Letters to the Editor
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@The Peanut Gallery
Let's us all pitch in to buy Mr.Bebop-o a new computer. So he can download stuff in less than a day and a half.
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Proximity Warning
It sounds like an awfully expensive and inefficient way to deal with you.
I think I'd sooner just call Jack Bauer to deal with you in a tax-payer friendly manner.
Thanks for making my point for me, neocon.
Now that you've made it clear that you like having your political enemies tortured you can proceed with the death threats.
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Glenn
Just like Bush followers who bizarrely think that the limitless presidential powers they're cheering on will only be wielded by political leaders they like, many hate speech law proponents convince themselves that such laws will only be used to punish speech they dislike. That is never how tyrannical government power works.
-- Glenn Greenwald
May I just say, Duh?
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In!
@The Peanut Gallery
Let's us all pitch in to buy Mr.Bebop-o a new computer. So he can download stuff in less than a day and a half.
-- Kitt
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Hey Proximity
Maybe Jack Bauer could "take out" Cindy Sheehan's mother!
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@L.W.M.
"Your comparison of expression to weaponry was a stretch, don't you think?"
If I thought that, I would not have said it in the first place. Your use of a rhetorical question in this context is rather condescending, don't you think?
I ask you to consider: How is
**the vast extension of power brought about by the technologies of weapons
in any way disanalogous to
**the vast extension of power brought about by the technologies of expression? Please be specific, and not merely rhetorical.
Human beings do not exist in a vacuum of expression such that it has no effect upon them. To imagines as much is rather like asserting that physical actions (as though engaging in ANY form of expression were *NOT* physical) have no effect upon them. But to acknowledge this manifestly obvious fact is to force one to acknowledge that technologies which change the possibilities of expression fundamentally change the realities of human existence. Expression IS physical; we are not Cartesian minds existing in independence of the world in which ideas are expressed and beliefs are lived.
By the bye, to further exemplify this point, I was just reading Charles S. Peirce's essay "The Fixation of Belief." (A copy may be found at:
http://www.peirce.org/writings/p107.html )
One of the things that the technologies of expression permit is the transformation of Peirce's "method of tenacity" in belief from a purely individual affair into the "method of authority." People whose beliefs had been isolated from contact with, and criticism by, their fellows can now find a prophelactic (sp?) community to reinforce them in their willfully narrow beliefs. Technology now permits them to ossify their attitudes with communal support, and insulate them from anything which (by some reckless stretch of the imagination) might be mistaken for reasoned discourse.
So let me serve your rhetoric back to you: Technology changes things. Are you, L.W.M., prepared to deny this? If not, then how is my analogy a stretch?
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FIRE! (run for your lives)
Sen. Mitch McConnell has said 'money is free speech', which strikes me just as odious as the noxious fruits of Hate Speech laws.
Money. Thats why the large news org.s (aka MSM) like nyt, wapo, wall street journal, Time Inc., etc., etc., can hire only the best, brightest, most qualified, well-connected and seriously-accurate journalists/reporters like Bill Kristol these days ... and not you, Glenn. :)
Nevermind, his pants are on fire.
Seriously, ... 'it is only through the clash of differing opinion that the spark of truth may be realized.'
Fire,
bah.
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Haha
"Thanks for making my point for me, neocon.
Now that you've made it clear that you like having your political enemies tortured you can proceed with the death threats."
Come now Walter, just a bit of light neo-con humour. We neo-cons like to have a laugh every now and then.
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Voltaire and Moi
It has just now occurred to me that there is no reason whatsoever for me to not publish my hitherto privately held improvement on the available verbalizations of the concept regarding free speech, attributed to Voltaire, so here's my effort at an improved rendition of it:
"Though I may utterly detest what you say, I will defend to my death your right to say it." (Ken Rogers, in an electronic post, January, 2008).
I so revise Voltaire's (or whose ever it was) verbalization of the concept on my own authority and on that of T.S. Eliot, who averred, "The immature poet borrows. The mature poet steals."
And we are talking about a concept here, which means that it must still be judged on its merits sub species aeternitatis, whether written in 1776, 2008, or in 2240, the assertions of the philosopher Alberto Gonzalez regarding the "quaint" and "obsolete" provisions of the Geneva Conventions, for example, notwithstanding.
KR
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@kitt
I'm in too.
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Proximity Warning
"Now that you've made it clear that you like having your political enemies tortured you can proceed with the death threats."
Come now Walter, just a bit of light neo-con humour. We neo-cons like to have a laugh every now and then.
We had already understood that neocons enjoy torture and mass murder as a recreational activity. Don't you think you guys could find a hobby that doesn't involve psychopathy? Or is that the whole point of doing it in the first place?
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@ David Tarrell, Dirigo
It's been 20 years since I worked there and that was Northern CA regional but I can tell you that students rights was a priority even then. Resources limit the ACLU to cases that have a broad impact. Legal triage, you know? And then there is politics. I can imagine that resources are tighter today they they were 20 years ago. But they used to be pretty good about professional courtesy, at least at Northern CA regional, assisting attorneys with guidance and advice at least. I don't want to give you the impression that National will assist, I don't know. But you could contact them. If they did, it might only be an amicus brief, if that. But they aren't the only game in town anymore. Good luck.
A.I. has got me thinking about degrees of menace again with respect to H.R. 1955.
What say you?
Dirigo,
To be blunt, I think Arthur Silber never met a molehill he wouldn't turn into a mountain. The end is always near and there is no hope. If you read him regularly you might want to slit your wrists.