Florida’s race to get rid of Evil Sex Books has swept up a number of Jewish authors
But, hey, let’s talk about how “liberals” are anti-Semitic.
“Florida district pulls many Jewish and Holocaust books from classroom libraries”
A global bestseller by a Jewish Holocaust victim; a novel by a beloved and politically conservative Jewish American writer; a memoir of growing up mixed-race and Jewish; and a contemporary novel about a high-achieving Jewish family are among the nearly 700 books a Florida school district removed from classroom libraries this year in fear of violating state laws on sexual content in schools.
The purge of books from Orange County Public Schools, in Orlando, over the course of the past semester is the latest consequence of a conservative movement across the country — and strongest in Florida — to rid public and school libraries of materials deemed offensive. While the vast majority of such challenged and removed books involve race, gender and sexuality, several Jewish books have previously been caught in the dragnet.
The Orange County case is unusual for the sheer volume of books removed — 699 including some duplicates, according to documents the district provided — and for the unusually large number of books about the Holocaust and Jewish identity included among them.
His take about the “crackdown” on conservatives is self-serving and inane.
Newt Gingrich, Dolt
I know I shouldn’t waste time discussing Newt Gingrich — the cut-throat GOP hack who bears a huge responsibility for the divisiveness of American politics today, almost a quarter century after he became Speaker of the House — but his commentary in Newsweek about the so-called war by the big tech giants on poor little conservatives distills down a bunch of current diatribes on the subject in a way that is, at least, illustrative.
When Twitter and Facebook decided to ban President Donald Trump, censor The New York Post and start erasing other people and institutions from their platforms, they started down a path which will have enormous consequences for them and for America.
When Google, Amazon and Apple joined in taking down Parler, a conservative social media platform, they reached critical mass in proving that an oligarchical cabal was potentially seeking to control public dialogue for all Americans.
Except it proves no such thing. It demonstrates, perhaps, that social media is largely concentrated in a few, most popular platforms — something encouraged, but not dictated, by those companies (something something free market something, isn’t that what you’re usually on about, Newt?) — but going from there to “seeking to control public dialog,” let alone “erasing people and institutions,” is a huge step.
Let’s start with a fundamental question, shall we? Or let’s make it two:
Are social media companies (and their providers) required to give me an account so that I can use their tools?
Are there any limits to what I can use that account to say?
We’ll get back to the first one shortly, because the second one is the key. And that brings us to Parler.
To be fair, it’s a nice logo.
On one level, I’m sorry to see Parler go, because I kept hoping it would drive the serious whackadoodles off of Twitter, rather than me having to block them or, when they go over the rails, report them. (Of course, what actually happened was those folk created Parler accounts, and then kept getting onto Twitter to talk about how horrible Twitter was, post their Parler account name in their profile, and continue to spew their normal nonsense.)
But nobody “took down” Parler because conservatives were “flocking” to it.
I could post, all day long, “Abortion is murder of a baby” or “Donald Trump is the greatest President ever,” and Twitter would never do a darned thing about it. I would expect to draw a lot of criticism, but those posts can be found all over Twitter (and, presumably, Facebook, a platform whose privacy policies I finally rid myself of months ago).
Here’s a page from the filing Amazon made in Parler’s lawsuit. It’s part of a list of comments Amazon presented to Parler over the course of months, complaining that Parler was in breach of the agreement with Amazon not to use its AWS servers to host violent content:
They seem nice.
Does Newt consider that “conservative speech” that needs protection?
Should Amazon be required to host it? Does Amazon’s own brand (let alone whatever corporate mission and vision it holds) take damage from such material being “powered by Amazon”?
Amazon repeatedly went back to Parler with these complaints. Parler showed an inability / unwillingness to do anything about it.
I would suggest Amazon (who was providing the virtual file servers) and Apple and Google (who were providing the optional but commonly used tools to install the Parler application) were fully within their right, under their terms of service, to no longer do business with Parler.
The same case can be made, with a bit more fuzz, in the case of Twitter and Facebook vs. Donald Trump and his enablers. In Twitter’s case, they have allowed Trump to say whatever the hell he wanted to — true, false, or outright crazy — up until after the election. When he started, post-election, started asserting as fact items that were untrue, up to and including the certification of the results of the election, they started flagging his comments as untrue.
And when he started making inflammatory comments that had already, demonstrably, led to violence — and, in fact, was defending the violence and the people who had caused it …
… they decided he had too egregiously violated their terms of service, and chose to cut off their (free) service to him. And they did the same for others who were actively plotting, or supporting plots, of violence against the nation’s political system and, in fact, politicians.
Newt considers this “seeking to control public dialogue for all Americans.”
People noticed that Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey had claimed the right to silence President Trump, who earned more than 74 million votes for reelection. The idea that a few oligarch billionaires could control the political discourse of America began to really worry people.
So there are two falsehoods in this statement.
First, nothing has been done to “silence President Trump.” Donald Trump remains one of the most powerful people in America. When he snaps his fingers, reporters gather, and the highest-rated cable “news” network in America hangs on and echoes his every word. His political operatives bury his potential supporters with blizzards of email sharing his opinions (and soliciting their money).
And as a private citizen, Donald Trump will remain (by his own claims) fabulously wealthy. He could buy or build whatever social media firm he put his mind to.
That two social media companies — two big ones, to be sure, but by no means the only way to communicate out there — have decided (accurately) that his actions violate the terms of using their service, they same as they would moderate any other individual, is by no means “silencing” him.
Heck, Donald — have someone rig up a server, connect it to the Internet, install WordPress on it, and build your own blog. Millions will flock to it. Zuckerberg and Dorsey aren’t obliged to do the work for you, any more than if Trump calls up Rachel Maddow during her show that she’s obliged to put him live on the air, or if Trump demands to have an opinion piece of his printed on the front page of the New York Times that they are obliged to do so.
Back when I was a kid, I can remember people saying that the Freedom of Speech didn’t mean that the government had to buy you a printing press.
(The Right has pressed forward for many years the idea that companies can have political and religious rights, and that companies with religious freedom should be able to not do business with whomever they want. Maybe if Twitter said it was about Jack Dorsey’s religious freedom, rather than about the company’s Terms of Service, Newt would back off.)
The second falsehood is that this “controls the political discourse of America.” The commentariat on the Right have long mocked the Left as being in an echo chamber on places like Twitter, and that the majority fo folk outside of Twitter think very differently. If so … then Trump not being on Twitter to give his opinion shouldn’t matter, should it?
Regardless, these take-downs were not about political opinion. Trump claiming he’s mastered China in foreign policy, or has been the best president possible about COVID-19, or that Joe Biden is a communist … none of that is what got him kicked off of Twitter.
This process of squeezing people out of the public square is inherently dangerous. As President Harry Truman warned, “Once a government is committed to the principle of silencing the voice of opposition, it has only one way to go, and that is down the path of increasingly repressive measures, until it becomes a source of terror to all its citizens and creates a country where everyone lives in fear.”
George Orwell’s 1984 (which was about a Western democracy devouring itself and its citizens in a totalitarian nightmare) captured this terrifying concept of the technological management of memory and opinion.
Except, of course, Twitter and Facebook and Google and Apple and Amazon aren’t the government. Their actions also have nothing to do with “silencing the voice of opposition,” just not being part of enabling that voice.
The cancel culture and social media erasure movements are strikingly like Orwell’s vision of a “memory hole,” in which ideas that those in power no longer deem valid are destroyed so people can no longer access them.
As an amateur historian, I certainly have concern over knowledge and history being lost. But that’s more a problem with our digital society as a whole. If the “failing” New York Times went out of business and took its archives with it, that would be a horrible loss of history and opinion — though I suspect Newt would not be as passionate about it.
But, then, invoking “cancel culture” as a bogey-man is problematic in itself. Did Newt flock to the defense of the Dixie Chicks when they were “canceled” by so many in the country music world for speaking out against George W Bush and the impending Iraq War? “Cancel culture” is, at its heart, a matter of consumer choice in a free marketplace of ideas, something one would assume Newt favors. If I find a media personality’s opinions on something (for example) particularly objectionable, I’m within my rights to avoid that personality. I’m within my rights to share my opinion about it with others. Heck, I might even feel like that the companies that continue to do business with that personality are enabling their message, and complain to them about it — and those companies may, in turn, reevaluate their relationship with that personality either on its own merit or with how it affects their bottom line, and are within their rights to act on that reevaluation.
The results may not be pleasant, or “fair,” or something that Newt (or I) would agree with, but society is messy, and there’s really nowhere in that process where you can demand that it be stopped without infringing on other, just as important rights.
And none of that involves the government, so the First Amendment has nothing to do with it.
The House Democrats’ new rules (adopted Jan. 3 with 217 Democrats voting in favor), which eliminate “mother,” “father,” “son,” “daughter” and more than a dozen other “inappropriate” gender-specific words from the Rules of the House of Representatives is another Orwellian example of retraining us to only think “appropriate” thoughts and use “appropriate” language. Truman’s fears are beginning to come true.
If the House Democrats suggested that official House business refrain from using a racial or religious epithet in reference to members of those groups, would that be Orwellian, Newt?
In this particular case, it’s even more limited than that: a single rules document has had a whole range of gendered language changed (e.g., “seafarer” for “seaman”). In the same set of changes, references to “he or she” were changed to more specific, but ungendered, language. (Was the original change from “he” to “he or she” Orwellian?). And, finally, in that one document, words like “mother” or “father” were replaced by “parent,” and “son” or “daughter” were replaced by “child.”
Eek.
It’s not that words don’t mean things — in fact, the very reason for doing it is because words mean things — but this is less prescriptive than descriptive, reflecting how language and understanding of sex and gender roles as a society is changing. That may make Newt uncomfortable, but it’s not exactly Winston Smith time.
Some have argued that the protections of Section 230 make them indirect agents of the government. The Supreme Court has ruled consistently that private corporations acting as government agents are bound by the U.S. Constitution. Cutting off free speech is a violation of the First Amendment guarantee of liberties, and therefore the companies might be subject to fines and penalties for violating the constitutional rights of their customers.
If Newt is suggesting that businesses that have specific protections under law are arguably agents of the government, that opens a can of worms far bigger than I think Newt wants to go.
That said, I’m pretty sure you could get fired from your government job by posting on a government website, “White people need to ignite their racial identity and rain down suffering and death like a hurricane upon zionists,” First Amendment or not.
The guarantee against lawsuits made sense when we passed it in 1996 (while I was speaker), because it was an effort to grow what were then tiny, fragile companies. Those guarantees no longer make sense when you are dealing with gigantic worldwide institutions of enormous power and wealth.
One can argue whether having deep pockets magically changes whether a company should be sued for doing something or not (tort reform supporters — like, I believe, Newt, have argued the contrary for years, claiming that we need to change such laws because the allow frivolous lawsuits against big companies). But Newt is, intentionally or inadvertently, suggesting making the situation worse.
Because, yeah, in theory Google and Facebook and Twitter might change some of their moderation policies if they had a flood of lawsuits coming in. But, as noted, they are not the extent of social media. Would Parler have been able to stand up to the massive wave of litigation? Would WordPress.org, which hosts an array of blogs?
Heck, if I flag as spam or trash a comment as inappropriate or unpleasant or violent on this very blog, would Newt suggest that I should be a target of a lawsuit? (I mean, yeah, he might suggest it, but would he have an intellectually coherent basis for doing so?)
Third—and the approach I most favor—conservatives should simply create alternative communications systems to provide access for everyone who disagrees with the Left.
Well, duh. I think that’s the best solution, too.
It still backs into the problems that Parler had (and which other “we’re never going to moderate our forums, so come over here, conservative type” sites have had as well): without moderation, any social media site (left, right, or center) becomes a cess pit (see the Amazon material about Parler, above), and, legally, some moderation must, by law, take place, because not all “speech” is legal. Death threats and incitement to violence is not legal. Child pornography is not legal. Conspiracy to commit crimes is not legal.
Ironically, the genius behind the rise of Fox into the dominant news channel, Roger Ailes, had been driven out of political consulting by the Left because it feared and hated him.
Now, we have the latest effort by the left to rig the game, smother dissent, and dictate what we can think, say, and believe.
Weirdly enough, attempts to “smother dissent, and dictate what we can think, say, and believe” are more associated with conservative politics and religion, due to their inherent interest in preserving the status quo. Just saying there might be a little projection going on here.
(Yes, Leftists can be authoritarian as much as Rightists.)
Competition will destroy this left-wing groupthink machine much more quickly, decisively and safely than any effort to regulate or supervise the big internet giants, which will take massive time and effort to defeat their lobbying machines.
Go for it. Though I’d suggest that Facebook and Amazon, trivial evidence to the contrary, epitomize the Right-wing, big business, profit-at-all-costs model than anything the Right is liable to put in its place. But if Newt thinks that a conservative-focused social media / hosting company can (a) compete against Facebook and Twitter and Google and Apple and Amazon, and (b) not become a “big internet giant” and “groupthink machine,” any more than Fox News did not take on the worst aspects of being a big media giant and groupthink machine … there’s nothing stopping him from plowing his money into such an investment.
It’s a free country.
More than 74 million Americans voted for President Trump. At least half of them would be a potential market for an alternative social media-web hosting system. That would be a market of 37 million Americans. If only a small share of non-conservatives came to the new system, that would give it a potential market of more than 40 million Americans.
And over 81 million Americans voted for Biden. Given that only a fraction of the US is on social media, Newt’s numbers here are kind of goofy. Twitter has 36 million active users in the US. Facebook has 190 million users (active or not) in the US — but most of them aren’t there for the politics (left, right, or center), but because their high school friends and family are there. The idea that a specifically conservative-driven social media / web hosting system would draw 40 million users seems … dubious.
But, hey, I’m not a media mogul. Again, go for it. Maybe Donald will invest, too.
I am convinced we Americans will reject domination by oligarchs and insist on our right to be free. We will not be thrown into the “memory hole” by a handful of rich liberals.
Newt never really does explain how banning violent accounts is somehow throwing Americans — even pro-Trump Americans — into the “memory hole,” but it sure sounds impressive.
But, then, Newt’s big into impressive, performative statements, like saying that 2020 is going to be a GOP blow-out like 2016, and like proclaiming he won’t accept Biden as President because, um, he’s angry about Biden. And that he and all the other people who are angry about Biden will mean a massive Republican win in 2022.
Of course, he also said that people angry about Clinton would mean a massive GOP win in 1998 — when the GOP ended up losing House seats, and Gingrich ended up losing his House Speaker job.
The Fairness Doctrine was a policy of the FCC between 1949-1987, mandating broadcast license holders to present controversial issues of public importance in a manner that was “honest, equitable, and balanced.” It didn’t mandate but often resulted in an “equal time” presentation of stances on such issues (if you had some guy talking about the virtues of gun control for ten minutes, you usually ended up with another guy talking about how awful gun control was for ten minutes).
The doctrine was finally abolished under the Reagan Administration because of concerns that it resulted in the restriction of journalistic freedom. And I can recall times since when liberal upset over conservative domination of the radio waves led to conservative punditry and politicians condemning any thought of reinstating it.
Now, it seems, Donald’s concern that too many people on the (non-licensed) Internet are saying too many mean things about him, without all the hypothetical people who might want hypothetically to say hypothetical nice things about him being able to get a hypothetical word in edgewise, might mean that the Federal Government does … um … something to try and “fix” the “problem.” A new Fairness Doctrine? Breaking up of social media giants? More promotion of Trump tweets? Who knows?
This is, of course, directly opposed to conservative thought for quite a few decades — but as the Trump era has shown, the GOP is willing to turn on a dime if it keeps that guy in the White House happy.
Hey, Donald. The word for today (as with so many days) is irony … as in tweeting:
Isn’t it a shame that someone can write an article or book, totally make up stories and form a picture of a person that is literally the exact opposite of the fact, and get away with it without retribution or cost. Don’t know why Washington politicians don’t change libel laws?
Almost everyone agrees that my Administration has done more in less than two years than any other Administration in the history of our Country. I’m tough as hell on people & if I weren’t, nothing would get done. Also, I question everybody & everything-which is why I got elected!
I mean, when it comes to making things up, Donald, you speak with authority, given the incredible number of false claims / lies that you issue on a daily basis. Including that second tweet up there. “Almost everyone agrees”? Is that why even your conservative-leaning favorite Rasmussen poll notes your abysmal approval rating?
The Rasmussen Reports daily Presidential Tracking Poll for Wednesday shows that 44% of Likely U.S. Voters approve of President Trump’s job performance. Fifty-four percent (54%) disapprove. The latest figures include 32% who Strongly Approve of the president is performing and 44% who Strongly Disapprove. This gives him a Presidential Approval Index rating of –12.
(Emphasis mine.)
Of course, maybe I’m overstating on this one point. You said that “Almost everyone agrees” that your Administration has “done more in less than two years” than any other Administration “in the history of our country.” You didn’t specify that they thought what had been done was good.
And, of course, for the record, Donald, existing libel laws do protect against exactly what you say. The legal definition of libel:
to publish … an untruth about another which will do harm to that person or his/her reputation, by tending to bring the target into ridicule, hatred, scorn or contempt of others. … It is a tort (civil wrong) making the person or entity (like a newspaper, magazine or political organization) open to a lawsuit for damages by the person who can prove the statement about him/her was a lie. … While it is sometimes said that the person making the libelous statement must have been intentional and malicious, actually it need only be obvious that the statement would do harm and is untrue. … Libel per se involves statements so vicious that malice is assumed and does not require a proof of intent to get an award of general damages. … The rules covering libel against a “public figure” (particularly a political or governmental person) are special, based on U.S. Supreme Court decisions. The key is that to uphold the right to express opinions or fair comment on public figures, the libel must be malicious to constitute grounds for a lawsuit for damages.
No need for a change in the law, Donald – if you think Woodward’s new book is “totally make up stories [that] form a picture of a person [you!] that is literally the exact opposite of the fact,” and that such libel was malicious and harmful, then you can, at any time, file civil suit against him.
Of course, then you have to prove it. Which should be entertaining.
Go for it, Donald. Show us how dedicated you are to the truth.
Every now and then articles bob to the surface of the Internet about how to avoid passing on bad information. “If you see something on the Internet that disturbs you, don’t take it on face value — do a little research first.” It’s good, sound advice.
Too bad Donald Trump cannot be bothered with it.
It’s pretty much an open secret that Donald Trump has zero filter, zero impulse control. If something catches his eye and causes a spurt of adrenaline to shoot through his brain, he immediately reacts.
This effect is known and used by various parties, from Fox News to those even less savory, to promulgate opinions, points of view, and bizarro world quasi-factoids. Multiple times a week, some Fox pundit will say something particularly outrageous in the morning, and, hey presto, Trump will pick up on it and pass it on as though it were his own particular brilliant insight.
This has consequences, as there apparently are plenty of people who are willing to believe anything Trump says, and plenty of others who are willing to use Trump’s blurts as a justification for passing on their particular zaniness.
In this particular example, Donald has gotten it into his head that Google is out to get him. It’s unclear why, except that, um, they don’t truckle to his commands and whims, and don’t give us a weekly Google Doodle dedicated to him or something. Or it may be that people have put a bug in his ear about it, knowing that Donald is always ready to believe a conspiracy against him.
The initial bits of this were Donald taking the word of some pundit or another who claimed that a search of “Trump news” gave lots and lots of negative articles as a result. Even without fully understanding how Google’s search algorithms work, the immediate answer would seem to be that there are a lot of negative articles written about Donald that are clicked through to or linked to, quite possibly because Donald does a lot of asinine things and is deeply unpopular [1].
And then someone dropped into Trump’s mailbox or Twitter feed or something a video indicating that Google used to promote the President’s State of the Union speech back in the Obama days, but as soon as Trump took over they stopped doing so, thus demonstrating Google’s horrible, horrible bias.
Now a mature adult President of the United States (or even George W. Bush) would turn to an aide and say, “Bob, that sounds pretty awful. Confirm that for me and, if it’s true, let’s get Google on the phone to see what they have to say, and, if we don’t get good answers, we’ll issue a statement.”
Trump, of course, just re-tweets it as proof of Google’s perfidy, without any research.
And, of course, as the article here notes, it’s a completely false accusation, that some basic research could have avoided.
One can question here whether Trump actually cares — whether he sees any need for a filter or a search for the actual truth (vs. what suits his rhetorical needs). After all, even with a clear fact check showing he’s incorrect, he’ll never, ever, issue a retraction. Even if the White House officially admits he misspoke (as they have more than once), it won’t at all slow him down from the next whimsical comment that pumps up his own ego and slings mud at his perceived enemies.
At best, that makes him a loose cannon (a shipboard event in the age of sale that could actually lead to ship damage and death to sailors); at worse, it makes him a willful and unrepentant liar.
This would be amusing if it was the Grandpa next door shaking his fist at the clouds. But this is the President of the United States. The things he says have impact whether they are true or false. In having a White House unable or unwilling to restrain him, and a subsection of the population who have a tribal attachment to him and, honestly, care more about his “style” than his “facts,” we end up with a situation that continues to escalate out of control, that threatens our economy, our international relations, our freedoms and civil liberties.
This just seems like a tiny example. It is not. It’s important in its own right, and it’s part of an even more important, and dire, trend.
If you are a government official and use Twitter for official business — like giving orders to the Justice Dept. or announcing international deals — then you can’t cut your constituents off from reading what you’re communicating. Seems pretty straightforward.
If Trump doesn’t like the comments he gets, he doesn’t need to read them. That’s the cost of being an elected representative. Being a pompous snowflake isn’t an excuse.
The majority seem to be “Anyone who takes stuff I like down from their privately owned site is practicing censorship because YouTube is a public utility so the FCC should be forcing them to leave up the stuff I like.” Though there’s a good sprinkling of “YouTube has stuff I don’t like, and YouTube is a public utility, so the FCC should be forcing them to take down the stuff I don’t like.”
‘Stop This BLATANT CENSORSHIP’: The Poor, Confused Souls Sending Their YouTube Complaints to the FCC
The Federal Communications Commission (FCC), which oversees telecommunications like radio, TV, and the internet in the U.S., doesn’t regulate content on online platforms like YouTube. But that hasn’t stopped people from sending complaints about the video site to the federal agency—and they’re every bit as unhinged as you’d expect.
Sean Hannity, Fox News’ preeminent talent, on how to solve the problems of school shootings (emphasis added):
The issue here — well, there is some issues with gun safety, you can’t let mentally ill people have guns. Criminals don’t obey the laws by their very nature. We also have to have, every school district needs to have some person that monitor’s every kid’s social media postings, maybe they need two people. This is a reality now that they’re telegraphing what they’re going to do. Terrorists do it. These school shooters do it.
Remember when it was the commies who were (openly) trying to monitor what everyone said and did?
European law around the “right to be forgotten” is pretty zany to start with. The idea is that people should be able to petition to have annoying, inconvenient, or possibly misleading information taken down off the Internet — or, in many cases, removed from search engines like Google.
For example, X is convicted of a crime, which is covered by the news media, and those articles get linked to by Google. Later, the conviction is overturned. That may generate less linkage than the original arrest, trial, and conviction — such things usually do. Now X discovers that when people Google their name, the top results are the trial and conviction, not the overturning. So X sues to have Google “forget” about the trial and conviction, remove the links to those articles, so that we can pretend it never happened. The information is “outdated” or “irrelevant,” so X should be able to ask to take it down.
That’s a relatively straightforward case, but the one that Google just lost is even dodgier. The judge basically ruled that, sure, the conviction happened, but it was a while ago, and it isn’t likely to happen again, and that the plaintiff has shown remorse … so those Internet links to news articles about the conviction should be taken down, too.
Explaining his decision, the judge said … NT2 had shown remorse. He also took into account the submission that NT2’s conviction did not concern actions taken by him in relation to “consumers, customers or investors”, but rather in relation to the invasion of privacy of third parties. “There is not [a] plausible suggestion … that there is a risk that this wrongdoing will be repeated by the claimant. The information is of scant if any apparent relevance to any business activities that he seems likely to engage in,” the judge added.
He said his key conclusion in relation to NT2’s claim was that “the crime and punishment information has become out of date, irrelevant and of no sufficient legitimate interest to users of Google search to justify its continued availability”.
It’s not that what happened was legally revised. Google just has to censor the record to pretend it never happened. Even though it did.
This is not just more dangerous (letting the government decide what picture of historical reality is in the best interests of society and individuals, because how could that possibly ever be abused), but the judge’s guidelines in the ruling are so vague and subjective, that I don’t see how Google (or anyone else) could possibly replicate them.
I understand Europeans’ focus on privacy (at least from business and other citizens; not so much from their governments), but it really strikes me that what’s being put forward here is not privacy, but something Orwellian.
While it didn’t make a big splash in the initial analysis of the House tax reform bill, one provision in there is interesting and disappointing in both small and large ways.
The GOP bill will repeal the Johnson Amendment which, back in the 1950s, basically said that a church (or other charitable organization) that was enjoying tax-exempt status could not, in turn, engage in political activity in favor of a specific candidate, because the tax exemption was going to support their charitable work, not their partisan politicking.
While the Johnson Amendment is rarely actually invoked by the IRS, it’s been a bugbear for conservative Christians as a suppression of their Religious Freedom. “How can we possibly preach the Gospel of Jesus Christ freely,” they cry, “if we can’t urge all our parishioners every Sunday to vote for Donald Trump?”
(Note: campaigning on behalf of a political candidate is an activity of the Kingdom of Earth, not the Kingdom of Heaven. This is nowhere more apparent than Christian churches supporting Donald Trump. Thus endeth the lesson.)
Of course, this provision in the tax bill will be much more consequential than just allowing even-more-partisan sermons on Sundays. It’s been suggested that repealing the Johnson Amendment will make activist conservative churches the target for massive voter donation money laundering schemes — all of it tax deductible, to boot! — oversight of which will be zealously resisted by conservative Christians who think that they should be able to directly influence the State, but the State shouldn’t have an control over them — even as they sell their heritage for a mess of pottage.
And that includes some publc school districts levying punishment to student athletes who take a knee during the national anthem.
You cannot force someone by law or other threat of state punishment to express (or not express) political sentiment. That includes patriotic displays. It would be as wrong (and illegal) to tell someone they must say or do something patriotic as to tell them they must not.
The Supreme Court has been very clear on this, dating back to the pretty-hyper-patriotic days of the Second World War. They ruled in Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette that students could not be compelled to pledge allegiance to the flag (emphasis mine), as it would be a violation of the First Amendment’s freedom of speech:
If there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation, it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion, or force citizens to confess by word or act their faith therein. If there are any circumstances which permit an exception, they do not now occur to us.
It that’s so for an explicit expression like the Pledge of Allegiance, how much more so for standing or hand-over-hearting for a patriotic tune? And calling something a “tradition” or saying that such protest must be done “respectfully” (i.e., out of sight) is no way to dodge around it, either.
Regardless of how one feels about the merits of such national anthem protests, they are in their own way more attuned to what the flag and the nation behind it stand for than “officials, high or petty” demanding behavioral orthodoxy and expressions of patriotism under threat of penalty.
The Cambridge University Press has backed away from its initial (temporary?) plans to have a China-specific website for its prestigious China Quarterly journal that adhered to Chinese government requests as to content. Though it would have kept a copy of its materials intact for the rest of the world (presumably until some other country asked for a country-specific website), the Chinese-focused version would have left out some 300 articles related to “the crackdown on pro-democracy demonstrations in Tiananmen Square in 1989, policies toward Tibetan and Uighur ethnic minorities, Taiwan and the 1966 – 76 Cultural Revolution”.
As China becomes a larger and larger market, the question of how to engaged with its stringent rules as what materials and products may or may not be shared becomes more and more significant. While Cambridge University Press faced serious academic backlash about this, other countries have made similar noises about materials that should be taken down for a variety of reasons, from cultural distaste to intellectual property considerations to political dislike to privacy expectations. Some of them have insisted only on a “local” version for their people; others have demanded the Internet as a whole reflect their standards.
It is unclear where this will end, even as the world’s intellectual and economic power shifts and grows. I’d like to think that maximal freedom of information would apply, but I’m sure that even I have things that I would disagree with full global publication of.
This article is a decent high-level look at the ACLU, civil rights absolutism, and its conflict with a variety of progressive ideals.
And I admit, this is one of those areas that, as each person speaks up with their on spin on the debate, I find myself nodding in agreement — which not only makes my neck sore, but leads to a confusion in viewpoint, which is what I’m suffering from at the moment (as a number of partial, abandoned blog posts on the subject demonstrate, at least to me).
The conflict is, as we look at the ACLU’s stance to date on protecting the civil liberties of Nazis (figuratively and literally) is, I think, fundamentally about ends and means.
The ends, from my perspective, is seeing anyone espousing the racist, demonizing, hate-filled rhetoric — rhetoric that is apparently utterly sincere in its desire to render a variety of minority groups as second-class citizens (at best), or to rid our society of them by whatever means necessary (at worst) — to see that rhetoric ended and the threat that goes with it.
So, yeah, the whole “punching Nazis” or keeping them from getting permits for gatherings or not defending them if they’re carrying around weapons, that makes complete sense to me. These are dangerous people, as the majority of the violence in Charlottesville demonstrates. And, heck, we’ve seen what happens in a country that adopts Nazi race supremacy as public policy, and we’ve seen what happens when white supremacists and the Klan hold sway in our own country. Seeing these folk marching about, espousing dangerous ideas and plans for future action, seems inconceivable to tolerate.
A day when no African-American, no Jew, no gay person, no person of color, no woman, no anyone has to hear that kind of hatred, that marginalization, that existential threatening — that sounds like a fine day to me.
But then there’s the question of means. Because there is one unalterable truth, and that is that those in power will use and abuse any legal abridgment of rights — any power to act against “dangerous ideas” or “threatening behavior” or “hate speech” or “risk to the public order” or “threat against the social contract and the ability of people to live their lives as they see fit” — that they will use those legalities against any idea or behavior or people by whom they are threatened.
Laws and court cases that stifle Nazis and their despicable ideology and their appalling protest marches will be used against socialists, against Black Lives Matter, against LGBT organizations, against women’s marches for reproductive freedom, against environmentalists, against strikes and organized labor, against people trying to block pipelines, to #Occupy groups and #Resist groups.
Indeed, to a degree they already have. And, historically, that’s been the “natural” way of things.
“But there’s a huge difference, qualitatively, in their cause, between Black Lives Matter and the Nazis,” you might say. “Nobody could possibly confuse the two.” And, yes, I agree — but that not a difference one can codify easily into law, not in a way that people in power who find your cause to be a threat, or distasteful, or just politically or economically inconvenient cannot take advantage of.
“BLM is a violent organization.” “BLM is a racist organization.” “BLM protests have turned bad.” “People who identify with BLM have done bad things.” “BLM is anti-police and anti-white.” Those are largely incorrect statements, but someone in power — a judge, a governor, a major — who asserted that they are correct could (and would, and have) then treat BLM (et al.) the same way many folk are understandably arguing that the Nazis, the KKK, the shouting, chanting, swastika-waving, hating, gun-toting, threatening-violence yahoos ought to be treated.
And that’s bitter to face. The righteousness of one’s ends tends to drive what seem like reasonable means. It tends to make it easy for the moment to see the bad guys, the black hats, the enemies, to consider them so clearly identifiable that anyone should recognize their particular evil and suitability for targeting.
But government is awful at taking official steps against “the bad guys,” because not only is governmental power a clumsy club, it’s too easily subverted by those in power.
It’s bitter, and it’s deeply frustrating, and I know that if I were a target of these groups (a direct, obvious target, at least), I’d feel that anger and frustration more clearly, to the point where “To hell with the means, we’ll worry about that after these yahoos are dealt with” as an attempt toward a short-term solution would seem to make sense.
But the short-term solution here is fraught with long-term peril. Heck, with the current Administration, perhaps only mid-term peril. A President willing to claim “many sides” were responsible for the violence in Charlottesville would clearly love to crack down on the “sides” he sees fit to.
How do you let the righteous crack down on the evil, and prevent the evil from returning the favor?
I don’t have any easy solutions, but arguing that there is a group so invidious, so threatening to the social order that the power of the state should silence them, seems fraught, to say the least. I do think that, given precedent, the state (local municipalities in particular) can take a much more careful view of future such rallies and gatherings, and can (and must) be much more prepared in their police activities to step in sooner and more forcefully when things start going wrong.
+Yonatan Zunger has argued, elegantly and persuasively, that tolerance is not a moral absolute, but a social peace treaty [https://goo.gl/NVvAwq], to be reconsidered regarding those who make it clear that they are not willing to reciprocate. I’m not arguing that Nazis should be socially tolerated — people who say that slices of our population are subhumans who ought to be shipped out, ghettoized, or treated as lessers have no moral or social standing to demand to be liked and treated as social equals when someone calls them on it.
But legal “tolerance” is another matter, because the law is myopic about the virtue of any particular given opinion or belief or cause, and the clumsy tools it provides are easily used against even the pure of heart and righteous. It is, writ large, similar to the conflict in giving criminals — even obvious and unrepentant and self-confessed criminals who were caught in the act, on camera, committing heinous crimes — the right to self-defense and due process. We recognize that as critical, because who is the “obvious” criminal is too open to interpretation, or willful misapplication, and deciding that only some people are allowed a court defense endangers everyone.
The ACLU’s efforts (among the many other things it does) to defend the civil liberties of even Nazis and haters can certainly be challenged in any given instance, but the angry (even justifiably angry) assertion that the ends sometimes do justify the means, that treating Nazis as unworthy of and therefore not eligible for those civil liberties, not only violates most practical and moral standards, but ignores how others will use those means to ends that I, for one, have no desire to see.
How else do we stop these brutes — who I clearly agree need to be stopped from their end goals, and the damage they’ll do in trying to reach them? I’m more than open to figuring that out.
Wow. The soon-to-be-Leader of the Free World, having a hissy fit about a magazine — and calling out its editor by name — that, presumably, said something mean to him.
Thin-skinned lack of impulse control? Or an effort to bully away journalistic dissent?
We know, at least, what GoodThinking magazines write about:
If you say so, Donald. Still waiting to hear how you will avoid looking like, when you make global or national policy choices, one of the factors isn't whether it affects your global and national business interests.
Unless the lack of complexity is "I'm President, so I can't legally have any conflicts of interest." That does sort of simplify things, right? It's good to be the king!
Those two identical tweets are an hour apart (and one has since been deleted). So … is Trump getting to be forgetful? Did someone fumble finger entering messages into some sort of timed release system and end up with dupes? Who's writing (or transcribing) this stuff, anyway?
As to the substance of the tweets, this is classic gaslighting. Because the White House did talk about Russian interference and information was released before the election about Russian hacking efforts. Really, truly, you can Google it.
As to the specific "The Russians were trying to throw this election for Trump" accusation — that information was presented to senor Congressional leadership to form a bipartisan stand against the matter; instead, Mitch McConnell, who now supports a Senate accusation, then called it political shenanigans and refused to go along with it.
And, knowing that making an announcement like this without bipartisan support, so close to the election, would in fact look like official interference in the election process — and, perhaps, being too confident that Clinton was going to win anyway — Obama didn't release what was known, except, again, in vague, non-partisan terms.
This is documented. Again, this can be Googled. Setting up an alternate reality where all this "hacking" stuff only came up after Clinton lost, is to basically lie about it (but set up a new narrative that, no doubt, we will hear from Trump supporters from now until doomsday).
In response to a lengthy survey sent out to DoE leadership by the Trump transition team — which, in addition to other info, asked for lists of employees who had attended climate change conferences, worked on climate change research, etc., the DoE has responded:
'“The Department of Energy received significant feedback from our workforce throughout the department, including the National Labs, following the release of the transition team’s questions. Some of the questions asked left many in our workforce unsettled,” said Eben Burnham-Snyder, a department spokesman. “Our career workforce, including our contractors and employees at our labs, comprise the backbone of DOE (Department of Energy) and the important work our department does to benefit the American people. We are going to respect the professional and scientific integrity and independence of our employees at our labs and across our department.
“We will be forthcoming with all publicly-available information with the transition team. We will not be providing any individual names to the transition team.” Burnham-Snyder’s email had the last sentence in boldface for emphasis.'
That's not a permanent solution — in theory Rick Perry, as the new head, can dispose of non-civil-service executives and use them to wheedle out the information once the Trump Administration gets underway. But it's the right answer in standing up to what looks like a witch hunt.
Energy Dept. rejects Trump’s request to name climate change workers, who remain worried
The scientists and their colleagues at Energy know global warming is real. What they don’t know is what Trump might do to those whose work has been in line with the science and the Obama administration, which has spoken about “the urgent imperatives of climate change.”
Scientists who are looking at the cabinet Donald Trump is assembling — and at Trump himself — and at an anticipated dismantling of federal climate change research, tracking, and even accumulated data, are busy making "guerrilla copies" of climate measurement datasets they are afraid will be taken private, offline, or deleted once the Trump administration takes over.
That people feel that fearful for science in this country — that they see such a threat to data — is amazingly sad. I hope it turns out that they are simply being paranoid. I am fearful they are not.
Google appeals a Canadian Supreme Court ruling that sets a principle (similar to rulings we've seen from the EU) that if a court in one country says that something should not be on the Internet seen in that country, it should not on the Internet as seen in any country.
Should a Canadian court be able to decided what someone here in the US should see? How about a French court? Or a Russian court? Or a Chinese court? Or an Iranian court?
Citing concerns over the incoming presidential administrations views on things like, oh, the First Amendment, Net Neutrality, and other such trivia, the Internet Archive is looking to duplicate itself in Canada, so that if the American part of the system gets shut down, restricted, throttled, or otherwise interfered with, its priceless treasure trove of the Internet over the years (including material that's often turned out to be embarrassing for politicians) will remain safe and intact.
It's a worthwhile non-profit cause to contribute to.
I'm fascinated by propaganda, regardless of the source. In this case, we have a photo essay of the Pyongyang Metro and the remarkable amount of nationalistic / pro-Kim artwork and aesthetic focus.The Metro is a big part of how North Korea feels it is part of the modern community of nations, while it also serves as a billboard for indoctrination reinforcement for the citizenry that rides it.
Until recently, only two stations were open to tourists (leading to conspiracy theories that there were, in fact, only those two stops, regardless of what the maps said). This article has pictures from all the various stations, now on display for those few people visiting the country.
I am second to none in my appreciation of female breasts, but if / where women are topless or their nipples are exposed, I consider that my problem not to trip over my tongue or stare impolitely.
I think it is worthwhile perspective to realize that men's nipples were considered improper to display in New York until 1937 (thus all those manly men in bathing suits with tops from the 20s).
If a situation is appropriate for a man to be wandering around without his shirt, it seems appropriate that a woman should have the same option.
(Warning: article as auto-playing video. With nipples.)
The Fight to Free the Nipple
An outdoor book club in Brooklyn garners stares and glares in its literal support of the Free the Nipple movement.
