Free Speech, Left-Style. Again

Posted on 10 November 2017 by eehines

The UC Berkeley student newspaper, The Daily Californian, accused Alan Dershowitz, in black and white, of having “blood on his hands” and of being “culpable for…Israeli atrocities”—of blood libel. The Harvard law professor emeritus wanted to respond, but

The Daily Californian “absolutely, categorically” refused to print his reply to the op-ed.

As Dershowitz put it in a Fox & Friends segment,

The Daily Cal, as many college newspapers today, are totally one-sided. You can say whatever you want about people like me if I’m pro-Israel. I don’t get to respond.

Free speech, indeed.

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A Slip of the Mask

Posted on 6 November 2017 by eehines

When President Donald Trump’s Twitter account was deleted for a few minutes last week, it looked like an isolated mistake by a customer service employee “on his last day at work,” as Twitter, Inc, representatives had it.

Maybe not. Now, more information is coming to light about that incident. Seconds thoughts are occurring about the likelihood of a single employee in such a position having the authority to delete an entire account. There’s more, too.

This is a preview of A Slip of the Mask. Read the full post (330 words, estimated 1:19 mins reading time)

Free Speech at the Universities

Posted on 25 October 2017 by eehines

Kent Fuchs, University of Florida President, and Glenn Altschuler, Cornell Professor of American Studies, have some…interesting…thoughts on this in their recent Wall Street Journal op-ed.

Public universities that choose to grant access to speakers who are not invited or affiliated with the institution are legally obligated to accept all such speakers. As a result, they may become hostage to Nazis or other extremists—forced to stand by as these groups capitalize on their university’s visibility and prestige to amplify their vile messages.

Fuchs and Altschuler wrote that as if it were a bad thing. I have to ask: why are they so terrified of a contest of ideas in an open, public forum?

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Colin Kaepernick’s Lawfare “Protest”

Posted on 19 October 2017 by eehines

After being unable to get a job with any team in the NFL this season, Colin Kaepernick has filed a formal grievance against the NFL, each of the 32 team owners, and President Donald Trump—who supposedly “influenced” league management and team owners into not hiring him—alleging that they colluded to not sign him at quarterback, or end-of-bench monitor, this season.

Coincidentally, his filing comes after a year in which he routinely attacked our flag and national anthem and insulted our veterans by taking a knee during the pre-game playing of our national anthem. Also coincidentally, his filing comes after a year in which he led his last employer, the San Francisco 49ers, to a 1-10 record before the team tired of losing and benched him.

This is a preview of Colin Kaepernick’s Lawfare “Protest”. Read the full post (357 words, estimated 1:26 mins reading time)

Good for Her

Posted on 28 September 2017 by eehines

Danish Immigration, Integration and Housing Minister Inger Stojberg has posted on her Facebook page a repeat of an image widely posted several years ago by the Danish paper Jyllands-Posten. What occasioned her post is the timidity of the Skovgaard Museum in Viborg, Denmark.

The museum is running an exhibition about blasphemy since the Reformation, but it has chosen to omit a classic example of blasphemy: images of Islam’s prophet Muhammed. As Stojberg noted, it’s the museum’s right to do this under Danish free speech law, but it’s excessively timid of the museum, and it’s the right of other Dames—including Stojberg—to decry the museum for its decision.

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The Left’s Favored Antifa

Posted on 31 August 2017 by eehines

The Wall Street Journal Editorial Page editors closed their Monday opinion piece with this remark:

The mainstream left ought to denounce it [Antifa’s censorious criminality] as much as the right should reject white supremacists.

The right does denounce white supremacists—and all bigots, not only white supremacists. We get called out by the dishonest Left and its NLMSM for not denouncing only the white supremacists.

Did I say “dishonest Left and its NLMSM?” That the Left chooses to embrace its hate groups and bigots rather than denounce them demonstrates the accuracy of the characterization.

This is a preview of The Left’s Favored Antifa. Read the full post (323 words, estimated 1:18 mins reading time)

The Left and the Left’s Police

Posted on 30 August 2017 by eehines

And the misrepresentation of the NLMSM.

A hundred members of Left-wing hate groups, including Antifa—hooded, no less, and armed with clubs—”broke through” police lines in Berkeley Sunday to attack the leader of a Conservative group, Patriot Prayer, which the NLMSM claims is “right-wing” rather than Conservative, and a separate group of four.

Notice that. The Left’s hate groups are hooded and carrying weapons; their targets are unarmed with faces bare, not looking for trouble and unafraid of being identified.

There’s more:

This is a preview of The Left and the Left’s Police. Read the full post (322 words, estimated 1:17 mins reading time)

Was I Right to Pull the Plug on a Nazi Website?

Posted on 25 August 2017 by eehines

That’s the title of a tortured op-ed in a recent Wall Street Journal by Matthew Prince, Co-founder and CEO of Cloudflare. Recall that he and his Cloudflare helped kick a group of neo-Nazis off the internet last week, including the Daily Stormer Web site. He bragged at the time about having done that, and as despicable as neo-Nazi and Nazi wannabe thugs are, that’s an easy brag.

In this op-ed, though, Prince is claiming to be having second thoughts.

However.

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Way to Go, Google

Posted on 10 August 2017 by eehines

Recall the now ex-employee who wrote a lengthy and thought-out memo for internal distribution via one of what Google is pleased to call its open communication channels. A summary of the ex-employee’s case is in the Sunday Wall Street Journal; my comments on the situation, based on that summary, are below.

…critics saying the company squelched free speech by firing a male employee who wrote a divisive memo denouncing its diversity push, while others said his views showed that the company’s diversity policies were needed.

This is a preview of Way to Go, Google. Read the full post (327 words, estimated 1:18 mins reading time)

Censorship

Posted on 14 June 2017 by eehines

The Chinese Communist Party’s powerful disciplinary wing is taking aim at the country’s internet censors for not pushing a party-line agenda, saying they were “irresolute” in implementing the policies of President Xi Jinping and “not trying hard enough to ensure political security.”

Read: political purity.

…authorities now want people to become absorbed by politics as defined by the party.

“If you let people get too sucked into entertainment, no one will care about what the leaders are saying. If you don’t do this [crackdown], no one will watch the ‘Network News,'” he said, referring to the staid evening news program of the official state broadcaster, China Central Television.

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