Coyote Blog

Cross-Posted From Climate Skeptic. 

In
1497, Savonarola tried to end the Italian Renaissance in a massive pyre
of books and artwork (the Bonfire of the Vanities).  The Renaissance
was about inquiry and optimism, neither of which had much appeal to
Savonarola, who thought he had all the answers he needed in his
apocalyptic vision of man.  For him, how the world worked, and
particularly the coming apocalypse, was "settled science" and any
questioning of his world view was not only superfluous, it was evil.

A popular anti-immigrant tactic in Arizona is to try to ban day laborers from public places.  Though it’s not how I would choose to sell my labor, many people choose to advertise and sell their labor from street corners and in public spaces.  And many of these folks, contrary to common perceptions, are legal residents of this country.

Here is a bit of good news:

A federal judge on Monday issued a temporary order blocking the town
of Cave Creek from enforcing a law aimed at stopping day laborers from
gathering on streets to look for work.

In her ruling, U.S. District Judge Roslyn Silver found that the
ordinance is an unconstitutional restriction of free speech, and that
the possibility of irreparable harm exists.

“Plaintiffs, as day laborers, face not only the loss of First
Amendment freedoms, but also the loss of employment opportunities
necessary to support themselves and their families,” Silver wrote in
the ruling.

Three trends on college campuses all came together in the case of Keith Sampson:

• Rampant political correctness
• A newfound "right" for protected groups to be free from being offended, a right that now seems to trump free speech
• The fetishization of symbolism over substance, and the belief that other people’s reactions to an act is more important than the nature of that act itself.

Here is an excerpt from his story:

IN November, I was found guilty of "racial harassment" for reading a public-li brary book on a university campus.

The book was Todd Tucker’s "Notre Dame vs. the Klan: How the Fighting
Irish Defeated the Ku Klux Klan I was reading it on break from my
campus job as a janitor. The same book is in the university library.

Tucker recounts events of 1924, when the loathsome Klan was a dominant
force in Indiana – until it went to South Bend to taunt the Irish
Catholic students at the University of Notre Dame.

When the
KKK tried to rally, the students confronted them. They stole Klan robes
and destroyed their crosses, driving the KKK out of town in a downpour.

I read the historic encounter and imagined myself with these
brave Irish Catholics, as they street-fought the Klan. (I’m part-Irish,
and was raised Catholic.)

But that didn’t stop the Affirmative
Action Office of Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis from
branding me as a detestable Klansman.

They didn’t want to hear
the truth. The office ruled that my "repeatedly reading the book . . .
constitutes racial harassment in that you demonstrated disdain and
insensitivity to your co-workers."

A friend reacted to the finding with, "That’s impossible!" He’s right. You can’t commit racial harassment by reading an anti-Klan history….

But the $106,000-a-year
affirmative-action officer who declared me guilty of "racial
harassment" never spoke to me or examined the book. My own union – the
American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees – sent an
obtuse shop steward to stifle my freedom to read. He told me, "You
could be fired," that reading the book was "like bringing pornography
to work."

I have argued many times on this page that there is a dangerous new rights theory gaining traction in today’s college campuses.  That theory holds that there exists a freedom (mostly for people in "protected" groups — women, minorities, etc) from being offended or even being criticized, and that this trumps free speech. 

For years I have supported the legality of what is called hate speech — not because I agreed with it, but because I thought its expression, no matter how contemptible, should be legal.  Free speech should have no content tests.  I also argued that there was a slippery slope.  If making racist remarks is illegal today, perhaps just criticizing a woman or an African American might be illegal tomorrow.

Enter Priya Venkatesan, former English teacher at Dartmouth.  Ms. Venkatesan was hired by Dartmouth to teach all kinds of odd (but always trendy) socialist eco-feminist babble.  Such courses seem to be a staple of colleges today.  I remember a number of such professors at Princeton, but it was no big deal as long as the course were clearly labeled and one could avoid them.  After all, if people really were attracted to such drivel, it just left more spots open for the rest of us in classes that actually prepared us for the real world. 

The problems began, though, when Ms. Venkatesan’s students refused to blindly agree with her  (apparently, they did not attend the University of Delaware indoctrination course that explained why you are not allowed to criticize anyone but white males).

The agenda of Ms. Venkatesan’s seminar, then, was to
"problematize" technology and the life sciences. Students told me that
most of the "problems" owed to her impenetrable lectures and various
eruptions when students indicated skepticism of literary theory. She
counters that such skepticism was "intolerant of ideas" and "questioned
my knowledge in very inappropriate ways." Ms. Venkatesan, who is of
South Asian descent, also alleges that critics were motivated by
racism, though it is unclear why.

After a winter of discontent, the snapping point came
while Ms. Venkatesan was lecturing on "ecofeminism," which holds, in
part, that scientific advancements benefit the patriarchy but leave
women out. One student took issue, and reasonably so – actually,
empirically so. But "these weren’t thoughtful statements," Ms.
Venkatesan protests. "They were irrational." The class thought
otherwise. Following what she calls the student’s "diatribe," several
of his classmates applauded.

Ms. Venkatesan informed her pupils that their behavior
was "fascist demagoguery." Then, after consulting a physician about
"intellectual distress," she cancelled classes for a week. Thus the
pending litigation.

Litigation, exposure of the names behind anonymous course evaluations, and email threats from Ms. Venkatesan follow.  More from Lubos Motl.

Postscript:  By the way, it is just astounding to me that anyone with an over-room-temperature IQ could passionately believe that technological progress is bad for women.  One might argue that way society is organized still under-utilizes women and/or puts artificial roadblocks up to a woman’s progress, but get some perspective!

Pre-modern life for women was horrible.  Because of the biological complexities of child-rearing alone, they died young far more often than men and their physical vulnerability caused them to be marginalized in virtually every society of every culture of the world until at least 1750 and really until 1900.  The whole women’s movement is built on a platform of technology that only begins with the pill and encompasses a thousand things from automobiles to computers that reduce the importance of size and physical strength in getting ahead in the world. 

…. Uh, never.  Except of course at Colorado College, according to Amanda Udis-Kessler, Colorado College’s Director of Institutional Research and Planning:

Social inequality is deeply grounded in a lack of respect-for women,
people of color, lesbian and gay people, and others. When we choose to
curtail our freedom to disrespect others in order to build a meaningful
society, we have made a mature and wise choice-and one that college
should help us learn.

The rest of the post is a roundup of the fallout over the punishment by the university of a parody of a campus feminist publication.  Basically, the argument boils down to the feminists feeling "dissed" and arguing that being dissed is a sufficient reason to curtail speech if one is in a protected group.   But remember this plea by the Colorado College feminists:

But please stop fabricating a story about humorless, offended feminists silencing men’s free speech.

Oh, okay.

There are enough cases of this new theory of speech running around, that speech may be curtailed if someone in a protected group feels hurt or challenged by the speech, for real concern.  It is the same theory at the heart of the kerfuffle in Canada over the human rights commission’s attack on conservative magazines and bloggers, and the same theory in the recent New Mexico decision that a photographer cannot choose not to photograph gay marriages.

Every decade or so, enemies of free speech adopt a new strategy for trying to curtail the First Amendment.  The current effort consists of attempting to define a "right not to be offended", and college campuses are a leading laboratory for this approach (see here and here).

Chris Robinson was recently brought up on trial at the University court for violating this right not to be offended of some of the women at Colorado College (you may notice that this "right not to be offended" seems to be enforced suspiciously asymmetrically, like all speech restrictions).  He has fired back with a marvelous editorial, of which I include one short excerpt:

Hyper-sensitivity in service to a purported greater good became the
justification for an authoritarian lock-down on speech. It’s the same
logic every time: the state comes down hard on behalf of "community."
Changing the rhetorical justification only masks the tyranny. The
effect of this on citizens, in the words of John Adams, is "reducing
their minds to a state of sordid ignorance and staring timidity."…

The simple fact that we were brought before a Soviet-style show
trial has already sent a message to campus, and it is a clear one,
namely that every other potential bearer of heterodox views
should think long and hard about expressing them for fear of ending up
in the same situation as us. In order to avoid even the possibility of offending one group or another, nobody outside the "approved" ideological categories will say anything.

This
is precisely the chilling effect that the First Amendment is
specifically designed to guard against, and to sanction it is a
fundamental violation of the mission of this college. Transparently
selective enforcement against ideologically disallowed speech is
categorically the same as those abhorrent thought-control missions
carried out by the Saudi Ministry of the Propagation of Virtue and the
Prevention of Vice, a perfect example of what John Adams called "the
most mischievous of all doctrines, that of passive obedience and
non-resistance." It’s Orwell and Kafka, together at last.

Bonus judos to Mr. Robinson for recognizing that as a private institution, Colorado College can legally implement whatever speech restrictions it likes, and so frames the question as an issue of "should it" rather than "can it?"

For all our problems in this country with protecting individual liberties, we at least still have pretty free reign in criticizing public figures.  Unfortunately, the same cannot be said of Canada.  I am not really that sympathetic to all that gets written on these Canadian web sites, but I support their right to say it.

Do not be too complacent, however.  I am absolutely positive that there are many prominent people in this country who are scheming to bring exactly this sort of regime to the US.  In fact, it is already being tested at various college campuses, where a newfound right "not to be offended" has begun to trump free speech, at least so far as offense is defined and felt by the ruling elite on campus.

It turns out, according to Barack Obama, (who hales from the party that doesn’t believe in questioning anyone’s patriotism) that I am not a "Patriot Employer."  This is from the text of Senate Bill S. 1945 of which he is a co-sponsor  (My snark is interspersed in italics):  Patriot Employers are to be given tax breaks over unpatriotic employers (I presume this means that their tax rates will be raised less in an Obama presidency than those of other folks) with "patriot employers" defined as such:

(b) Patriot Employer- For purposes of subsection (a), the term
`Patriot employer’ means, with respect to any taxable year, any
taxpayer which–

  `(1) maintains its headquarters in the United States if the taxpayer has ever been headquartered in the United States,

OK, I guess I can comply with this.  Though I am not sure the best way to begin an Obama "kindler gentler foreign policy" is to tell the nations of the world that we will be taxing their company’s income in the US at a higher rate than our own companies.

  `(2) pays at least 60 percent of each employee’s health care premiums,

So the #1 determinant of patriotism is not commitment to individual rights but paying 60% of employee health care costs.  I guess I am so unpatriotic

And, just from a practical standpoint, 90% of my employees are seasonal, hired for about 4 months of the year.  To be patriotic, I have to pay their health care costs all year long?  Also, since most of my employees are retired, they are on Medicare or an employee retirement medical plan.  If they pay $0 in premiums and I pay $0 of that, do I get credit for 60%?  Maybe the government can mandate a solution for zero divided by zero, like they did for the value of pi years ago

  `(3) has in effect, and operates in accordance with, a policy requiring neutrality in employee organizing drives,

I presume neutrality means that in a hypothetical union drive, I do not express my opinion (and likely opposition) to said unionization drive?   I am told that this also entails allowing card checks rather than hidden ballot voting.  In other words, patriotism is being defined here as 1) giving up your free speech rights and 2) opposing hidden ballot voting.  Uh, right.  Besides, if a union organized our company, as unlikely as that would be, I would probably have to do a Francisco d’Anconia on the place.

  `(4) if such taxpayer employs at least 50 employees on average during the taxable year–

`(A) maintains or increases the number of full-time
workers in the United States relative to the number of full-time
workers outside of the United States,

In other words, we don’t want American companies growing overseas.  This could also be called the "give up international market share act."  This implies that it is unpatriotic for US-based Exxon to explore for oil in Asia and that it is more patriotic to let the Chinese national oil company do it.  This implies that it is more patriotic for Coke to lose market share in Germany than to gain it.  This means that it is more patriotic for Mattel to buy its toys in China from Chinese companies rather than run the factories themselves (and thereby be accountable themselves for product quality and working conditions).

This is beyond stupid.  We LIKE to see US companies doing well overseas.  If we have to import our raw materials, we feel more comfortable if it is US companies doing the extraction.  Don’t we?  In the name of patriotism, do we really want to root for our domestic companies to fail in international markets?

`(B) compensates each employee of the taxpayer at
an hourly rate (or equivalent thereof) not less than an amount equal to
the Federal poverty level for a family of three for the calendar year
in which the taxable year begins divided by 2,080,

90% of my workers are retired.  They work for me to supplement their income, to live our in nature, and to stay busy.  They need me to pay them based on the poverty line for a family of three, why?  I will tell you right now that if I had to raise wages this much, most of my employees would quit.  Many of them force me to give them fewer hours so they can stay under the social security limits for income.  I discussed what rising minimum wages often force me to do here, but just as an illustration, a $1 an hour across the board wage increase would easily wipe out all the money I make in a year and put me into a loss position.  In which case the lowered tax rate would not do me much good anyway.

  `(C) provides either–

  `(i) a defined contribution plan which for any plan year–

`(I) requires the employer to make
nonelective contributions of at least 5 percent of compensation for
each employee who is not a highly compensated employee, or

`(II) requires the employer to make
matching contributions of 100 percent of the elective contributions of
each employee who is not a highly compensated employee to the extent
such contributions do not exceed the percentage specified by the plan
(not less than 5 percent) of the employee’s compensation, or

`(ii) a defined benefit plan which for any plan
year requires the employer to make contributions on behalf of each
employee who is not a highly compensated employee in an amount which
will provide an accrued benefit under the plan for the plan year which
is not less than 5 percent of the employee’s compensation, and

Uh, I am not sure why it is unpatriotic for an employee to save for themselves, but I think 401k plans are a nice benefit.  I would certainly offer one except for one tiny fact – ALL MY EMPLOYEES ARE ALREADY RETIRED!!  They are over 65.  They are drawing down on their retirement, not contributing to it.

This is at the heart of the problem with all US labor law.  Folks up in Illinois write laws with a picture of a steel mill in mind, and forget that employment and employees have infinite variations in circumstances and goals. 

So I am unpatriotic, huh.  But if forcing companies to contribute to emplee retirement plans is patriotic, why is hiring folks once they are retired to give them extra income in retirement unpatriotic?  In fact, maybe I could argue that 100% of the wages I pay go to retirement spending

`(D) provides full differential salary and
insurance benefits for all National Guard and Reserve employees who are
called for active duty, and

In other words, we of the government are not going to pay our employees (ie reservists on active duty) what they are worth and are not going to give them benefits, so to be patriotic you need to do it for us.  We in Congress are not really very patriotic and don’t support the troops, so you need to do it for us.

All kidding aside, I would do this in my company if it was applicable, but I really resent being piously told to do so by several Senators who don’t really model this behavior themselves.

  `(5) if such taxpayer employs less than 50 employees on average during the taxable year, either–…

blah, blah.  Basically the same stuff repeated, though slightly less onerous.

Since when did patriotism equate to "rolling over to the latest AFL-CIO wish list?"

Gene Nichol of William & Mary has resigned, pointing to the university’s opposition of his First Amendment defense of a campus sex workers’ show as a major reason for leaving.  Which is all well and good — I for one compliment him on supporting the speech rights of controversial people and performers. 

However, before we go declaring Mr. Nichol a martyr for free speech, FIRE reminds us that less than six months ago Mr. Nichol spearheaded this far more comprehensive violation of free speech:

This fall, The College of William & Mary launched a Bias Incident Reporting System
“to assist members of the William and Mary community—students, staff,
and faculty—in bringing bias incidents to the College’s attention.” In
its initial incarnation, the system was fraught with constitutional
problems, from both free speech and due process standpoints. The system
initially allowed
for anonymous reporting, providing that “[a] person reporting online
may report anonymously by leaving the personal information fields
blank.” The definition
of “bias” was overbroad and encompassed constitutionally protected
expression: “A bias incident consists of harassment, intimidation, or
other hostile behavior that is directed at a member of the William and
Mary community because of that person’s race, sex (including
pregnancy), age, color, disability, national or ethnic origin,
political affiliation, religion, sexual orientation, or veteran
status.” The homepage
for the system even contained an explicit misstatement about the First
Amendment, stating that the First Amendment did not protect
“expressions of bias or hate aimed at individuals that violate the
college’s statement of rights and responsibilities.”

…a group calling itself “Free America’s Alma Mater” published an advertisement in William & Mary’s student newspaper, The Flat Hat,
skewering the new program. “Welcome to the new William & Mary’s
Bias Reporting System, where W&M now invites you to shred the
reputation of your neighbors…anonymously,” the ad read. “Prof
gave you a bad grade? Upset at that fraternity brother who broke your
heart? Did a colleague vote against you for tenure? Now you can get even!!
Anonymously report anything that offends you to the William & Mary
Thought Police at http://www.wm.edu/diversity/reportbias/.”

This earlier episode reveals that Mr. Nichol clearly does not believe that all speech is protected.  In this light, the episode with the sex workers becomes one of taste rather than first amendment privileges, a mere quibble over where the censorship line (that Mr. Nichol believes should exist) is going to be drawn.

Which reminds me of the old joke:  A man approaches a beautiful woman at a party, and says "Would you sleep with me for a million dollars?" and she says, "Yes."  He then asks "would you sleep with me for $10?" and she screams "what kind of girl do you think I am?"  He retorts "We already established that.  Now we are just haggling over price."

Ezra Levant has posted YouTube videos of his interrogation by an oily little Canadian bureaucrat called "a human rights officer."  He has done it in a series of post, so go to his site and keep scrolling.  Apparently, in Canada, free speech is not a human right but "freedom from criticism" is, at least for certain politically connected groups  (threatening violence at the drop of a hat also seems to help gain one this "freedom from criticism" right.  Levant is being hauled in by the government for publication of those Danish cartoons that barely register at 0.1 on a criticism meter that goes to 10. 

This exchange really resonated with me:

Officer McGovern said "you’re entitled to your opinions, that’s for sure."

Well, actually, I’m not, am I? That’s the reason I was sitting
there. I don’t have the right to my opinions, unless she says I do.

For all of you who left the US for Canada for more freedom from Bush and the Iraq war, have at it.  Because Bush will be gone and we will be out of Iraq long before Canada (as well as Europe) catch up to the US in terms of its protection of [most] individual rights, like free speech.

via Maggies Farm

Update, from Mark Steyn:

Ms McGovern, a blandly unexceptional bureaucrat, is a classic example
of the syndrome. No "vulnerable" Canadian Muslim has been attacked over
the cartoons, but the cartoonists had to go into hiding, and a gang of
Muslim youths turned up at their children’s grade schools, and Muslim
rioters around the world threatened death to anyone who published them,
and even managed to kill a few folks who had nothing to do with them.
Nonetheless, upon receiving a complaint from a Saudi imam trained at an
explicitly infidelophobic academy and who’s publicly called for the
introduction of sharia in Canada, Shirlene McGovern decides that the
purely hypothetical backlash to Muslims takes precedence over any
actual backlash against anybody else.

I made this prediction way back in February of 2005:

I resisted the call by a number of web sites at the beginning of the
year to make predictions for 2005.  However, now I will make one:  We
will soon see calls to bring a tighter licensing or credentialing
system for journalists, similar to what we see for lawyers, doctors,
teachers, and, god help us, for beauticians.  The proposals will be
nominally justified by improving ethics or similar laudable things,
but, like most credentialing systems, will be aimed not at those on the
inside but those on the outside.  At one time or another, teachers,
massage therapists, and hairdressers have all used licensing or
credentialing as a way to fight competition from upstart competitors,
often ones with new business models who don’t have the same
trade-specific educational degrees the insiders have….

Such credentialing can provide a powerful comeback for industry insiders under attack.  Teachers, for example, use it every chance they get to attack home schooling and private schools,
despite the fact that uncertified teachers in both these latter
environments do better than the average certified teacher (for example,
kids home schooled by moms who dropped out of high school performed at
the 83rd percentile).  So, next time the MSM is under attack from the blogosphere, rather than address the issues, they can say that that guy in Tennessee is just a college professor and isn’t even a licensed journalist.

So here we go, here are a few recent such calls for licensing of journalists.  The first via Hot Air:

Supporters of “citizen journalism” argue it provides independent,
accurate, reliable information that the traditional media don’t
provide. While it has its place, the reality is it really isn’t
journalism at all, and it opens up information flow to the strong
probability of fraud and abuse. The news industry should find some way
to monitor and regulate this new trend….

The premise of citizen journalism is that regular people can now
collect information and pictures with video cameras and cellphones, and
distribute words and images over the Internet. Advocates argue that the
acts of collecting and distributing makes these people “journalists.”
This is like saying someone who carries a scalpel is a “citizen
surgeon” or someone who can read a law book is a “citizen lawyer.”
Tools are merely that. Education, skill and standards are really what
make people into trusted professionals. Information without
journalistic standards is called gossip.

But that one is downright sane compared to this, from Cleveland’s Voice for Social Justice (have you noticed how "social justice" always seems to require forcefully silencing people?):

For every champion of journalism who write stories about Walter Reed or
Extraordinary Rendition Flights, there are two reporters at Channel 19
who care very little about society. For every Seymore Hersh there are five Michelle Malkins or Ann Coulters.   With citizen journalists spreading like wildfire in blogs, we seem to have one Froomkin created, there are five extremist blogs proclaiming the assaults on homeless people everyday….

The Society of Professional Journalists must start licensing
journalists or the government will start doing it for them. We need to
start taking this practice seriously and separate the real journalists
from the fakes. The decisions made by journalists have consequences for
ruining people’s lives or for causing grief, suicide or even murder.
The genocide in Rhwanda were carried out using the radio commentators
to urge citizens to kill Tutsis. If journalists want to be taken
seriously they must figure out how to separate the real from the
O’Reilly types. They must set up a structure to license journalists
with an enforcement mechanism to strip bad journalists from practicing
their craft.

This is from the weblog of a bunch of media students:

It scares me to think that the field I will going pursuing when I
graduate might be confused with entertainment reporting – things like
“Who Ben Affleck is dating now” and “Will Brad and Jen get back
together.” Certainly, these things are news to a select few. I will
not, however, get into the whole tabloid issue. I seems to have sparked
some intense debate with that one a few weeks ago. But, I am worried
that with the onslaught of weblogs and internet news, many readers and
listeners will get confused and think what they’re reading and watching
is actually news. I have nothing against web loggers, even though they
are a threat to my future career. But, all of this leads me to question
the professionalism of journalism.

Should we license journalists? This has been a question that has
been debated back and forth for awhile. Many journalists are against
the idea because they believe that that would mean licensing
information and licensing free speech. But I think we need to look at
the issues at hand right now. The news is getting out-of-hand. The
public is being onslaught with an enormous amount of information due to
our increasing rush of technology and it has to be hard for them to
differentiate between real news and opinions being costumed as news.
This is why we need to start seriously considering licensing
journalists. It may be the only real hope for the future of
journalists. With licenses, we can hold on to whatever ethical and
moral characteristics we have left in the news business. There will be
no more “parading reporters” and no more “video news releases.” Who
thinks we should pursue this? Who thinks the entire idea is ridiculous?

Some countries are seriously considering it.  Brazil and Indonesia are looking into licensing their journalists.  Here’s an article
from Indonesia – even though it’s agaist thh idea of licensing it’s
still a good example of how serious this debate is becoming

Its good we are taking lessons on free speech and the media from Indonesia and Brazil.  I probably should not make fun of the typos and grammar errors in this post by a "media student" since I make such mistakes all the time.  Of course, I am not a "licensed journalist."

This is not a new issue.  In the early 1980′s, the US vigorously resisted attempts by the UN to implement a variety of euphemisms that boiled down to licensing requirements for international journalists.

In the statist’s world, your rights are whatever the state says they are.  You can really see this concept at work in this breathtakingly bad Canadian decision reported by Eugene Volokh:

Richard Warman, a lawyer who worked as an investigatory for the
Canadian Human Rights Commission, often filed complaints against "hate
speech" sites — complaints that were generally upheld under Canadian
speech restrictions. Fromm, a defender of various anti-Semites and
Holocaust denials, has been publicly condemning Warman for, among other
things, being "an enemy of free speech." Warman sued, claiming that
these condemnations are defamatory.

Friday, the Ontario Superior Court held for Warman
— chiefly on the grounds that because Warman’s claims were accepted by
the legal system, they couldn’t accurately be called an attack on free
speech.

This case leaves one’s head just spinning with ironies, not the least because it is a great example of how libel law as practiced in many western countries outside the US is itself a great enemy of free speech.  The logic chain used by the judge in this case should make every American appreciative of our Constitutional system and our view of rights as independent of (and if fact requiring protection from) the state:

[25] The implication, as well as the clear of meaning of the words
["an enemy of free speech" and "escalated the war on free speech"], is
that the plaintiff is doing something wrong. The comment "Well, see
your tax dollars at work" also implies that Mr. Warman misused public
funds for this "war on free speech".

[26]  The plaintiff was using legal means to complain of speech that he alleged was "hate" speech.

[27]  The evidence was that Mr. Warman was successful in both the complaint and a libel action which he instituted.

[28] Freedom of expression is not a right that has no boundaries.
These parameters are outlined in various legislative directives and
jurisprudence. I find Mr. Fromm has exceeded these. This posting is
defamatory.

The implication is that there are no fundamental individual rights.  Rights are defined instead by the state and are whatever is reflected in current law.  In this decision, but fortunately not in the US, the law by definition can’t be wrong, so taking advantage of a law, in this case to silence various groups, is by definition not only OK, but beyond the ability of anyone to legally criticize.  There is much more, all depressing.  Here is one example of a statement that was ruled defamatory:

Thank you very much, Jason. So, for posting an opinion, the same sort
of opinion that might have appeared in editorial pages in newspapers
across this country, Jason and the Northern Alliance, his site has come
under attack and people who are just ordinary Canadians find themselves
in front of the courts for nothing more serious than expressing their
opinion. This is being done with taxpayers’ money. I find that
reprehensible.

OK, so here is my opinion:  Not only is Richard Warman an enemy of free speech, but the Canadian legislature that passed this hate-speech law is an enemy of free speech and the Canadian Supreme Court is an enemy of free speech.  Good enough for you hosers?

I guess I will now have to skip my ski trip to Whistler this year, to avoid arrest at the border.

From the Associated Press:

The U.S. Supreme Court declined Monday to hear a challenge to
Alabama’s ban on the sale of sex toys, ending a nine-year legal battle
and sending a warning to store owners to clean off their shelves.

An adult-store owner had asked the justices to throw out the law as
an unconstitutional intrusion into the privacy of the bedroom. But the
Supreme Court declined to hear the appeal, leaving intact a lower court
ruling that upheld the law.

Sherri Williams, owner of Pleasures stores in Huntsville and
Decatur, said she was disappointed, but plans to sue again on First
Amendment free speech grounds.

"My motto has been they are going to have to pry this vibrator from my cold, dead hand. I refuse to give up," she said.

The appeals court made this distinction:

Williams had asked the Supreme Court to review a decision by the
11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals that found Alabama’s law was not
affected by a U.S. Supreme Court decision knocking down Texas’ sodomy
law.

The
Texas sodomy law involved private conduct, while the Alabama law
regulated commercial activity, the appeals court judges said. Public
morality was an insufficient government interest in the Texas case but
was sufficient in the Alabama case, they said.

Now, I don’t in any way shape or form see any differences between "private conduct" and "commerce."  How in the hell can sexual decisions between consenting adults be any different, legally, than commercial transactions between consenting adults.  It is a distinction that socialists have been succesful in introducing in the US, and to which many now cling.

The interesting part is to consider the folks who are fighting the sex toy ban.  My wild guess, which may be off the mark, is that this is not a bunch of Christian conservative Republicans.  My guess is that these folks are probably a bit left of center, and further, that many of them accept and support the notion that the government has every right to regulate dirty old commerce, but no right to regulate one’s "private life."  Well, maybe now it will be clearer, at least to some, how dangerous this distinction is.   As a parting note, it has been two years now since we saw the irony of left-leaning members of the Supreme Court overrule state laws allowing medical marijuana use based on the commerce clause.

I feel like it is time for one of those unpopular libertarian rants that piss everyone off.   As with the last time this issue came up, I just don’t understand what we fear so much letting Iranian dictator Amadinejad speak on American soil.  I am absolutely all for letting people put themselves on the record in the clearest possible way.  McQ over at Q&O is a smart guy I often agree with, but his core assumption seems to be that an invitation from Columbia University somehow confers some legitimacy on an otherwise egregious world leader.  How?  I am not sure the Columbia name even confers much legitimacy on its faculty.  The only thing the decision communicates to me is that Columbia, the university that didn’t allow presentation of the Mohammad cartoons and that allows speakers to be manhandled off the stage, is deeply confused about speech issues on campus.

Information is always useful.  Would I have allowed Hitler to speak in the US in the 1930′s?  Hell yes!  I wish he had gone on a 20-city speaking tour.  Hitler couldn’t help but telegraph his true intentions every time he spoke.  Hell, he wrote it all down in a book if people would have paid attention.  But what if he didn’t?  What if he convinced all America he was peaceful?  Even then it would have been useful.  Intelligent media (if there are any left) could then compare and contrast what he said at home vs. what he said in the US, much like a few folks do with Muslim clerics, comparing their English and Arabic speeches.  Further, folks would have immediately seen Hitler was lying in September of 1939, and, knowing Americans, they would have been more pissed off at him for being lied to.  Further, it would be fabulous to have quotes form Mussolini, touring eastern US cities, praising the New Deal and the NRA, much of which was modeled on his program in Italy.

What about, as Roger Simon asks:

I have a question for the Columbia crowd, since Holocaust deniers are
welcome, would you allow a speaker in favor of a return to black
slavery? I hope not. Well, that’s how I feel about Holocaust deniers.

Absolutely I would.  If there was a prominent person who advocated the return to black slavery, I would want that person on the record in public.  I would love to listen to see what kind of supporters he thought he had, and, perhaps more importantly, to see who reacted favorably to him.   You have to pull these guys up into the sunlight and show the world how distasteful they are.

Update:

During the 1930s, "one of the things we really lacked in this country
was sufficient contact with Nazis to realize what they are up to," said
Harvey Silverglate, a prominent civil rights attorney who has sharply
criticized higher education for failing to support free speech on
campus. The notion "that you’re going to take really awful people and
not listen to them is really suicidal for any society."

I am not at all clear why the Congress needs to take a formal vote on a resolution condemning a legal act of free speech by American citizens.  Yeah, I get the politics of this move.  But can’t they focus on more important issues, like approving official national days for obscure vegetables.

McQ at QandO posts a number of examples of jihadi websites hosted on American ISPs, and goes on to urge:

If you’re doing business with any of these ISPs, you may want to advise
them of your displeasure that your fees are helping support a company
that is hosting websites of avowed enemies of your nation and culture.
Granted, because these are in arabic, the ISPs may not even know what
the sites are, but now you do. Point the ISPs to the MEMRI post. Tell
them that websites which call for the killing of Americans, waging war
against us and teaching radicals how to make bombs are unacceptable.
This is not something which you must wait on government to do. These
sites need to come down and they need to come down because of
grassroots and market pressure to do so. Shut them down.

I have a number of problems with this.  Of course, in a free society, one can choose an ISP any way one likes.  However, given the nature of the Internet, this is one of those suggestions that may sort of feel good but have no chance of having any kind of impact.  Even if wildly successful, all you are going to do is drive these sites to offshore hosts, and I sure hope no one is talking about setting up Chinese-type filters and firewalls at our borders.

Further, there is nothing I like more than having my ISP blissfully ignorant of, and apathetic to, whatever it is they are hosting for me.  I DO NOT want to gear up ISP’s to start reviewing and disallowing content.  That is a horribly slippery slope that will only end badly, as we have started to see with video banning at Google and YouTube.  In fact, given the precedents we have seen at YouTube, I would be willing to guess that if ISP’s did start** putting a filter on sites and start** banning them based on public complaints, that McQ is not going to be happy be my sense is that their political filters are different than his.  Just look at campuses today — many universities have defined a new right not to be offended that trumps free speech.  Do we really want to bring this horrible "innovation" to the Internet?

Finally, I think its awesome and what makes America great that we are so tolerant of speech from even the nuttiest of our worst enemies.  I had kind of hoped that GoDaddy would be on his list, just to experience the cultural irony of GoDaddy girl meets fundamentalist Islam.

** Actually, "start" is not the right word, since some undoubtedly kill certain sites when people complain.  Usually but not always today this is based more on irritating Internet behavior (e.g. spamming) rather than content of speech.  It would be more accurate to have said "substantially increase the banning of sites based on content."

I have argued for a while that American support for real free speech seems to be languishing, and we seem to be more and more comfortable with making exceptions to the first amendment for "hate speech" and speech that offends people, and speech that costs money during an election.  And now this, via Q&O, from a Rasmussen poll:

A large segment of the public would like to extend the concept of the
Fairness Doctrine to the Internet as well. Thirty-four percent (34%)
believe the government should “require web sites that offer political
commentary to present opposing viewpoints.” Fifty percent (50%) are
opposed.

They could only dredge up a bare majority of 50% to oppose this?

I have written a number of times about universities establishing a "right not to be offended" that supersedes free speech.  This is a bit old, but apparently our confused state of Arizona has done the same thing:

The Arizona Senate has unanimously passed
a resolution banning the "Bush Lied, They Died" t-shirts from sale in
the state. The shirts include the names of hundreds of U.S. troops
killed in Iraq in fine print, which legislators apparently find
unseemly, and which they say makes the shirts commercial speech,
instead of political speech, which the Supreme Court says enjoys more
First Amendment protection.

This theory is absurd.  Printing it on a T-Shirt and selling it for money no more converts this into commercial speech than printing Maureen Dowd’s column on paper and selling it for money makes her editorials unprotected.   The law makes it

punishable by up to a year in jail to use the names of deceased
soldiers to help sell goods. The measure, SB 1014, also would let
families go to court to stop the sales and collect damages

Here is a question – about every person in Phoenix, including me, has bought some sort of Pat Tillman shirt or jersey, to memorialize our local football player killed in action.  Are those now illegal?  The AZ Republic makes money selling papers in Phoenix that contain the
names of deceased soldiers all the time — are they going to jail?  Does this mean that no one can sell Glen Miller albums in Arizona?  And if it is determined to be OK to sell shirts memorializing soldiers or reporting on their deaths but not to criticize the president, well, that is pretty much selective enforcement based on political views, is it not.

As an aside, I have never really like the Bush Lied meme, though perhaps not for the reasons his supporters hate it.  I don’t like it because it’s purpose seems to be to relieve every other politician of both parties from any responsibility for the war;  ie, since they were all victims of lies, they bear no responsibility for their actions (or their votes).  I don’t buy that.

Update: Volokh has a much more complete analysis here, which include exceptions to the law.  It appears that at least the Arizona Republic and Glen Miller are safe, but Pat Tillman jerseys still seem to be in the gray zone.  However, interestingly, the law seems to exempt many forms of commercial speech but ban political use of the names.   Wither the first amendment.

In a prior post, I asked the left if they were uncomfortable with liberal judges being on the wrong side of free speech in the recent BCRA-related decision.  As equal time, in the spirit of the heinous Fairness Doctrine again raising its ugly head, I will ask the right if they are comfortable with conservative justices being on the wrong side of property rights and government power in Wilkie v. Robbins.

By the way, speaking of the Fairness Doctrine, its instructive that the incumbent political parties consider fairness to mean equal time for all the … incumbent political parties.  Its interesting that no one in Congress takes the law to mean equal time for Greens or Libertarians or White Supremacists.

David Boaz:

Maybe libertarians should try to describe their philosophy by saying
“libertarians believe in the free speech that liberals used to believe
in, and the economic freedom that conservatives used to believe in.”

On the positive side, the Supreme Court has struck down portions of the BCRA, also known as McCain-Feingold:

The Court concluded that Wisconsin Right to Life’s ads, which urged
people to contact their senators (including one who was up for
re-election) about the confirmation of judicial nominees, did not
constitute either. The majority said "a court should find that an ad is
the functional equivalent of express advocacy only if the ad is
susceptible of no reasonable interpretation other than as an appeal to
vote for or against a specific candidate." To put it another way,
BCRA’s pre-election blackout cannot be constitutionally applied to a
spot that reasonably can be viewed as an issue ad, which means interest
groups are once again free to engage in public policy debates on the
air, no matter what time of year it is.

By the way, does anyone on the left feel at all worried that the four liberal judges were on the "limit speech" side of this issue?

But at the same time, the Supreme Court upheld speech limitations against High School students based on the content of the speech.  The rights of non-adults is a complicated issue, but precedent has been set that student speech is generally protected unless it is significantly disruptive of the school’s functioning.  Except, it appears, when it is related to drugs.  This is part of a disturbing trend where an increasing number of topics, from "hate" speech to drug legalization speech are considered to be exceptions to the First Amendment.  However, almost everyone on the court seemed to have a different view on this, so it may be hard to generalize here.  Even the concurring opinions ranged the gamut from "this is narrowly aimed only at speech about narcotics" to "there is no free speech right in schools for minors."

And, speaking of hate speech, out in wacky Oakland, the world leader in Ebonics studies,

Marriage is the foundation of the natural family and sustains family
values. That sentence is inflammatory, perhaps even a hate crime.

At least it is in Oakland, Calif. That city’s government says those
words, italicized here, constitute something akin to hate speech and
can be proscribed from the government’s open e-mail system and employee
bulletin board. …

Some African American Christian women working for Oakland’s
government organized the Good News Employee Association (GNEA), which
they announced with a flier describing their group as "a forum for
people of Faith to express their views on the contemporary issues of
the day. With respect for the Natural Family, Marriage and Family
Values."

The flier was distributed after other employees’ groups, including
those advocating gay rights, had advertised their political views and
activities on the city’s e-mail system and bulletin board. When the
GNEA asked for equal opportunity to communicate by that system and that
board, it was denied. Furthermore, the flier they posted was taken down
and destroyed by city officials, who declared it "homophobic" and
disruptive.

The city government said the flier was "determined" to promote
harassment based on sexual orientation. The city warned that the flier
and communications like it could result in disciplinary action "up to
and including termination."

We might as well just repeal the First Amendment now and save time if we continue to believe that the government should ban any speech that offends someone.

Oh, and while we were talking about kids and drugs, check out this awesome rant by Mayor Cory Booker of Newark.

He wants to reserve prison cells for those who do violence and
divert the nonviolent drug offenders into treatment programs and
halfway houses.

He wants to change the New Jersey laws that
bar many ex-cons from getting a driver’s license. He wants a black kid
from Newark who sells marijuana to clear his record as easily as the
white kid from the suburbs who buys it.

He wants to stop banning ex-cons from such a long list of jobs, including warehouse jobs at the nearby airport.

The scale of the problem is staggering: About 1,500 convicts are
released from state prison to Newark each year, and 1,000 of them will
likely be arrested again within three years — mostly for drug crimes.

"The drug war is causing crime," Booker says. "It is just chewing up young black men. And it’s killing Newark."

Good, its about time.  Not to be misunderstood, I would kick my kid’s asses from here to the moon if I found them doing hard drugs.  But I want the responsibility to mold and repair their behavior to be mine, an option that is cut off if they get thrown in jail (which they probably wouldn’t, since my kids are well off and white).  It is fine and fairly rational that we have determined as a society that kids can mess up their life doing drugs.  It is insane — totally insane — that our response is that we will respond by … messing their life up even worse by throwing them in jail.

Today, Greenpeace attacked ExxonMobil for exercising its free speech rights.  In particular, it criticized Exxon-Mobil for spending $2 million funding about 40 groups it calls "global warming skeptics."  For perspective (missing from this article), pro-anthropomorphic global warming research receives over $2 billion in the US alone (and that is just government money, it does not include private money), making Exxon’s funding less than 0.1% of that provided to groups with opposing viewpoints. 

How settled can the science be if the anthropogenic global warming (AGW) believers feel horribly threatened by a group they outspend more than 1000:1?  This is like Hillary Clinton complaining that Mike Gravel is being allowed to spend too much money.  The AGW folks have consistently lost debates where they went head to head against credible skeptics.  If you don’t want to argue the issues, you resort to ad hominem attacks.

By the way, shame on Exxon-Mobil for getting all defensive about their spending.  They should have said "sure we are skeptics, and we think there are a lot of good reasons to be skeptics.  In fact, we’d love to have a televised debate with Greenpeace on AGW."

Update: In a related announcement, scientists declared the science of Phlogiston settled.

FIRE points out yet another university that is attempting to restrict speech it does not agree with, in the name of, uh, freedom or something.  The university’s Student Union proposed to close down the campus humor magazine that made a joke about race relations.  The reason?

Specifically, in response to the “overtly racist, sexist, and generally
offensive articles, statements, and images published in the Spring
Issue of Gravity Magazine,” and because the publication of this joke
had caused “members of our community to feel ‘unsafe,’ ‘powerless,’
‘unsupported,’ ‘harassed,’ and ‘threatened;’”

Now, this university is private, so I suppose as a private body they can define acceptable speech in their private confines any way they want (just as my kids dropping F bombs is legal by the first amendment, but banned in my household).  However, I fear that the folks involved do not understand that they need to leave these attitudes behind when they leave their private little cocoon university, because speech that hurts your feelings is not illegal, thank goodness, in the rest of the country. 

Unfortunately, it is almost too much to ask nowadays that universities understand that, as Louis Brandeis wrote, the best response to speech you don’t like is more speech.  The rich irony comes from the fact that this occurred at … Brandeis University.  The freaking place was named after the man who wrote:

Those who won our independence believed… that freedom to think as
you will and to speak as you think are means indispensable to the
discovery and spread of political truth; that without free speech and
assembly discussion would be futile; that with them, discussion affords
ordinarily adequate protection against the dissemination of noxious
doctrine…

They recognized the risks to which all human institutions are
subject. But they knew that order cannot be secured merely through fear
of punishment for its infraction; that it is hazardous to discourage
thought, hope and imagination; that fear breeds repression; that
repression breeds hate; that hate menaces stable government; that the
path of safety lies in the opportunity to discuss freely supposed
grievances and proposed remedies; and that the fitting remedy for evil counsels is good ones.

Fear of serious injury cannot alone justify suppression of free
speech and assembly… To justify suppression of free speech there must
be reasonable ground to fear that serious evil will result if free
speech is practiced… [N]o danger flowing from speech can be deemed
clear and present unless the incidence of the evil apprehended is so
imminent that it may befall before there is opportunity for full
discussion. If there be time to expose through discussion the
falsehoods and fallacies, to avert the evil by the process of
education, the remedy to be applied is more speech, not enforced silence. Only an emergency can justify repression.   (Emphasis added.)

Check out the FIRE article to learn much more about the events in question, including what the original joke was.

In the beginning, human rights were things we could enjoy by ourself on a desert island.  Speech, assembly, the ability to make decisions for our own life, to keep the product of our own labors — these are all rights that don’t require other people to make them real.  The only role for government is merely to keep other people from trampling on these rights by the use of force.

And then, in the 20th century, we invented new rights — the "right" to sustenance, to be clothed, to have shelter, to be educated, to have health care.  These were not the passive rights like freedom of speech.  For example, the right to shelter did not mean that we were free to go and build ourselves a shelter and have it protected from attack or burglary by others.  No, it has come to mean that if we don’t have shelter, either through hardship or fecklessness, it should be provided for us. 

I hope you can see the difference.  These new rights require action by someone else.  They require that someone, by force if necessary, be made to provide us these things, or at least be made to forfeit wealth which is used to purchase these things for us.   These new rights are not only different from traditional rights like speech and property, but they are 180 degrees opposite.  The old-style rights established that no other person has a call on our mind, our bodies, or our labor.  The new-style rights establish the opposite, that we do have a call on someone else’s mind and labor.  In fact, these news-tyle rights are not rights at all, but dressed up slavery.  Because no matter how you try to pretty them up, the fact is that none of them have any meaning unless force can be used to make someone provide the object in question, whether it be health care or education or housing.

Now when we libertarians begin calling things like this slavery, the average American turns off.  Oh, you libertarian guys, always exaggerating.  But Eugene Volokh brings us a great example that proves otherwise.  Libertarian Dr. Paul Hsieh wrote what I thought was a pretty reasonable letter to the Denver Post:

Health care is not a right, and it is not the proper role of
government to provide health care for all citizens. Instead, this
should be left to the free market. It is precisely the attempts of the
governments of countries like Canada (or states like Tennessee) to
attempt to mandate universal coverage which have led to the rationing
and waiting lists for vital medical services. Similar problems are
already starting to develop in the Massachusetts plan as well. Any plan
of government-mandated "universal coverage" is nothing more than
socialized medicine, and would be a disaster for Colorado.

Paul S. Hsieh, M.D., Sedalia

Denver Post columnist Jim Spencer is scandalized by Dr. Hsieh’s position:

The craziest letter to the editor that I’ve read in some time came
from a physician who claimed that Coloradans have no right to health
care.

Seems the guy not only forgot his Hippocratic oath but also the law.

If you’re sick enough or badly injured, they have to treat you at the emergency room regardless of your ability to pay.

The doctor aimed his editorial rant against socialized medicine. But
he wrote it because a state blue-ribbon commission is now cobbling
together a plan for medical treatment and prescription drugs for
Coloradans….

First, it is depressing how deeply these new non-rights are embedded even in the freest country in the world — so much so that the reporter considers it the craziest notion in the world that free health care might not be a human right.  (I have a thought problem for you — if free health care is a fundamental human right, and a group of us are stranded on an island with no doctor, how do we exercise our right?)

Second, the fact that something is written into the law does not make it a right.  Rights flow from man’s nature (or from God, depending on your beliefs) and NOT from the government.  The fact that the government legislates against free speech does not change my right to free speech, it just marks itself as a bad government.  On the other hand, if the government legislates that we all get free plasma TV’s, it does not change the fact that man does not have the inherent right to a plasma TV. 

Third, and I think most interesting, is how Mr. Spencer is using Dr Hsieh’s Hippocratic oath as a club.  In effect he is saying "you swore an oath and now you are obligated to provide us all with health care at whatever price, including zero, we wish to pay for it."  Mr Spencer demands the right to health care — and Mr. Hsieh is going to provide it at any price the government demands because his Hippocratic Oath forbids him to do otherwise.  Very unsubtly, Mr. Spencer is treating Dr. Hsieh as his and society’s slave, and he is appalled that the slave has talked back to the masters.

Postscript:  I could not let this other paragraph in the article go. 

"Insurance companies are not in the
business of providing quality, equitable health care," [health care reform advocate] White explained.
"They’re in the business of making money. I said, ‘OK, let’s fix this
once and for all.’ This establishes a single- payer system."

I just love the people that treat "making money" and "quality service" as incompatible.  Because its just so easy to make a crappy product and sustain profits over a number of years.  Here is an exercise:  Name 10 private for-profit businesses that make a quality product or service.  Gee, how about Apple, Sony, Toshiba, GE, Home Depot, UPS, Wal-Mart, etc. etc.  You get the idea.  Now name 10 government run agencies that provide a quality service.  Gee there’s the post office, uh no, not really.  DMV?  no.  VA hospital?   no.  Amtrak?  no.  OK, name one.

Via Overlawyered:

They’re doing it again in California: "State and federal authorities
have opened an investigation into a Norco housewife, alleging that her
vitriolic protests against a high-risk group home in her neighborhood
may constitute housing discrimination." Federal officials asked state
fair housing regulators to investigate Julie Waltz, 61, who had
protested plans to open a group house next to her home for
developmentally disabled residents; among those eligible to reside
there under state law would be persons deemed not competent to stand
trial on sex crime charges.

Yes, you heard that right.  She is being threatened with a housing discrimination charge by the government for exercising free speech on a public policy issue.