Free Speech Turkey-Style

Posted on 23 December 2017 by eehines

Enes Kanter, a Center for the New York Knicks, has expressed his opinion of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, and a Turkish prosecutor has indicted him in absentia for this heinous crime and wants Kantor jailed for four years. Among other things, Kantor has said that Erdogan is the “Hitler of our century,” in the aftermath of the Turkish government’s revocation of his passport and its having forced his father, still in Turkey, to disown him—and then was thrown into jail, anyway. All because Kanter supports the equally Erdogan-hated Islamic preacher Fethullah Gulen.

Here’s Kanter:

This is a preview of Free Speech Turkey-Style. Read the full post (298 words, estimated 1:12 mins reading time)

PRC Censorship

Posted on 15 November 2017 by eehines

…is reaching into other nations to deprecate their free speech.

Clive Hamilton, Professor of Public Ethics at Australia’s Charles Sturt University has written a book, Silent Invasion, that details the breadth of influence the People’s Republic of China has achieved within Australia. His publisher, Allen & Unwin, has decided to “delay” release of the book because the PRC is threatening “defamation action” against the publisher.

What defamation, exactly (and how does a private citizen defame a foreign government, anyway)? Hamilton says his book is

“very factual, very deeply researched,”…the “first comprehensive national study of Beijing’s program of exerting influence on another nation.”

This is a preview of PRC Censorship. Read the full post (240 words, estimated 58 secs reading time)

Cornell Professors

Posted on 13 November 2017 by eehines

…apparently support racism and racist stereotyping.

Recall that George Ciccariello-Maher, Associate Professor of Politics and Global Studies at Drexel University, routinely says it’s whiteness, white victimization, all things white that are at fault for mass shootings and violence generally. For instance, this in an interview with Democracy Now!

Whiteness is never seen as a cause, in and of itself, of these kinds of massacres despite the fact that whiteness is a structure of privilege and it’s a structure of power, and a structure that, when it feels threatened, you know, lashes out.

What makes white men so prone to this kind of behavior?

This is a preview of Cornell Professors. Read the full post (264 words, estimated 1:03 mins reading time)

Frightening the Snowflakes

Posted on 12 November 2017 by eehines

It seems a Cambridge University professor had the effrontery to warn new students of a class of his—Physical Sciences—that life is hard and that it’s harder when you’re stupid. For instance, this in an email that he sent to his incoming students:

Remember that you are NOT at any other uni, where students do drink a lot and do have what they regard as a ‘good time’—and you are NOT on a course, as some Cambridge courses sadly are, where such a behaviour pattern is possible or acceptable.

Oh, the wailing and bodice rending that resulted.

This is a preview of Frightening the Snowflakes. Read the full post (257 words, estimated 1:02 mins reading time)

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.

This is a preview of Free Speech, Left-Style. Again. Read the full post (127 words, estimated 30 secs reading time)

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?

This is a preview of Free Speech at the Universities. Read the full post (279 words, estimated 1:07 mins reading time)

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.

This is a preview of Good for Her. Read the full post (168 words, 1 image, estimated 40 secs reading time)

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)

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