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.
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.
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.
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...
I'm against transphobia, but not being able to vocally dissent on a certain politically loaded topic... that shit is bad.
> 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?
> 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.
> 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.
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?
>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?
That's a lot of points, so I'm going to simply hone in on one point which I feel is sort of indicative here:
> If forming a government, and the results of certain variables are unclear, why not try to wholeheartedly clone the most successful example?
I genuinely, honestly believe that of the countries I've highlighted, the people in the US get the rawest deal. It ranks lowest in life expectancy, locks up three times as many people as the next highest on that list, people get the least paid time off, obesity is by far the worst, people still go medically bankrupt(!!!), people are killed by law enforcement at three times the rate of the next highest (Canada), inequality (via Gini coefficient), homicide rate is 4x the nearest neighbor (UK). In short, I think it's hard to build an argument off "copy what the United States did because they're the best".
>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].
[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))
When it comes to insights about freedom I prefer to rely on research such as the Human Freedom Index, that I read yearly[2], instead of trying to present data in a way that I can rely on exceptions to support my view, from Wikipedia.
"Safety" from hate speech is difficult to define in statistical terms, because it tends to be nonlinear - everything looks fine until someone goes on a murder spree or starts up the death camps again. The last European genocide was in my lifetime, at Srebrenica (which, incidentally, Spiked Magazine are denialists of)
Americans seem much more comfortable with the idea that both free speech and free gun ownership will get more people routinely killed; like car ownership, it's just part of the price, it seems.
> Americans seem much more comfortable with the idea that both free speech and free gun ownership will get more people routinely killed; like car ownership, it's just part of the price, it seems.
In 2013 there were 33,636 deaths due to guns. Even without breaking down those figures (2/3 were suicides) it would take 178 years to reach the 6 million regularly claimed to be the total for the Holocaust. That seems to be a fair price to avoid genocide and tyranny.
Why would any of the mass murders "spill over" into mass genocide? I don't see why one should logically follow from the other (I stress logically because they obviously don't in practice, as the example of the US shows).
.. or four Srebrenicas, or roughly the entire historical body count of the Troubles. If it was concentrated then we would say that it was genocide.
The big threat of the moment is "stochastic terrorism". If you tell enough people that X is a threat that is coming for them - that they are going to be victims of a holocaust - then eventually one of them will follow the logic that they can use their gun to avoid the holocaust by pre-emptively murdering the threat. Most people will recognise these messages as lies and nonsense, but there will be a number who believe it. Of those, eventually one will take action.
There has been a steady drip of those people "taking action", such as by going and opening fire on synagogues. Often they leave behind surprisingly similar manifestoes. They speak the same language and are radicalised in the same way, despite never having met nor being part of the same organisation.
Now, this is ""fine"" as long as there's only one such movement carrying out occasional massacres. What happens when someone decides to start pre-emptively shooting back? Reprisals? Riots? As soon as there's two armed groups in politics there is the risk of horrible escalation.
> or four Srebrenicas, or roughly the entire historical body count of the Troubles.
If you're going to compare the 300+ million population of the USA with something, it's better to do it with (German occupied) Europe than a place with a population of around 1% that of the USA. It's also strange to bring in wars, civil or otherwise, and again compare numbers when the entire population of the island has a population of around 2% that of the USA's.
> If you tell enough people that X is a threat that is coming for them - that they are going to be victims of a holocaust - then eventually one of them will follow the logic that they can use their gun to avoid the holocaust by pre-emptively murdering the threat.
I suppose we should stop saying "win at all costs" or "some people think football is a matter of life and death. I assure you, it's much more serious than that." because maybe a Liverpool fan will go on a killing spree.
Mass murders aren’t the the thing that spills over into genocide — they get stopped when the shooter runs out of bullets etc. — it’s hate speech which spills over because it gets the speaker an army which can replenish itself.
To put it another way, it’s not like Hitler personally shot all the people he killed, he convinced other people to do it for him.
Good, we're agreed, hate speech is vile. What we're not agreed on is the response. I am convinced by John Stuart Mill that I am not infallible therefore I should not be judge of who can and cannot speak. I can, however, judge the speech and think it is wrong and oppose it with my own speech. If they move to violence I may defend myself or others.
Or I could claim infallibility and judge that this is hate speech but that is not so this person cannot speak or say these things but that person can. In Germany, the person doing the judging was Hitler and people who agreed with him.
It doesn't sound like the best system to me. A big help to his plans was that the people denied the right to hold weaponry for personal defence were… Jews. As Frederick Douglass pointed out when talking about the oppression of blacks in America, without the right to bear arms the work of the abolitionists would not be over. History proved him (and Mill) right in Germany too.
> A big help to his plans was that the people denied the right to hold weaponry for personal defence were… Jews.
Mill also said:
> That the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others. His own good, either physical or moral, is not sufficient warrant.
Which rather limits the effectiveness of — for example — the Jewish people taking up arms in self-defence in WW2. However, if you wish to argue that every victim of persecution was defending the other victims rather than themselves, the same argument would enable those same victims using their guns to shoot the propagandists. In fact, as Mill was a Utilitarian, I would expect [1] him to prefer that the free speech of literal-third-Reich-Nazis to be suppressed with a few literal bullets in the face, than to allow the holocaust to be escalated to 17 million dead.
[1] If someone resurrected him with an ancestor simulation, I’d expect him to have difficulty believing something that bad could happen and that it wasn’t merely a thought experiment like the utilitarian eyelashes thought experiment (whose formal name I’ve forgotten) or the trolley problem. However, as a note of caution to what I’ve written, although I’ve studied Philosophy formally, I got a poor grade and may be misrepresenting Mill without being aware of it.
I think you've misunderstood the Mill quote. Immediately preceding the quote you used:
> the sole end for which mankind are warranted, individually or collectively, in interfering with the liberty of action of any of their number, is self-protection.
He's saying that others cannot compel someone to do things, even if it is for their own good. They may only interfere for their own self protection. This implies and supports the right to self defence.
Ending the paragraph containing the quote you provided:
> In the part [of his conduct] which merely concerns him, his independence is, of right, absolute. Over himself, over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign.
This does not in any way limit or argue against the effectiveness or right to self defence but instead, again, supports it. I'd encourage you to read On Liberty as, in my opinion, it is the greatest modern philosophical work.
> Citing 30 potentially offensive tweets, the PC singled out a limerick Mr Miller had retweeted which questioned whether transgender women are biological women. It included the lines: "Your breasts are made of silicone, your vagina goes nowhere."
The most disturbing aspect of this is that there is no possible limerick including those lines!
As a Brit who's lived in the USA and UK, I'd say that people outside the UK probably get a misleading impression from new stories like this. I'd say that political discussion in the UK is actually freer in practice than in the US. There's certainly a wider range of opinion in the mainstream press, and Prime Ministers are more effectively held to account by Parliament than Presidents are held to account by congress and the judiciary.
What the article describes is obviously an absurd waste of police time. However, no-one was even arrested, so it's hard to get excited about it as an example of someone's free speech rights being violated. I would happily take this kind of police harassment over the kind that leads to unarmed people being shot. It at least targets people who vaguely deserve it.
In the US, there's this notion of a chilling effect. Even if nothing ultimately comes of it, police harassment has the effect of convincing people to stay silent. This is not exactly a win, and definitely the kind of tool that the less kind sort of government has used to suppress ideas they dislike.
Yes, sure, but this particular example of police harassment isn’t especially disturbing. Do you not think that, for example, routinely shooting unarmed black men probably has a bit more of a “chilling effect” than this does?
As I said, I’d be wary of forming your opinion of what political discourse is like in the UK from reading news stories. How much time have you actually spent in the UK?
You're right. Routinely shooting unarmed black men definitely has a great many unwanted effects, not the least of which are on the people who get shot.
We're fortunate, then, that this is not something anyone is suggesting should be done in the UK! Nor is the question at hand the probative value of whataboutism.
The question at hand is that of police in the UK turning up and asking you why you're making an arse of yourself online. Against the possibility that they could not do that.
Come to think of it, does the First Amendment actually stop the police in the US doing the same thing? The article reports that the police acknowledged that no crime had been committed. I don't think that there's anything unconstitutional about a police officer calling someone up and asking them questions.
In the US, a pattern of police doing so could be actionable.
It would be rather difficult for most American PDs to justify devoting resources to investigating somoene being mean online unless it was in a fairly narrow set of categories (clear and specific threat, harassment, etc.).
English defamation law makes it very easy to use libel to silence critics. In the US, by contrast, standards are much higher and silencing people much more difficult.
The UK has not profited in any way, shape, form, or manner by this. It clogs up courts to no productive use and serves mainly to intimidate people into silence in the face of money. A free society is better without this.
Sure, that's a valid criticism. However -- and as far as I'm aware -- this isn't an issue in any of the other countries, suggesting that this is more a peculiarity of the British system, rather than an inherent feature of not allowing free speech?
This British peculiarity could perhaps be regarded by some people as one nasty failure mode of free-ish speech.
I would say that once you have free-ish speech, you have incentives for people to find ways to characterize speech they dislike for any reason as on the wrong side of the "ish" lines. The more flexible and privately actionable the enforcement is the more people will seek to find ways to use it for their own gain.
To put it another way, how easy do you want it to be for powerful private citizens or the government to silence anyone they don't like for arbitrary reasons? Before any protests that this can be countered by clear legal drafting, perhaps consider how readily criticism of Israeli policies is cast as anti-Semitic hate speech.
> This British peculiarity could perhaps be regarded by some people as one nasty failure mode of free-ish speech.
Sure, but the Americans are innovative yo! (cf: Peter Thiel and Gawker)
> how easy do you want it to be for powerful private citizens [...] to silence anyone they don't like for arbitrary reasons
I do not want this, but I feel the press in the UK counter-balance that pretty effectively. Rich people seem to love bringing down other rich people
> how easy do you want it to be for [...] the government to silence anyone they don't like for arbitrary reasons
I feel like Americans hold a uniquely strong distrust of their government. If you're British you just have to suck up the fact that Parliament can pass any bill they like to do whatever the hell they like with a simple majority, but it's been _working ok_ for a few centuries now.
> I do not want this, but I feel the press in the UK counter-balance that pretty effectively. Rich people seem to love bringing down other rich people
Relying on a commercial sector seems like odd. Why can't individuals have those rights too? Does having a printer make someone more deserving of rights? I would think not, in an age where anyone with a smartphone can reach a sizable audience, but I'm also clearly the crazy American in this thread.
> I feel like Americans hold a uniquely strong distrust of their government. If you're British you just have to suck up the fact that Parliament can pass any bill they like to do whatever the hell they like with a simple majority, but it's been _working ok_ for a few centuries now.
There's a pretty strong argument that India, Australia, and indeed the US are clear signs that it hasn't been working OK for a few centuries now. All of them learned a few things about what Parliament might get up to when you can't riot under their noses to drive home the objections.
>Relying on a commercial sector seems like odd. Why can't individuals have those rights too? Does having a printer make someone more deserving of rights? I would think not, in an age where anyone with a smartphone can reach a sizable audience, but I'm also clearly the crazy American in this thread.
Where are you getting the idea that newspapers in the UK have rights that individuals don't?
Parent said that newspapers counterbalance the potential to use libel law to silence people. This suggests to me that publishers have de facto protections and rights that individuals do not.
I would love to learn that I have been badly misinformed, and it is in no way true that infamously flexible UK libel law is not mostly defended against with a well-funded legal department.
You’ve certainly been misinformed if you think that there is some kind of special free speech protection in the UK that applies only to publishers.
I don’t know of any country in the world where having money and resources doesn’t confer all kinds of advantages. It wouldn’t be difficult to come up with a list of fundamental rights which de facto aren’t available poor people in the USA. (Just think of all the people jailed under plea bargains because they couldn’t afford proper legal advice. Plea bargains aren’t a thing in the UK.)
Certainly, you are better able to defend against a libel action if you have a lot of money. But in fact private individuals would rarely be sued for libel unless they were rich, as it otherwise wouldn’t be worth it. The libel laws (which I’m not a fan of) have the largest chilling effect on small to medium sized publications, not on individuals.
Cultural domination. There used to be a time when countries such as UK, France, Germany were incredibly influential in areas such as music and film. Now they're barely a blip on the radar. All the famous movies and music artists come from the US. I'd argue that stronger protections of free speech is a major advantage that led to this happening.
The part that gets exported, the pop culture so to speak, is as uncontroversial as it can be. But it's just the end product of a creative process. And this creative process works best in a free society. Moreover, pop culture is the tip of the iceberg standing atop all sorts of cultures and counter-cultures that make up the free society. It wouldn't have been created if free thought wasn't allowed to flourish.
Yes. I think most people would strongly argue against "more freedom" when it came to their neighbors being "free" to store large quantities of explosives in their house, for example.
I would guess that to most of the world's population "prohibition of the use of illegally obtained evidence" is a crazy and stupid idea. Apart from the USA, which countries have a rule like that? (Perhaps Germany does?)
I'm not saying the rule didn't serve a useful purpose in some particular historical circumstances, but in general if you know that X is true then you should use that fact to avoid miscarriages of justice, and if crimes were committed in establishing the truth of X then you should hold a separate trial of the people responsible for those crimes (unless of course they are dead or for some other reason cannot be tried).
Ginsberg's association with NAMBLA is indeed odd and unfortunate, as it taints a lot of his more respectable work. Here is what wikipedia quotes a friend of his as saying:
> But, in fact, he was a pedophile. He did not belong to [NAMBLA] out of some mad, abstract conviction that its voice had to be heard. He meant it. I take this from what Allen said directly to me, not from some inference I made. He was exceptionally aggressive about his right to [f*ck] children and his constant pursuit of underage boys
In the same way that it's hard to like a Woody Allen film or Michael Jackson song -- you can recognize the quality of the art but then realize they may have a monstrous side.
Except that we are talking about celebrating the publishing of Howl. Does Howl advocate child rape, or does he keep that out of his works like Michael Jackson doesn’t advocate relationships with children in Thriller and Woody Allen doesn’t advocate for marrying underage relatives in Manhattan.
I expect Allen Ginsburg’s Howl is about as depraved as the man.
There is a lot in there of which I am not intimately familiar but I don't believe it does. It seems to me that contemporary claims of depravity of Howl centered around depiction of consensual homosexual acts, or drugs, or simple use of swearing, all of which are less shocking today than they were in the 50s. If you can find a specific example do tell.
> Woody Allen doesn’t advocate for marrying underage relatives in Manhattan
There is a creepy relationship with an underage girl (played by Mariel Hemingway) in that film. The amount of seeming autobiographical material in his work of the time make this hard to dismiss.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
Only partly true, I'm afraid. This source is hard right. I don't want to go down a non HN- rabbit hole bc we're here to talk mostly about tech and information related things, but in extreme cases it's worth noting. I had also once thought Soiked was left wing, its editorial bears no resemblance to the old Left whatsoever. You might call it alt-right-libertarian, and funded by the notorious Koch brothers.
https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Spiked
They were considered dangerous activist judges by many in their time.