyear 4y agoBoth parties are very much so the war party. If you're saying the left supports war bc Ukraine that is really tough to swallow. There was not a conflict under trump, but it is not hard to find tweets from him celebrating our military capability. Plenty of conservative politicians in the last eight years have statements of "war mongering" if you want to call it that.
- sixQuarks 4y agoI don't know why Ukraine is a tough pill to swallow, the US has no interest in a proxy war with Russia, no matter what the mainstream media tells you. The left fully supports this to the tune of $100 billion so far and counting. $100 billion that could be used to build up our own infrastructure, combat homelessness and mental illness, hire more teachers, etc.
- chiefalchemist 4y agoTo clarify, free speech !== discrimination The argument is, as I understand it, self-expression even in the form of discrimination is protected. If it's not, then that leaves 1A venerable. The foundation left by the Founders is complicated. Yes, sometimes that looks like hypocrisy. Similar is the left's anti-gun / pro-abortion stances.
- joxel 4y agoWait, you think anti-gun and pro abortion aren’t logically consistent? Is it because you erroneously believe embryos are people?
- selfmodruntime 4y agoNo. But it stops at disallowing groups who incite real violence instead of „hurtful language“.
- hotpotamus 4y ago[flagged]
- selfmodruntime 4y ago> How can we know the difference between speech that incites real violence and mere hurtful language Easy. Speech that is hurtful aims at portraying someone as lesser compared to other people, speech that incites actual violence tells you to do something about it. Me disagreeing with gay marriage (I would never, but let’s entertain that notion) is very different from me saying we need to forcibly imprison homosexuals as criminals.
- unityByFreedom 4y agoCase by case. Generally, if they commit to no violence then they should be supported, even protected by police. Uncomfortable conversations should be allowed to happen.
- GeekyBear 4y agoFor speech to be illegal, the legal standard is that it needs to incite specific lawless action and be likely to succeed. For instance, Indiana locked up an anti-war protestor: >The case involved an antiwar protest on the campus of Indiana University Bloomington. Between 100 and 150 protesters were in the streets. The sheriff and his deputies then proceeded to clear the streets of the protestors. As the sheriff was passing Gregory Hess, one of the members of the crowd, Hess uttered, "We'll take the fucking street later" or "We'll take the fucking street again." Hess was convicted in Indiana state court of disorderly conduct. The Supreme Court reversed Hess's conviction because Hess' statement, at worst, "amounted to nothing more than advocacy of illegal action at some indefinite future time." In addition, Hess' speech was not directed at any particular person or group. As a result, "it cannot be said that he was advocating, in the normal sense, any action." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hess_v._Indiana https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hess_v._Indiana
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]