Tag Archives: free speech

Another Start

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And an illustration of why this sort of start is so necessary.

The Florida House of Representatives is putting forth a law (readable here; remarkably, it’s only 12 pages long, vice another party’s Federal level laws) regarding individual liberty and due process on Florida’s taxpayer funded college/university campuses.

Some high points:

[S]tudents would be permitted to conduct “free-speech activities”, including “all forms of peaceful assembly, protests, and speeches; distributing literature; carrying signs; circulating petitions; faculty research, lectures, writings, and commentary, whether published or unpublished; and the recording and publication, including the Internet publication, of video or audio recorded in outdoor areas of campus.

And

The State Board of Education may not shield students, faculty, or staff at Florida College System institutions from free speech protected under the First Amendment to the United States Constitution[.]

The bill also protects professors’ intellectual property. While students can record the profs’ lectures, they are not permitted to publicly release the recordings with the profs’ permission. The recordings are solely for the students’

own personal educational use, in connection with a complaint to the public institution of higher education where the recording was made, or as evidence in, or in preparation for, a criminal or civil proceeding.

Of course, if the matter does go to court, the recorded lecture(s) would enter the public record, as they should.

The proposed bill also makes a strong move, contra the Obama DoEd and President Joe Biden’s (D) reconstruction of it, to protect students’ access to due process when faced with allegations.

Colleges and universities who discipline a student for violating the code of conduct must give written notice within 7 business days that includes allegations being investigated, the citation to the specific provision of the code of conduct at issue, the process being used to determine whether a violation has occurred, and the date, time and location of the disciplinary hearing.
At least five days prior to the disciplinary hearing, each student must also be provided with:

  • A list of all known witnesses that will provide information against the student or student organization, all know information related to the allegation
  • The right to a “presumption that no violation occurred”
  • The right to an impartial hearing officer
  • The right against self-incrimination and to remain silent
  • The right to present relevant information and question witnesses
  • The right to an advisor, advocate, or legal representative at the student or student organization’s own expense
  • The right to appeal the final decision of hearing directly to the vice president of student affairs or any other senior administration designated by the code of conduct to hear the appeal and make a final decision
  • The right to an accurate and complete record of every disciplinary proceeding relating to the charged violation of the code, including record of any appeal, to be made, preserved, and available for copying upon request by the charged student or student organization
  • A provision setting a time limit for charging a student or student organization with a violation of the code of conduct, and a description of those circumstances in which that time limit may be extended or waived

And an illustration of why this sort of law is so badly needed, conveniently provided by a Progressive-Democrat, the State Senator Tina Polsky, who

questioned whether hate groups such as Nazis or the Ku Klux Klan would be able to enter a campus under the legislation.
“You just can’t practice in absolutes and say that every single person is welcome on campus, because they’re not,” Polsky told AP. “This is meant to be a safe place for students.”

Umm, no. Leave aside Polsky’s own absolutism even as she claims otherwise with her cynical distortion that the proposed law says every single person is welcome on campus. Every single person isn’t welcome, true enough. But that unwelcome is strictly limited to criminals. Nazis, KKK, any other solely nasty person saying nasty things, of course must be welcome, else we’ll have the likes of Polsky defining for us who will be welcome, what speech or political bias will be permitted.

Beyond that, No, a campus most assuredly is not intended to be a safe place for students. It’s intended to be a place where various, and variously conflicting, views of the political and social world are openly explored, discussed, and debated. That can be deucedly uncomfortable and challenging to cherished beliefs. Students, though, aren’t on campus to be wrapped in swaddling blankets.

The safe place for students? That only exists with the safety of liberty for all of us, with the safety of thinking and speaking aloud those thoughts freely by all of us.

Yes, I’d give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety’s sake. But Progressive-Democrats like Polsky would deny us that safety because they know so much better. And that makes them especially dangerous to our liberty.

Accuracy and Truth

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In one of their Tuesday editorials, The Wall Street Journal editorial board wrote about the shooting of Daunte Wright in the Minnesota town of Brooklyn Center. They seemed to be on the right track in their insistence for due process both for Wright and for the police officer who, according to body camera video and audio, fatally shot him.

Sadly, the editors blew up their thesis with this, regarding post-shooting events:

On Monday night protesters looted businesses….

Accuracy, and truth, die at the hands of political correctness.

Protesters don’t loot. Criminals loot.

Protesters don’t riot. Rioters riot.

It’s…dismaying…to see the Newspeak dictionary spread so far.

Spreading Disinformation

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Jay Bhattacharya, in his Tuesday Wall Street Journal op-ed, (mostly) correctly called out and decried YouTube for censoring and spiking a public-policy roundtable hosted by Florida Governor Ron DeSantis (R) and in which Bhattacharya had participated.

Among other things discussed by the participants was the wisdom of requiring children to wear masks in the face of the Wuhan Virus situation. The panel said the requirement was foolish and counterproductive, and this was too much for the Know Betters. YouTube

removed the video “because it included content that contradicts the consensus of local and global health authorities regarding the efficacy of masks to prevent the spread of COVID-19.”

Bhattacharya, though, in his op-ed cited study after study supporting the panel’s position: requiring children to wear masks is deeply suboptimal, and is so across a wide range of dimensions.

Never mind.

Never mind that the panelists, in addition to Bhattacharya, who is a physician, economist, and Stanford Medical School professor, consisted of Sunetra Gupta, infectious disease epidemiologist and epidemiology professor at Oxford; Martin Kulldorff, professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School and biostatistician and epidemiologist at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital; and Scott Atlas, radiologist, health care policy advisor, and senior fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution. They’re only experts; they know nothing.

Their position is contrary to The Narrative. How dare anyone contradict Settled Narrative.

I said above “‘mostly’ correctly called out…YouTube” because YouTube is wholly owned by Google, and Google is wholly owned by Alphabet. The latter two are run by Sundar Pichai.

It is, in fact, Alphabet and Sundar Pichai who are peddling disinformation under the guise of preventing “misinformation,” using YouTube as the vehicle for their machination.

Once again, Pichai is pushing the Left’s Newspeak dictionary and doing so at the direct and deliberate expense of objective discourse.

This also is a prima facie case for treating Alphabet, et al., as public accommodations—or as common carriers—and limiting their ability to discriminate or to censor.

Slander

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Our slander laws are convoluted, and as part of that convolution, they put certain Americans—celebrities and politicians, for instance—out of effective reach of their protection, and they put other Americans—journalists, for instance, functionally immune to their restrictions. Glenn Harlan Reynolds, a University of Tennessee law professor, in his Thursday Wall Street Journal op-ed, wants to niggle around their edges to improve them.

No. It’s time, to coin a phrase, to go big. Libel law, in fact, is simple enough to simplify: if someone lies about or otherwise slanders another, the liar/slanderer is liable. If someone mistakenly mischaracterizes another and doesn’t correct the mischaracterization when advised of the error, mischaracterizer is liable, if to a lesser degree.

That’s pretty simple and straightforward. The only grey area—and this is where juries earn their pay—is in that area between lie and mistaken mischaracterization.

That straightforward correction of slander laws can be made simpler, yet. The new law should apply to the press—it’s really not that hard for a pressman to tell the truth, except, apparently, in the minds of those of the journalist guild—and it should apply equally to the politician or celebrity who’s the victim.

But, but—according to Reynolds, New York Times Co v Sullivan, the Supreme Court ruling that created the imbalances involving the press and celebrities and politicians,

grew out of a concerted effort by Southern states to use libel lawsuits as a weapon in a sort of asymmetric warfare. Civil-rights organizers had powerful support from national media organizations, but local judges and juries were sympathetic to segregation.

No, it didn’t. Those judges’ rulings and their influences on juries via judicial instructions to those juries had nothing to do with slander, per se, and everything to do with those judges acting in accordance with their personal agendas rather than in accordance with the text of the laws before them.

Sullivan needs to be reversed.

“Not Renew”

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Newspeak for “Cancel.”

That’s what the University of Cincinnati has chosen to do to its now ex-instructor John Ucker in the school’s…reaction…to Ucker’s referring to our favorite virus as the “chinese virus.”

The school’s Dean of Engineering and Applied Science, John Weidner, said this about that:

These types of xenophobic comments and stigmatizations around location or ethnicity are more than troubling. We can better protect and care for all when we speak about COVID-19 with both accuracy and empathy, something we should all strive for.

Regarding that, I have a question for Weidner: what are his preferred pronouns for the Zika, Ebola, West Nile viruses? What self-identifications does he find acknowledge for the South Africa Variant, the UK Variant, the Brazil Variant of our favorite virus?

The school said last Friday that Ucker’s contract “would not renew”—that Ucker would be canceled—because he spoke with accuracy and without stigmatization or xenophobia and not from within the school’s Parameters of Preciousness.