Tag Archives: rights

Was I Right to Pull the Plug on a Nazi Website?

Posted on by
Reply

That’s the title of a tortured op-ed in a recent Wall Street Journal by Matthew Prince, Co-founder and CEO of Cloudflare.  Recall that he and his Cloudflare helped kick a group of neo-Nazis off the internet last week, including the Daily Stormer Web site.  He bragged at the time about having done that, and as despicable as neo-Nazi and Nazi wannabe thugs are, that’s an easy brag.

In this op-ed, though, Prince is claiming to be having second thoughts.

However.

As an opponent of free speech, Mr Prince, of course you were right to censor any speech you personally would consider repugnant.  As a biased opponent of free speech, moreover, you’re entirely correct to leave your favored-of-the-Left hate groups—Antifa and BLM, for instance—untouched by your censorship.

But this—this is impressively shabby.

[T]he First Amendment doesn’t compel private companies to let anyone broadcast on their platforms.

No, more than merely shabby.  This is utterly, cynically disingenuous. It’s true in the narrowest, most legalist sense that the First Amendment only limits government’s ability to censor speech. But the principle underlying that Amendment, the individual liberty to speak freely in accordance with one’s own conscience rather than in comportment with a Know Better’s diktat is universal. It’s one of our unalienable Rights…among [which] are…Liberty….

Of course, as the son of a journalist [growing up] with discussions around the dinner table on the importance of freedom of speech, you know this full well.

Your Orwellian missive, with its artificial, bodice-ripping anguish, is at best mendacious.

Monuments

Posted on by
Reply

The European Commission had a thought on the occasion of the European Day of Remembrance for Victims of Stalinism and Nazism, that while not explicitly about monuments is related:

The European Union was built on the common values of human dignity, fundamental rights, rule of law and democracy, and on the rejection of extreme nationalism.

We must never take these rights and freedoms for granted. We pledge to fight for them every day.

Extremism, nationalism, xenophobia and hatred can still be heard in public speech in Europe. Keeping these memories alive is not only a tribute to the victims but also a way to ensure that these ideologies can be forcefully rejected and such atrocities never happen again.

We stand firm in our defense of democracy, the rule of law and fundamental rights, in Europe and worldwide. There is no place in the European Union for extremism, intolerance and oppression.

These remarks dovetail tightly with a suggestion by Vice President Mike Pence:

I hold the view that it’s important that we remember our past and build on the progress that we have made.

I’m someone who believes in more monuments, not less monuments.  What we ought to do is we ought to remember our history, but we also ought to celebrate the progress that we’ve made since that history.

And

When I walked back in 2010 across the Edmund Pettus Bridge…we remembered Bloody Sunday and the extraordinary progress of the civil rights movement, and I can’t help but think that, rather than pulling down monuments, as some are wont to do…we ought to have been building more monuments[.]

Hmm….

Bullies

Posted on by
Reply

Recall how Google, last week, outed a Conservative employee and his critique of Google personnel practices, then bullied him with public opprobrium, then fired him.

Google Chief Executive Sundar Pichai was going to have an all-hands town hall this week to address the matter, but then, after employees expressed concerns

about their safety and worried they may be “outed” publicly for asking a question in the Town Hall[,]

he cancelled the whole affair.  The company put the original teapot tempest into the public’s eye, but when allegedly faced with the same outcome for themselves, they skittered back into their baseboard holes in the walls.

Aside from the breathtaking hypocrisy of this sorry charade, this illustrates an old maxim: bullies are cowards, and Google management and Google’s Precious Ones employees are just the same.

Gun Control

Posted on by
1

A bill is making progress in Congress that would allow concealed carry license holders, whose license was issued in one State (their State of residence) to concealed carry their weapons in all States: the Constitutional Concealed Carry Reciprocity Act of 2017.  The bill also would require such a carrier to abide by the laws of the State they’re visiting, including all of that State’s gun-free zone designations.  In this way, the reciprocity law is similar to drivers license reciprocity, under which it’s legal to drive in any State so long as the driver both is licensed in his home State and obeys the driving laws of the State he’s visiting.

Naturally, the bill has lots of resistance in the coastal States and cities—jurisdictions run by Progressive-Democrats.  The California Police Chiefs Association President Edward Medrano, for instance, has these objections:

The bill would erode local control of issuing concealed carry permits, as the arbitrariness of the issuing authority rules would reduce the requirements for concealed carry to the lowest common denominator.  Further, the lack of a national database for concealed carry permits makes it functionally impossible for a law enforcement officer in the field to determine the legal compliance of an individual carrying a concealed firearm.

Both of these objections are disingenuous.  The requirement for concealed carry is quite simple, and it’s laid out clearly in the 2nd Amendment [emphasis added]:

A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.

The “lowest common denominator” objection also illustrates the utter illogic of Medrano’s objection.  It is the multiply varied local jurisdiction rules that are arbitrary.  The lowest common denominator standard, accepting that characterization arguendo, would be easily understood and widely so, since it would not at all be arbitrarily varying.  Too, a required reciprocity like that in the Act, would put the onus for keeping up with local jurisdiction variability and arbitrariness where it belongs: on the individual and not on the government’s men.

Beyond that, no national database of concealed carry permits is needed.  Most States issue concealed carry licenses and require the license holder to have that license in his possession at all times—just like his drivers license.  A few States don’t require licenses to carry concealed, but those States are easily identified—by the drivers license the holder still must have with him at all times.

New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio and Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel (OK, an interior mayor, but a Progressive-Democratic Party one nonetheless) argue that the reciprocity act would

essentially force the localities to give full faith and credit to permits that are issued on less rigorous grounds [and] remove local governments’ ability to maintain sensible gun standards.

Because full faith and credit is a terrible thing.  We’ve also seen what Progressive-Democrat “sensible gun standards” amount to: a citizen having to show to a government official’s satisfaction that a need to carry exists.  The Supreme Court has already ruled on the illegality of that arrogant nonsense.

Progressive-Democrats like New York’s District Attorney Cy Vance is even arguing that reciprocity would give Daesh terrorists (and other terrorists, presumably) a leg up.  This is just a cynically offered red herring of a scare tactic.  Guys like Vance carefully ignore the fact that the leg up is that of an armed citizen or group of us confronted with an already armed terrorist.

The Constitutional Concealed Carry Reciprocity Act needs to go through without any delay.

Asset Forfeiture

Posted on by
Reply

Attorney General Jeff Sessions has withdrawn President Barack Obama’s (D) blanket hold on asset seizure, but with safeguards.  I think those safeguards need improvement.

Stop sharing seized assets with local law enforcement.  Each State has its own laws regarding asset seizure by local law enforcement; these laws should be respected and not bypassed.

Also:

Sessions’ new guidelines say that state or local agencies seeking forfeiture under federal law must demonstrate probable cause within 15 days of the seizure. The sponsoring federal agency must notify the property’s owner within 45 days, so he can challenge it, including by going to court.

This is much too slow.  These agencies already have probable cause, or they couldn’t have conducted the raids and seizures in the first place.  Where a seizure is made pursuant to an unwarranted but otherwise legitimate stop or arrest, the seizure has its probable cause in the same process with which the police after the fact justify their stop/arrest.

The sponsoring agency knows at the moment of the seizure what it’s seized and what it intends to do with it; there’s no reason for a 45-day delay in notification other than to make the seizure as irrevocable as possible and, in the case of financial asset seizure, to make as great as possible the cost to the owner of his property’s recovery.

Finally, absent an actual conviction, there shouldn’t be any asset seizure outside the strictures of the already existing civil and criminal sections of the RICO statute.  That law provides sufficient grounds for seizure prior to conviction, when the seizure is made solely on the basis of an accusation.