Category Archives: rights

Censorship in the Patent and Trademark Office

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The Supreme Court has heard the oral arguments for Iancu v Brunetti, a case I wrote about a bit ago.  Hadley Arkes’ op-ed in The Wall Street Journal shed additional light on the matter, which centers on whether Iancu’s business can trademark the name of his business, Friends U Can’t Trust, with its acronym stand-in.

Certain words are fixed in the language with the moral functions of “commending” and “condemning,” and some of them have a special edge….

You bet.

However, confusing F**T with the specially edged F**K can only be done by those with potty-mouthed minds.  Ordinary people, people with the barest modicum of decorum, are not so easily misled, whether they simply choose not to see the worst in everything they encounter, or they’re mildly amused by the obvious jape.

Chief Justice John Roberts did raise a significant point:

…advertisements will be posted in malls where children can see them. Mr Brunetti is appealing to rebellious young men, “but that’s not the only audience he reaches….”

However, this isn’t the risk that Roberts thought he saw.  This is an excellent opportunity to teach those children how to recognize critical differences and to not be misled by artificial similarities.  And to teach them how not to be easily offended or cavalierly crude.

Putting potty-mouthed minds into the PTO to effect government censorship according to their base criteria should be unacceptable.

Obstruction

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President Donald Trump, along with many of the rest of us out in flyover country, are fed up with the Progressive-Democrats’ obsessive inquisition into his administration, and he’s decided to actively counter, now by saying he’ll “resist all efforts by the House to question current and former administration officials about special counsel Robert Mueller’s report.”

That report, recall, acknowledged officially what those of us in non-coastal US and outside enclaves like Chicago and Austin and San Antonio already understood: that despite repeated efforts to suborn them, the Russians failed utterly to get Trump, family members, or associates to go along with Russian attempts to sow FUD in our election processes and republican democracy.  That report also found no obstruction to have occurred, recounting as it does a short dozen of occurrences of an angry Trump venting and his staff having the skill to recognize that as such (even as Congressional Progressive-Democrats loudly contort venting into obstructing).

Those House Progressive-Democrats are responding to Trump’s latest effrontery.

Congressman Elijah Cummings (D, MD), House Oversight Committee Chairman, said

the White House was engaged in a “massive, unprecedented and growing pattern of obstruction.”

And Jerry Nadler (D, NY), House Judiciary Committee Chairman, said

the effort to block the subpoena for Mr McGahn was “one more act of obstruction by an administration desperate to prevent the public from talking about the president’s behavior.”

It is, after all, obstruction to object to attacks, it’s obstruction to defend oneself against any charge, whether the charge is grounded on actual evidence or is blatantly false.

The accused should simply roll over, surrender, and accept punishment.

This is the kind of government we can expect from a Progressive-Democratic Party reign.

“A Battle for the Soul of this Nation”

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That’s what Progressive-Democratic Party Presidential candidate and Hamlet’s poor relation Joe Biden, said we’re in as he opened his campaign.

We are in the battle for the soul of this nation[.] If we give Donald Trump eight years in the White House, he will forever and fundamentally alter….

Indeed, we are in a battle for our nation’s soul. It’s a battle between one party that actively tries to improve the situations of our nation’s citizens—whether we agree with those policies or not—and a party that has no aim for our people’s benefit, but is focused solely on anti-Trumpism.

It’s a battle between a party on the one hand that wants to get Government out of our way, to unleash our individuality and individual entrepreneurial spirit, to restore to us our individual responsibilities and freedoms, and a Party on the other hand that wants to take things away from us: our money in the form of higher taxes; our weapons, under the guise of carefully undefined “common sense”…restrictions; our freedom of speech under the cynically offered guise of suppressing “hate” speech or “terrorism fomenting;” our freedom of religion under the just as cynically offered guise of “protecting” others from discrimination (but not the ones asserting their religious tenets); our morality by growing Government to arrogate that morality to it, thereby destroying it in both places; our individualism by mandating what all of us collectively must do because Party says it benefits some of us—even where it plainly does not—and on and on.

It’s a battle between a party that wants to shrink government and Party, which wants to grow a Government run by Party members who Know Better than the rest of us.

It’s a battle between a party that wants government to work for all of us and Party, which has open contempt for millions of us and insists that us ignoramuses must simply be quiet and obey.

What will be altered—an outcome devoutly to be wished—is what this nation has become under the last 80 years of pressures and outright rule of the Democratic Party and of late the Progressive-Democratic Party: a rapidly growing regulatory state with weakened national security, and a nation damaged domestically by Party’s explosively growing national debt, its racist and sexist affirmative action programs, its gilded welfare cage, and lately its revived segregationist policy of identity politics.

There have been excursions from that trend, to be sure, but they have been only occasional and brief: one party’s successful effort to defeat the Soviet Union via its rapid defense buildup and its current, nascent restart toward rebuilding our nation’s defense establishment, together with the beginnings of a rollback of Party’s imposed regulations governing what Party would permit or require each of us to do.

This is a battle we cannot afford to lose.

Banning Violence and Extremism from Social Media

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That’s what France and New Zealand want to do and want others to join them in doing, all in response to the terrorist murders in New Zealand.  The two intend to host a conference involving G-7 members’ IT chiefs and a separate “technology summit” aimed at getting commitments

to end the use of social media to organize and promote terrorism and extremist violence.

But whose definition of violence? Whose definition of extremism? We’re already seeing, in our nation, the Progressive-Democratic Party and their violence-oriented arms, Antifa and BLM, and their university management team associates, defining conservative speech as triggering, dangerous to mental health, violent.

This is a very slippery slope, onto which the first step may well be fatal.

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.