At Stanford law school, the dean takes a stand for free speech. will it work?
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
Amazing that no one else was willing to sponsor an event featuring the first woman president of the ACLU.
1. The overly-broad application of the First Amendment to conservative SCOTUS decisions giving corporations 1A rights.
2. The financial success of propaganda corporations such as Fox News, and their poisoning of public discourse.
3. The weakening of democratic institutions and the ability for people to govern themselves as they choose
Given that, is it any surprise that people are lashing out? MTG gets softball 60 Minutes segments. Perhaps people are coming to understand that this isn’t a viable way forward.
Fox started the problem with our news, but now we have similiar outlets on both left and right doing it. Don't watch them.
1) arguing that private companies arbitrarily deciding what they want to allow on their platform, even under direct request from government departments and powerful individuals, is actually good and needed to protect minorities.
2) They also defend one set of "propaganda corporations" from the other set of "propaganda corporations"; they don't rail against extremely partisan coverage, they have come to consider it a patriotic duty to even suppress true information that would give the opposition ammo.
3) They support the FBI and the CIA over Congress and the democratic process. Democratic processes are ridiculed as "popularity contests." They support US military interventions and sanctions regimes abroad against democratically elected leaders.
wrt free speech I find poppers paradox of intolerance relevant. a unhealthy overdose of Der Stürmer and lashing out against some scapegoat minorities lead Europe into WWII
in simple words: you _have_ to put limits on bullshitting else your freedom is shat on.
Not really. He’s making these pronouncements and reforms. He isn’t deferring to each bishop in their own territory.
wrt free speech I find
Regardless of what you or I think about this issue there was an organization that stood for one position on it for almost a century.
However good the arguments are, I don’t expect the National Pro-Life Religious Council to decide that maybe abortions aren’t so bad after all.
so in a way he's is managing "free speech"
which is our topic here: how do we establish the rules for speech which support unity and support for our neighbors and which end oppression of weak minorities? which speech rules foster growth and fairness and justice and health for all?
Except that:
1. Hitler rose to power mostly on the back of widespread civil unrest caused by the conditions placed on Germany for being the loser of WW1. Jews weren't popular anywhere in Europe at that time, anti-semitism was not a uniquely German thing, but Hitler came to power there because the German people could see no way out of the crushing poverty and despair caused by the reparations they were being forced to pay.
2. Germany didn't have strong free speech or political protections in the runup to Hitler taking power which is why a political party was able to have its own shock troops on the street beating up other parties. The first thing Hitler did was get rid of free speech and the free competition of ideas more generally, because the sort of people who hate free speech are exactly those people who are engaged in bullshitting and don't want other people to point it out.
If Germany had strong democratic and free speech institutions, and the victors in WW1 had paid more attention to rebuilding Germany in their own image instead of treating it as a loot box, then Hitler would likely never have happened. He'd have been beaten back at the ballot box and become a failed politician of no real note.
Amazing how the world has forgotten that part of it, and how in vogue totalitarianism was in the 1930s
there problem pre 1933 was that Hitler could spread whichever slander he wanted, "free speech", just louder and bullshittier than anybody else. "free bullshitting" because "free speech"
and the problem post 1933 was that nobody else was allowed to speak freely any more.
and PS: he already started losing at the ballot box. he just FUD-ed the moderate conservatives enough to have ether back.
Sorry, what? This stands out to me way more than some heckling at a speech that this article seems focused on. Really feels like what gets lost in these conversations is how "free speech" should mean you can voice opinions without having your livelihood threatened, not some requirement that people are literally quiet while you are talking.
A brief interruption to express disagreement is one thing, but a constant yelling simply to drown out the event participant is a completely different thing.
For example, it would be harassment if I show up at your birthday party at a restaurant patio and repeatedly yell that you are a pedantic, argumentative, picayune anarchist who should have more manners and respect the opportunity of others to speak their opinions as well. Saying it once or twice is another matter.
Take your thought process here a step further. If we establish that speech needs to be heard in order to satisfy the principle of free speech, how many people need to hear something before it qualifies?
>If I intercepted the post you just made and scrambled it with random characters so noone else would understand it, are you still calling that free speech?
Are you arguing that downvoting a comment until the text is gray and difficult to read is HN infringing on a user's free speech?
Similarly, trying to form a barricade and keep people from reaching the speaker and hearing them is an attempt to silence their speech.
Thats an easy question to answer.
The answer would be whoever voluntarily chooses to listen to that speech, of their own free will, without other people coming in to make significant disruptions (especially illegal disruptions, or acts of illegal physical violence) of that voluntary interaction between speaker and hearer.
> Are you arguing that downvoting a comment..... is HN infringing on a user's free speech?
A better example would be a 3rd party going to the server room where Hacker News is stored, destroying the servers with a hammer, and then saying "Your speech isn't infringed on! You were allowed to say whatever you wanted! You just don't have the right to be heard, because I the uninvolved 3rd party broke into the server room and destroyed the server hardware!"
Yes, if this is what happened, this is starting to get close to censorship. Especially if it is not a one time thing, and is instead continual or illegal.
Also, if you want a better explanation, just go look up how free speech works in the US.
All these crazy hypotheticals, that you think are somehow gotchas, have mostly been settled by the US court system.
And the US court system has side strongly in favor of protecting free speech, while also being able to deal with these very limited and rare exceptions, to prevent extremely damaging content, like direct and immediate calls or violence, or the like.
This has all been covered before, mostly, in a good way, by the US legal system and court precedent.
Time and place restrictions are perfectly legal.
A school, government fund or otherwise, or even the government itself, is absolutely free to prevent a mob of students, from shouting down speakers.
And they can use the force of their position as the university, or the force of law to do so.
Time and place restrictions absolutely can help promote speech, and are legal.
Either way, it doesn't refute my original point. People are asking for certain people's free speech rights to be curtailed in order to protect the free speech rights of others. That is effectively the same argument that the students are often making in these situations. Speech should be restricted when it infringes on other people's rights. The pro-free speech side just likes to play no true Scotsman games and redefine stuff they don't like as not really speech. But if the audience members heckling the speaker can be speech unworthy of protecting because it infringes on other people's rights, then we also need to evaluate what the speaker on the stage is saying and whether their words infringe on the rights of anyone else.
* with defamation (edit: and false advertising, perjury, etc) exception, for things you know are lies when you say them.
This is a direct contradiction of "unconditional free speech". Once you allow the manner of speech to be restricted, free speech is no longer unconditional. You just want to believe in "unconditional free speech" because freedom is great and being pro-freedom makes us all feel warm and fuzzy inside. That ideal can't stand up to the complexities of the real world when the rights of multiple people come into direct conflict with each other. There need to be restrictions in both the manner and the content. The only content restriction you listed was defamation, but I have a feeling you would be against at least some of the following: fraud, perjury, false advertising, copyright infringement, threats, incitement to violence, coercion, blackmail, revenge porn, child porn, and the list goes on and on. Suddenly there are a lot of conditions on that "unconditional" and it becomes less clear why some further restriction such as outlawing hate speech would be a monumental infringement on freedom of speech.
These, like defamation, fall under "things you know are lies when you say them." I should have phrased that differently, edited.
> copyright infringement, threats, incitement to violence, coercion, blackmail, revenge porn, child porn
Not expressions of opinion, so don't fall under my definition of free speech. (Fair use ensures that copyright law doesn't conflict with free speech/expressing opinions).
> outlawing hate speech
Unlike all the extant restrictions you mentioned, this would make it illegal to express a particular opinion or belief, that you don't know is empirically false.
> complexities of the real world
I do believe this is a nuanced issue with answers that are not always clear-cut. Specifically, it can be hard to tell where government (which has to be fair and neutral) ends, and private organizations (which have the right to their own opinions) start. Everyone interacts with the government in some way, via road system, taxes, regulation, grants, public contracts, etc.
Also, I don't know why you are categorizing that group as not expressions of opinions. It is certainly possible to frame opinions into those various categories. The most obvious examples are the old "it would be a shame if something happened to..." threats that you see in every bad mob movie.
In theory, this law, if perfectly applied, would not be incompatible with my view of free speech. In practice, such a law would be too broad, because determining whether something is true or not, and whether someone believes it or not, are hard problems that the justice system can't solve in general.
> It is certainly possible to frame opinions into those various categories.
It's possible to frame an opinion into any action, including straightforward murder. But no opinion requires an action in that group to express.
For the "it would be a shame if X" example, the crime is not the words or opinion. In fact, it's perfectly possible to use those same words legally, to express a genuine opinion that X would be bad! The crime is communicating a threat (which is not an opinion) via implication.
That's a genuine question.
Of course that's speech.
You don’t have a right to force a private university to host your speech and prevent its students from heckling.
SFSU let Riley Gaines be beaten and held against her will by the braying mob. New Zealand let Posie Parker and a bunch of old ladies be attacked be assaulted by shrieking thugs. There's nothing of speech in their actions, just terroristic political violence against the enemy.
> you’re free to buy / rent your own private venue
Actually, no you're not. The mob will blockade even an entirely private event held off-campus, or in a public square with permit, etc.
Likewise, blockading a private event is likely a criminal act.
When you have some students against a high-level public official, the students' rights are obviously more important from a freedom of speech perspective.
Of course, freedom of speech is not an absolute right, and it's not the only thing that matters. If the university finds it valuable to host controversial speakers, maintaining the order by suppressing the freedom of speech of those who try to disrupt the talk can be a valid choice.
"Those in power" is such a nebulous concept. In certain situations (legal cases that come before him), the circuit court judge has a lot of power. In others (Stanford campus environment), the students have more power than he does. Freedom of speech is fundamentally the right to express one's opinion—it is irrelevant whose interests that opinion serves. In the Stanford incident, the hecklers interfered with the judge's ability to express his opinion, while the judge's actions in no way interfered with the ability of the students to communicate their opinions.
Second, opinions are irrelevant. Everyone has them, and they are almost always worthless. Placing excessive value on opinions is the reason why we are in this endless quagmire of political polarization. The students disrupted the talk instead of arguing with the speaker, because they believed they have the right (rather than just the freedom) to express their opinions.
Freedom of speech is at its core the right to express politically actionable ideas. It protects those who reveal secrets the authorities would keep hidden, those who criticize the way things are done, and those who propose doing things in a different way. It allows citizens to debate matters and to make better, more informed decisions.
The freedom to express opinions is a trivial consequence.
Freedom of speech protects your right to say that the earth is round. The roundness of the earth won't reveal any corruption scandals, it won't lead to major political reforms. It's not political at all. And yet is is just as protected as anything else.
More generally, defining freedom of speech in terms of government is wrong, because freedom of speech fundamentally does not depend on government. It is an inalienable, God-given right, that people have even in a state of nature where no government exists.
As for those supposed inalienable rights, I suggest empirical validation. Go to a country like North Korea and try testing, which rights actually exist.
The only rights that matter are the ones that the society (not necessarily the government) is willing to enforce.
The students rights aren't being infringed. They can spend all 365 days of the year saying what they want, everywhere they want, except in that one room for two hours.
To imply that they have a right to amplified shrieking over the speaker to state their point, you're doing what you accuse the other side of doing, insisting that free speech is a right to be heard.
The students deserve the same treatment the invited speaker deserves - a guarantee that they can speak and be peacefully heard - somewhere. Universities have many rooms and the students can have their own.
Frankly, it's good to see people taking a moral stance against someone who takes a "moral" stance (imposing their holy book on everyone) by doing something like allowing states to ban gay marriage. People on this site talk big about "accountability" for their pet problems like data leaks and privacy but seemingly don't like it when public figures are held even modestly accountable for their shit behavior which does irreparable harm.
That statement is frightening. I sure hope most people think they are obligated to allow other people their right to free speech.
In situations where people start threatening others with violence to shut them up, concern is warranted. Until then... Let's touch grass together.
Even just crowding beyond capacity into a room, or shoving signs in front of speakers, or blocking people's way, would be treated as a crime if it was done to interrupt a stockholder's meeting. Do you think these actions are okay in protests or do you think they should be stopped?
How close, how many, and how loud, would the people be allowed to be? Are they allowed to shove into every elevator with you to deny you any potential "platform" to talk, or are they limited to only disrupting sanctioned meetings? Can they follow you home at night, or to the movies?
Can they simply scream incoherently, or are they limited to actually speaking words to be treated as protestors? Are amplified sirens allowed, and when?
Given that masked protestors have and frequently do attack people at rallies, and threats are easily implied from masked people screaming at you, would you be fine asking police to follow the usual (pre 2010) rules on masking at political events and either unmask people or make them leave?
And lastly, are these rules that you think are reasonable and should apply in both directions, regardless of which side protests what?
1: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/email-mocking-stanford-...
There's more to the story. The flyer presented itself as a Federalist Society flyer including using their logo and template, and there was indeed some confusion about whether or not it had been put out by the Society:
https://www.thefire.org/research-learn/stanford-federalist-s...
People not being sure if “violent insurrection can be an effective approach to upholding the principle of limited government” was genuinely espoused by the Society makes the parody even more meaningful.
For example, if someone put up a poster, with your name and photo on it, and the poster said "I, the person in the photo, support Killing a bunch of people, on this date, at this time, at this location", this would be defamation.
When you start getting into actual death threats, this can cross the line into illegal defamation.
And no, defamation is not protected by the 1st amendment, nor are many types of death threats.
Instead, the court system in the USA mostly does a pretty good job determining what is or is not speech, and ways of having very limited restricts on speech that only prevent the extremely harmful stuff, while maintaining people's rights.
Addressing these "corner cases" is exactly what the court system does, and it has resulted in a society where the vast vast majority of speech is protected, and only very extreme and damaging edge cases are banned.
You just ascribe "hateful" motives to anyone disagrees with you, then suddenly your own common, mediocre, garden variety hate is elevated to a higher moral purpose. You're not a hater (you are), you're fighting hate! (not really).
There are a ton of people that operate under this delusion.
"The Circle" isn't a parody. Social commentary, perhaps, and its commercial nature as a film would make reaching the threshold for parodic fair use harder. https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/parody
I don't hope for a long life, because when these people gain power life will be worth much less. I intend to enjoy freedom while I can.
They weren’t clear about exactly what high rule would be violated, but then again a lot of these rules can be vague and subject to interpretation.
We may need to redirect our ire toward the government who creates these vague, restrictive rules and regulations instead of the corporations who are forced to tiptoe around them.
I think the Judge is a piece of shit. I don’t like him as a human being. However, “ignoring” is precisely what should have happened here.
Also, if you watch the video the entire thing was staged - the students shut up on command - to get that lady dean up on stage where she could present her prepared speech about how valorous it was for her and them to shut him up. Pure hypocrisy.
On an epistemological level it is even more frightening. We lose knowledge when we refuse to engage ideas, especially when the intellectual elite does the equivalent of sticking their heads in the sand.
Students could (very reasonably) argue that they were granted explicit permission and approval at the event by attending administrators.
To be clear, they could not have been punished for violating any laws. But the school could have punished them, and the state bars to which they will be applying could deny them admission based on their behavior. This would have a serious impact on their ability to earn money and/or repay loans.
I do wonder how the wealthy families who bankroll the school would feel about their kids getting punished for shouting down known bigots. I'm sure many would approve, but many also would not. It's likely the school's has incorporated this fact into their response.
They suck and they should all be in a maximum security prison themselves.
As long as one side gets to decide what the other can say, you are not impartial here, and can't fairly moderate.
no one should be moderated
Paraphrasing a Colbert quote (“reality has a well-known liberal bias”) is oddly apropos, given the thread topic.
The Colbert Report actively sought out guests/topics with unorthodox views and used speech (in the form of satire) to indirectly mock or support. And it worked as both a moderator of extremism as well as a way to humorously expose issues embedded in society.
And while it was certainly a “liberal” oriented show, they went out of their way to showcase conservatives with interesting ideas (eg: Ron Paul, who was essentially blackballed from other media at the time) and touched on topics like the Snowden leaks that would be absolutely verboten on Colbert’s sad and pathetic Late Night Show.
“I am very moral therefore I am the arbiter of speech” is what the left used to rail against. “Canceling” used to mean “Jon Stewart went on Crossfire and exposed the show for the society-destroying rage bait it always was”. What happened? (Yes Trump, but it has to be more than just him)
Also, you'd have to be pretty blind to history, to argue that "left wing ideology holds up better to academic scrutiny"...whatever that means exactly.
I don't know where you got the idea I said that. Universities examine all ideologies.