[HN Gopher] The Disintegration of the ACLU
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The Disintegration of the ACLU
Author : jdkee
Score : 39 points
Date : 2021-03-31 18:52 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.tabletmag.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.tabletmag.com)
| rayiner wrote:
| > "My successor, and the board of directors that have supported
| him, have basically tried to transform the organization from a
| politically neutral, nonpartisan civil liberties organization
| into a progressive liberal organization," Glasser says about
| Anthony Romero
|
| I'm surprised but then not to see Glaser has the same opinion of
| Romero that I do. I'm a card carrying member of the ACLU but even
| a decade ago I realized Romero was not a straight shooter. The
| ACLU newsletter had become a work of propaganda. Before I started
| sending it to /dev/null I would open it up, work up a frothy
| outrage at some documented injustice, only to be left annoyed
| when I googled for further details and realized Romero's team had
| completely misrepresented the facts. It's not that I disagree
| with defending someone who murdered a pizza delivery guy in front
| of his family (read up on the Juwan Wickware case). That's what
| lawyers do. But the ACLU didn't misrepresent the facts to make
| the Skokie Nazis seem like they were Boy Scouts.
| obviouslynotme wrote:
| The ACLU used to be my favorite organization to donate to. They
| had a set of principles and defended them rigorously. Due to
| the way US jurisprudence works, most people who are victimized
| by laws and courts are criminals and general scum. It takes
| maturity to rise above that initial distaste and accept that
| criminals and scum not only have rights too, but are _the most
| important_ people to defend from victimization. Not every civil
| rights case will be Rosa Parks.
|
| Needless to say, I no longer donate to the ACLU. I know why
| they have changed, but I do not like it. I will not support it.
| They can take their dirty money and play their political games
| by themselves. There are many good charities that need support.
| Animats wrote:
| "And unlike the 1970s, when the ACLU was run by stubbornly
| principled people who refused to buckle under the weight of
| fashionable opinion or donor pressure, the new generation of
| leaders prioritized conformism over intellectual consistency."
|
| That's a problem. The huge pressure for conformity. Both Left and
| Right are way too insistent on this. The Left now insists on
| gender concepts that were considered totally wacko twenty years
| ago. The Right is stuck with fear of and attraction to Trump.
| Rejecting those positions can get people fired. This is not good.
| bhouston wrote:
| It is hard to take this as a serious criticism
|
| First James Kirkpatrick argues that the ACLU doesn't stand for
| anything these days.
|
| Then he starts to associate the ACLU with cancel culture. Mostly
| by citing surveys of leftist students and implying that the ACLU
| is also leftist thus it is basically the same.
|
| Then he argues that the ACLU does stand very strongly for
| transgender rights but then criticizes it for being strong on
| that because James Kirkpatrick doesn't agree with it.
|
| Argh. I think the key problem is that James doesn't like what the
| ACLU is prioritizing, that is all.
| SpicyLemonZest wrote:
| He's not arguing that the ACLU stands for _nothing_ , I don't
| think. He's arguing that it's shifted towards being a general-
| purpose progressive activism group, standing up for whichever
| causes are trendy in progressive circles and ignoring causes
| that aren't, rather than prioritizing based on the underlying
| principles of civil liberties they're nominally protecting.
| slibhb wrote:
| The article quotes the guy who led the ACLU from 1978 to 2001:
|
| > My successor, and the board of directors that have supported
| him, have basically tried to transform the organization from a
| politically neutral, nonpartisan civil liberties organization
| into a progressive liberal organization
|
| You are of course not obligated to agree. But acting like it's
| just the author sharing his funny opinions seems a bit
| disingenuous.
|
| If you are a progressive, you might not object to the turn the
| ACLU has taken. For liberals and conservatives, it's been a
| marked decline. The same is true for the SPLC.
| jonny_eh wrote:
| I don't see the benefit to being neutral if the Right is going to
| demonize it anyways.
| geofft wrote:
| This article glosses over the actual results of _Skokie_ and
| _Charlottesville_ , both of which are pretty important. The Nazis
| never ended up marching in Skokie, nor did they march in any of
| the other small towns where they'd requested permits, either.
| There's a fair bit of reason to believe that their goal wasn't to
| promote their ideas, nor even to harass the heavily Jewish
| village of Skokie through marching, but to harass the village
| _through the courts_ - they found someone who they could bully
| and they enjoyed it.
|
| Charlottesville didn't deny the alt-right a permit. They denied
| them a permit _in a particular park_ , which had a particular
| statue - but they denied it on the grounds that security would be
| difficult to arrange in the small park, and they granted them a
| permit in a larger, nearby park. The alt-right did in fact rally,
| and as the city predicted, there was an act of violence because
| of the crowded conditions, and someone died.
|
| Both of these were tactical failures.
|
| Which is to say, I don't think it's particularly easy to say that
| Ira Glasser-era ACLU was a great force for justice and Anthony
| Romero-era ACLU lost it. I'd argue that the ACLU made the same
| mistake, in the same context, both times. In neither case did
| they actually make it so someone could exercise their free speech
| rights. They just got lucky the first time that there were no
| obviously negative consequences to their action, and so they
| could engage in PR that they were the good guys. And the ACLU
| themselves bought into that PR, which kept them from realizing
| their mistake.
|
| The article also makes this pretty wild assertion at the end:
|
| > _FIRE also discovered that female, LGBT, and Black students are
| less supportive of free speech than male, straight, Hispanic,
| Asian, and white students, a worrisome indication that the
| insidious effort to malign the entire concept of "free speech" as
| a weapon to "harm" minorities is bearing fruit. Rather than
| learning how the First Amendment has been a precondition for
| every social, political, legal, and cultural advancement secured
| by marginalized groups in America, it would tragically appear
| that indoctrinating the latter-day beneficiaries of these
| struggles in the belief that they are helpless against
| "oppressive structures" and "systems" has convinced many that
| free speech is their enemy._
|
| Why is it taken as an obvious fact that said female, LGBT, and
| Black students are wrong about free speech? Why are they clearly
| indoctrinated? Why not ask them _why_ they don 't support it?
| Perhaps they have a well-considered opinion on the matter?
| throwaway0x2 wrote:
| >Why is it taken as an obvious fact that said female, LGBT, and
| Black students are wrong about free speech?
|
| Because de facto (and de jure) they are.
|
| >Why are they clearly indoctrinated?
|
| https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/09/the-cod...
|
| >Why not ask them why they don't support it?
|
| FIRE literally does exactly that.
|
| >Perhaps they have a well-considered opinion on the matter?
|
| This made me audibly chuckle. Undergraduate students with
| pronouns in their Twitter profiles having a well-considered
| opinion on free speech? Press X to DOUBT.
| geofft wrote:
| That _Atlantic_ article is pretty clear that they don 't know
| the cause (" _It's difficult to know exactly why vindictive
| protectiveness has burst forth so powerfully in the past few
| years._ ") They've got a bunch of speculations, that children
| aren't allowed to play outside or whatever. But even those
| weak speculations don't lend themselves to the thesis that
| children were indoctrinated: no part of being told not to
| play outside means that you emerge programmed to oppose free
| speech. The further extrapolations don't hold up too strongly
| - if the younger generation is trained, as the article says,
| to believe that the older generation will keep them safe from
| a scary world, why is it the younger generation that is
| taking the lead in censorship? Why is the liberal professor
| mentioned at the beginning of the article scared of his
| liberal students? The article says that increasing reports of
| mental health issues from students " _has surely changed the
| way university faculty and administrators interact with
| them,_ " but again, doesn't that mean that it's the students
| driving that change, and the university faculty and
| administrators figuring out how to adapt?
|
| If anything, the article tends to support the case that
| they're not indoctrinated. It mentions that students grew up
| as teenagers on Facebook, " _sharing their moral judgments
| and supporting one another in moral campaigns and conflicts,_
| " which - again - is self-driven by this group, not forced on
| them by anyone. (And also, who would be indoctrinating them?
| The same liberal professors that are scared of their liberal
| students?)
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| throwaway0x2 wrote:
| Liberals are scared, leftists are not. It's leftist
| activist who are pushing and approving these changes. Old
| school liberals, like the ones mentioned and outlined in
| this post's article, are quickly finding themselves to be
| politically homeless.
|
| >If anything, the article tends to support the case that
| they're not indoctrinated.
|
| This is where you're wrong:
|
| "This new climate is slowly being institutionalized, and is
| affecting what can be said in the classroom, even as a
| basis for discussion. During the 2014-15 school year, for
| instance, the deans and department chairs at the 10
| University of California system schools were presented by
| administrators at faculty leader-training sessions with
| examples of microaggressions."
|
| It's been institutionalized. We now have primary school
| administrators making claims as outlandish as "acronyms are
| white supremacy": https://abc7news.com/sfusd-renaming-
| schools-board-meeting-sa...
|
| These are the children becoming undergraduates.
|
| Those undergraduate students with pronouns in their Twitter
| profiles having a well-considered opinion on free speech?
| Press X to DOUBT.
| jfengel wrote:
| They do seem surprised that "groups most frequently harassed,
| most frequently support limits on harassment".
| Simulacra wrote:
| I used to support the ACLU personally and financially but the
| leadership took a decidedly left turn at some point, and lost its
| neutrality. The shift to the left has been so great that it's
| hard to tell if their motives are one-sidedly political.
| dmitrygr wrote:
| I cancelled my monthly automatic donation to them a few years
| back in 2018, when this happened [1]. I _started_ those
| donations when I was 18 (15-ish years ago), because I read
| about this [2]. Having come to this country from a place where
| speech could get you jailed, it was glorious to support a fight
| to keep speech free - to me it is what made America magical.
| Sad to watch them (and the country) fall so far on this
| important topic...
|
| [1] https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-aclu-retreats-from-free-
| exp...
|
| [2]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Socialist_Party_of_Am...
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(page generated 2021-03-31 23:03 UTC)