Tag Archives: free speech

More Censorship

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Jack Dorsey has chosen to have his Twitter company censor another conservative account, this time @AOCPress.  Their crime? They mock a Progressive-Democrat (I’ll leave it as an exercise for the student to figure out who).  Dorsey insists the parody account (an obviously parody account—it was labeled “parody”) mislead fellow tweeters.  Because, apparently, Dorsey’s customers are mind-numbingly stupid and can’t recognize parody.

Dorsey seems not to like parody in general, too, at least when it comes from Conservatives.

Twitter has also banned an account parodying former Rep. Beto O’Rourke, D-Texas, and another that mocked Russian president Vladimir Putin.

This is free speech Left-style.

A Politician Demands Doxing Occur

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Doxing is the deliberate exposure of personally identifying information, things like phone numbers and home addresses of individuals—often including family members: wives, husbands, and children—in order for each of those folks to be personally confronted with opprobrium at their homes and schools.

Pennsylvania State Representative Brian Sims, a Progressive-Democrat, called for precisely that when he confronted and harassed a woman and her two teenaged daughters who were praying outside an abortion clinic in Sims’ Philadelphia district. He went far beyond his on-scene harassment, though. He recorded his verbal assault and posted it on line, with this request for doxing:

So, here’s the deal.  I’ve got $100 to anybody who will identify these three, and I will donate to Planned Parenthood.

When he started catching flak for his assault and his call for the dox, Sims posted his follow-on:

I can do better.

He masqueraded that as a sort-of apology.

Here’s one of the results of doxing.  Swatting is a false call to emergency facilities claiming a deadly event—usually a domestic violence claim—in progress and please hurry. This is done while identifying a doxed address as the location of the supposed deadliness.  For example,

a call from a man who said he had shot his wife and then tied up his children inside his house, where he had several pipe bombs.

And this:

A perpetrator was recently sentenced to 20 years in prison for launching a swatting attack in December 2017 in Wichita, KA, against a man who was killed by police responding to the call.

Given the emotional tension and outright violence already extant surrounding the abortion/anti-abortion conflict, it’s ludicrous to the point of insulting our intelligence to consider any premise that Sims didn’t know these risks.

Sims’ subsequent post is, to use the technical term, BS.  He was speaking—shouting, really—from his heart when he engaged in his verbal assault and subsequent call for his targets to be doxed.  His later commentary is nothing more than words mouthed for his personal benefit, politically spoken to dodge his culpability.

Sims needs to go. He can have no value in a State government purporting to represent its constituents.

Censorship Continued

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The Poynter Institute, an organization that masquerades itself as a…watchdog…built a list of what it claimed to be unreliable news outlets and then urged censorship through boycotting these offending outlets. “Unreliable,” mind you, was determined by Poynter personnel.  Then they got caught, and they’re claiming to have withdrawn their list.

Here are two critical clues to the nature of their list. One is [emphasis added]:

…initially released a list of more than 500 “unreliable” news outlets purportedly “built from pre-existing databases compiled by journalists, fact-checkers, and researchers around the country.”

Even those purported researchers were carefully unnamed.

And this one:

The index was created with the help of an employee for the Southern Poverty Law Center.

That’s by itself is a fatal condemnation.

From those two clues, it’s clear that the Poynter Institute got exactly what it was looking for.  It just got caught, like the Ezra Klein’s JournoList of a few short years ago.

Do we have, though, any reason to believe the list actually has been scrapped? Or is it merely being better hidden? Like that JournoList. This is, after all, a long-established member of the NLMSM.  The Managing Editor of Poynter, Barbara Allen, had this about that in her statement:

[W]e are removing this unreliable sites list until we are able to provide our audience a more consistent and rigorous set of criteria. The list was intended to be a starting place for readers and journalists to learn more about the veracity of websites that purported to offer news; it was not intended to be definitive or all encompassing

In other words, they’ll be back with a more effectively disguised version of their attempt at censorship, a censorship goal made plain by her next sentence. A starting place for readers and journalists to learn more about the veracity of websites, indeed. A “starting place” written by journalists and JournoList members who will define for us “veracity,” because we’re too stupid to recognize it on our own.

And not intended to be definitive….  Yewbetcha.

Censorship

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The Wall Street Journal opined the other day on the New York Yankees and the Philadelphia Flyers banning Kate Smith and her rendition of God Bless America from the opening of their home games.  The WSJ takes the position that this is overwrought concern for perfection in today’s persons, demanding even perfection of their past.  Smith was, as we all are, and the WSJ notes, a person of her time. The WSJ went on:

Smith’s fate suggests the dominant impulse of our era is in fact to censor—and that those rifling through the histories of people long dead for evidence to destroy their reputations are progressive Puritans, seeking to suppress or cover up anything they object to.

I’m not so sanguine.  The Yankees and Flyers aren’t censoring Kate Smith for her early last century-era songs that very few of us knew about, or remembered—and some of which were satirical, not straight up. No, they’re showing their Liberal bona fides by censoring a song that glorifies America.

A Few Impertinent Questions about Hate Speech

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One of the things French President Emmanuel Macron has proposed for strengthening of the European Union’s governance—the EU’s Government—is

enhanced protection against hate speech

In particular, in his op-ed For European renewal [emphasis Macron’s]

creating a European Agency for the Protection of Democracies, which will provide each Member State with European experts…European rules banish all incitements to hate and violence from the Internet

This is to be done under the guise of

respect for the individual is the bedrock of our civilisation of dignity.

My questions aren’t specific to Macron, though, or to the EU—they’re general in their application.

How is it respect for the individual that Government tells him he’s too mind-numblingly stupid to decide for himself to what speech he should attend and what speech he should ignore, to what speech he should provide answer—and how? To tell him he’s too cowardly to respond coherently and that Government must…protect…him?

How long will it be, do you think, before Government decides that speech that counters hate speech—Louis Brandeis’ instruction—is itself hate speech, thereby allowing the original to stand unchallenged?

When will we recognize that Government’s enforced silence is not, cannot be, the answer to “hate speech?”

When will we recognize that the enforced silence of Macron’s proposal is itself hate speech?