Tag: BLM

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First Amendment rights

Protest Hits the Pavement

Black Lives Matter, Washington D.C.

Social justice activists and Washington D.C. city officials have collaborated to paint the slogan “Black Lives Matter” on 16th Street near the White House. 

The city has also allowed the words “Defund the Police” to be painted on the street.

Does this mean that the roadways of our nation’s capital city are now a public forum accessible to anyone who files the proper forms?

So far, doesn’t look like it. 

So Judicial Watch (JW) is suing for the right to paint its own motto, “Because No One is Above the Law,” on a DC street. JW went to court because its applications to perform a similar paint job have fallen on deaf ears.

It contends that its First Amendment right of freedom of speech is being violated.

“We have been patient,” Judicial Watch says. “We also have been flexible. We have stated our willingness to paint our motto at a different location if street closure is necessary and the city is unwilling to close our chosen location. All we ask is that we be afforded the same opportunity to paint our message on a DC street that has been afforded the painters on 16th Street.”

I can’t wait until all this gets cleared up. I suppose it’ll be one or two paint jobs per applicant. 

“ThisisCommonSense​.org” has a nice ring to it, eh? 

Something about “unalienable rights [to] Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness” would also be a great message, assuming it’s still legal to quote the Founders whose legacy we celebrated over the weekend.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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crime and punishment ideological culture

Victimhood Conspiracy

riots, protest, BLM, antifa,

When a purported Antifa group tweeted an “alert” on Sunday, instructing “Comrades” to “move into residential areas … the white hoods … and we take what’s ours,” tagging it “#BlacklivesMaters #F**kAmerica,” Twitter closed the account. 

Few would object. 

That was criminal incitement to riot, and worse.

But when Twitter, Facebook and YouTube remove client content for arguing things about the coronavirus that does not fit with government bodies’ officially approved information, something else is going on. 

Last week, President Donald Trump warned of the dangers to election integrity of switching to mail-​in ballots. So Twitter flagged his tweet, implying it as non-factual.*

I am not going to defend the wisdom or legality of Trump’s threats — on Twitter or by executive order. But one characterization of the whole affair by Elizabeth Nolan Brown at Reason seems a … bit … off.

“The order relies heavily on conservatives’ victimhood conspiracy du jour: that social media companies are colluding to suppress conservative voices,” Ms. Brown wrote last Thursday. “It’s an objectively untrue viewpoint, as countless booted and suspended liberal, libertarian, and apolitical accounts can tell you.”

The fact that non-​conservatives have been de-​platformed does not actually work against the supposition that the social media outfits are colluding against conservatives. It remains a problem if conservative thought is suppressed along with libertarian and anything else heterodox. These companies do conspire to suppress opinions they do not like, and influencers they regard as dangerous.

To center-​left establishment opinion.

These social media behemoths aim to defend their approved news and opinion against what they regard as “fake news.” Thereby suppressing free debate and inquiry.

Opposing Trump’s reaction does not require pretending that these companies’ policies are not deeply problematic.

Concern about open and robust debate is not a mere “victimhood conspiracy du jour.”

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* How a prediction can be a factual matter is a bit odd. But let that slide, I guess.

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folly general freedom ideological culture media and media people moral hazard nannyism national politics & policies Popular Regulating Protest U.S. Constitution

Force Over Persuasion

free speech, BLM, Black Lives Matter, tolerance, censorship

Today’s campus radicals assert that free speech is bad because it “gives voice” to people with hateful, dangerous views.

Does that argument seem at all familiar? It is the old RightThink rationale for censorship.

A recent Spiked “Unsafe Spaces” event at Rutgers (“Identity Politics: the New Racialism”) was interrupted by now-​too-​famiar shouts and out-​of-​turn questions and invective. Kmele Foster, one of the panelists, had been explaining how important free speech rights were to the civil rights protesters in the 1960s, and to Martin Luther King in particular.

At “that precise moment,” as Reason’s Matt Welch puts it, the shouts of “Black lives matter!” began. And continued.

But more interesting than this bullying? Some of the more coherent theses articulated by the interrupters. One woman, CampusReform relates,

yelled in response to the panelists that she doesn’t “need statistics,” later complaining that “the system” controls facts.

“It’s the system. It’s the institution,” she said. “Don’t tell me about facts. I don’t need no facts.”

Well, the moment you prove immune to any fact is the exact point in time that you’ve given up on rationality, free inquiry, and maybe even civilization itself.

It’s so 1984-ish.

And it demonstrates the old idea that, when you can no longer reason or allow others to express different opinions … or even discuss the factuality of this or that contention, you have only one other option: force. 

Become bully.

Or tyrant.

Civilization is the triumph of persuasion over force. Being against free speech is to reverse that.

The acme of barbarism.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Categories
national politics & policies property rights too much government

The Tiny State of Nevada

Nevada isn’t really that big of a state. Oh, sure, it appears large on the map.

But 81 percent of that land mass isn’t Nevada. It’s federal government property, run by various branches of the nation’s central government in Washington, D.C.

Much of the controversy surrounding the Cliven Bundy ranch, and the rustled cattle, and the standoff with the federales, has to do with federal government land.

From my reading of the Bundy family ranch affair, it appears that the legal question is not one of taxes, but of usage fees; not of endangered tortoises, but cattle. But mostly about land. My sympathies are with the Bundies. They seem to have a very old adverse possession case against the government.

I wasn’t surprised to learn that federal judges didn’t look very kindly to the Bundies’ customary rights. Federal judges prefer legislated law to common law. We’re a long way from our roots, folks.

But the issue lurking behind all other issues is the over-​dominance of the federal government in twelve western states. Five of them have over half of their land titled to and run by the federal government: Oregon, Idaho, Alaska, Utah and Nevada. This imbalance gives just too much power and purview to federal agencies, who are then tempted to run roughshod over locals. That is, state citizens.

Cliven Bundy may be dead wrong legally, but politically, he has a point.

The federal government should privatize all or most of its grazing lands and desert lands. Its forest lands should at least be “state-​ized” — given back to the states.

This is a federal republic, right? Not an empire?

The states are not supposed to be mere conquered provinces.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.