Commenter Archive

Citing Jason Richwine seems to be a very strange choice if you're interested in defending anti-immigration (or even anti-illegal-immigration) activism from charges of racism.

What I'm arguing here is that I, like the court in Masterpiece Cakes, don't think the argument made by by the bakers is correct. Saying that being required to sell a wedding cake to gay people while selling wedding cakes to straight people is "compelled speech" strikes me as pretty bonkers. It makes as much sense to me as saying that it's "compelled speech" to require a newspaper stand to sell newspapers to black people.

How does that not apply to every banning of anyone anywhere?

Sure, maybe the person banned wasn't black, but then you have to prove you didn't do it because they were white, or Asian, or male, or female, or gay, or straight, or....

DensityDuck:
Your #2 and #3 on the list are the same thing.

Yeah, I meant to have one option be, "Accept liability for what his commenters say."

The link was meant to be this one.

I don't know the precise legislative history, but it would surprise me not at all to learn that the "safe harbor" provision of the CDA was intended, in part, to supersede that ruling.

“Why don’t we not open this can of worms, since the whole thing appears to be a non-solution to a non-problem.”

Is it allowable to delete everything that a black person posts?

As far as I know.

First, your link doesn't go anywhere.

Second, I think that's flatly ridiculous. You're arguing that a Catholic blogger has three options:

1. Not have a comment section.
2. Moderate the comment section in a "viewpoint neutral" way.
3. Allow a Satanist commenter to attempt to convert people to worshiping Beezelbub in his comment section.

This does not strike me as a fair imposition.

The viewpoint neutral thing in and of itself seems like an endless source of problems. Is a prohibition on "racial slurs" viewpoint neutral? What if there's disagreement over whether a given word is a slur or not? Why don't we not open this can of worms, since the whole thing appears to be a non-solution to a non-problem.

DensityDuck:
So all along Schilling has had an unspoken “except of course for areas of speech regulation that are required to be in compliance with the law” tagged to everything he’s been saying?

What speech regulation? I assume Schilling likely agrees with the opinion of the court in Masterpiece Cakes that was simply about discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation. Perhaps the reaction would be different if RSM had been banned on account of his sexual orientation, race, or gender, but there's absolutely no evidence that this is the case.

I mean, shit, if that’s the case then why can Twitter even exist?Once the first person says something racist or homophobic, shouldn’t the whole works be shut down for publishing illegal speech?

Because racist and homophobic comments aren't "illegal speech"?

CDA Safe Harbor provisions also apply to bloggers hosting comments.[1] Would you be comfortable with the free speech implications of the government requiring bloggers to host comments that they find repellent?

[1] I'll take the EFF's word for it, as IANAL.

That seems like a curious conclusion to draw, since "discrimination based on sexual orientation" isn't the same thing as "discrimination based on viewpoint".

Murali:
I’m not saying that it should be treated like a public utility, but people who are willing to regulate other non-monopolies (like Tod, you and basically just about almost everybody else who is vaguely to the left of Rand Paul) to ensure non-discrimination can’t justify not regulating twitter on the grounds that only government violations of liberty matter.

We can justify it on the grounds that only government infringements on free speech matter, though, because governments requiring that people publish messages they disagree with in the name of free speech is, in fact, itself a violation of free speech. There isn't even basic internal consistency there.

Also, I don't see any particular reason to treat the anti-discrimination law as some open-ended thing that prohibits all conceivable forms of discrimination. It's actually limited in scope, people who support anti-discrimination laws support laws that are limited in scope, and that scope generally doesn't include prohibiting discrimination on the grounds of political viewpoint, and it's not remotely clear why that should change.

My mind is made up, but my prose was confusing as hell, so I'll take another crack at it:

They're so heavily influenced by their own cultural norms that they think they're just acting the way that anyone would act, without realizing that to people who don't share those cultural norms, it looks like they're taking sides.

j r: It’s Twitter taking side in the culture war and pretending to just be engaged in routine housekeeping.

I don't think the distinction between the two is nearly as clear as you think. One of the things about the sort of community "housekeeping" you describe is that it's going to be heavily influenced by housekeepers' cultural norms[1] that the housekeepers. A lot of people would look look at Nero's or RSM's output and see something sufficiently revolting that it would never occur to them that they're engaging in part of a culture war--they're just reacting the way anyone would react.[2]

As for me, I don't particularly care if Twitter is being fair to the likes of Nero or RSM. I don't even particularly care if it's might stop being fair to the likes of me at some point in the future. I've enjoyed bloviating online for about twenty years, and have changed platforms many times in that span.

[1] Or those of the customers they're trying to mollify.

[2] I suppose another way of thinking about it is that "culture war" is they're often about people coming into conflict because they're in each others' metaphorical blind spots.

#slatepitch!

I just noticed this for some reason, and hope it isn't too late to respond.

I think the core of our disagreement is that you appear to be implicitly assuming that a true commitment to free speech flows from a commitment to a (classically) liberal view of rights, and thus is appropriately rooted in property rights, in the manner of classical liberals. I disagree, and think that you can plausibly root a real commitment to free speech in all sorts of places, including the concerns of the left. I don't think arguing that free speech rights flow organically from one set of fundamental principles or another means they aren't real, though they may differ in key details.

As for the left "cutting to the chase" and dispensing with free speech, it certainly can and has happened[1], but even classical liberals and libertarians aren't immune to that. I attribute a lot of the American left's interest in free speech on suppression it faced in the US, what with jailing of anti-draft protestors, banning information on birth control as obscene, or greeting civil rights protestors with dogs and firehoses. It's also not all that hard to find examples of self-styled and very influential libertarians who were willing to wink at right-wing dictators overseas because they were protecting what really mattered: markets and property.

I'm not trying to argue that all leftists have a genuine commitment to free speech, because I think some obviously don't. I just don't think that being a leftist entails not having such a genuine commitment, nor that a genuine commitment means that it won't conflict with other values that matter to said leftist.[2] The latter is hardly unique--I think there are important ways that free speech is limited that seem entirely consistent with classical liberalism, and tend to focus on the importance of commerce and property. Copyright is the most obvious of these.

[1] Though in most of those instances, you had a profoundly illiberal pre-revolutionary society replace by a profoundly illiberal post-revolutionary society, which seems like it's relevant somehow. Revolutionary leftists have never had anything like that sort of success (and subsequent catastrophic failure) in liberal societies.

[2] I think proposed restrictions around "hate speech", or the similar feminist anti-porn crusading of the '80s, are foolish and shortsighted, but not necessarily particularly indicative of hypocrisy. There are lots of ways to be wrong in this world of ours.

I’m also aware that many on the broad left viewed his joining the majority on that case as contradicting what they took to be his position or philosophy.

Well, yeah. If we can't rely on Scalia (and by extension Dreher) to honor this alleged principle of "judicial restraint" when it's our cherished policies in the crosshairs, why shouldn't we dismiss it as cant?

Scalia never pretended to be in favor of restraint in undoing what he viewed to be excessive activism.

But he didn't just do things that could be reasonably construed as that. Shelby County v. Holder, where he joined the majority, for example, was straight up rejecting a law passed by Congress, based on policy objections, despite the powers granted by the explicit text of the Fifteenth Amendment.

The social conservative handwringing is typical Dreher, but the real irritation here are the profoundly silly process arguments. "Oh, no! How the replacement of Antonin Scalia will inflame partisan acrimony. It will remind us of the last time the Senate actually debated a SCOTUS nominee on the substance of the beliefs that will most influence their rulings!"

One of the things I actually realized before Scalia died was how daft it is to maintain the pretense that Court nominees aren't going to have a pretty good idea what rulings they agree with and what they don't. I'm (to put it mildly) a Bernie skeptic, and realized that I was deploying that argument against him after what he said about appointing justices to overturn Citizens United... and it's just foolish. I'd much rather have an actual debate over the issues at stake in appointments than another round of tedious shadowboxing over questions of how the Senate is obligated to address its duty to offer "advice and consent" on nominees.

If being honest about what's at stake in judicial appointments, or for that matter elections, makes them more acrimonious, so be it.

This overlaps strongly with why Trump freaks me out. He has no interest in conforming to any of the informal norms that govern political campaigns (or just politics broadly), and while some of those are pretty dippy, stuff like, "Don't encourage or excuse your supporters when they kick someone's ass," and, "Don't talk about how offing journalists is cool," is actually kind of important, as is, "Don't signal-boost neo-Nazis."

There was a lot to like about the Bouruis piece, but a couple bits jumped out at me as... kind of weird:

Want to end illegal immigration once and for all? Destroy our own existence, our own prosperity, our own safety, such that life in the United States is worse than the proverbial hell holes illegal immigrants and refugees currently live in. Do that, and the world will stay home.

The alternative is to improve the rest of the world's existence, safety and prosperity; that will also make people more inclined to stay home. Counterintuitive as it may seem, I think this is actually considerably easier than completely wrecking the US, and is obviously a better solution for everybody involved.

Republicans talk about liberty, but never do much of anything from a policy standpoint to advance it; they’re distrustful of it. If you truly believe that liberty is the way, how can you concede that “immigrants” and “refugees” that come here can’t be won by a message of free enterprise, self reliance, personal responsibility, and individual achievement? Unless liberty is a false premise, it is a message that applies to all, regardless of race, nationality, religion, etc.

I... hmm. I think that the idea that some people can handle liberty and other people can't, and that the lines may largely coincide with ones of race, nationality, religion, et c. is a depressingly traditional one.

I'm just upset because if he drops out, it means he's coming back to New Jersey.

To quote an old joke: "Shoot."

I'll hold off on a longer reply in case you post somethiing new, but I did want to respond to one thing:

CK MacLeod: The Left, in your example, expressly does not favor freedom of speech as an end in itself, but as a practical necessity in relation to the Left’s actual primary interests, including its self-interest.

This is an argument that proves too much. Many self-identified libertarians also will favor freedom of speech as an end in itself, for instance as a necessary condition for a robus "marketplace of ideas" to sort wheat from chaff. Some leftists view freedom of speech as purely instrumental, but for others it follows from their concern that the downtrodden have a voice. For the American left in particular, there's such a strong bent towards anti-establishment sentiment, counter-culture and straight-up defeatism that I don't think it's particularly meaningful that it doesn't address what would happen in some imagined future where the left has triumphed.

Unless there is some principle that binds “being on the Left” with support for “something like freedom of speech” or other liberal or quasi-liberal values, then the presence “on the Left” of people who support liberal or quasi-liberal values is strictly speaking accidental, a matter of contingency or random selection.

Of course there is such a principle: free speech is essential in order for the left to organize and advocate for the kind of change it wants to see. The history of free speech activism in the US[1] is heavily entangled with the history of leftism because leftists were so often the people the government wanted to silence.

This isn't the only such principle that animates the left, of course, and it can be in tension with other leftist values. Campus speech codes are probably the clearest example of this in the contemporary US.[2] "Has other values that sometimes conflict," though, shouldn't really be disqualifying.

Also, there are elements of how people on the right view free speech that conflict strongly with leftist values, because there it is rooted in a commitment to expansive property rights and unfettered commerce.

Finally, though stuff like campus speech codes and pro-censorship anti-porn activism are things, I really believe a lot of the perception of the left as being anti-free-speech is being driven by a torrent of spurious "defenses" of free speech arguments mostly emanating from the right and center.

[1] Not gonna touch the question of the global left vs. right, especially since I'm not even aware of anything that could be considered "global libertarianism".

[2] Anti-porn feminism from the '80s came from a similar place.

Sex crime registries isn't obviously illegitimate program in theory, and the loss of liberty involved isn't out of proportion to what's at stake when offenders are convicted serious crimes (years or even decades in prison). The actual implementations, on the other hand, are routinely awful, for many of the same reasons that our justice system as a whole is routinely awful.

Since this software doesn't seem to have any sort of ignore list functionality, I guess I'll have to ignore your nitpicky, mindless partisanism the old fashioned way. I'm not planning on responding to you again; feel free to claim victory and tell everybody who will listen how your towering insight was too much for me to deal with.

You seem to be assuming that all police stops are racist and that all stops lead to an arrest, neither of which are true.

No, I assume that enough police stops are racist that members of racial minorities are disproportionately likely to be stopped, and that a stop is at least as likely to result in arrest when a member of a racial minority is the person stopped.

Furthermore, the article plainly states that the schools in question say that an arrest isn’t an automatic disqualification.

It doesn't have to be; hell, it could just be a tie-breaker and it would have a negative disparate impact on minorities.

Sadly, you read as poorly as dragonfrog.

One of us sure has a reading comprehension problem.