
The fight to publish Allen Ginsberg’s ‘Howl’ - everbody
https://www.spiked-online.com/2019/05/09/the-fight-to-publish-allen-ginsbergs-howl/
======
lenticular
It's pretty incredible how recent many of our seemingly inalienable rights
(actual freedom of speech, de jure racial equality, right to representation,
prohibition of the use of illegally obtained evidence, etc) have actually only
been around a few decades, mostly thanks to the visionary Warren and Burger
courts.

They were considered dangerous activist judges by many in their time.

~~~
nullc
With the US standing almost alone among developed nations and even the ACLU
backing away from its policy of defending impolitic or hurtful speech we can
probably expect this recent anomaly of free expression to be relatively short
lived.

I'm glad I got to live now and not some other time.

~~~
peteretep
Could you briefly outline how you think the USA has benefitted from this
freedom, in a way that other rich Western countries haven’t? I guess I’m
specifically thinking of Australia, New Zealand, UK, Canada, as all have
broadly similar legal systems and robust judiciaries / policing, but not the
singular focus on free speech.

~~~
exolymph
How about a lot fewer people being jailed or otherwise punished by authorities
for expressing their opinions? The UK has gotten positively absurd. You can be
forced to talk to cops about un-PC tweets. Example:
[https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2019/01/24/man-
investigated...](https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2019/01/24/man-investigated-
police-retweeting-transgender-limerick/)

I'm against transphobia, but not being able to vocally dissent on a certain
politically loaded topic... that shit is bad.

~~~
peteretep
> a lot fewer people being jailed or otherwise punished by authorities for
> expressing their opinions

To be absolutely clear, "their opinions" here (in the example you gave, and
presumably what you're referring to) is hate speech, which the US allows[0].

What advantages have accrued to the US through hate speech being protected, in
your opinion? You say "a lot fewer people being jailed", but a quick scan of,
say, UK cases prosecuted as hate speech[1] don't show examples of people being
jailed for it. Do you have some statistics for "a lot [of] people being jailed
or otherwise punished" for hate speech?

[0]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hate_speech_in_the_United_Stat...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hate_speech_in_the_United_States)

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hate_speech_laws_in_the_United...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hate_speech_laws_in_the_United_Kingdom)

~~~
brigandish
From The Times[1]:

> More than 3,300 people were detained and questioned last year over so-called
> trolling on social media and other online forums

13 forces declined to give the information which means it is very likely to be
far higher. That was a couple of years ago and it appears to be increasing.

As to advantages of free speech, social freedoms are strongly correlated with
economic freedom, and hence, economic success. Simply to look at an ordered
list by GDP would correlate with free speech strongly. Even the anomolies
would support it, like China, by using a historical chart.

Are hate speech laws making Europe safer? Maybe it would be better if you
tried to show that with some statistics.

[1] [https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/police-arresting-nine-
peo...](https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/police-arresting-nine-people-a-day-
in-fight-against-web-trolls-b8nkpgp2d)

~~~
peteretep
> As to advantages of free speech, social freedoms are strongly correlated
> with economic freedom, and hence, economic success. Simply to look at an
> ordered list by GDP would correlate with free speech strongly.

I suspect you have not done your research

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(PPP)...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_\(PPP\)_per_capita)

But, the question I originally asked remains, although I'll restate it to make
it even easier to answer. You are tasked with convincing a newly formed
republic to add a constitutional right to free speech like the USA, rather
than free-ish speech like Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the UK. What are
your arguments, based on these countries? What has the US gained over these
countries from that free speech, exactly?

~~~
serf
>What has the US gained over these countries from that free speech, exactly?

I think it's non-trivial to try to quantify the effects of free speech.

Freeform opinions off the top of my head:

the definitions of 'hate speech' are too fluid, allowing argument opposition
to massage the definition until your protest against them is considered to be
hateful -- which then allows legal options to silence the opinion.

The United States has been the culture leader of the Western world for some
time, and the position seems to be ever-increasing. The United States is , and
has been, the largest media producer _ever_ . This allows the United States to
own the most effective propaganda engine the world has ever seen.

New branches of media genre and topic since the 1900s are almost entirely US-
centric (Pop art, Beatniks, Flower power, hip-hop and rap culture, jazz,
blues, etc) -- many of them included topics like public dissent and negative
opinion of government that would've been entirely illegal in the majority of
the rest of the world. They are all now ubiquitous throughout the world,
spreading US-centric culture to all reaches.

I think that freedom of speech helped to facilitate the role the United States
now holds within 'Western Civilization', related to the above mentioned
points.

 _In my opinion, in our world, owning the world 's biggest propaganda engine
seems to be the most dominating weapon yet._

Some questions :

If forming a government, and the results of certain variables are unclear, why
not try to wholeheartedly clone the most successful example? The United States
is that example, at the moment.

At what point is a parity reached between damages of false-imprisonment, and
actual damage accrued from the results of hate speech?

What _are_ the damages of hate speech? Can you realistically consider damages
from a violent individual to have been caused by hate speech -- or is that a
good scapegoat for a mentally disturbed individual to kill people with?

Why do we attack social problems with less communication, and enforced
communication, rather than with care for the ill individuals who display
behavior outside the social healthy norm? Will macro actions help problems
that stem from individual issues?

And most importantly : _Who_ gets to define our speech? Who holds the keys to
the kingdom? Who deserves that trust?

~~~
claudiawerner
>What are the damages of hate speech? Can you realistically consider damages
from a violent individual to have been caused by hate speech -- or is that a
good scapegoat for a mentally disturbed individual to kill people with?

Not only the actions of the individual (we must remember concepts such as
stochastic terrorism) due to hearing hate speech, but also the harm of the
speech itself. There's substantial work done on this concept, i.e. that speech
itself at least has the potential to be actually harmful, and that there is no
meaningful rigorous distinction between "speech" and "action" \- metaphysical
or otherwise. In this way, regulating speech should be just like we regulate
any other kind of action. As Brison has said:

"although this relational account helps to explain why the right to speak and
to receive others’ speech is important, it does not yield a defense of the
view that speech is special, requiring greater justification for its
regulation than is needed for the regulation of other conduct."

This[0] is a great paper to read for the argument. There are also more
'traditional arguments arguing that Mill's ideal (and the principle that free
speech is based on) has become obsolete in the face of the ever-shortening
distance between speech and action (which was observed during the rise of the
Nazi Party), along with the function of mass media which dulls critical
thinking[1].

[0] SJ Brison, "Speech, Harm, and the Mind-Body Problem in First Amendment
Jurisprudence" (1998)
[http://susanbrison.com/files/B.16.-speech_harm_and_the_mindb...](http://susanbrison.com/files/B.16.-speech_harm_and_the_mindbody_problem_in_first_amendment_jurisprudence.pdf)

[1] "Surely, no government can be expected to foster its own subversion, but
in a democracy such a right is vested in the people (i.e. in the majority of
the people). This means that the ways should not be blocked on which a
subversive majority could develop, and if they are blocked by organized
repression and indoctrination, their reopening may require apparently
undemocratic means. They would include the withdrawal of toleration of speech
and assembly from groups and movements which promote aggressive policies,
armament, chauvinism, discrimination on the grounds of race and religion, or
which oppose the extension of public services, social security, medical care,
etc." (Herbert Marcuse, "Repressive Tolerance" (1965))

~~~
brigandish
Thanks for those links. Much as I disagree if your summary is correct, I'll
definitely give them read, they look interesting.

------
nemosaltat
The excerpt in the article is misprinted (2019-05-13-0118 GMT). It should
read: _“I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving
hysterical naked, dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn
looking for an angry fix”_

In the article _angry_ and _negro_ are transposed.

------
buzzert
Fans of the movie Hackers (1995) will recall Dade Murphy reading the first
line of Howl in his advanced English class.

The Beat culture of the 1950's was absolutely the predecessor to the
hacker/cyberpunk culture of the 1990's.

------
jlarocco
Funny, I just bought a collection of Ginsberg's poetry after seeing a
reference to 'Howl' in the "Academe's Extinction" article posted here the
other night.

------
50
On a tangent: If you were alive during the counterculture movement of the
1960s/1970s and have strong thoughts about it, I would love to do a short
interview via email (email is in my profile bio) - it's for a history paper.

------
mgr86
As a Ginsberg related aside I often think his poem "I Am a Victim of
Telephone" could be refreshed as a comment on modern life.

    
    
        [...]How are you dear can you come to Easthampton we're all here bathing in  the ocean we're all so lonely
    
        and I lie back on my palette contemplating $50 phone bill, broke, drowsy,
    
           anxious, my heart fearful of the fingers dialing, the deaths, the  singing of telephone bells
    
        ringing at dawn ringing all afternoon ringing up midnight ringing now
    
           forever.

------
pseingatl
These days, long form poetry is dead.

------
richardhod
I think many here learned to appreciate this poem from HN postings of this
analysis of Howl:

[https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-
moloch/](https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/)

SSC is a great site, and if you haven't, please do have a look^. Do please,
however, be aware that spiked-online is pretty alt-right and politically
extreme, and although this is a decent historical piece, most articles there
are of the ultra-neocon and angry cable talkshow style opinion, dressed in
intellectual wording.

~~~
dang
On HN, it's the article that matters. Most primarily-political sites have a
downweight on them, but we turn the downweight off when a good article comes
along. Or try to, at least; it depends on whether we see it or someone points
it out to us.

~~~
mandelbrotwurst
Are you saying that they're algorithmically downweighted and that you manually
turn that off when it seems appropriate?

Interesting, I thought the feed was just based on chronology + votes! How
quaint of me. Is there anything written anywhere about how the feed algorithm
works generally?

~~~
dang
Correct.

The feed has always been based on more than just time and votes. For example,
flags. Another factor is HN's anti-abuse software, like the voting ring
detector. Then there is moderation. For example, moderators downweight certain
kinds of stories, such as sensational ones or indignant ones, that routinely
attract many more upvotes than others. Another example is the boosting system
that was discussed recently here:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19871809](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19871809).

There's no article or essay about it, but I've posted many comments to HN
about all of this over the years. None of it is secret, and we're happy to
answer questions.

~~~
mandelbrotwurst
That's helpful, thanks for the reply!

Are all sites deemed political down-weighted equally? Is this a manually
curated list or also algorithmically determined somehow?

Are there other categories / topics that sites might be placed in that affect
their ranking?

The problem of trying to apply weights to domains and/or specific submissions
based on some idea of how well they fit the ethos of the site seems like an
interesting one!

~~~
dang
Yes, primarily-political sites are downweighted equally. And yes, there are
other kinds of site that get penalized. For example, most major media sites
produce more lightweight articles than substantive ones, so are marked that
way in our system. I should mention, though, that there are plenty of ways for
such penalties to be overridden, besides moderators turning them off manually.
For example, they don't apply to submissions by users who have a track record
of submitting solid stories.

Some of this is algorithmically determined and some of it is manually curated.
The more complicated a decision is (e.g. is site X primarily political), the
less likely it is to be algorithmic.

~~~
richardhod
Thank you for this enlightening addition. I certainly was not complaining
about the article's presence here, but rather instead warning against the rest
of a particularlyedangerously truthy political site. Your context really helps
us in general not worry too much, knowing that you have your human eye on
submissions. Nonetheless, since people often look around a site after reading
a first article, i think such a warning is warranted most times such a
particularly egregious site posts a rarely decent article.

