The social justice warrior’s gain is the civil libertarian’s loss. The ACLU still engages in the fight for civil liberty, especially in opposition to the post-9/11 security state and as part of the anti-Trump ‘resistance’. But the 21st-century ACLU has chosen its battles with a progressive sensibility that devalues free speech and due process for all. Most notably, it has shied away from confronting campus-censorship crusades and the threat of an ideology that equates allegedly hateful speech with discriminatory action, subordinating the right to speak to the imagined rights of particular listeners to suppress what offends them.
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Samizdata quote of the daySamizdata Illuminatus (Arkham, Massachusetts) · Civil liberty, Law & Regulation · North American affairs · Slogans & Quotations October 12th, 2017 |
 49 comments to Samizdata quote of the day |
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Books, and stuff.
CaptDMO, Vox Day is a genius.
Actually Vox Day is a jackass, even if we share a few enemies.
That’s because at its core the ACLU was never driven by a desire to protect or extend civil liberties. It may have seemed that way when leftist speech was the speech being protected, but aside from a few PR stunts over the years they have ignored the institutional suppression of civil liberties when that suppression serves the collectivist agenda.
Eric is correct. The ACLU is an organization I’ve always wanted to support but never could because they inevitably fail to take on causes which they should and sometimes take on those which they shouldn’t.
We should remember the founder of the ACLU, and his philosophies:
(From Roger Nash Baldwin and the American Civil Liberties Union [New York: Columbia University Press, 2000], pp. 228-229.)
(Baldwin and his ACLU was perceived to be anti-communist in the 1940’s, and actually purged some communists from the organization, but he was more accurately anti-Soviet.)
No contradiction here. In this new internet of seamless mass communication and a disaggregated media, jackass geniuses rule.
Beale can be a very interesting read if you can move past the distasteful parts.
“Sole control by those who produce wealth.” One assumes he includes Ellis Wyatt, Hank Rearden, Ken Dannager et cie., no?
The statement is, as Richard would say, an intellectual mess. To quote somebody, maybe Sir Humphrey, “Did [he] think that up all by [himself]?”
Good info, though, bobby. Thanks.
And shockingly, there are some OTHER folk represented on that page, if one were to “scroll down”.
He was one of the first libertarian communists. That seems like an intellectual mess by itself.
I am well aware of the communist roots of the ACLU. I’m not overly bothered by that, though, given the era in which it was founded (the 1920s). We didn’t have much experience with real, operational communism at the time; a lot of otherwise intelligent people were seduced by the idea. Even that quote by Baldwin was from 1935, and while he should have known better by then he was an old dog incapable of learning anything new. None of that excuses today’s ACLU, which by rights should be better than it actually is. It’s truly a disappointment.
But this isn’t all just ancient history. Keep in mind that Baldwin served as Exec Director of the ACLU until the mid-fifties, and then remained as one of its preeminent advisors until 1979. While I agree that the ACLU is not a communist organization, the essential philosophy under which it was formed remained in control until that recently, and remains a core value of many of its longtime influencers and deciders. It is a decidedly leftist organization.
People speak of Baldwin’s having seen the light following the Soviet-Nazi Pact, but in truth he simply became disenchanted with how communism was being implemented. He became another of the many “it’ll work, but no one’s tried it correctly yet” crowd.
Each state’s chapter sets its own atmosphere, and, while some state chapters uphold what I would consider the proper “preserve the Constitution” mission, many stray and push their own agendas.
We sometimes complain that the left stole the term ‘Liberal’, but we did it first! The term ‘Libertarian’ was first used by Anarchist communes. People who lived in communes are called communards, while believers are communists.
A US west-coast friend of mine has recently ceased giving money to the ACLU, partly because “they’re getting shedloads” from the hysterical left, partly because they themselves are infected by the post-election hysteria, but also for the reasons the OP states. Before this year, she always conceded my point that “they hate economic freedom” – I had only to glance at the ACLU magazines in her house to see that in spades – but she defended their value in protecting the first amendment all across the spectrum. (What Eric, October 12, 2017 at 11:32 pm, terms “a few PR stunts”, she took more seriously; she had a degree of acquaintance with west-coast ACLU members – enough to sometimes shock them by her irreverent attitude to virtue-signalling.)
Lie down with dogs, get fleas. Having exchanged a few pointed remarks with the man, I advise against having anything to do with him. He really is what the left (falsely for the most part) try to paint all their enemies as, a racist misogynist.
Does the truth matter less if articulated by a jerk?
bobby b is correct.
The ACLU (even back in the 1920s – i.e. at the start, well before the quote he gives) was founded by socialists – people who decided to “wrap ourselves in the flag” and pretend a devotion to a Constitution whose propertarian (private property) principles they detested.
Actually the fault goes all the way back to J.S. Mill – who held that civil liberties (such as freedom of speech) were based on a different principle from economic freedoms (the latter being of only practical usefulness – not moral principles).
To Mr Mill the freedom of an intellectual, such as himself, was much more important than (say) the freedom of a baker – the freedom of the latter was just a practical matter (a matter of the economic utility of the community) not a matter of MORAL PRINCIPLE.
Mr John Stuart Mill was wrong – horribly wrong. And modern “liberals” are even more wrong – because they do not even see that “mere” “economic freedom” is of service to the general utility.
Actually even that problem can be traced back to Mr Mill – with his belief that Jeremy Bentham (the high priest of bureaucracy in Britain – with his desire for 13 Departments of state controlling most aspects of life and his doctrine that “rights are nonsense and natural rights are nonsense on stilts”) was the leading liberal of the age (a view that John Stewart was taught by his father James Mill) – with the added twists of holding that large scale private landownership was somehow wrong (a development of David Ricardo’s FALSE view of land and rent – refuted by Frank Fetter after the time of J.S. Mill) and his view that large scale private ownership of factories was somehow also wrong – which should be replaced by worker coops.
In my bitter old age I have come conclusion that there is no great mystery in how 19th century British liberalism collapsed into the “New Liberalism” of the late 19th century which leads to the Economist magazine and so on of our own time (whose idea of “liberalism” is to support Frankfurt School Marxist Barack Obama, TWICE, and to demand benefits and “public services” all-over-the-world) – there is no mystery, because the early 19th liberalism of Jeremy Bentham and J.S. Mill was already not-good.
If Vox Day is a racist and misogynist, then the words have no meaning. What, precisely, is “distasteful” about the 16 points?
The ACLU is against Rights of Association so why shouldn’t they be against the Right to Free Speech? The common guy is confused by this because people were “raised to believe”(*) that one should have free expression, but free association is “racist/sexist/…ist” and therefore wrong. However, the two rights are simply two expressions of the same idea, that I have rights because I own myself. To tell me that I have free expression, but don’t have the right to disassociate myself from those I choose is like serving food that is part food and part poison. It’s saying my mind is free but my body belongs to others, by order of the state. How is this different than antibellum American slavery?
*(I can’t stand this phrase because it’s a cop-out).
“People who lived in communes are called communards”
Are you sure it isn’t commutards? 😉
“Actually Vox Day is a jackass, even if we share a few enemies.”
If this is the same Vox Day I used to debate/argue with 15-20 years ago, then hs is a jackass and not very bright to boot.
I guess he believed that wealth just oozes causelessly from the social corpus.
The idea that people voluntarily trade ONLY when all parties involved determine that trade would PROFIT them by doing so, and that both sides gain AT THE SAME TIME from their relative perspective, that is both sides GROW RICHER AT THE SAME TIME AT NO ONE’S EXPENSE…would melt his brain should he come to conceive of this fact of reality. One person’s achievement isn’t earned at the expense of those who haven’t acheieve it themselves. Yeah boys and girls…wealth is CREATED, not merely hunted and gathered in some zero-sum existence.
I’d love to ask this fellow, in his emotional and interpersonal trade he has with his wife…which one is the victim, and which the exploiter.
Wobbly,
No, but one who is a habitual jerk risks his credibility, no matter the truth of his claims or the quality of his theory.
Any claim he makes needs to be supported by outside evidence from facts known to the reader or listener or credible others, or the agreement on theory from credible others. “Credible” to the person making the judgment, that is.
If we have any sense, we don’t accept statements from habitual jerks at face value. So we do not “trust.” Instead, we verify.
Personally, I know nothing about Mr. Beale except that maybe he’s in the “alt-right,” whatever that is. Never followed him.
Well, Thai, as you know I am a Roarin’ Woman, so you know my opinion. 😉
Personally, I’ve been taken in more often by false claims made by people who present as socially and morally acceptable.
Sometimes abrasive jerks simply lack the guile to present more acceptably.
I’d alter your statement to say that we ought to verify claims by anyone.
Wobbly: Some truth coming from someone who also spouts a lot of identity politics shit does not move me to make common cause. I am pragmatic enough not to require purity tests from people I share enemies with, but there comes a point where the enemy of my enemy is also my enemy. I have no wish to get tarred with the same brush, given I hold up the likes of Corbyn to scrutiny on the basis one can infer quite a lot by who someone associates with.
Alter away, bobby! In the main I agree with your point, but there have been a few people I’ve come across whom I really do trust, provisionally at least, to have the straight of it (except when they don’t, of course). And absolutely trust to tell the truth as they believe it to be.
My Honey was one such, although he did need to be disabused of a few “facts” he wrongly believed.
I’ll see if anyone else comes to mind.
😉
damaged justice (October 13, 2017 at 4:05 pm): ‘If Vox Day is a racist and misogynist, then the words have no meaning.”
Thanks to the politically correct, these words almost always have less than no meaning in modern discourse, i.e. those accused of either prejudice are far less guilty of it than their accusers. A historical comparison may be useful.
In September 1939, there were probably a few Britons who had enjoyed the excitement of WWI, were profoundly bored during the years of peace, and were pleased Mr Hitler had provided just cause for more war. Many more thought it time (or high time!) that we fought him, without being enamoured of war as such: war was Mr Hitler’s game, so they played it with him. Meanwhile, the line of the hard left in the UK was that “British capitalism is fighting for loot” against not-so-bad-as-we’d-thought Mr Hitler and his new friend, positively-nice Mr Stalin. (Despite this, it proved possible to preserve the meaning of the word ‘warmonger’ and pin it on Hitler, where it belonged.)
Today, instapundit wrote understandingly of protesters shutting down a Dem official at a Californian university with chants of MAGA; that’s the game of the pair they shouted down, and now some on “our side” have started to play it. Logically, there will always be a question whether some in such a crowd would be fine with silencing hateful speech if only they were the silencers, just as there might have been some in the British WWII army who were ‘too keen’ to kill Germans. (In the case of the Mitford son, he was reluctant to kill Germans, influenced by attitudes of sisters Diana and Unity, but was really keen to kill Japanese, for reasons in which the word racist might not be wholly devoid of meaning. He died bravely for Britain fighting the Japanese.)
In the very populous USA, there is probably someone somewhere who regrets the defeat of the Confederacy and is pleased modern SJWs unwittingly provide so much ‘logical’ justification for its attitudes while justifying their own. There are far more who think “that is the game so I’ll play it”, and far more still who think “that is their game, so sadly I must play it”, while for most, such antics are just a mirror held up to the left: “look at yourselves if you have eyes to see”. Some will feel, as C.S.Lewis said in WWII, that when at war for a fair cause, one should take all the help that glory and spirit offer, not walk around with a long face to show liars who don’t care that you are not the henchman of “British capitalism fighting for loot.”
Summary: I’m very cautious about condemning someone for not advertising that degree of regret that I might feel if I ever ‘played their game’, but I also think it wise to reflect on the characters of those who may be pushing our way today. Comment threads in a venue like this are probably not much quarried for aid and comfort by SJWs 🙂 , so I value getting Perry’s take on people, whether or not I agree.
Niall, are you sure instapundit wrote “understandingly” about the protest? He said he hopes it will “cause them to rethink their positions and endorse free speech for all.”
Of course not, as it is independent from the source – and that is precisely the reason that it better be obtained from an alternative source, who is less of a jerk than the jerk in question (if one is available, which they usually are).
And on what do you base this? to use terms like ‘racist’ or ‘misogynist’ is to use the language of the cultural marxists.
Are you saying that there are no real racists or misogynists in existence, or that we should deny/ignore they existence just because cultural Marxists are using the terms way too loosely? Or that we should cease more control of our own language every time said Marxists make another assault on it?
That was what I meant. I thought his summary showed understanding of the issues. In your quote, the “them” applies specifically to left-wing shouters-down of free speech, but he makes clear his ideal is a “mutual assured destruction” that ends anti-free-speech behaviour across the board.
if by ‘real racists or misogynists’ you mean someone who hates women or certain ethnicities simply because of their sex or race, then yeah they probably do exist, even if they are completely insignificant. But that is not how the the terms ‘racist’ or ‘misogynist’ are used: they are terms coined by cultural stalinists to pathologize and shut down those who recognize the reality of HBD or the innate biological and psychological differences between the sexes.
Just because a term is used in a debased manner by my enemies does not matter to me, because unless an alternative exists to describe someone who thinks women are naturally subservient and blacks are savages by virtue of being black, rather than for cultural reasons, I am going to stick with ‘Misogynist’ & ‘Racist’ even if those words are grossly overused and disingenuously misapplied by the left. Sometimes it is simply the truth, but I am already wasting pixels on someone like Vox Day.
That may well be true regarding racism – in which case you are welcome to suggest a similarly fitting term to describe the same, but without the Stalinist etymology. Until that happens, I will continue using the term simply because it is useful. As regards misogyny though, it comes from ancient Greek, with the first English use going back to mid-17th century – so I feel no reason to abandon its use just because it being is used (and misused) by people whose world view is different from mine.
To you, I presume.
For my part, there’s more of an “as applied” problem here than an assertion that the words have no actual objective meaning. There certainly are racists and misogynists in the world, but the words are being applied far too casually and inaccurately.
Beale has never struck me as “racist” in the old accepted meaning of the term. Being part-white and part-Native American, he’d be hard-pressed to fit the normal picture of the white supremacist that “racist” usually means.
He’s certainly a nationalist, and a hard-core separatist – meaning he believes that the various races do not combine well, and would all be better off without striving for “diversity” as a goal in and of itself.
He’s also never struck me as a misogynist, in the old accepted definition of someone who hates women and thinks of them as something inferior to men. He sees differing roles for the two genders in society, with differing capabilities and predilections, but this is more akin to an old conservative view than a misogynist one.
He’s an arrogant jerk who trumpets his supposed high IQ every chance he gets, he’s abrasive, he loves to be worshipped . . . the man has a lot of issues. But the casual labeling, using the left’s overly-inclusive definitions that cast too wide a net, is a bit lazy.
We all seem to be in furious agreement on that part.
Indeed, Alisa (October 14, 2017 at 7:07 pm), there is much furious agreement about the left’s abuse of such terms as racist in this thread, but there is also the point that even in the rare event that one were to encounter an actual white supremacist in the anglosphere today, being concerned about them would be like being concerned about Trotskyism in 1937 Russia. Had Trotsky won, he would have killed many, though maybe not so many as Stalin, but in the event, Stalin did the killing and Trotskyites merely did a tiny percentage of the dying.
(Not always even under that designation: in the great purge, one woman was arrested as a Trotskyite but charged as a nationalist because, as the local KGB chief casually explained to her, “We’re over our quota for Trotskyites but under it for nationalists, even though we’ve arrested every poet and writer we can think of!”)
Niall:
Indeed, unless one happens to be “black”/Jewish/otherwise-non-“white” (or a woman, in the case of an encounter with a misogynist). I do agree that even such real encounters are not worth more than a shrug or a sneer, but that does not mean that they should be condoned either – and that’s when appropriate terminology becomes useful, as in ‘Why did you sneer at this guy?’ ‘Because he’s a stupid racist/misogynist’.
As to the rest, I don’t find the analogy with Trotsky applicable, since it is not necessarily in the political context that I am discussing racism, misogyny, or any other unjustified prejudice – as this whole line of discussion started out about a specific person being (or not being) so prejudiced.
Well, speaking further O/T, I believe it is in this interview with William Buckley on the subject-matter of his book Communism — A History that Richard Pipes states that Trotsky was in fact more prepared even than Stalin to kill however many it took, and that he was not the relatively gentle soul of reputation.
View or download from https://hooktube.com/watch?v=3OO3efQx5J8; or just watch at almost the same address, just substituting “you” for “hook” in the URL.
The man’s videos on-line always fascinating.
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Alisa, I would be particularly interested in some of his takes on the attitudes of people under the Soviet regime. I think it’s in this same video that he mentions that a bit. (If not, it’s in one of the other videos to which I gave a link.) I’ll watch this again (it’s worth it!) to check.
Just curious – why do you do this?
“John Galt,” or as I address him, “JG,” told us here awhile back that the hooktube program allows downloading of almost everything on UT. I used to use kiss*you*tube (without the asterisks), which also was program on the Web IIRC, but after maybe a couple of years it stopped working.
So I tried AllMyMac from Wondershare, and was pleased enough that I bought the sucker for $ 29: a pretty good deal. But maybe a year ago or less, it seemed to be causing kernel panics or simple system crashes. In the end I deleted it from my machines, and was dead in the water.
So far hooktube has worked well, but I no longer have any trust at all in the effective lifetime of any software product.
And I am a Mad Collector of Everything, so was overjoyed to learn of this video downloader.
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If you have anything else you can recommend, I’d be glad to hear of it. And by the way–I’m a MacAddict. :>)
Well, my memory is close but not close enough. But a few points:
~5 min. in:
Dr. Pipes tells an anecdote about his visit to a Russian library, in which students were studying for exams. His story is perfectly illustrated in the unforgettable “Red Blues” number in the movie with Cyd Charisse (made me a huge fan of Cyd for life) and Fred Astaire.
~39 min:
Dr. Pipes discusses the general Russian attitude toward property. (One of his well-known books is Property and Freedom.) I’d love to know what Alyssa thinks of this, although the segment I was looking for must be in some other video. Of course I cannot have mixed it up altogether.
Awhile later there are some remarks about Trotsky, but while he doesn’t think much of the man, in this video at least he finds him a hair less outrageously evil than Uncle Joe.
In the Q&A, he has a different view of the Allende killing from what is standard fare on the WWW. In particular, he argues that the summary “deposing” of Allende was definitely not a coup, since it was perfectly consistitutional according to the Chilean constitution.
I can’t say that from Near Chicago in 2017 everything he says sounds exactly right to me, but I’m sure that he’s right about many things.
Also, the interview occurred in 1991, just two years after the Fall of the Wall, and now 26 years past. I have no idea if his statements in the interview were accurate at the time (but they sound plausible enough), nor whether the general Russian attitudes toward property have changed in the interim.
Julie, at 39 min. he actually answers a question about Trotsky. I caught a short discussion about property just about 3 minutes prior, and that was in the context of the rather silly comparison between Christianity and communism made by someone in the audience. William Buckley was the one who raised that specific point there. Was that what you were thinking of? Because I have not yet had the time to watch the whole interview.
Also, the interview is from 2001, not 1991 – unless I am confusing two different videos?
I didn’t even know that hooktube was the name of a redirector. I thought you were just showing a distaste for typing Youtube. Makes more sense now. 😳
Well, bobby, if I did as I ought I would boycott UT (as a subsidiary of Google). Then again, if I boycotted everyone I should, I’d be living in 3rd-world hermetic squalor in Antarctica, subsisting on whatever dribs and drabs fell from the mouths of any passing penguins. :>(((
Actually, I also gave the UT address for the sake of any who might wish not to patronize hooktube for watever reason. To be honest (which I am, once in awhile when it’s not inconvenient *g*) I do rather wonder if their enabling downloads from UT with, I assume, no permission since their sites insist they are most definitely not connected with UT in any way, shape, &c.
Nay, Alyssa, I must claim the confusion as mine and mine alone. Indeed the correct date of the interview is 2001.
Thank you very much for the correction. 😀
I see I also messed up the marker for the discussion of the Russians’ general attitude toward property. Trotsky is indeed at 39 min. And I especially wonder what is your own observation of their attitude to property — if you agree or disagree with Dr. Pipes. etc.
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Apologize to everyone for the flubs. I typed the comment immediately after the video ended, but clearly there was enough time in there for a good deal of info to bury itself among the dust bunnies, or to escape altogether.
Julie, no worries about the YT thingies. As to your question, I’m not so sure I can answer it with any competence, seeing as I was quite young when I left. That said and from that same perspective of a child, I can tell you that I see private property as being as natural to humans as things like self-defense: we kids seem to had been born with the same concepts of ‘this is mine, and this is yours, and this is not ours at all’, ‘I was here first’, ‘She hit me first and I just replied in kind’, etc. – just as kids still do everywhere I know of, despite the attempts by some “sophisticated” grownups to convince them otherwise.
Also and as far as I can tell, things like theft, burglaries, and similar activities were held as criminal offences punishable by law, and quite severely too (at least in theory, and at least when said offences were not committed by people in positions of power).
Another anecdotal point is that even though one did not officially own one’s living quarters (such as an apartment, or more commonly a room in a communal apartment), for all intents and purposes it was treated as private premises by one’s neighbors – although obviously not by the authorities when push came to shove, as it often did.