Category: general freedom

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Accountability First Amendment rights folly general freedom ideological culture media and media people moral hazard nannyism national politics & policies Regulating Protest too much government U.S. Constitution

Freedom “Weaponized”

free speech, First Amendment, censorship, freedom, liberty, rights, Justice Elena Kagan

Justice Elena Kagan has a way with words. The conservative majority on the court, she said after two recent rulings, is “weaponizing the First Amendment.”

What a phrase! But what does it mean?

“Conservative groups, borrowing and building on arguments developed by liberals,” explains The New York Times, “have used the First Amendment to justify unlimited campaign spending, discrimination against gay couples and attacks on the regulation of tobacco, pharmaceuticals and guns.”

First: if “liberals” now find themselves not supporting the idea of particular freedoms, or freedom in general, are they really “liberal”?

Second: “borrowing arguments” is what we expect to happen. Logic isn’t partisan.

Third: the point of the Bill of Rights is to “weaponize” the defense of freedom.

Remember, it is freedom of speech; freedom of the press; freedom of association; freedom of exercising one’s religion. The First Amendment weaponizes their defense by disallowing Congress from legislating against them.

Now, it has long been a “problem” that these listed freedoms blend together. They all work together or don’t work at all. And each points to freedom more broadly.

Kagan wants to read freedoms narrowly — though liberals historically have, indeed, read them broadly.

She’s objecting to two recent rulings. The first prohibits states from requiring pregnancy centers to talk up abortion options to their clients. An obvious free speech issue. The second prohibits governments from backing unions in their extraction of “agency fees” from non-members. An incontrovertible issue of freedom of association.

Kagan and The New York Times apparently think that “liberalism” means defending some freedoms in some contexts, but denying freedom in others.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

 

 

Illustration by Newtown grafitti

 

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crime and punishment general freedom ideological culture moral hazard nannyism political challengers privacy Regulating Protest too much government

Don’t Enable Tyrants

Tor, anonymity, privacy, Venezuela, socialism, dictator, censorship, criticism, Maduro

If I deliberately help somebody to do evil things — and nobody is holding a gun to my head — I am thereby doing evil myself.

A person should not let himself be in that position. Not even if he’s “just doing my job” and looking for a non-evil job would be demonstrably inconvenient. To have a motive for doing a bad thing is not by itself exculpatory.

What provokes this observation is a newly amplified assault by the Venezuelan government on the rights of its citizens. The government is seeking to violate the right to peacefully read stuff on the Web by blocking Tor software, which allows users to elude government surveillance and reach banned websites.

Venezuelan dictators Chavez, now dead, and Maduro, still there, have never hesitated to stomp freedom in the name of a spurious greater good. Somebody like Maduro is certainly unscrupulous enough to go after Tor for thwarting censorship. So he fulfills that requirement. I doubt that he possesses very extensive programming ability.

Tor may not be perfect, but it’s pretty robust. You need substantial resources, such as those at the disposal of a government, to stop it. You also need to know what you’re doing. The coders on Venezuela’s stop-Tor team are probably smart enough to grasp the purpose of their work.

They and all other such collaborators should defect to the other side: that of programmers working to protect innocent people from government-sponsored cyber-assault.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

 

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Accountability crime and punishment general freedom ideological culture media and media people moral hazard national politics & policies responsibility

Eighty-sixing Civility

Had Sara Huckabee Sanders been asked to leave the Washington, DC, Red Hen, rather than the restaurant of that name in Lexington, Virginia, things might’ve turned out a bit different. In the nation’s capitol, it is illegal to discriminate against customers for reasons of political affiliation.

Out in Lexington? Not so much. One can “86” a politico there with impunity, I guess.

A Yelp reviewer defended the restaurateur’s request not to serve President Trump’s Press Secretary. “Thank you for refusing to serve a person who lies to the American people for a living.”

Wait — I thought that is what all Press Secretaries do: present the official lie. Be that as it may, or not, objecting to one Administration and not another implicitly endorses the policies and lies of the Administration not censured. And the grounds given in this Red Hen cluckery — that the Trump Administration is racist, etc. — might possess a tad more plausibility had the Obama Administration not engaged in policies startlingly similar to the ones Trump and Sanders are blamed for.

The “right to refuse service to anyone” may be a right retained by the people, but since the Ninth Amendment is a dead letter, and the federal government, at least, does not recognize such rights when the refused parties fall into certain “protected groups,” talking about it at length is probably a waste of time.

While the anti-Trump side of the current political-cultural divide seems resolute in denying a right to refuse to bake specialty cakes for gay couples, refusing to serve standard meals to political enemies is apparently copacetic.

Which can only mean: that democratically elected and appointed government officials are not the right “protected group” — which is odd, isn’t it, when those doing the discriminating call themselves “Democrats”?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

 

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Accountability crime and punishment general freedom moral hazard nannyism privacy too much government U.S. Constitution

Social Workers: Stop Kidnapping Kids

Michael Chambers, Belle, custody, child, protection, Mississippi, Social Worker,

Michael Chambers is living a nightmare.

His young daughter, Belle, has been taken away by social workers — without any reasonable cause or due process.

When Belle was two, her mother relinquished care to Belle’s grandmother. Then Michael accepted the responsibility. Periodically, his vindictive ex-wife would sic Child Protective Services on him. At first, the annoyance was as benign as such an intrusion could be. The social workers where he lived understood that there was a troublemaking ex-spouse in the picture.

But when Michael and Belle moved to a different Mississippi county, a new social worker, Kyra Reed, got involved. Reed seemed determined to intrude, make demands, and eventually remove Belle by force from Michael’s custody.

For example, Social Worker Reed early on demanded that Michael let her search his home. He was uncomfortable permitting it unless she obtained a warrant. Reed never did get one, or search the house — not even when accompanied by sheriffs. But somehow she didn’t need any legal authorization to steal Belle from Michael. Belle ended up in a foster home, where she was treated badly, before ultimately being forced to live with her mother, whom she hadn’t seen in four years.

The many ugly details of this case cannot be recounted briefly. Michael’s fight to get his daughter back is an expensive one. You can find out more about what happened and, if you like, contribute to Michael’s gofundme campaign to raise money for his legal expenses.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

 

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crime and punishment general freedom national politics & policies privacy responsibility Second Amendment rights too much government U.S. Constitution

Don’t Bring Pepper Spray to a Gun Fight

pepper spray, gun violence, gun control, self defense, 2nd Amendment, rights, crime

“My students are my kids . . . and I want to be able to protect them just like I would protect my own son,” says the Oho teacher, who participates in a program called FASTER Saves Lives. (“FASTER” stands for Faculty/Administrator Safety Training & Emergency Response.)

Since 2013, FASTER Saves Lives has trained teachers and other school employees to carry and shoot firearms. Although many lawmakers and school officials around the country oppose letting teachers bear arms in the classroom, a growing number sanction the practice.

It makes sense. Is there any better way to prepare for the possibility of having to defend your life and your students’ lives against an armed assailant bent on mass murder? (We can set aside the notion that aspiring murderers will scrupulously respect gun-control laws.)

People do have counterproposals. Congressional candidate Levi Tillman urges arming teachers with pepper spray. Well . . . there are problems, as blogger Tom Knighton elaborates. How do you get close enough to use the pepper spray before the killer squeezes the trigger again? What if he sees you coming?

And suppose you do spray the attacker? He won’t be immediately incapacitated. He may even be unaffected.

Some brave people have stopped a gunman by tackling him in mid-rampage. Great . . . if you have the ability and opportunity to do that.

On the other hand, suppose you’re neither strong nor nimble but can shoot, carry a gun, and shoot back — when the assailant is on the floor, bleeding: no more threat.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Accountability crime and punishment general freedom government transparency individual achievement media and media people moral hazard national politics & policies privacy Snowden U.S. Constitution

Happy Birthday, Edward Snowden

Edward Snowden, birthday, surveillance, whistleblower, patriot, sacrifice, NSA

Edward Snowden turns 35 today and begins another year as a fugitive stuck in Russia.

Five years ago, he fled the country to Hong Kong, meeting with The Guardian’s Glenn Greenwald and documentary filmmaker Laura Poitras to discuss documents he had released showing illegal National Security Agency collection of our phone records, social media posts and mega other metadata.

It is not merely Snowden who calls the NSA’s programs unconstitutional, or me, but how a federal judge ruled.

Remember when James Clapper, President Obama’s Director of National Intelligence, wittingly misled Congress by claiming our private information was not being swept up, except “unwittingly.” We only know that Clapper fibbed because of what Snowden divulged.

“[T]he breaking point was seeing the Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper, directly lie under oath to Congress,” Snowden has explained. “There’s no saving an intelligence community that believes it can lie to the public and the legislators who need to be able to trust it and regulate its actions.”

Clapper is free, collecting his pension. Snowden has been indicted under the Espionage Act, which unconstitutionally limits his defense.

Snowden sure has paid for his courage. He was making very good money, and living with his girlfriend in Hawaii, when he decided he had a duty to alert us to our government’s lawlessness — at the cost of his livelihood, his future, his very life, perhaps.

While our leaders call him a traitor, I call him “friend.”*

Edward Snowden is a friend of every American who cherishes our Fourth Amendment right “to be secure in [our] persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures.”

Freedoms the government was secretly stomping upon.

It is time to bring him home.**

Ed Snowden, thank you for your service. Happy Birthday!

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

 

* I feel a connection to Mr. Snowden, and have an inkling of what it’s like to do what you believe is right and to find yourself wanted by the government, on the run, far from home.

** Snowden deserves a presidential pardon. But he has said he would even return to face prosecution, provided the charges did not preclude him from defending his actions in open court.

 

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