Tag Archives: morality

Free Speech at the Universities

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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?

And:

[A] partial solution [to handling costs] could entail a new Federal Extremist Speakers Fund to help universities with their exorbitant security costs. That would shift the financial burden of following the First Amendment to the government that requires universities to do so.

Wow.  Apparently, Fuchs and Altschuler slept through their eighth-grade Civics class.  Government isn’t making universities do anything here.  We the People, through our 1st Amendment, are making the government protect free speech in all public forums.

And:

Meanwhile, when openly racist and virulently anti-Semitic speakers show up on campus, we need to deprive them of attention and confrontation, the oxygen on which they thrive, by shunning them.

Certainly.  And that will happen pretty much automatically over the course of the ideas contest of which Fuchs and Altschuler are so terrified.

Paying Ransom for Cyber Crimes

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Paying ransom to unlock a hacker’s lock on hard drives and the data stored there, paying protection money to “get back” stolen data, is worse than merely aiding and abetting the criminals.  It puts at risk more than just the ransom-payer. By paying this reward money, by ensuring that this particular crime, at least, pays and pays well, it put others at risk of the same crime.

Now those put at risk by these ransom payers have grown to include children.

Hackers looking to exploit sensitive information for profit are increasingly targeting the nation’s schools, where they are finding a relatively weak system to protect a valuable asset: student data.
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The attackers have gained access to servers containing student names, addresses, social security numbers, birth dates, academic performance, phone numbers and medical and discipline records….

This is the payoff for rewarding hackers for their crimes: child molesting hackers moving to get in on all the paydays.

On Oct 5, a Twitter page using the name of a well-known hacker took credit for Johnston County’s hack in a tweet that read: “With the student directory from JCSD we released, any child predator can now easily acquire new targets and even plan based on grade level.”

A Mistake

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Would a partitioned Iraq be a better pawn for Iran?  Or would a freed-up, independent Iraqi Kurdistan serve as a buffer to mitigate Iranian influence in the area—and an impediment to an Iranian road to Damascus and on to Latakia and Tartus on the Mediterranean Sea?  And an impediment to that road, passing as it would, right by Israel via Hezbollah?

An Iraq weakened by the partition would be easy prey for Iran?  No, that’s a wash for the weakened Iraq that’s already in Iranian sway, via all those Shiite “militias” that are funded and armed by Iran’s terror support organ, the Iranian Republican Guards Corps.

Recall two things: one is the Peshmerga and their courage and battlefield skill and tenacity in rescuing Yazidis from a mountain “island” during the initial Daesh barbarians’ rout of the Iraqi “army,” in stopping the barbarians’ rush east into Kurdish Iraq, in helping clear Mosul, and other events and campaigns.

The other thing is that all of this was done without support from Baghdad, done even with active Baghdad obstruction of US arms going to the Kurds so they could better fight the Daesh, who already were armed with American heavy weapons, courtesy of the Iraqi “army” which had abandoned all of that as they abandoned their duty and ran south before the Daesh, like grains of sand on a desert wind.

Now President Donald Trump is professing American neutrality as Baghdad, supported by Iranian forces (those “militia”) and Iranian weapons, moves into territories liberated by the Kurds from the Daesh and seeks to subjugate the Kurds, once again, to Baghdad’s diktat.

We don’t like the fact that they’re clashing.  …  We’re not taking sides.

And: what is the stability in the region before Iran’s advances with Iraq riven by civil war rather than stabilized by a settled Iraq and Iraqi Kurdistan?

Where would an Iraqi Kurdistan, or even a subjugated Kurdish region, be regarding its policy toward the US were we to betray them in the present situation, as we betrayed them after the first Gulf War, implying they should revolt against a surviving Saddam Hussein government only to stand by while he gassed them into submission?

And there’s this bit from a Wall Street Journal editorial:

A central tenet of the Trump foreign policy, a work in progress, has been that the US would rebuild its relationship with America’s allies.

Who are the Kurds, if not an American ally?  Who are the Kurds, if not one of the staunchest allies we’ve had?

One More Reason

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…for charter and voucher schools, this time provided by the Biloxi (public) School District.  They’ve banned Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird from its 8th grade classrooms.  Why?

…some of the book’s language “makes people uncomfortable.”

Never mind that proper education must make people uncomfortable because it challenges their preconceived notions, it makes them think, it makes them think for themselves.  It even confronts students with uncomfortable aspects of our history, like Atticus Finch explaining to his daughter, Scout, the term “nigger-lover.”  Or Tom Robinson referring to himself, ironically, as a nigger.

No, we have to raise precious little snowflakes unable to take care of themselves in adulthood.

Never mind, either, that the Web site associated with the district says that

To Kill A Mockingbird teaches students that compassion and empathy don’t depend upon race or education.

Instead, the school has ducked the question:

School board Vice President Kenny Holloway says other books can teach the same lessons.

No, very few do, and those that do don’t do it nearly as well.

Protests

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Former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice says that NFL players should voice their concerns about racial injustice without “alienating” people.

Whatever the players were trying to do in drawing attention to these issues, it’s gone another way now in that people have stopped listening to each other.

Indeed, the players’ “protest” could go no other way since their path centered on attacking our nation’s flag and anthem and insulting those who fought for what these symbolize.

The best form of protest against racial injustice, or any other form of injustice, is to succeed, loudly and publicly, despite the bigotry.  Like folks like Condoleezza Rice; Muhammad Ali; Martin Luther King, Jr; Jackie Robinson; and a potful of others, including old, dead guys like Martin Luther, Galileo, et al., have done.

The second best form of protest is to protest the injustice itself rather than going off message to protest via something else in an effort to cutesify the message.