Category: First Amendment rights

Categories
First Amendment rights free trade & free markets

Elon Musk Is Serious

Elon Musk, Twitter

Billionaire Tesla and SpaceX entrepreneur Elon Musk is showing the world how capitalism reforms wayward companies — like Twitter. 

It is done from within the system.

By stock ownership.

Becoming Twitter’s top stockholder — right after Musk told the Babylon Bee he just might have to buy Twitter to reform it — surely demonstrates serious intent.

But Twitter honchos have stressed that the mere advent of Elon Musk portends no major changes, a hint of things not to come. 

Moreover, a restriction on how many shares board members may purchase meant that had Musk joined Twitter’s board, he’d have been unable to ramp up the pressure for reform by becoming an even bigger stockholder.

So Musk chucked his original plan to join the board and decided, what the heck: If I do need to buy Twitter to fix its anti-​speech policies, I better outright buy it. He has reportedly offered $43 billion.

He says: “I invested in Twitter as I believe in its potential to be the platform for free speech around the globe.” But he now realizes that the company in its current form will never be that platform. 

“Twitter needs to be transformed as a private company.”

A week ago we asked, “Will Elon Liberate Tweeting?”

We’re still asking. Maybe the current owners love banning disagreement with themselves too much to give it up. 

Someone should tell them that are worse things to sell out for than open discourse and freedom of speech.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

PDF for printing

—

See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)

See recent popular posts

Categories
education and schooling First Amendment rights

Don’t Ask, We Won’t Sue

Solas, CRT, Critical Race Theory

Uh oh. Haul out the armament and load and aim — at least if you’re responsible for educating the young daughter of Nicole Solas.

Solas is among the many parents who missed the memo about how sinful it is to have some idea of and influence on what their kids learn in public schools.

She’d heard about how public schools have been indoctrinating kids with a noxious ideological brew about race and gender. So she asked the principal of her daughter’s school in the South Kingstown School District of Rhode Island whether collectivist critical race theory and gender theory were any part of the curriculum.

The principal give hints that this was indeed happening. But then the school stopped talking. Instead of elaborating, school officials told Solas to instead send formal public record requests to learn what was happening at the school.

Which she did. Then the school district began publicly harassing her for being a “threat to public education” (as we all should be, given such doings). The Rhode Island branch of the National Education Association even went so far as to sue this mom.

Nicole Solas could easily have been swamped by litigation costs. Fortunately, the Goldwater Institute stepped in to defend her against the lawsuit and help her pursue her inquiries about the school.

As for her little girl, she’s doing fine. In a private school that is open about what it teaches, which doesn’t include any corrosive political agenda.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

PDF for printing

—

See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)

See recent popular posts

Categories
First Amendment rights Internet controversy social media

Will Elon Liberate Tweeting?

Elon Musk

Persons who skip social media or who spend their time on Twitter and Facebook discussing lunch or the weather may not realize how anti-​speech such big-​tech forums have become.

If you disagree about what’s better for breakfast, eggs or oatmeal, no problem.

But despite their putative pretense of providing open forums, the dominant social-​media companies routinely ban discussion of touchy subjects like Hunter Biden laptops, pandemics, and and the politics of race and gender. As the satire site Babylon Bee discovered, even calling a man a man, apparently quite a controversial observation, can get you in hot water with Twitter censors.

We have ways of combatting the censorship. One is using alternative platforms that do regard open discussion as a value. Another is becoming a major stockholder and disrupting the anti-​speech agenda from within.

Is this what Elon Musk is up to? Bee CEO Seth Dillon says that after Twitter suspended Babylon Bee for calling a man a man, Musk called him about the suspension and said that “he might need to buy Twitter.” 

Presumably in order to put a stop to such censorious shenanigans.

Now Elon Musk, who has 80.6 million followers on Twitter, has bought the company. Or rather, he has acquired a big stake in it, a 9.2 percent stake. This apparently makes him Twitter’s largest stockholder. Maybe we can dare to hope that he will eventually become the majority stockholder.

Good first step, Mr. Musk. 

Next? Get Twitter to remove the gags.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

PDF for printing

—

See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)

See recent popular posts

Categories
First Amendment rights ideological culture

Our Uncivil War

speech, 1st Amendment, freedom, censorship

The New York Times admits it: “America Has a Free Speech Problem.” But the March 18 editorial, while trying carefully to distinguish one kind of speech issue from another, fails to acknowledge the full extent of the problem. 

The trouble, you guessed it, is partly a left versus right issue: “Many on the left refuse to acknowledge that cancel culture exists at all, believing that those who complain about it are offering cover for bigots to peddle hate speech,” which strikes me as a fairly accurate account. But the Times cannot help itself — the right must be made to seem worse. “Many on the right,” the editorial goes on, “for all their braying about cancel culture, have embraced an even more extreme version of censoriousness as a bulwark against a rapidly changing society, with laws that would ban books, stifle teachers and discourage open discussion in classrooms.”

Sans persuasive examples — the Times provides none — I reject this claim as a grave misunderstanding of current trends. What has been happening is not the banning of books, but the mere removal of them from public school libraries and/​or curricula. 

“Stifling teachers” is not a thing, really. Taxpayer-​funded teachers have no more right to teach anything they want than taxpayer-​funded police have the right to enforce whatever laws they want.

The multi-​racial backlash against the left, most recently in Virginia, was a movement of parents upset over cultural Marxist indoctrination on racial issues … taking the place of quality education. 

Something else the Times missed: the extent to which cancel culture has worked hand-​in-​hand with social media companies under the influence of partisans in Congress and the Deep State.

That being said, the Times does get something right: “When speech is stifled or when dissenters are shut out of public discourse, a society also loses its ability to resolve conflict, and it faces the risk of political violence.”

Yes, it’s a problem.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

PDF for printing

—

See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)

See recent popular posts

Categories
First Amendment rights social media

Chirp Meets Buzz

twitter, Babylon Bee, censorship

The Babylon Bee won’t cooperate with Twitter’s censorship of the Babylon Bee.

When instructed to remove tweets in order to recover account access, people tend to comply.

Not always, but often.

Hard to blame them. But it does mean that Twitter gets away with all kinds of egregious censorship that the social media “platform” shouldn’t get away with.

The Bee’s latest sin? Bestowing upon HHS Assistant Secretary for Health Rachel Levine — who had just been dubbed a Woman of the Year by USA Today because Levine “identifies as” a woman — the title Man of the Year.

Twitter has locked the Babylon Bee out of its Twitter account.The platform literally “can’t take a joke.” And Twitter demands the Bee must delete the tweet to regain access.

“We’re not deleting anything,” says Bee CEO Seth Dillon. “If the cost of telling the truth is the loss of our Twitter account, then so be it.”

Dillon notes that account holders are not only expected to remove offending tweets but also to repentantly check a box to renounce the censored viewpoint. “You have to deny that you meant it.… They’re forcing you to grovel and adopt an ideological position that you don’t actually hold.”

The Babylon Bee is routinely assailed by Internet censors. Satire, parody, pastiche, lampoon, spoof, sarcasm, irony, etc. are all allegedly forms of “misinformation” and “hate speech,” thwarting of which is the rationalization du decade for stopping people from talking to each other.

In response, the Babylon Bee is thankfully taking a stand and, let’s hope and trust, won’t back down.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

PDF for printing

—

See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)

See recent popular posts

Categories
crime and punishment First Amendment rights Fourth Amendment rights

A Guide for the Surveilled 

cyber security, web, internet, crime

If you’re hounded — or merely have reason to suspect you are about to be hounded — by censors and spies, there are things you can do to protect yourself.

Self-​defense often starts with your communication devices, the kind of things that Big Brother and Big Corporate Overlords tend to target. Reclaim the Net has put together a fairly comprehensive overview and explanation of ways to reduce your risk.

For example:

● Use a strong passkey.

● Turn off fingerprint unlock and face unlock.

● Be alert to phishing attempts.

● Delete unused apps and data.

● Delete photo metadata before sending or posting photos.

● Disable location services.

● Use airplane mode when preventing access to you is more important than having access yourself.

● Usea VPN to evade censorship and tracking.

● Be careful what kind of information about yourself you make public.

● Take steps to recover a confiscated or stolen device, or at least to make its data unrecoverable.

● Use anonymous accounts.

● Use encrypted text messengers.

● Switch to more privacy-​conscious browsers, search engines, and ISPs.

Depending on your circumstances, some of these tips will be more relevant than others, of course. But it’s worth perusing the whole list.

Of course, to go to all this trouble, you’d have to believe that big governments and mega-​corporations are trying to surveil you. As if we lived in one of those dystopian futures they talk about in scary science fiction stories.

And who could ever believe that?

Well . . .

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

PDF for printing

—

See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)

See recent popular posts