Category Archives: regulation

A Judge to be Impeached

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US District Court Judge Jesse Furman said the censorship itself was protected free speech.

This is a man who has violated his oath of office and so is unfit to continue in office.

Baidu, the People’s Republic of China’s Google wannabe, has a free speech right, according to this “judge,” to block searches for things related to the PRC citizenry’s pro-democracy movement.  After all,

The First Amendment protects Baidu’s right to advocate for systems of government other than democracy (in China or elsewhere) just as surely as it protects plaintiffs’ rights to advocate for democracy.

Advocating for one’s own position by actively preventing those with differing opinions from speaking their differing opinions, or from seeking out differing opinions, is “free speech.”  Because suppressing the free speech of dissenters, suppressing dissenters’ access to others’ free speech, or to anything related to the subject(s) of their own interests, is just “editorial judgment.”  Because isolating dissenters each into a separate, individual island, and preventing contact with any other island is entirely legitimate free speech.

In fact, in dismissing a free speech suit against Baidu, this judge ruled in part

…to allow Plaintiffs’ suit to proceed, let alone to hold Baidu liable for its editorial judgments, would contravene the principle upon which “[o]ur political system and cultural life rest”: “that each person should decide for himself or herself the ideas and beliefs deserving of expression, consideration, and adherence.”

And therein lies a fatal contradiction of this judge’s pseudo-logic.  Each person cannot decide ideas and beliefs for himself if he’s actively denied access to those ideas and beliefs.  If each person is allowed only to decide from among a carefully limited set of ideas and beliefs which others permit him to view, he has no decision to make.

The failure of the judge’s logic goes further.  The only liability to which a publisher is subject in the editorial judgments it makes is from its decision to suppress speech, not its decision to present it.

And further, and far more fundamentally: each person’s right to decide for himself “the ideas and beliefs deserving of expression, consideration, and adherence” extends to presentation and consideration to him alone; it does not include any right to prevent presentation to or consideration by others.  Each person’s right to decide questions of adherence extends to himself alone; there is right to prevent such consideration by others.

What this judge appears to have (carefully?) ignored is that there is nothing at all in a right to free speech that requires any person to listen to another, nor is there any right to determine for another person what that person will be permitted to listen to.

Furman’s opinion can be read here.

Unionizing College Sports

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In light of the NLRB’s ruling that Northwestern football players can join a union, I have a number of questions and concerns.

How many other college semipro sports will unionize?  Will athletic departments survive the costs of unionization?  Will ticket sales?

What will the NLRB’s ruling do vis-à-vis Title IX?

How will the vast majority of college and university programs that don’t make money from their athletic departments will survive?  How will those programs within athletic departments that don’t make money survive–will the “football” union be willing to subsidize them?  Even were they willing, will they have the money to do so for all?

Will academic students now be forced to pay union dues, since they “benefit” from the “football” union’s…bargaining?  Will other student athletes in other sports?

Unionized semi-pro athletes who happen to attend college represent a fertile training ground for future union membership.  This ruling sets up that farm system.

And as The Wall Street Journal cites NLRB’s Peter Sung Ohr [emphasis added]:

[C]ollege players aren’t student athletes who get an academic scholarship in return for competing in a sport. They are “employees” and thus eligible to have a union collectively bargain with their university employer.  Mr Ohr explains that college players spend 40-50 hours a week at their sport during the season, often more than on class work, and that they are essentially paid for their work via a scholarship that covers tuition, fees and room and board worth about $61,000 a year.

Not a trace of irony there.  No, Sir.

The WSJ added this parting point:

Don’t look for the football players to give up their gourmet training tables in solidarity with the geeks majoring in pre-med.

Be all right with me if colleges shut down their athletic programs, converted them all to IMs, converted existing athletic scholarships to academic scholarships of the same value, and stopped offering athletic scholarships altogether.  Put the “student” back in “student athlete.”

Another Thought on the Contraceptive Mandate Case

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Justice Stephen Breyer asked why the government couldn’t provide the companies the same accommodation it offered nonprofit religious organizations.  In those instances, the government effectively picks up the cost of the challenged methods.

“You’re talking about a very open-ended increase in the cost to the government,” [Solicitor General Donald] Verrilli said.

Related to that is Justice Elena Kagan’s worry that “everything would be piecemeal.  Nothing would be uniform.”

There’s a hint there, folks.  If a thing is too expensive, or too confusing or hard, for government to do right, maybe government shouldn’t be doing it.

Talk About Paranoia

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Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker (R) has committed the dastardly deed of posting on his Facebook and Twitter feeds, references to a Biblical verse: Philippians 4:13.  The meaning of this verse, “I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me,” is less important than Scott’s purpose in posting it and the hue and cry raised over it by the atheists of the Left.  Walker’s Press Secretary Laurel Patrick, had this to say of that purpose:

While [Governor Walker] frequently uses his social media to engage with Wisconsinites on matters of public policy, he also uses it to give them a sense of who he is.  This does just that—it was a reflection of his thoughts for the day.

On the other hand, Freedom From Religion Foundation really has its collective knickers in a twist.

This braggadocio verse coming from a public official is rather disturbing.  To say, “I can do all things through Christ, who strengthens me,” seems more like a threat, or the utterance of a theocratic dictator, than a duly elected civil servant.

A threat?  Really!?  And where is the diktat involved here?  In what way is Walker ordering anyone else to do anything?

In what way is a man required to check his ethos—or his religion—at the door when he goes to work?  Should Walker also check his Judeo-Christian requirement to help the least among us at the door, too?

Come to that, where is the FFRF on government welfare—that use of taxpayer dollars, that use of FFRF members’ tax dollars—to support this Christian effort by government?

This would be bad parody, except that the FFRF and other If-It-Offends-Me-It-Must-Be-Unconstitutional crowd are deadly serious.  Instead, it’s just a disturbing level of paranoia.

What is it

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…with Liberals and uniformity?  I mentioned here a Liberal Justice’s fear of “the noisiness of republican democracy.”  Following is an example from near the other end of the jurisdictional spectrum.

It seems a grade schooler at the Caprock Academy in Grand Junction, CO, shaved her head in solidarity for a classmate and friend who was undergoing cancer treatment and in the process losing her own hair.  This got the grade schooler expelled from Caprock: such a thing violated the school’s precious dress code.

Never mind that shaving heads is a widespread and well-known act for the purpose: solidarity and emotional support for someone who is losing their own hair from a cancer treatment régime.  Never mind that the Caprock administrators knew the purpose of this girl’s head-shaving.  No: Get outta here.

The school’s excuse?  Unbelievably, it’s this.  Caprock’s President and Board of Directors Chairman, Catherine Norton Breman, said the school’s dress code

was created to promote safety, uniformity, and a non-distracting environment for the school’s students.  Under this policy, shaved heads are not permitted.

Uniformity.  No exceptions.  In what way, exactly, is supporting a friend in her extended hour of need in any way unsafe or distracting to other students?

In what way, exactly, is non-uniformity such a fearful thing?  Especially in an environment where students are supposed to be learning to think—and to think for themselves—is non-uniformity such a terrifying thing?

Of whom, or of what philosophy, are Liberals trying to make all of us—all of our children—unthinking, carbon copy acolytes?

I should note that, in the end, the girl’s expulsion from school only lasted one day, and she was allowed back to school the following Tuesday.  The school’s directors also were to meet—behind closed doors, of course—to “discuss” this thing.  The questions above remain though: of what is this bunch of Liberals, and all Liberals, apparently—so terrified of people, or children, not being all alike?