Tag: free speech

Our Non-Know-It-All Censors

Post author By Redactor
Post date September 14, 2021
3 Comments on Our Non-Know-It-All Censors

The censors don’t know everything.

That a censor declares Conclusion X to be the case, i.e. the truth, allegedly a good reason to prevent anyone from claiming the contrary on a forum, doesn’t actually mean that Conclusion X is true.

Consider recent predictions by Dave Rubin and Mr. Obvious that the Biden administration would impose a federal vaccine mandate. Big tech responded by censoring both men.

In July, Twitter shut down Rubin’s Twitter account until he removed a tweet about the desire of some for “a federal vaccine mandate for vaccines which are clearly not working as promised just weeks ago.”

Then Google removed a video from the Mr. Obvious YouTube channel predicting a federal vaccine mandate that would be announced only a week later.

“Maybe they thought that I was simply jumping the gun saying that Biden was going to do these federal mandates,” Mr. Obvious now comments. “Mr. Obvious was in fact right.”

These predictions did not promote criminality or terrorism.

They were based on savvy political assessments.

Those assessments are now vindicated.

Such vindication in a particular case is not required to establish the value of open discourse. But that the censors were so manifestly wrong here does dramatize a big whopping problem with censorship.

What now?

Surely, the policymakers at Twitter, Google, Facebook, et al., can see once again that their censorship is misguided; hanging their heads in shame, they will henceforth ensure that discussion on their forums is open and untrammeled.

Don’t prove me wrong, guys.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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First Amendment rights national politics & policies

You Kill Me!

“Facebook isn’t killing people,” President Joe Biden informed us yesterday.

At least, “That’s what I meant,” he clarified ever-so-confusingly.

Meant last Friday, after a reporter mentioned “COVID misinformation” and asked Joe: “What’s your message to social media platforms like Facebook?”

“They’re killing people,” replied the president. “I mean, it really, look — the only pandemic we have is among the unvaccinated. And they’re killing people.”

CNBC noted that Facebook “reacted defensively” to Biden’s friendly murder accusations, failing to hit LIKE on the administration’s characterization of its pandemic performance.

“The facts show that Facebook is helping save lives,” a company spokesperson countered.

“My hope is that Facebook, instead of taking it personally that somehow I’m saying Facebook is killing people,” Mr. Biden chided the social media giant, “that they would do something about the misinformation, the outrageous misinformation about the vaccine.”

After all, the Biden Administration has certainly rolled up its sleeves, as White House press secretary Jen Psaki put it: “We’re flagging problematic posts for Facebook that spread disinformation.”

Yes, behind the scenes, this administration works with these behemoth social media corporations to help determine what hundreds millions of Americans will be permitted to say and share and discuss — on matters such as medicine, theories of disease origins, etc.

Didn’t we just ride this pony? Remember the supposedly baseless, debunked, conspiracy-nut-fueled Wuhan lab-leak theory?

That idea was blocked from us by Facebook (and Google and YouTube) at the behest of Big Government Science … until just weeks ago.

It’s hard to keep up.

Perhaps we are not supposed to.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Tags censorship, covid, Facebook, first amendment, free speech, freedom, Joe Biden

partisanship social media

Another Comedian Breaks Free

Post author By Redactor
Post date March 17, 2021
2 Comments on Another Comedian Breaks Free

Comedian Sarah Silverman, who has famously lent no small part of her cachet to the progressive cause, supporting Senator Bernie Sanders in both of his Democratic presidential runs, is now ditching the Democratic Party.

Her complaint isn’t that the party stiffed her candidate twice, first when the Democratic National Committee stabbed Bernie in the back for Hillary and next when it orchestrated ingenious maneuvers to gain the nomination (and then the presidency) for the tepid (and tepidly supported) Joe Biden.

I have argued before that Democrat insiders’ treatment of Sanders was deeply anti-democratic. But no, Ms. Silverman directs her ire against “the absolutist-ness of the party,” as she put it the other day on Instagram. “It’s so … elitist. You know, for something called ‘progressive,’ it allows for zero progress.”* Telling, perhaps, that Ms. Silverman emphasizes “progressive” and not “democratic,” as if it were named “The Progressive Party.”

Silverman specifically called attention not only to progressives’ unwillingness to compromise, but also to the it-takes-two-to-tango divide: “You know, Republicans might hear an idea that they would totally agree with, but, if it comes from AOC then they hate it.” She admitted that the same thing applied to her.

No wonder, then, that she does not “want to be associated with any party anymore,” complaining about “too much baggage.”

But she’s objecting to her fellow progressives’ anti-free speech agenda, too, characterizing it as “righteousness porn.”

Silverman, who has a special named Jesus Is Magic and is famous for her rape jokes, has herself felt the sting of cancel culture and would be a natural proponent of principled free speech.

But that is not a progressive cause, it is a very old-fashioned liberal one.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* An f‑bomb has been elided in the quotation from Ms. Silverman.

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folly ideological culture

Peak Absurdity

We have gone on beyond nonsense. Theodore Geisel — Dr. Seuss — whimsically drew and rhymed his way into our hearts. But owners of his copyrights and trademarks have announced that they will no longer keep in print a handful of Seussiana, including And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street, If I Ran the Zoo, and On Beyond Zebra!

“These books portray people,” says a press release from “Seussville,” “in ways that are hurtful and wrong.”

The objection appears to be that caricatures of Chinese and Africans and others are based on stereotypes and, therefore, “hurtful.”

After retrieving your rolled eyes from deep within their sockets, recognize that cartoons and caricatures rely upon stereotypes. Which is why I still own copies of the first two books on the list and will not hesitate to read them and show the pictures to any child of any race or ethnicity who might be interested.

While the woke guardians of the Seuss brand have every right to cease publication — just as eBay, the trading platform, possesses the right to prohibit sale of used copies — this is historic. The woke social justice crowd have pushed their mania past absurdity.

Not, alas, a funny, Seussian absurdity.

His very liberal voice, favoring individuality, diversity and just being nice, was utterly at odds with the implied calumny from the corporation that bears his pen name.

But I do hear chanting in the background: “boil that dust speck!” (A great line from Horton Hears a Who.) Seuss developed his case against intolerance and mob mania in a number of works, most of them not deprecated by his heirs, thankfully.

Kids who read them possess the tools to understand the whys of woke nonsense.

Pity that the adults in charge do not.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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First Amendment rights

Dissidents. Disagreement. Disinformation.

Post author By Editor
Post date February 25, 2021
3 Comments on Dissidents. Disagreement. Disinformation.

Politicians are ramping up assaults on political disagreement (with them) … only they call the disagreeable data “disinformation.”

The latest is a threatening letter by Democratic Representatives Anna Eshoo and Jerry McNerney to cable companies and digital providers such as Apple and Roku. Sample: “Are you planning to continue carrying Fox News, OANN and Newsmax on your platform both now and beyond the renewal date? If so, why?”

Bottom line: Do more to deprive dissidents of a forum! (Here we loosely define “dissident” as “anyone who disagrees with Eshoo and McNerney.”)

With such epistolary conduct the threat is implied. When congresspeople write a complaint like this, the “gun under the table” is understood. They can make laws or use existing laws — antitrust laws or 10,000 other possibilities in the kit bag of the federal leviathan — to pummel speech-enablers.

On Monday, I noted next month’s scheduled congressional inquisition of Twitter, Facebook and Google CEOs, the third such “hearing” in the last five months. That alone imposes a punishment of sorts … and to what purpose?

As Glen Greenwald cogently points out: “Congress violates the First Amendment when it attempts to require private companies to impose viewpoint-based speech restrictions which the government itself would be constitutionally barred from imposing.”

Congressmen who oppose what Eshoo and McNerney are doing should take this attack on our right to speak very, very seriously. Government must not silence voices, directly or indirectly. If there’s a battle to pick in defense of our freedom, this is it.

Freedom of speech is our first, last, and most important defense against tyranny. Tyrants have never been fans. We must be.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* It reminds me of President Trump complaining on Twitter about “Fake News out of NBC and the Networks” and asking

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First Amendment rights

Rewriting Amendment Number One

Post author By Editor
Post date February 24, 2021
5 Comments on Rewriting Amendment Number One

People once wondered — perhaps not very seriously — whether falsely shouting “Fire!” in a theater and telling hit men “Here’s $50,000; you will get the rest when you finish the job” count as speech that should be protected as a matter of right.

They do not.

And it’s not so puzzling that freedom to exercise a legitimate right does not entail license to violate the rights of others.

But some people are eager to prohibit us from uttering statements that don’t come within twenty parsecs of such alleged quandaries. These censorious ones include big-tech firms and big DC politicians like, for example, U.S. Senator Richard Blumenthal, a bully urging social-media firms to crack down harder on the speech of “‘antivax’ groups.”

Such persons seem to think that the First Amendment as presently worded, at least the part protecting freedom of speech, is a big dumb mistake. What would they like it to say instead?

Maybe:

“Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press, unless a would-be speaker wishes to dispute government-endorsed or Google-Twitter-Facebook-Amazon-endorsed conclusions about medicine, vaccines, pandemics, masks, lockdowns, transgenderism, euthanasia, abortion, or election fraud; to spend ‘too much’ money on campaign speech; to utter ‘hate speech’ about chess pieces; to speak freely; etc.”