First Amendment
Article
First Amendment is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 6 times across 6 issues between August 18, 2021 and February 11, 2026. The archive places it in contexts such as “The First and Second Amendments to the US Constitution are big deals”; “making fun of the powerful First Amendment and Second Amendment lobbies”; “find First Amendment lawyers to outline legal advice”. It most often appears alongside effective altruism, Afghanistan, cancel culture.
Metadata
- Category: Concepts
- Mention count: 6
- Issue count: 6
- First seen: August 18, 2021
- Last seen: February 11, 2026
Appears In
- Links For August
- ACX Grants ++: The Second Half
- Your Book Review: Lying for Money
- Some Practical Considerations Before Descending Into An Orgy Of Vengeance
- Lukianoff And Defining Cancel Culture
- Political Backflow From Europe
Related Pages
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- effective altruism (3 shared issues)
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- Afghanistan (2 shared issues)
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- cancel culture (2 shared issues)
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- China (2 shared issues)
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- Germany (2 shared issues)
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- Google (2 shared issues)
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- Harvard (2 shared issues)
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- India (2 shared issues)
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- London (2 shared issues)
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- Noah Smith (2 shared issues)
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- Richard Hanania (2 shared issues)
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- Scott (2 shared issues)
External Links
Source Context
Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.
4: The First and Second Amendments to the US Constitution are big deals, while the Third Amendment (the government can’t make people quarter soldiers in their houses) languishes in obscurity. Until now! ÞALA (Third Amendment Lawyers Association) has filed a brief against the eviction moratorium. They argue that an eviction moratorium means the government is making landlords quarter people nonconsensually, and "given the size of the population at issue, some of these tenants are bound to be soldiers", so the moratorium is a Third Amendment violation. This is interesting because as far as I can tell ÞALA started out as (still is?) a joke group of lawyers making fun of the powerful First Amendment and Second Amendment lobbies. So as best I can tell these are real lawyers in a joke organization filing a joke brief in a real case. Indeed do many things come to pass.
Inline links: has filed a brief against the eviction moratorium
#101: A Foundation To Support Undercover Journalism Nellie Bly exposed 19th-century asylum horrors without hidden cameras or recorders. With those tools, Shane Bauer got a book out of his undercover private-prison job, yet few have followed him. Exposing corrupt institutions operating often takes many people bravely coming forward at personal risk. One journalist, outfitted with the right tech and backed by correct legal advice, could do similar work with less risk and get greater personal reward. So why aren't journalists regularly going undercover? It's a coordination problem. No single journalist or organization has the time or resources to make this workable. But an organization dedicated only to this project could recommend tools, provide training videos, offer general legal advice, and consult on projects for any reputable news organization or other qualifying truth-seeking entity. That would make these kinds of projects more rewarding relative to risk, and a thousand stories could bloom from journalists turned undercover staffers in nursing homes, meat processing plants, and other places where vulnerable people are subject to abuse with little recourse. Just the threat of this kind of exposure would cause many previously untouchable organizations to clean up. The idea is to buy the top-rated recording devices, to test them, to produce training videos, and to find First Amendment lawyers to outline legal advice and provide consultations. journalismundercover@protonmail.com
Adam Smith was breaking with centuries of tradition when, in The Wealth of Nations, he frowned practice of price fixing by describing it as a "conspiracy against the public." And even though believed that price fixing had a pernicious effect, he believed that it would be "impossible indeed to prevent such meetings," as any meeting that tried to ban conspiratorial price-fixing would have either been impossible to execute, or inconsistent with liberty and justice. (He wrote this in 1776, but had the US Constitution and Bill of Rights existed at the time, he might have argued that a meeting between two competitors to decide how to price their wares would be protected by the First Amendment.)
The priests of Amun probably felt pretty great revenge-cancelling the priests of Aten after they regained power. But nobody remembers them today and they’re not part of the story of human progress. Jefferson and Madison wrote the First Amendment to defuse the entire conflict from above, and everybody remembers them, and it actually made a long-term difference.
Cancel Culture is the uptick, beginning around 2014 and accelerating in 2017 and after, of campaigns to get people fired, disinvited, deplatformed, or otherwise punished for speech that is — or would be — protected by First Amendment standards, and the climate of fear and conformity that has resulted from this uptick.
It refers to First Amendment standards, which already includes a lot of case laws on specific situations. I’m slightly confused about this, because all Lukianoff’s examples are about government officials; my impression is that the First Amendment mostly doesn’t constrain private businesses. I can’t tell whether or not he’s advocating an implied “we should hold private business to the same standard as the First Amendment holds the government” here.
The European discourse can be - for lack of a better term - America-brained. We hear stories of Black Lives Matter marches in countries without significant black populations, or defendants demanding their First Amendment rights in countries without constitutions.