Since several people are asking why the ACLU isn't what it once was, let me answer that.
In 1978, the ACLU successfully defended the right of neo-Nazis to march in the predominantly Jewish town of Skokie, Illinois. This action reflected their commitment to free speech, regardless of how offensive the speech might be. The movie "Skokie" and documentary "Mighty Ira" are based on this event-- I highly recommend them because this is an important piece of U.S. history.
In contrast, the modern ACLU has backed away from this stance. A leaked ACLU memo[1] says that before they take a free speech case, they will consider the "context of the proposed speech; the potential effect on marginalized communities; the extent to which the speech may assist in advancing the goals of white supremacists or others whose views are contrary to our values; and the structural and power inequalities in the community in which the speech will occur."
I understand citizens need the right to voice their opinion without fear of government repression; but citizens shouldn't believe they have the right to insult and behave antisocially to other citizens.
Any kind of white supremacist behavior is not something to be treasured as freedom, because that enables their harmful behavior against other citizens.
It's only freedom of speech if it protects speech which is actually controversial. This isn't high school. People should have the right to give offense and behave antisocially, if for no other reason than because there is no one who can be trusted with the power to determine what falls into these extremely arbitrary and subjective categories.
Yes we should tolerate the speech of white supremacists and other hateful characters, because the alternative is to see reasonable statements lumped in with them. Where we should draw a clear and sharp line is at violence.
"It is better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer."
- William Blackstone
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
- Evelyn Beatrice Hall
You prevent them from gaining power by winning debates against them and demonstrating to everyone why they're wrong.
I mean have you actually seen the "science" used to claim even the existence of different races? It's all misleading statistics and pseudoscience. You group a bunch of people together based on geographical origin and then observe some differences in the averages between the two groups, ignoring that the differences within each "race" are larger than the differences between "races," and that the lines are being drawn arbitrarily, and that even the measured averages could be different as a result of environment or culture rather than genetics.
There is no way for a Nazi to win that on the facts because the facts are against them. Which is why they have so little actual support. There are probably more trolls pretending to be Nazis than there are actual Nazis.
They're used as the boogeyman specifically because there is such widespread agreement that they're wrong.
Individuals who dared to make anthropological, social and genetic studies on ethnic groups were retaliating upon with great anger and were banished from academic life even if the scientific methodology was sound.
No one dares to do such studies anymore so we can conclude that the "good" has won.
Unless I'm misinterpreting your angle, this sounds like a blatant, hysteric mistruth. Nearly every day I see studies where social and ethnic groups are used to partition and understand the population, particularly with COVID.
So it depends what you mean. If you mean there are no studies done with such partitioning aimed towards the benefit of those groups, I call that bunkum.
If you mean studies are not sponsored where the outcome is of no societal value beyond reinforcing or justifying an established hegemony or excusing discrimination, then perhaps... and good.
You're missing an important point here, that Eric Weinstein brings up a lot. The goal of science is finding truth, but the mechanism of how it happens right now is very tied to the "goal" of each study. Goal-less data collection is apparently impossible to certify and "be acknowledged".
>no societal value beyond reinforcing or justifying an established hegemony or excusing discrimination
Researchers might have hypotheses they want to test, and any hypothesis that's not "good" is not explored. Because
1. real identities and careers are affected
2. collected data isn't good enough for journals
> You prevent them from gaining power by winning debates against them and demonstrating to everyone why they're wrong.
"A lie can travel around the world and back again while the truth is lacing up its boots."
It doesn't matter how solid your facts are if people are listening to vox pops of people who back their own internal beliefs.
> There is no way for a Nazi to win that on the facts because the facts are against them. Which is why they have so little actual support.
They don't need support, they just need an echo chamber to be encouraged. Pop onto stormfront and try convince a handful of posters there and see how far you get.
> There are probably more trolls pretending to be Nazis than there are actual Nazis.
If x% (where x is some suitably small number) of a group are the only ones who truly believe it, and the rest are just trolls, then increasing the population size leads to both more trolls and more Nazis. It also doesn't matter to anyone whether the person spewing vitriol is actually a Nazi or a troll when the abuse is directed at them.
Our tooling for communicating ideas and finding good ones is equivalent to mob rule, same as a hundred years ago, just amplified. More at my older comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29051178
> Pop onto stormfront and try convince a handful of posters there and see how far you get.
I've actually done this - it's far easier than you make it seem. I haven't really started collecting metrics on success, but that's kinda what we're missing - messengers who construct a pyramid of truthy statements and go back up the chain to whoever convinced THEM to a particular viewpoint when they find resistance to change from the opposite side. We're missing tech that incentivizes such behavior.
Of course this requires that everyone has a set for themselves a threshold for when they would change their mind about a topic - which I find is far more prevalent among US conservatives (at least online, as they behave to me), than when you try to establish the same among US liberals. Of course, ignoring the obvious field that doesn't have a threshold by design - supremacist religion.
My working theory is that supremacist religionists who converted out of it simply replaced it with liberal ideas (and were being supremacist about those), while there are both religionists and non-religionists among the conservatives.
Pretty sure millions were already in Soviet gulags with Pravda and Izvestiya cranking out official propaganda before anyone became a Nazi.
If you want to understand the terror of total state censorship practiced "the first time", then look to Lenin specifically and communism more generally.
Alternately, one can argue this climate of fear and systematic repression was present during the French revolution, but not localized to the entire state.
Cute, but trivially falsifiable. Wearing a Freddy Krueger mask on Halloween doesn't make you Freddy Krueger.
And to the extent that it is true, it implies that we should stop using Nazis as the boogeyman. Because trolls are going to use whatever will get a rise out of people. Best not have it be this that they summon up.
I don't think any quotes are required around the research performed by Rushton & Jensen (2010)[1] and others that they build on. Doesn't it seem perfectly plausible that, much like other physical characteristics (height, body composition, heat tolerance, etc.) the meat in our skulls also varies between ethnic groups? Shouldn't this be researched and investigated like every other observation?
Once you start studying groups by linguistic origin (not "race") things become much clearer since people historically didn't really move around that much, and genetic markers are quite visible (a la 23andMe). I don't think you need to be a Nazi or a troll to be interested in any of this.
You're talking about the differences in averages. But that's meaningless. If the median Asian man is 5'8" and the median European man is 5'9" (or whatever the numbers are), this tells you nothing about any individual Asian or European males, because like 40% of Asian males will still be above the European median and half of Europeans will be below it.
And it's a completely arbitrary line. If Swedes are on average taller than Austrians, are they different "races" then? It's balderdash. There are genes that affect height and whatever else, but they're widely distributed throughout all "races."
It tells you a whole lot about the composition of either end of the bell curve. It means that in a given population the shortest people are much more likely to be, say, Taiwanese (average aheight 5'3"), and the tallest Dutch (average height 6'½").
Edit: To your point about group taxonomy, usually precision is only available to a level where genetic markers are present and distinct. This in turn comes from groups not interbreeding. For instance, using 23andMe's taxonomy, Sweden belongs to the "Scandinavian" group and Austria belongs to the "French & German" group:
There are two adult brothers somewhere in New York City. They have both of the same parents. One of them is 5'3" and the other one is 6'½". What's the probability that one of them is Dutch and the other one is Taiwanese? If your answer wasn't zero I would like to see your work.
If they are brothers then I suppose they could be mixed Taiwanese-Dutch. But that really isn't the point is it? I'm talking about trends in populations. It's an answer to the question of "Why do we see different representation of these groups on the height spectrum?", not "Explain the difference between these two individuals".
Edit: Also to assert that, given two random people on opposite ends of the height spectrum, it's much more likely that they are distantly related than closely related (controlling for sex) because (controlling for nutrition) height is a heritable trait.
> It's an answer to the question of "Why do we see different representation of these groups on the height spectrum?"
But we already know that, by and large. It's genetics. And the thing we know about genes is that they align very poorly with "races".
It's like grouping animals by color. Then you discover that brown animals are bigger than red animals, because bears are brown and bears are big whereas cardinals are red and cardinals are small. But sparrows are brown. Using the logic of "race" we put the sparrows in the same category as the brown bears. The black bears go in with the black housecats. The red housecats are with the cardinals.
The fact that you can find statistically significant differences between the color groupings doesn't mean you're not doing something preposterous.
>It's like grouping animals by color. Then you discover that brown animals are bigger than red animals, because bears are brown and bears are big whereas cardinals are red and cardinals are small.
But there are groupings of people by genetic markers which correlate to linguistic/cultural origin. These aren't "races" per se but they are a valid and interesting taxonomy of people. And unsurprisingly given they are determined by genetic distance, these groups tend to have a more homogenous physical appearance. When we're talking about IQ, asking "why is does it differ across identifiable groups of people?" seems to be a very controversial question to ask or attempt to answer, often getting you lumped in with the Nazis, which was my original point.
>If you take two populations of otherwise identical people and then isolate them from each other, they'll diverge over time. Maybe the land is different, or the weather, and some genes are better adapted to one place or the other so they become more common there.
By these logic every form of life it's the same since all evolved from the same unicellular organisms.
And yet my cat doesn't have leaves while my plant I keep in the pot doesn't meow.
> These aren't "races" per se but they are a valid and interesting taxonomy of people.
The thing about groupings like this is that they only exist in the statistics.
If you take two populations of otherwise identical people and then isolate them from each other, they'll diverge over time. Maybe the land is different, or the weather, and some genes are better adapted to one place or the other so they become more common there.
That's just averages. Originally 50% of the combined population had trait A. Over time, it becomes the case that 30% of the first population has it and 60% of the second population. You can measure the difference in the average. But the people in the first population who have the trait are the same as the people in the second population who have the trait. It just happens to be the case that that trait is better adapted to the place where the second population lives. If you want to talk about something, talk about people who have the trait or don't, rather than where their ancestors lived.
> When we're talking about IQ, asking "why is does it differ across identifiable groups of people?" seems to be a very controversial question to ask or attempt to answer, often getting you lumped in with the Nazis, which was my original point.
Oh, absolutely. And if that's true, it's true whether you want to hear it or not.
The salient point is that the Nazis are still wrong even if it is. Because it's all still just averages. If there is some gene that makes you smarter and 55% of "white people" have it and 45% of "black people" have it and as a result the averages are different, the conclusion obviously isn't that all white people are smarter than all black people, so Nazis are still wrong.
There is also no concrete proof that that's the case rather than the disparity being a result of nurture rather than nature. It's legitimately hard to separate them out even when it's not as politically charged as this.
> The thing about groupings like this is that they only exist in the statistics.
You could say that about any grouping of people whatsoever.
> If you want to talk about something, talk about people who have the trait or don't, rather than where their ancestors lived.
But clearly where there ancestors lives is a major factor in identifying the likelihood that a person will have a particular trait. And all of this matters because people have gotten it into their heads that every cultural/ethnic group should be equally represented in every field. When you point out that, for the above reasons, this is just as absurd in executive leadership as it is in basketball, they call you a racist/Nazi.
The same objection is raised when people ask "Why are Ashkenazi Jews disproportionately rich/powerful/successful?" or "Why are African Americans disproportionately not?" and you point to the IQ data. In fact you're a racist for even thinking to study this in more detail. This is why I'll never trust anyone to decide what is and isn't an offensive thing to say.
> The salient point is that the Nazis are still wrong even if it is.
It depends on what you mean "wrong". They're clearly morally wrong for murdering and sterilizing millions of people. They're not however wrong that eugenics programs are just as effective in humans as any other animals. And there's more than one way to do eugenics. Why not, for instance, as a matter of public health, simply incentivize people with desirable traits to produce more offspring?
> It's legitimately hard to separate them out even when it's not as politically charged as this.
I agree. Like most things it seems to be genetic predisposition in combination with environmental factors.
>You're talking about the differences in averages. But that's meaningless. If the median Asian man is 5'8" and the median European man is 5'9" (or whatever the numbers are), this tells you nothing about any individual Asian or European males, because like 40% of Asian males will still be above the European median and half of Europeans will be below it.
Valable also for German Shepherd and Golden Retriever.
>If Swedes are on average taller than Austrians, are they different "races" then?
But Swedes can be still considered a different ethnic group than Austrians. Does the exact terminology matters? Various groups of people have both differences and also things in common. So what?
The core problem here is that our technology for discourse is basically twitter and "voting with likes". The algorithms are optimized for attention and likes, so the mob wins - not the best argument.
IF we fixed THAT problem (with new technology, an early one is https://www.kialo.com/tour, but it's not good enough), we can have what you want.
Right now, we're effectively the same tech level as the 1900s (perhaps in a more dangerous way) w.r.t finding truth or the "right" arguments
I’ve never been a fan of voting with likes either. I’d be all in for legislatively banning up and down vote systems. You will get minimal traction here though as the political left use these content voting systems to focus effort and gamify division.
As a Black American who has fought against white supremacists in the street I would say the government has no right to prevent their free speech.
At the same time, I’m under no obligation as a private citizen to tolerate their odious speech. This even includes in business settings… At an old company I once asked our CEO to take down “sponsored content” from our home feed that was promoted by a group on the SPLC hate group list (for comparison we also regularly took down ISIS material.)
Maybe try thinking about it for a moment instead of resorting to the boring heuristic of assuming Americans are dumb zealots treasuring rights because they are brainwashed.
People like you need to stop saying things like "I understand citizens need the right to voice their opinion without fear of government repression" because this is exactly the opposite of what you want. You want views that you consider objectionable to be subject to government repression. You don't have to qualify it, just admit it.
The reason people oppose restrictions on freedom of speech are fairly obvious to anyone who has thought about the question for more than 5 minutes. The moment you start deciding which speech is and isn't legal, you have now established a mechanism to censor. Ban 'hate speech', those who define the term now control the boundaries of allowable speech, and you can guarantee bad actors will seek those powers and abuse them.
You misunderstood me. The government should not censor speech because governments tend to authoritarianism, but civil organizations also shouldn't support neonazis when they exert their freedom of speech against other citizens.
TL;DR: The government must not censor freedom, and citizens should not support acts of oppressions disguised as civil rights.
"Shouldn't behave antisocially", as in e.g. that whole asbo thing that the Brits had until very recently? I'm very glad US doesn't have anything like this:
Civil order that it is a crime to breach. So you could get slapped with one on "balance of probabilities" while becoming criminalised for something fairly arbitrary like entering an area or being drunk. I seem to recall somebody was given an ASBO forbidding them from having noisy sex - which they subsequently did and then faced criminal sanction.
>Any kind of white supremacist behavior is not something to be treasured as freedom, because that enables their harmful behavior against other citizens.
But inciting on harmful behavior against white people is somehow the right thing to do?
I believe all people should be treated against the same set of rules.
In 1978, the ACLU successfully defended the right of neo-Nazis to march in the predominantly Jewish town of Skokie, Illinois. This action reflected their commitment to free speech, regardless of how offensive the speech might be. The movie "Skokie" and documentary "Mighty Ira" are based on this event-- I highly recommend them because this is an important piece of U.S. history.
In contrast, the modern ACLU has backed away from this stance. A leaked ACLU memo[1] says that before they take a free speech case, they will consider the "context of the proposed speech; the potential effect on marginalized communities; the extent to which the speech may assist in advancing the goals of white supremacists or others whose views are contrary to our values; and the structural and power inequalities in the community in which the speech will occur."
[1] https://reason.com/2018/06/21/aclu-leaked-memo-free-speech/