Posts Tagged ‘free speech’

How Free Speech Works

Posted: December 7, 2024 by datechguy in education, internet/free speech
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Good! I approve of that.

Zaphod Beeblebrox IV when informed the computer is trying to make tea Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy

One of the things about free speech is that it mean that people you dislike and disagree violently with get to speak. Like this:

Students at Columbia University launch anti-Israel ‘Columbia Intifada’ newspaper: ‘Outrageous’

The post article has more

The hateful group’s four-page spread includes no bylines or any information connecting the articles to their respective authors, nor is there any solicitation for outside perspectives or reactions from readers.

The only words on the front-page masthead is a quote from a poem by woke extremist scholar Sophia Armen, which reads, “You, genocider — who remembers you?”

It almost goes without saying that I disapprove of the opinions of this paper and the people who write and distribute it on campus.

That being said I completely approve of this method of expressing these at best misguided and at worst violently anti-Semitic opinions.

It’s not occupying buildings or disrupting classing or any form of physical violence. It’s expressing their opinion is an open way and a person is not required to own or read said opinion if they don’t want to.

In short it’s making an argument and frankly there is no reason why such a weak argument can’t be countered by people making a counter argument.

By all means feel free to attack the paper and those who write and distribute it but I’m with Sarah Hoyt when she says:

FREE SPEECH INCLUDES THE RIGHT TO PUBLICLY EXPOSE YOURSELVES AS A**HOLES

The 1st Amendment covers everybody. Even A**holes. Full stop.

Under the Fedora: An Accurate Assessment, DA Bragg’s priorities, So Bad even the MSM can’t spin it, An idiot no longer Useful, Stacy on Susan Wojcicki

Posted: August 16, 2024 by datechguy in education, election 2024, immigration, the courts, under the fedora
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This assessment of the situation in England is better than anything else I’ve read

Not since 1066 has a government in my land so hated and despised the people it rules, and been so determined to enslave, reduce, deny, exploit and destroy them. What is happening with mass immigration, with unacknowledged but real Muslim conquest, and with erasure from both the history books and the streets, represents a deliberate attempt to expunge a distinct people from the world, to consign them solely to history. And if you don’t believe that is true, visit the parts of Birmingham or London or Bradford where it has already happened, and find me an Englishman there.

There is also an excellent bit of history about the Norman Conquest and its aftermath well worth your time.

The difference between how DA Allen Bragg treats people who are considered a danger to Democrat re-election efforts vs a danger to police or innocent Jews is illustrated here:

James Carlson, who also goes by Cody, burned an Israeli flag, violently stormed Columbia’s Hamilton Hall, clashed with a facilities worker, and allegedly broke a police camera while detained. He was arrested on April 20 on a misdemeanor arson charge and again on April 30, the day that New York City police swept Columbia and cleared Hamilton Hall, for burglary, a felony in New York.

By the time Carlson and other Hamilton Hall arrestees attended their June court hearings, however, the Manhattan district attorney’s office—led by Alvin Bragg—opted to pursue a reduced charge against Carlson: criminal trespassing, a misdemeanor. As a result, Carlson, a trust fund kid who specializes in animal rights law and lists his $2.3 million Brooklyn townhouse on his active New York attorney registration, faces little risk of losing his license.

Via Hotair. Never forget that if Trump was the pre 2015 Trump who was not consider a threat to Democrats holding power his case would never have seen the light of day.

How Bad was the Walz Pick by Kamala Harris, this bad:

Two things to remember about this story:
  1. The Walz pick was the first decision made by Kamala as the Democrat candidate for president.
  2. This is the same media that has done their level best to raise up and protect Harris from the moment Biden was forced out.

Almost more interesting is the media sudden volte face on Hunter Biden.

A CNN panel reacted on Wednesday to the news that Hunter Biden reportedly sought help from the U.S. government for a possibly financially beneficial energy project in Italy while his father was vice president, and said it felt “very strange.” 

“This isn‘t great. Hunter Biden, everybody in the White House has known for a long time, is an issue. The way that his lawyers responded to this disclosure saying, ‘Well, yeah, he sent letters but did nothing wrong.’ This feels very strange to people that the vice president‘s son was sending letters or making requests to other government officials and saying, ‘Hey, would you meet with this company?’,” CNN’s Edward-Isaac Dovere said.

The killer quote however is this:

“One of the other things The New York Times reports here is that this document was suddenly shaken loose from the U.S. bureaucracy of the week that President Biden dropped out of the race,” CNN host Kasie Hunt said. “They claim it’s a coincidence.”

It’s amazing what can happen when an idiot is no longer useful

Math and Logic are important and Stacy McCain notes both with discussing the COVID Vaccines and the death of former Youtube Boss who was in charge when I was kicked off the platform:

My point is that two things can be simultaneously true: (1) the COVID-19 vaccines inflicted no serious harm on the vast majority of patients who got vaccinated against the virus, and (2) there are many thousands of people who suffered serious side effects of the vaccines, including hundreds who died as a result of getting vaccinated. You don’t need any expertise in epidemiology to ujnderstand this; it’s just simple math.

OK, so it is probably just a coincidence that pro-vaccine fanatic Susan Wojcicki died of lung cancer at age 56, a little more than three years after the COVID vaccines became available. For my friend to suggest that it was “turbo cancer” is not justified by any available evidence, and it’s probably impolite even to discuss it.

But is it wrong? Well, I can’t say that for certain, and neither can you. Logic requires that we reserve judgment when encountering the unknown, and mRNA vaccines are so new that potential side effects are definitely in the realm of the unknown.

The math is simple:

If you tell me, for example, that mRNA vaccines have been proven 99.9% safe, what you’re actually telling me is, one in 1,000 patients will suffer serious side effects. And if you’re going to administer such vaccines to many millions of people, simple multiplication tells you that there will be a thousand “bad” cases for every million of patients who get the vaccine.

As far as the death of Ms Wojcicki all I know for sure is she was loved by God and Christ died for her sins along with everyone else’s. I hope and pray that she took advantage of said mercy when offered.

I also know that you should subscribe to Stacy McCain’s substack.

Britain throws The Two Greatest Gifts to Mankind Away

Posted: August 10, 2024 by datechguy in culture, internet/free speech
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The nations, not so blest as thee,
Must, in their turns, to tyrants fall;
While thou shalt flourish great and free,
The dread and envy of them all

."Rule, Britannia! rule the waves:
"Britons never will be slaves."

Rule Britannia! 1740

I have often argued that the two greatest social developments in the history of mankind for the cause of good are

  1. Christianity
  2. British Common Law

The first Christianity establishes the idea that all people are equal in the sight of God:

Men, women, slaves, freemen, Jews, Greeks, rich, poor (to use the phrases of scripture) all are God children and thus due the respect of such.

Even if you don’t believe in Christ, that idea was about as radical as you can get in the 1st century. And it is from that idea that the rights of man evolved.

The second British common law built on both the concepts of Christianity and the rights granted by Magna Carta. Again this was revolutionary.

From this grew the concept that if men were equal before God they should also be equal before the law. It was the idea that the law applied to the great as well as the common, the powerful as well as the powerless and that judgement would not come in a summary manner.

It was this idea spread by the Brits going around the world that made possible those in the world who would eventually leave the empire they would build, because they would be educated in this law and then insist that said ideas be applied where they were.

Now I don’t claim for a moment that these concepts were always applied by imperfect humans nor to I claim that there were not those who tried to use them for their own advantages. If you want perfection you’ll have to wait for heaven. Suffice to say that those who would use such things for advantage would have had no problem using other systems the same way, systems that didn’t provide legal or social restraint to their goals.

These things changed the world for the better.

That’s what makes Britain’s situation today really sad and completely predictable.

Once the British started rejecting Christianity, equality before God, it became easy to reject equality before the law. The seeds laid by Henry VIII finally bloomed at the 1930 Lambeth Conference and have now spread and taken solid root to the point where Englishmen don’t have confidence in their own culture and are now ironically being colonized by a people who DO have confidence in both their laws and religion which proclaim them superior.

Thus if all men are not equal in the eyes of God why would they be equal before the law so why should British police or members of the British government risk their single life and limb with no reward to follow to enforce the laws of those who might harm them if they do or protect the rights of those who can not?

And of course nobody can be allowed to speak aloud this shameful change, they must all be silent less their true state be known and the newly minted slaves become aware of their chains.

So much for “Britons never never never shall be slaves”

How foolish, how sad and how utterly predictable.

Russia, Britain and the Left: “Institutional lying”

Posted: August 9, 2024 by datechguy in culture, internet/free speech, Uncomfortable Truths
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Consider too what undesirable deaths occur in wartime. Men are killed in places where they knew they might be killed and to which they go, if they are at all of the Enemy’s party, prepared. How much better for us if all humans died in costly nursing homes amid doctors who lie, nurses who lie, friends who lie, as we have trained them, promising life to the dying, encouraging the belief that sickness excuses every indulgence, and even, if our workers know their job, withholding all suggestion of a priest lest it should betray to the sick man his true condition! 

C. S. Lewis The Screwtape Letters #5 1941

The truth is like a lion; you don’t have to defend it. Let it loose; it will defend itself

St. Augustine of Hippo

I noted yesterday that there was very little reporting on the Ukrainian incursion into Russia but Redstate has a pretty informative article:

The Two big developments:

That means troops to the south don’t get resupplied and in a war of attrition that’s deadly. Think of it as if Jubal Early’s Force had taken the rail hub at Harrisburg PA in 1864. If I’m Ukraine I’m destroying this ASAP

This however is even bigger:

That means that Ukraine can hold or destroy this state which would cripple Russian exports of gas (and not do any favors to Europe that needs it) at any time. In fact when the Russian Counter attack comes this will likely be the first place blown up.

I’ll let Redstate tell that story but there was a bit of info that I think goes beyond the bounds of the war into something fundamental:

Those are the key words: “institutional lying”.

For Russia this institutional lying has two purposes. For those doing it in peacetime it allows the diversion of funds that are necessary for anything from training to equipment to the person committing the graft, people below either are intimidated or get their share and the people above are told all is well as are the people. This of course leads to disaster when you actually needed troops or equipment to work.

The second of course is the classic problem of delivering bad news. When dealing with a leader who makes people disappear or whose enemies have interesting “accidents” this can really hurt your life span so you do not tell the truth, particularly an uncomfortable truth and have to spin a lie to cover when disaster strikes, to wit:

This by an odd coincidence was both the same problem that the Arabs had in their various wars with Israel reporting “glorious victories” to their people while Israeli was routing their armies, in fact the “Britain did it” was the same line that both Nasser and King Hussain used in the Six Day War because it obviously couldn’t have been the Jews who destroyed their jets on the ground and neutralized their air forces in a single day.

Because it CAN’T be the mere Ukrainians successfully pulling off this attack, it HAS to be a major power like Britain attacking them, which is of course ridiculous as the government of Britain right now is too busy attacking their own citizens who tweet or retweet the wrong things.

In fact the Labour party who are all in for radical Islamists in their nation are also using “institutional lying” to deny the Two Tiered Justice system that has arisen there

And of course such visuals can not be spread, upsets the people you know.

This is also why control of the internet is so important to the left in general and anyone wanting to sell a big lie in particular because you can’t sell the “big lie” if anyone can look on twitter and see the reality happening before their eyes

Meanwhile if Croydon:

Well we can’t have news of that spread can we?

This “institutional lying” is one of the basic MO of the left/media making it a point of telling an untruth that they either want to advance over and over and accusing others of “disinformation” if they contradict it.

Consider less that 50 days ago if you suggested to anybody that Joe Biden was not able to function you were called the spreader of disinformation and assured by everyone from Joe Scarborough to Kamala Harris that Joe was as sharp as a tack. It was only when this was publicly revealed in the Debate to be a life that this fell apart, sort of like the Russian defenses and the big push to get Biden out began.

The media was shocked SHOCKED that they had fallen for the “institutional lying” that they at best had enabled and at worst had committed.

And then once Joe Biden was forced out the institutional lying pivoted stating that old Joe had dropped his campaign of his own free will and that Kamala who just a few weeks earlies people were wondering aloud how to get rid of was suddenly portrayed as the most competent person on the planet.

Nobody wants to say the reality, well ALMOST nobody:

“I don’t know if [Biden is] happy about that decision [to quit]. The presidency was taken away from Joe Biden. And I’m no Biden fan. But I’ll tell you what, from a constitutional standpoint, from any standpoint, you’re looking at they took the presidency away.”

That’s Donald Trump saying the truth out loud and publicly which is why the left has spent so much effort trying to shut him up over the last few years.

Bottom line Institutional Lying is the primary tool of any group trying to oppress you, you can either pretend it isn’t happening or fight, your choice.

I’ll give the last word to Christ:

you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.

John 9:32

Update: Glenn Reynolds makes a true historical point about the Russians that I forgot about:

Of course, the Russians have a history of carrying on when their logistics are shot. But that’s what they’ll have to do, if they are to carry on at all.

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