Monday, March 18, 2024

Australian conservatives' push to make promoting crime online an offence, with powers to take down violent content


By general agreement, incitement to violence has always been subject to censorship and prosecution so this in not a far-out proposal but the devil is in the detail.  The laws against it in various jurisdictions try to define what it is and set boundaries to it but prosecutions under such laws have been difficult and there are controversial cases

The problem is particularly great when it comes to religion. The Bible in Leviticus calls homosexuality an abomination and orders offenders to be killed.  A court in Finland is prosecuting a Christian woman over that text at the moment.  And many Muslims justify calls for aggression against Jews on words in the Koran.  So laws meant to punish ordinary criminals could ensnare religious true believers

So I think Peter Dutton is walking into a quagmire if he is serious about this.  Very tight definitions might protect people against any abuses of such laws but tight definitions  would probably also make convictions difficult.

Australia has long had laws against "hate speech" but even attempts to enforce them have been rare.  Judge Mordechai Bromberg's absurd conviction of Andrew Bolt under section 18C of the RDA in a race-related prosecution seems to have chilled all further urge to action.  As Bromberg is Jewish, everybody wants to walk away from the potential complexities of the matter



Opposition Leader Peter Dutton has called for powers to take down harmful online content to be extended to social media posts "glamorising" violence and criminal activity, with new offences to punish those who "post and boast".

The Coalition will introduce a private members bill into parliament next week that would grant the eSafety commissioner powers to issue take-down orders and criminalise the act of promoting crime online.

The bill would create a new Commonwealth offence to criminalise posting material that depicts violence, drug offences or property offences to increase a person's notoriety, punishable by up to two years' imprisonment.

It would also provide sentencing options to ensure courts could prohibit individuals convicted of that offence from using social media for up to two years.

The commissioner's current take-down powers only allow posts to be removed with the cooperation of the hosting social media company.

Mr Dutton said the offences were a "common sense" proposal that he urged the government to support.

"I hope that the government is able to pick it up quickly because I think Australians want an answer from the prime minister about what we can do at a federal level," Mr Dutton said.

"When I was a policeman many years ago you'd go to a break-and-enter, largely it was someone breaking in to steal goods or money to fuel a drug habit.

"Today we know cars are being stolen and people's houses are broken into ... because kids if they're part of a gang or if they're part of a culture where they can post an image of a motor vehicle ... or a designer handbag, or if they're standing in a bedroom with an elderly lady asleep or cowering behind them, that brings them great kudos online, and it gives them notoriety, and it glamorises their crime."

Renewed calls to turn the tide on youth crime

Dubbed a "wicked" problem with the power to shape elections, youth advocates fear punitive measures will fail to address the underlying causes of crime.

The Coalition has campaigned on issues of crime in recent weeks, both ahead of the Dunkley by-election in Victoria and the Queensland state election due to be held in October.

Monthly crime data shows there has been a long-term trend downwards of crime in Queensland and fewer young offenders as a percentage of all offenders, however assaults, rape and shop thefts have risen since 2003.

Crime rates also appear to have returned to trend after dropping off during the COVID pandemic.

Some states have already moved to ban criminal "posting and boasting", with New South Wales announcing earlier this week it would create new penalties for people who shared vehicle thefts or break-and-enter offences, and make it tougher for young people to get bail.

University of Queensland Associate Professor Renee Zahnow said "posting and boasting" laws already existed in Queensland, but they had been difficult to enforce.

Dr Zahnow also said posting crimes was an issue beyond content that promotes those acts, and that governments should also be thinking about crimes posted out of community safety concerns, as well as crimes that identify victims.

"The government and police pick up on the posting and boasting because that's the most offensive to the public. But the other thing we need to start to think about is more broadly not just when people are putting up their own offences and boasting about it, but they can still get the same infamy from other people putting up posts on them committing offences," Dr Zahnow said.

"[And] If the victim is involved they are automatically identified."

Dr Zahnow said if the eSafety commissioner were granted takedown powers, those could also extend to powers to pull content that identifies victims of crime.

But she noted even though there were benefits to "posting and boasting" laws, they would do little to actually reduce youth offending.

"They're not going to stop crime rates. Young people who are doing this stuff don't care. You don't steal a car and put your video online of you doing it, and then think, 'Oh someone is going to charge me for putting it online.'

"[however] we might not see changes now ... and it's very hard to measure, but the benefit might be that we don't see other young people do these offences later, maybe the young brother, or the young kid who lives down the street."

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-03-14/dutton-push-criminalise-social-media-crime-promotion/103586388

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My other blogs. Main ones below:

http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)

http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)

http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)

http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/ (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)

http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)

https://immigwatch.blogspot.com/ (IMMIGRATION WATCH)

https://awesternheart.blogspot.com/ (THE PSYCHOLOGIST)

http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs

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Sunday, March 17, 2024

Must not be skeptical about the Holocaust


The lamebrains of the Left seem blind to the fact that prosecuting skepicism about the holocaust cretes the impression that it is really a false story.  Why get so heavy about it if it is truth?

As recent upsurges of vocal antisemitism over Palestine have shown, suspicion of Jews is still widespread in Europe so this conviction will simply reinforce antisemitic ideas, not reduce them.  Trying to shut someone up creates the impression that they have something important to say


A court in Belgium sentenced prominent far-right activist Dries Van Langenhove to a year in prison on Tuesday for running an organization that a judge said spread “racist, hateful, Nazi and negationist speech,” in a major ruling on how the nation deals with extremism.

Five members of the extremist group that Van Langenhove led received suspended sentences, including two who work for the far-right Flemish Interest party, which is slated to make big gains in June elections.

Tom Van Grieken, the leader of the Flemish Interest party, said the ruling was proof that “Belgian justice is rotten to the core” and called the proceedings “a political trial from day one.”

They were accused of using a chat group to exchange racist, antisemitic and other extremist comments. Van Langenhove, a former Belgian parliamentarian, also had some of his civil rights suspended for a decade, making him ineligible for office.

Investigative journalists from the VRT public broadcaster were at the heart of the case as their 2018 documentary on Van Langenhove's Shield and Friends group highlighted its public and private militaristic and extremist activities.

"The defendant raved about Nazi ideology, which has caused and continues to cause untold suffering to countless people. The file showed that he wants to undermine democratic society and replace it with a social model of white supremacy,” said Judge Jan Van den Berghe.

The chats on the Shield and Friends site included the most macabre jokes and memes on anything from famine in Africa to Holocaust concentration camps.

Van Langenhove, 30, said he did not commit any crimes.

“A years-long investigation, on which the Justice Department wasted millions of euros of taxpayers’ money, shows that the ... activists cannot be charged with anything other than some memes. Humor. Memes that I didn’t even post myself,” he said in a reaction.

Some of the parties in the case lodged complaints following the VRT documentary.

“The ridiculing of gas chambers, of incinerators, that was so over the top for me that I spontaneously lodged a complaint,” said Henri Heimans, a former magistrate whose parents survived the Nazi death camps. “Then, of course, I unwittingly ended up in a procedural battle that lasted for years.”

Van Langenhove was not at the court in Ghent, some 50 kilometers (30 miles) west of Brussels, but his lawyer said he would appeal the ruling, which automatically suspends his imprisonment. He was also fined 16,000 euros ($17,470).

Right-wing extremism, racism and antisemitism has been on the rise through much of Europe, and far-right political parties have made big inroads in many European Union nations over the past few years. They're set to be a key issue at the June 6-9 EU elections.

https://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory/belgium-court-convicts-prominent-activist-1-year-jail-108042850

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My other blogs. Main ones below:

http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)

http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)

http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)

http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/ (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)

http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)

https://immigwatch.blogspot.com/ (IMMIGRATION WATCH)

https://awesternheart.blogspot.com/ (THE PSYCHOLOGIST)

http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs

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Thursday, March 14, 2024

US lawmakers say TikTok won’t be banned if it finds a new owner — but that’s easier said than done


US lawmakers are threatening to ban TikTok but also say they are giving its Chinese parent company a chance to keep it running.

The premise of a bipartisan bill headed for a vote in the US House of Representatives is that TikTok fans in the US can keep scrolling through their favorite social media app so long as Beijing-based ByteDance gives up on owning it.

“It doesn’t have to be this painful for ByteDance,” Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi, an Illinois Democrat and bill co-sponsor, recently posted on X. “They could make it a lot easier on themselves by simply divesting @tiktok_us. It’s their choice.”

But it’s not going to be as simple as lawmakers are making it sound, according to experts.

While some people have voiced an interest in buying TikTok’s US business — among them “Shark Tank” star Kevin O’Leary — there are a number of challenges including a 6-month deadline to get it done.

“Somebody would have to actually be ready to shell out the large amount of money that this product and system is worth,” said Stanford University researcher Graham Webster, who studies Chinese technology policy and US-China relations. “But even if somebody has deep enough pockets and is ready to go into negotiating to purchase, this sort of matchmaking on acquisitions is not quick.”

Big tech companies could afford it but would likely face intense scrutiny from antitrust regulators in both the US and China.

Then again, if the bill actually becomes law and survives First Amendment court challenges, it could make TikTok cheaper to buy.

“One of the main effects of the legislation would be to decrease the sale price,” said Matt Perault, director of the University of North Carolina’s Center on Technology Policy, which gets funding from TikTok and other tech companies. “As you approach that 180-day clock, the pressure on the company to sell or risk being banned entirely would be high, which would mean probably the acquirers could get it at a lower price.”

That could only happen if the US president determines “through an interagency process” that TikTok is “no longer being controlled by a foreign adversary,” according to the bill.

Not only that, but the new US-based TikTok would have to completely cut ties with ByteDance.

That includes no more “cooperation with respect to the operation of a content recommendation algorithm or an agreement with respect to data sharing.”

It reflects longstanding concerns that Chinese authorities could force ByteDance to hand over data on the 170 million Americans who use TikTok.

The worry stems from a set of Chinese national security laws that compel organizations to assist with intelligence gathering.

It’s an unusual bill in the way that it targets a single company.

Typically, a government group led by the Treasury secretary called the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, or CFIUS, will review whether such a sale would pose any national security threats.

HASN’T THIS HAPPENED BEFORE?

Yes. The Trump administration brokered a deal in 2020 that would have had US corporations Oracle and Walmart take a large stake in TikTok on national security grounds.

The deal would have also made Oracle responsible for hosting all TikTok’s US user data and securing computer systems to ensure national security requirements are satisfied.

Microsoft also made a failed bid for TikTok that its CEO Satya Nadella later described as the “strangest thing I’ve ever worked on.”

Instead of congressional action, the 2020 arrangement was in response to then-President Donald Trump’s series of executive actions targeting TikTok.

But the sale never went through for a number of reasons. Trump’s executive orders got held up in court as the 2020 presidential election loomed. China also had imposed stricter export controls on its technology providers.

Incoming President Joe Biden in 2021 reversed course and dropped the legal proceedings. Now Biden says he’s in favor a bill that would ban TikTok if ByteDance won’t divest, and Trump is not.

https://nypost.com/2024/03/12/tech/us-lawmakers-say-tiktok-wont-be-banned-if-it-finds-a-new-owner-but-thats-easier-said-than-done/

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My other blogs. Main ones below:

http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)

http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)

http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)

http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/ (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)

http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)

https://immigwatch.blogspot.com/ (IMMIGRATION WATCH)

https://awesternheart.blogspot.com/ (THE PSYCHOLOGIST)

http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs

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Wednesday, March 13, 2024

The dangers of banning ‘Islamophobia’


The definition of Islamophobia, put forward by the All-Party Parliamentary Group on British Muslims in 2018, has now been adopted by one in seven local authorities in England. It is likely to be taken up by more, particularly if the Labour Party wins the next General Election (Labour has itself adopted the definition for internal party matters). This is all happening despite the UK government’s refusal to adopt the definition, which it describes as ‘not fit for purpose’.

The APPG definition is as follows: ‘Islamophobia is rooted in racism and is a type of racism that targets expressions of Muslimness or perceived Muslimness.’

The problem with such a broad definition is that it can be invoked to shut down legitimate criticism of Islam as a religion, not just unacceptable prejudice towards Muslim people. Indeed, the authors of the APPG report dismissed the ‘the supposed right to criticise Islam’ as ‘nothing more than another subtle form of anti-Muslim racism’. In this way, a well-meaning effort to protect Muslim people from abuse ends stifling debate about almost anything connected to Islam. Teaching about the spread of Islam historically through war and conquest, criticisms of Islamic practices around women’s rights – particularly those made by ex-Muslims – and press coverage of Islamist terror attacks all have the potential to be labelled ‘Islamophobic’, according to the APPG’s definition. No other religion is granted this degree of protection in the UK.

The definition of ‘Islamophobia’ in the APPG’s report is so broad that, among other things, it means anyone disputing Hamas’s description of Israel’s military operation in Gaza as a ‘genocide’ is guilty of hate speech. Indeed, anyone who questions a group of Muslims, or a Muslim-majority state, when they claim to be experiencing ‘genocide’ is designated as an Islamophobe. As GB News reporter Tom Harwood recently pointed out, this would make Keir Starmer, who doesn’t accept that what’s happening in Gaza is a ‘genocide’, an Islamophobe. Anneliese Dodds, Labour’s shadow equalities minister, recently tried to publicly shame the Conservative Party for not subscribing to the APPG’s definition. She was seemingly unaware that, as a member of Labour’s front bench, her adoption of Labour’s official line on Gaza would make her an Islamophobe as well.

Recognising that the APPG definition risks suppressing public debate about the Israel-Gaza conflict does not mean condoning bigotry towards Muslim people. As the Network of Sikh Organisations has pointed out: ‘“Anti-Muslim’ hatred, (like “anti-Sikh” or “anti-Hindu” [hatred]) is much clearer language to describe hate crime specifically against the Muslim community.’ And, of course, it is already a criminal offence to stir up hatred against a group on religious grounds.

The terms ‘Islam’, ‘Muslimness’ and ‘perceived Muslimness’ are never explicitly defined by the APPG, so the definition can be easily exploited by those wishing to advance their own subjective interpretation of Islam. Is it ‘Islamophobic’ to say that Islam discriminates against women? Some would say it is, others would say it isn’t. Is ‘Muslimness’ defined exclusively by clothing and, if so, how does the APPG definition protect those Muslims who choose not to wear Islamic dress?

What’s more, by defining Islamophobia as a form of racism, the APPG definition wrongly implies that Islam is a race, rather than a multi-ethnic religion. In the APPG’s report, the meaning of racism is even expanded to encompass criticism of a ‘culture – broadly defined – that is perceived to be inferior’. Again, would it therefore be Islamophobic to criticise Islamic cultural practices?

Even bad behaviour that happens to be committed by Muslims would also be ringfenced from criticism. Journalists such as Dominic Kennedy and Andrew Norfolk have already faced accusations of Islamophobia for reporting on the grooming-gangs scandal. Adopting the APPG definition would further empower those, like Miqdaad Versi of the Muslim Council of Britain (MCB), who often complain of Islamophobia whenever the British media report on stories that he thinks reflect badly on Muslims.

The grooming-gangs scandal itself is indicative of a further problem with adopting the APPG definition: the abuse of vulnerable girls by mainly Muslim men of Pakistani heritage was ignored for too long by local authorities afraid to intervene, lest they be accused of Islamophobia. Similarly, counter-terrorism operations that depend on a frank assessment of the religious motivations of Islamist perpetrators would be imperilled by the widespread adoption of the APPG definition.

https://www.spiked-online.com/2024/03/04/the-dangers-of-banning-islamophobia/

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My other blogs. Main ones below:

http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)

http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)

http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)

http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/ (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)

http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)

https://immigwatch.blogspot.com/ (IMMIGRATION WATCH)

https://awesternheart.blogspot.com/ (THE PSYCHOLOGIST)

http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs

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Tuesday, March 12, 2024

Censorship by another road


Detailed information released this week by the U.S. House Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government makes plain that the Biden administration has been partnering with major banks and payment processors to censor non-profit ministries and threaten the freedom of everyday Americans.

And now, the subcommittee has revealed that the government has targeted Alliance Defending Freedom. We’ve been unlawfully swept up in the federal government’s “domestic terrorist” dragnet.

While ADF was advocating on behalf of the freedom of EVERY American to live according to their beliefs—including at SCOTUS—the U.S. Treasury Department was telling Big Banks to monitor their customers to identify domestic threats and shared a list of “hate groups” published by the hyper-partisan Institute for Strategic Dialogue to help them do so.

This censorship-industrial complex is a clear threat to the freedom of every American. The Biden administration is attempting an end-run around the Constitution and outsourcing censorship to some of the world’s most powerful corporations.

This is simply unconscionable.

The government can’t openly silence those they disagree with, thanks to the First Amendment, so the federal government is now enlisting and pressuring big banks to intimidate, punish, and cancel their opponents by cutting off financial services to disfavored groups, ministries, and people.

This Orwellian surveillance of American citizens has no place in a free society.

If this isn’t stopped now, then future government officials could use the same tactics. And if they can do this to a successful U.S. Supreme Court advocate like ADF, what ministry or non-profit organization could they target next?

https://adflegal.org/support/stop-debanking

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My other blogs. Main ones below:

http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)

http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)

http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)

http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/ (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)

http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)

https://immigwatch.blogspot.com/ (IMMIGRATION WATCH)

https://awesternheart.blogspot.com/ (THE PSYCHOLOGIST)

http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs

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Monday, March 11, 2024

Ireland tries to take women out of its Constitution


Irish voters took to the polls on International Women’s Day — Friday — to remove the words “woman” and “mother” from the Constitution.

Also up for vote: a measure that would widely expand the definition of “family.”

Two amendments were on the ballot: Article 39, on the family, and Article 40, on the role of women/mothers in society.

Article 39 would redefine the family to a grouping “founded on marriage,” as the Constitution now says, “or on other durable relationships.”

The proponents of the changes argued the current wording is exclusionary to single-parent and nonmarried households.

“The relationship that exists between a child and their mother or father when they’re born, that’s the one-parent family,” Prime Minister Leo Varadkar has said. “It’s committed, it’s caring, it’s long-lasting.”

But the vague inclusion of “durable relationships”  caused more confusion.

Nobody — neither voters nor politicians — seemed to have a clear definition of the term.

The referendum failed.  The voters rejected the proposals

https://nypost.com/2024/03/05/opinion/irelands-about-to-take-women-out-of-its-constitution/

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My other blogs. Main ones below:

http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)

http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)

http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)

http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/ (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)

http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)

https://immigwatch.blogspot.com/ (IMMIGRATION WATCH)

https://awesternheart.blogspot.com/ (THE PSYCHOLOGIST)

http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs

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Sunday, March 10, 2024

St. Louis TV station KMOV under fire after anchor uses ‘outdated’ racial term on air


I guess we are not allowed to say what NAACP stands for

A St. Louis television station is under fire after an anchor “mistakenly” described minority homeowners using an “outdated, offensive and racist” term.

Television station KMOV issued an apology for using the term on Feb. 26 while previewing a story about racial bias on home appraisals, according to reports.

“Tonight, colored homeowners are sounding the alarm when it comes to undervalued home appraisals,” anchor Cory Stark, who is white, said on air.

JD Sosnoff, KMOV vice president and general manager, and Stark tried to do damage control over the apparent slip-up as criticism grew over the cringe remark.

“It was in an original script as ‘homeowners of color’ and was inadvertently changed and mistakenly read on air,” Sosnoff said, according to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.

https://nypost.com/2024/03/06/us-news/st-louis-tv-station-kmov-under-fire-after-anchor-cory-stark-uses-outdated-racial-term/

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My other blogs. Main ones below:

http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)

http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)

http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)

http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/ (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)

http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)

https://immigwatch.blogspot.com/ (IMMIGRATION WATCH)

https://awesternheart.blogspot.com/ (THE PSYCHOLOGIST)

http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs

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Thursday, March 07, 2024

Wrong to call called a London police officer “a stupid white bastard”?


It appears to be a criminal offence in Britain. One would think that a policeman would be accustomed to abuse and would see it as all in a day's work

On the other hand, what if the cop had been black and was called a "stupid black bastard"? In that case the abuser would undoubtedly have had the book thrown at them

The Left are in a huge pickle over this. They do not want a popular brown woman to be described as racist but they have difficulty expaining how an explicitly racist comment is not an explicitly racist comment

Their difficulty stems from their own past politiical opportunism when they have descibed any comment about race as indicating racism. That stupidity has come back to haunt them.



The moment Samantha May Kerr made her Matildas debut at the age of 15, everyone watching knew there was something special about her. From her uncanny ability to sniff out a goal, to her strengths in the air, and her unaffected charm – Kerr’s career trajectory was as thrilling to watch as it was to enjoy once she reached the heights of global esteem.

But no amount of penalty shootouts, World Cup appearances or Women’s FA Cup finals could prepare Kerr for the pressure she’s under now after news broke that she’d been charged with causing racially aggravated harassment, alarm or distress to a London police officer.

It has since come to light, via British tabloid The Sun, that Kerr allegedly called a police officer “a stupid white bastard” during a dispute over a taxi fare on January 30 last year. She reportedly vomited in the cab after a night out and is alleged to have made the slur when police arrived.

Many will question whether the alleged slur satisfies a criminal threshold. Where a black and white argument starts to become grey is whether or not the alleged remark amounts to a form of racism. We know little of the detail but we know this much: a white, male police officer is accusing a lesbian, female footballer of Indian heritage of racism.

https://www.smh.com.au/sport/soccer/if-sam-kerr-was-a-straight-white-housewife-would-she-stand-accused-of-racism-20240306-p5faf7.html

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My other blogs. Main ones below:

http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)

http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)

http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)

http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/ (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)

http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)

https://immigwatch.blogspot.com/ (IMMIGRATION WATCH)

https://awesternheart.blogspot.com/ (THE PSYCHOLOGIST)

http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs

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Wednesday, March 06, 2024

Excommunicated by Medium.com


Google has deleted some of my blog posts because of their political incorrectness.  But I now have a new censor:  Medium.com is a site where people can put up their personal thoughts and stories.  I use it as  somewhere to go when I have time on my hands.  

Its posts are mostly open to the public but you can become a "member" by paying a small monthly fee.  I have paid that fee as I do get some value out of the site.  And there is a privilege attached to membership.  Some posts are made available to members only.  How that selection is made is a mystery to me.

The site does allow and encourage comments on its posts and I have put up comments occasionally.  They have however now put up a flag whenever I log on to say that I have violated their rules  The rules concerned are a very long list so I have no idea which rule I have broken and when. And I now no longer get the privileged members-only emails.

It would be nice if they had the manners to tell me which particular comment they disliked.  Even Google does that whenever they delete one of my blogspot posts.

It will be interesting to see if they take their monthly fee from me.  It will be a test of how hollow or not their  pretensions of having principles are.

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My other blogs. Main ones below:

http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)

http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)

http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)

http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/ (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)

http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)

https://immigwatch.blogspot.com/ (IMMIGRATION WATCH)

https://awesternheart.blogspot.com/ (THE PSYCHOLOGIST)

http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs

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Tuesday, March 05, 2024

Must NEVER spell out the N-word


High-profile film critic Shane Danielsen has left the news and culture publication The Monthly after a dispute centring on the use of the N-word in a film review, and a subsequent decision by the magazine not to run his story about controversies at the Berlin Film Festival involving the war in Gaza.

Danielsen, a Hollywood-based Australian writer, filed a review of American Fiction that included the title of the Flannery O’Connor short story The Artificial N----r, which is referred to in the script and is a key part of the film’s storyline about the fallout from a black character’s use of racially loaded language.

Danielsen spelled the N-word out in full in his copy, but the magazine’s editor, Michael Williams, argued it shouldn’t be published. A forthright email exchange followed and the critic quit, citing censorship.

Williams agreed the context “could not be clearer or more unequivocally non-racist”, and argued he shouldn’t quit over the issue. Danielsen later backtracked and apologised for what he called an overreaction.

https://www.smh.com.au/business/companies/conflict-over-the-n-word-and-gaza-surrounds-departure-of-the-monthly-s-film-critic-20240304-p5f9p2.html

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My other blogs. Main ones below:

http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)

http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)

http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)

http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/ (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)

http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)

https://immigwatch.blogspot.com/ (IMMIGRATION WATCH)

https://awesternheart.blogspot.com/ (THE PSYCHOLOGIST)

http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs

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Monday, March 04, 2024

Ohio Union Violating First Amendment by Taking Dues From Public School Staffer Who Opted Out


Suppose you joined a local gym several years ago, but after a while you discovered that you didn’t like some of the gym’s policies. So, you tell the gym that you no longer want to be a member and ask it to stop taking your monthly membership payments.

The gym confirms that you are no longer a member and stops taking payments.

However, a couple of months later, you discover that the gym has started taking payments again without getting your permission. When you ask what happened, the gym claims to have made a mistake by allowing you to leave.

Apparently, the only time you may stop payments to the gym is during a 10-day period occurring once a year. Unless you make your request within that window next year, they’ll just keep taking your money—even though you haven’t been a member or been charged for months.

Surely, the gym can’t just start taking your money without your permission after stopping payments months earlier.

But that’s pretty much what happened to Denise Cogar—except in her case, she tried to quit and stop paying a public sector union, rather than a gym.

When Cogar began working as a paraprofessional for an Ohio school district more than 20 years ago, she joined the Ohio Association of Public School Employees, Local 367, the union that represents the district’s paraprofessionals. It’s an affiliate of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees.

At the end of 2022, she became frustrated with the union, and sent a letter withdrawing her membership and requesting that dues no longer be withheld from her wages on her paycheck. The union confirmed her withdrawal and told her that it would inform the school district to stop withholding union dues.

And the school did stop—briefly.

Four months later, the school district started taking money from her wages again. The union told Cogar that it had made a mistake. Because she hadn’t made her request during the union’s 10-day “opt-out window,” she had to keep paying dues after all.

Worse, the union and the school district’s actions were at the behest of Ohio law, which requires that a government employer withhold dues from its employees on behalf of the union.

But the U.S. Supreme Court in 2018 held in Janus v. AFSCME that public employers cannot give an employee’s money to a public sector union “unless the employee affirmatively consents to pay.” Doing so violates the employee’s First Amendment rights.

Because the union confirmed that Cogar was no longer a member and instructed the school district to stop withholding dues at the end of 2022, dues could only be withheld from her paychecks again if she consented to the withholding. But she didn’t consent—and the union’s reliance on Ohio state law to withhold union dues violated her First Amendment rights.

The union’s violation of the Cogar’s constitutional rights didn’t end there.

Months later, based on the union’s claim that Cogar could only stop paying dues during an “opt-out window” between Aug. 22 to Aug. 31, she tried to stop the withholding of dues again. She mailed an opt-out request to the union, which the union said it had received one day before the window began. As a result, the union refused to stop her dues payments.

The union waited until after that window had closed to tell her that. According to the union, that means she’ll have to wait another full year for the opt-out window to reopen before she can try again—and the union plans to keep charging her monthly dues in the meantime.

The union’s actions to continue to take Cogar’s money without her permission is unjust and unconstitutional.

That’s why Cogar, with the help of the Liberty Justice Center, filed a federal lawsuit in Ohio alleging that the union’s actions, the school district’s withholding of union dues, and the Ohio law on which the union and district relied are unconstitutional because they violate her First Amendment rights.

Government employees have a First Amendment right to decide whether they want their money to support public sector unions, and those unions can’t move the goal posts in order to take an employee’s money without their consent.

https://www.dailysignal.com/2024/02/21/ohio-union-violating-first-amendment-taking-dues-public-school-staffer-who-opted-out

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My other blogs. Main ones below:

http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)

http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)

http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)

http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/ (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)

http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)

https://immigwatch.blogspot.com/ (IMMIGRATION WATCH)

https://awesternheart.blogspot.com/ (THE PSYCHOLOGIST)

http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs

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Sunday, March 03, 2024

Lost freedoms across the board


The Biden administration trampled the First Amendment by “suppressing millions of protected free speech postings by American citizens,” a federal appeals court recently ruled.

The Supreme Court will hear that bellwether case next month.

In the 1990s, local bureaucrats sporadically cracked down on home schooling, preventing a smattering of parents from teaching their own kids.

During the recent COVID epidemic, teacher unions spurred unjustified school lockdowns that victimized tens of millions of children.

Vast learning losses resulted that continue to plague young lives.

In the 1990s, controversies erupted when some schools gave free condoms to teenagers.

Nowadays, many of the nation’s largest school systems encourage children to agonize over their own gender identity from kindergarten through high school.

Ten million kids attend government schools that will assist children in changing their gender without parents’ knowledge or permission.

Puberty blockers and “gender-affirming” double mastectomies are far more disruptive than prophylactic freebies.

In the 1990s, civil-liberties groups challenged laws requiring drug tests for new employees.

In September 2021, President Biden decreed that 80 million-plus adults working for private companies must get Covid vaccine injections.

After millions of Americans took the jab thanks to his edict, the Supreme Court struck down his order.

But neither Biden nor his political appointees have any liability for that illicit command or the side effects of the vax.

https://nypost.com/2024/03/01/opinion/shed-a-tear-for-americas-rapidly-vanishing-freedoms/

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My other blogs. Main ones below:

http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)

http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)

http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)

http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/ (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)

http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)

https://immigwatch.blogspot.com/ (IMMIGRATION WATCH)

https://awesternheart.blogspot.com/ (THE PSYCHOLOGIST)

http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs

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Thursday, February 29, 2024

American Psychological Association's ABSURDLY woke new dictionary bans common phrases like 'you're killing it!', 'turn a blind eye' or 'blue-collar job'


Psychologists should avoid using phrases such as 'you're nailing it' when trying to encourage patients because it could be interpreted as violent.

That is according to a new psychology language manual that lists dozens of everyday phrases that should be swapped out for more 'inclusive' terms.

Phrases such as 'take a shot at', 'target population'  and 'you're killing it' should be avoided because they are microaggressions, the guide says.

Meanwhile, 'stand up for', 'turn a blind eye to' and 'lend you voice to a cause' should be axed because they are 'ableist' and offensive to disabled people.

The manual released in December by the American Psychological Association (APA), which has nearly 160,000 members, including scientists, clinicians and consultants.

The guidelines aim to 'dismantle the destructive hierarchies that have marginalized people from equitable representation and participation in society,' the organization said.

But Dr Sarah Hill, a professor of psychology with expertise in women, health, and sexual psychology at Texas Christian University in Fort Worth, told DailyMail.com that restricting language would only make communication between patient and doctor harder.

'It just creates a situation where people don't want to talk,' she said.

'All it does is make well-intentioned people afraid to speak, because they're afraid of hurting people's feelings.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-13126995/american-psychological-association-inclusive-dictionary-bans-microagressions-apa.html

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My other blogs. Main ones below:

http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)

http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)

http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)

http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/ (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)

http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)

https://immigwatch.blogspot.com/ (IMMIGRATION WATCH)

https://awesternheart.blogspot.com/ (THE PSYCHOLOGIST)

http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs

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Wednesday, February 28, 2024

To Censor or to Host? Supreme Court Hears Social Media Platforms’ Free Speech Challenge to State Laws


The Supreme Court on Monday heard hours of argument in two free-speech cases, Moody v. NetChoice and NetChoice v. Paxton.

NetChoice, an industry group representing large tech companies, argued that laws enacted by Texas and Florida restricting the companies’ ability to demote or remove user content violated the First Amendment rights of social media platforms.

Listening to NetChoice’s arguments, one gets the impression that the states are forcing social media to broadcast pro-terrorist, pro-suicide messages.

They are not. And the hysterics of NetChoice’s hypotheticals should make a fair-minded person skeptical.

Rather, the cases are, to paraphrase the late historian and scholar Christopher Dawson an effort by the nation’s de facto social powers to exempt themselves from all interference by lawful political authority.

The dominant social media platforms—Facebook, X (formerly Twitter), et al.—attained their dominance by marketing themselves as an open digital marketplace for ideas. The question now is whether states have any authority to regulate these private businesses to keep the digital “public square” available to speech and speakers that the platforms disfavor.

Whether states have such authority depends on how much of social media platforms’ operations are protected by the First Amendment: All? Some? None?

Do platforms such as Facebook merely host the speech of others, like providers of cellphone service?  Is algorithmic content curation inherently expressive like the decisions of a newspaper’s editorial board? Is the decision to ban certain users censorious in the expressive sense or merely censorship?

Texas and Florida contended that little of what social media platforms do to user content qualifies as expressive. Throughout oral arguments, the solicitor generals of Florida and Texas maintained that when the platforms demoted or promoted, hosted or banned, they were engaged in conduct, unprotected by the First Amendment, not in speech.

Thus, it was perfectly constitutional for Florida to prevent social media sites from deplatforming candidates for public office or for Texas to prevent platforms from deleting posts based on viewpoints.   

Advocating for NetChoice, former U.S. Solicitor General Paul Clement argued that virtually everything platforms do is expressive because their very business is to disseminate speech.  

Justices Ketanji Brown Jackson and Neil Gorsuch took a more nuanced view. Rather than looking at the nature of social media’s business, both justices insisted that the matter needed to be assessed at the level of function.

Facebook, for instance, offers users the ability to post public comments or to send someone a direct message. Contrary to Clement’s assertions, the justices indicated that the First Amendment concerns would be different when the platform was simply transmitting a message versus when it was curating or promoting content.

Even the word for what the platforms do with user content became a matter of semantic dispute.

Justice Clarence Thomas pressed Clement for a case in which the court had declared that “censorship” enjoyed First Amendment protection. Justice Samuel Alito described as “Orwellian” the platforms’ insistence that deleting users and posts was merely “content moderation.”

Justice Brett Kavanaugh, in a plaintive echo of the Reagan era, rejoined that “When I think of Orwellian, I think of the state,” implying as he did throughout the argument that censorship cannot be an issue when a private company is the censor.

Other questions were raised without answers.

Were social media platforms common carriers like telephone companies and thus duty-bound to welcome all patrons? Were the states’ laws making pernicious content-based distinctions favoring conservative speech or were they simply preventing the platforms from discriminating based on speech content?

Even Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar made a guest appearance on behalf of the federal government (not a party to either case) to argue that while not every business transmitting speech enjoyed First Amendment protection, contra the states, there was no common-carrier exception to the First Amendment.

Yet these conceptual concerns, so central to the case, are unlikely to be the basis of the court’s decision this term.

That’s because the dominant theme preoccupying the justices during oral argument was the cases’ peculiar procedural posture. NetChoice, in its haste to stop the states’ laws from going into effect, brought what is known as a pre-enforcement facial challenge. To sustain that challenge before either law is applied or interpreted, NetChoice has the burden to show that the laws have no constitutionally legitimate applications. That’s a tall order, especially when the record in both cases left it ambiguous which platforms were even covered.   

The cases’ posture concerned justices across the ideological spectrum. Some, like Justices Elena Kagan and Amy Coney Barrett, seemed open to the argument that the platforms engaged in expressive conduct when they curated content for user consumption.

But they were concerned that both state laws could accomplish lawful ends such as preventing Gmail from blocking email accounts of controversial public figures such as Tucker Carlson and Rachel Maddow, a hypothetical posed by Alito. As Jackson put it:  “I think that’s a problem in this case. We’re not aware of all the facts.”

Why should a facial challenge cause the justices to hesitate? In a word, federalism. Our system of vertically bifurcated sovereignty entails a presumption that state laws are valid when properly enacted. As judgments of the people’s representatives, state laws must be given effect unless and until they are shown to be patently unconstitutional.

As Solicitor General Aaron Nielson said, “Texas has a right to protect Texans.”

So, what outcome should one expect when the court rules on these cases by June?  The answer is likely a remand and more litigation in the lower courts over the particulars of when and to what extent the respective state laws apply.

But the core concerns will remain alive. As today’s arguments make clear, America is at a crossroads when it comes to limiting the influence of the major tech platforms, which hold tremendous sway over everything from the content of our debates to the socialization of our children.

Under the status quo, social media platforms enjoy near-limitless discretion to suppress whatever views they wish, for any reason whatsoever.

If the Supreme Court eventually invalidates state bans on viewpoint-based discrimination, states would have far fewer options to address the most egregious censorship practices.

Because these platforms are the modern public square, their censorial conduct undermines the free speech of everyday Americans. Even worse, a full embrace of the tech companies’ radical First Amendment theory runs the risk of entrenching censorship well beyond social media.

NetChoice seems to argue—or at least imply—that the mere act of allowing or disallowing content on a social media service is a communicative act and, therefore, is the platforms’ own protected speech.

On this theory, by merely hosting a user’s content (e.g., posts, websites, videos, electronic files), a digital service provider “participates” in that speech and is thus free to refuse service to anyone it doesn’t like.

Such a holding risks foreclosing reasonable legislative measures to prevent viewpoint discrimination against users on numerous other digital services.

For instance, Amazon has removed or reduced visibility for books from its e-commerce site. Apple has also removed apps from its App Store, web hosting services like Go Daddy have been known to deplatform websites, and email services such as Gmail may have disadvantaged certain messages based, in part, on their political content.

Applying the First Amendment in the way NetChoice proposes would undermine important protections against these and other forms of censorship.  

When asked how the state laws might affect his clients once applied, Clement told the court, “We’d have to fundamentally change our business models.” To this, most Americans might say “the sooner, the better.”

https://www.dailysignal.com/2024/02/26/censor-host-supreme-court-hears-social-media-platforms-free-speech-challenge-state-laws/

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My other blogs. Main ones below:

http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)

http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)

http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)

http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/ (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)

http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)

https://immigwatch.blogspot.com/ (IMMIGRATION WATCH)

https://awesternheart.blogspot.com/ (THE PSYCHOLOGIST)

http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs

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Tuesday, February 27, 2024

Government Censorship: How We Got Here


Until now, you likely haven’t heard of Mike Benz, nor visited his website, nor seen him on X. But if you watch Tucker Carlson’s recent hour-long interview with Benz, you’ll have a hard time getting him off your mind.

But don’t take our word for it. Here’s The Federalist’s normally sober-minded John Daniel Davidson: “If you didn’t see Tucker Carlson’s interview last week with Mike Benz, you need to take an hour and watch the whole thing. In a mind-bending narrative about the emergence of what Benz calls ‘military rule’ through an online censorship industry in the U.S., he lays out in startling detail just how corrupt and tyrannical the U.S. defense and foreign policy establishment has become.”

Benz, as his biography notes, “is a former State Department official with responsibilities in formulating and negotiating US foreign policy on international communications and information technology matters.” So he knows of what he speaks.

As Carlson noted in his introduction, our nation is great because of its First Amendment. “But that right,” he says, “that foundational right that makes this country what it is, that right from which all others flow, is going away at high speed.”

Carlson says that the censorship we’re experiencing isn’t being conducted by the private sector alone. As the Twitter Files made clear last year, the government has a heavy — and, we think it’s fair to say, unconstitutional — directorial hand in all this.

“How does censorship happen?” Carlson asks. “What are the mechanics of it?” Mike Benz, he says, is “the expert in the world on how this happens.”

The Internet, according to Benz, worked wonderfully from 1991 until around 2014 as “an instrument of statecraft.” During this period, he says, Internet freedom was a sort of rapid-response free-speech tool for use by our State Department and our NATO allies to help overthrow totalitarian regimes. But it reached its high-water mark with the Arab Spring in 2011 and 2012, during the so-called Facebook revolutions that occurred across the Arab world.

All that changed in 2014, when a coup in Ukraine was followed by a counter-coup. The former was favorable to the U.S. and its NATO allies, but the latter was unfavorable and resulted in the breaking away of Crimea and the Donbas region from Ukraine to Russia. Shortly thereafter, the Crimean annexation vote also went Russia’s way, and, as Benz puts it: “That was the last straw for the concept of free speech on the Internet in the eyes of NATO. As they saw it, the fundamental nature of war changed at that moment.”

The result of the Crimean vote was NATO’s adherence to the Gerasimov Doctrine, which was a Russian general’s assertion that a nation needn’t necessarily win land wars to influence nations and thereby take territory. Instead, the focus should be on control of the media — and especially social media — because that’s what decides elections.

That’s how this modern-day “Department of Dirty Tricks” — this hybrid warfare conducted across State, Defense, and the intelligence services — was born. From there, as Benz notes, it wasn’t much of a leap to go from using social media to fight Russian propaganda in Europe to using it against Donald Trump with Crossfire Hurricane, and four years later with the suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop story, as well as fighting COVID apostasy in 2020 and beyond.

Since then, the Internet has done a 180 on free speech and has instead become a tool for speech suppression. Since then, the Internet has been used by our military in collusion with the State Department to censor Russian propaganda and also the communications of right-wing populist groups in Europe, which were growing in power and fury due to the crisis of runaway immigration from the Middle East and Africa. Then came Brexit in June 2016 and the fear that it would be followed domino-like by populist uprisings across Europe. And that’s when the Censorship Industrial Complex crossed the pond to the U.S.

Benz says that some 60 universities — including Stanford and the University of Washington — now have federally funded analysis organizations within them whose main focus is to monitor social media for trending language that threatens the approved narrative. From there, these organizations build “code books” of certain words and phrases, which they then use to censor tens of millions of social media messages with a few lines of code. Diabolical, no?

When a slack-jawed Carlson stopped Benz to ask whether the Defense Department was involved in censoring American citizens during and around the 2020 election, Benz nodded and said, “The two most censored events in human history, I would argue, to date, are the 2020 election and the COVID-19 pandemic.”

That the 2020 election was rigged for Joe Biden should deeply trouble the masses, but by now it shouldn’t shock anyone. What Benz reveals, though, are the blueprints. This “pre-censorship” regimen, says Benz, was conducted across 15 social media platforms and hundreds of millions of posts. He said flagged messages were “scanned and banned,” “throttled,” or had “frictions” attached to them in the form of “fact-checks,” which made it more difficult to share them.

“What I’m essentially describing,” says Benz, “is military rule.”

Thus, the rise of democratic populism became a call to arms for the Censorship Industrial Complex. As Benz puts it:

The whole push after the 2016 election was to completely invert everything we’ve described as being the underpinnings of a democratic society in order to deal with the threat of free speech on the Internet. And what they essentially said was, “We need to redefine democracy from being about the will of the voters to being about the sanctity of democratic institutions.”

All this is a lot to process and digest, but it’s about our right to speak freely, and it’s thus critical to the survival of the American Experiment. As The Federalist’s Davidson puts it, the essence is fairly simple:

Those who have power don’t want to be held accountable by the unwashed masses, by “populism,” and certainly not by the results of free and fair elections. They will not tolerate anyone, not even a duly elected president, going against the “interagency consensus” — that famous phrase of Alexander Vindman’s from the first Trump impeachment. They don’t think the people have that right, and they intend to use every tool they have to protect their power and privilege.

How does the world’s foremost champion of free speech, Elon Musk, fit into all this? Benz says the censorship industry and the national security state have him in their sights. He says they’re trying to “induce, I think, a sort of corporate regime-change through … a sort of death by a thousand paper cuts. I think there are seven or eight different Justice Department, or SEC, or FTC investigations into Elon Musk properties that all started after his acquisition of X.”

Benz says the censors are hitting Musk in Europe first, where the EU, which he says is a proxy for NATO, has conveniently banned “disinformation,” and where X has 450 million users, far more than the 300 million it has in the U.S.

We know Musk has the world’s deepest pockets. For the sake of free speech, both in the United States and abroad, we hope he also has some really good lawyers.

https://patriotpost.us/articles/104620

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My other blogs. Main ones below:

http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)

http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)

http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)

http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/ (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)

http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)

https://immigwatch.blogspot.com/ (IMMIGRATION WATCH)

https://awesternheart.blogspot.com/ (THE PSYCHOLOGIST)

http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs

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Monday, February 26, 2024

Canadian School Board Facing More Legal Action for Allegedly Censoring Public


A British Columbia school board, already facing legal action for allegedly restricting speech during its public meetings, may soon see additional civil suits, as both a current and a former trustee are making similar accusations.

The development is part of a trend that has seen pro-parental rights trustees, teachers, and members of the public reporting they were silenced at school board meetings.

Darrell Furgason served as a trustee with the Chilliwack School District from 2018 to 2022, and continues to attend most board meetings as a member of the public since losing his re-election bid.

Mr. Furgason says that when he spoke at a public meeting in October 2023 and again on Feb. 13 this year, school board chair Willow Reichelt repeatedly muted his microphone, a move he believes was arbitrary and unwarranted. And now he plans to sue.

“There’s chunks of it missing on that video—her statements, my statements—and I do believe that’s a violation of their role as elected officials to just mute themselves when they don’t feel happy,” he said.

“They’ve done it twice to me and you'd think Willow [Reichelt] would learn? No, they don’t learn, so I decided I’m going to launch a lawsuit against the board and I’ve got video evidence. I’m going after them. There’s only one thing they’ll listen to and that’s the law.”

In October 2023, a lawsuit was launched by Lynda di Armani, a grandmother and former education assistant who says she was unable to comment without being censored during public meetings. She told The Epoch Times that since initiating her lawsuit, she has been given more opportunity to speak than before but still gets muted, with the chair saying she strays off-topic.

“You’re only allowed to talk about things that are on the agenda and they make really strict rules, so they used to cut me off all the time,“ she said. ”And they’ve shut down meetings. They will shut down a meeting for five minutes if they don’t like what you’re saying. This board is very left-wing

https://www.theepochtimes.com/world/chilliwack-bc-school-board-facing-more-legal-action-for-allegedly-censoring-public-5593359

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My other blogs. Main ones below:

http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)

http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)

http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)

http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/ (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)

http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)

https://immigwatch.blogspot.com/ (IMMIGRATION WATCH)

https://awesternheart.blogspot.com/ (THE PSYCHOLOGIST)

http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs

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Sunday, February 25, 2024

An Argument for Free Speech, the “Lifeblood of Democracy”


Michael Glennon, professor of constitutional and international law at The Fletcher School, has been troubled by a growing trend to censor speech, from college campuses to social media to the halls of government itself. In a provocative new book, "Free Speech and Turbulent Freedom: The Dangerous Allure of Censorship in the Digital Era", he argues that such bans—while often well-meaning—are almost always counterproductive, creating more problems than they solve.

The book’s sweeping argument runs from 19th-century Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., who set the foundations of First Amendment law, all the way to the most recent social media controversies.

Glennon spoke with Tufts Now about the importance of free speech and why he believes a “marketplace of ideas” is the best antidote to tyranny.

Q: In your introduction, you describe the change you’ve observed in students over the last few years when it comes to free speech. How did that inspire you to write this book?

A: Students’ attitudes toward free speech have changed dramatically. Nationwide, over half of college students believe that schools shouldn’t allow a speaker on campus who has previously expressed ideas they intensely dislike, and over 30 percent believe it’s acceptable to drown out speakers to prevent them from speaking.

Many of these students think that suppressing free speech is somehow necessary to preserve democracy. I wrote the book to suggest that this view is profoundly and dangerously mistaken.

Freedom of speech is the lifeblood of democracy. They both rest on the same premise: that people are able to sort out for themselves what’s true and what’s false, and that it’s for individuals, not the government, to judge what’s in their own best interests.

https://now.tufts.edu/2024/02/20/argument-free-speech-lifeblood-democracy

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My other blogs. Main ones below:

http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)

http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)

http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)

http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/ (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)

http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)

https://immigwatch.blogspot.com/ (IMMIGRATION WATCH)

https://awesternheart.blogspot.com/ (THE PSYCHOLOGIST)

http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs

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Thursday, February 22, 2024

When is "Zionist" hate speech?


Meta is considering expanding and “revisiting” its hate speech policy around the term “Zionist”, the Guardian has confirmed. The company reached out to and met with more than 10 Arab, Muslim and pro-Palestinian organizations on Friday to discuss the company’s plans to review the policy to ensure the term “Zionist” is not being used as a proxy for Jewish or Israeli people, according to an email the Guardian reviewed.

The policy as it exists allows “Zionist” to be used in “political discourse but removed when it’s used explicitly as a proxy for Jews or Israelis in a dehumanizing or violent way”, according to an email a Meta representative sent to the organizations inviting them to the Friday meeting. The email further stated the company was considering reviewing it in light of posts users and “stakeholders” have recently reported, the Meta representative wrote. The Intercept first reported the potential change in policy.

In an email to another organization, the Meta representative said the company’s current policies don’t allow users to attack others based on their protected characteristics such as nationality or religion and that the policy “requires a current understanding of how people use language to reference those characteristics”.

“While the term ‘Zionist’ often refers to a person’s ideology, which is not a protected characteristic, it can also be used to refer to Jewish or Israeli people,” the email read. “Given the increase in polarized public discourse due to current events in the Middle East, we believe it’s important to assess our guidance for reviewing posts that use the term ‘Zionist.’”

Organizations involved in discussions, which include MPower Change, 7amleh and Jewish Voice for Peace, expressed deep concern in the meeting about whether this change would further censor pro-Palestinian voices. Several reports commissioned by 7amleh and Human Rights Watch as well as one commissioned by Meta confirmed that Palestinian accounts have long been systematically silenced and stifled on Meta-owned platforms.

However, Meta asserts that an independent consultancy it works with, BSR, “did raise important concerns around under-enforcement of content ... and specific instances where they considered our policies and processes had an unintentional impact on Palestinian and Arab communities”.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2024/feb/09/meta-hate-speech-policy-zionist-censorship-pro-palestine-content

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My other blogs. Main ones below:

http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)

http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)

http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)

http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/ (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)

http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)

https://immigwatch.blogspot.com/ (IMMIGRATION WATCH)

https://awesternheart.blogspot.com/ (THE PSYCHOLOGIST)

http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs

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Wednesday, February 21, 2024

100+ Yale professors sign up to protect free speech — and save school from being a hot mess

Elite higher education is a hot mess. But at least someone in the belly of the beast is trying to change that.

As campuses explode with bigotry and illiberalism, Yale professors are banding together to form a coalition defending academic freedom and free speech.

They’re the latest to join a growing movement across the country. Faculty at Columbia, Dartmouth, Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania, Princeton and the University of Chicago have all formed similar groups over the past year.

The latest initiative out of New Haven, called Faculty for Yale, has garnered the signatures of more than 100 professors who agree that “Yale must rededicate itself to its fundamental mission: to preserve, produce, and transmit knowledge.”

The group is calling for a reaffirmation of free speech principles, greater transparency from the administration and institutional neutrality.

Sterling Professor of Social and Natural Science Nicholas Christakis is one of the groups’ organizers. He told The Post that what started with a dozen professors in December has blossomed into a university-wide coalition.

“Increasingly, universities have lost their way, and our objective is to get our university to refocus on its fundamental mission,” he told The Post.

Faculty for Yale is calling on the school to cease making institutional statements about contentious social and political issues: “Some people want the university to take stands. But of course these people always imagine that the university will take political stands that they support. They never consider the alternative.”

Advocates for institutional neutrality say schools shouldn’t be taking stances — and that, had administrators not set a precedent by commenting on everything from Trump’s election to Kyle Rittenhouse’s acquittal, their silence in the wake of October 7’s Hamas attacks on Israel wouldn’t have been so deafening.

The group formed after several illiberal skirmishes at Yale. In 2022, students shouted down a bipartisan panel on free speech and were so disruptive that a police escort was required. The year before, a law student was also threatened by administrators for using the term “trap house” in a party invitation.

“The alienation from the fundamental mission is leading to all these other problems — the suppression of speech, the constraints on academic freedom, the loss of public confidence, the growth of the bureaucracy,” Christakis explained. “All of those are symptoms of the underlying disease.”

“I’ve been concerned about students’ comfort with speaking out generally, including in classes,” she told The Post. “I’m someone who is relatively comfortable speaking out, but I’m doing this very much on behalf of my students.”

According to polling data from the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), the state of free speech at Yale is grim. Some 73% of students say that they feel pressure to avoid discussing controversial topics, meanwhile a third say that using violence to stop speech is at least sometimes acceptable.

Adams has noticed a general degradation of free speech principles over her twenty years at Yale: “It’s been coming on somewhat gradually over the years … Today, free speech is of a delicate nature at universities and colleges.”

Christakis and Adams agree academia has reached an inflection point in the wake of October 7, when the chaos and extremism that erupted on college campuses — and particularly elite ones — exploded in a fashion that was impossible to ignore.

It became glaringly obvious to donors alumni, and the general public that these schools have lost sight of their mission, and have been inculcating extremism in students rather than classical values.

“I think a lot was crystallized by the transparent hypocrisy after the Hamas attack, and I do sense a change,” Christakis said.

Both professors hope that more faculty coalitions will emerge across academia — and they should.

As public faith in higher education craters, professors taking a stand in defense of liberal education might be the only way to reverse the trend. Where administrators and university presidents fail, it’s incumbent upon faculty to reorient colleges in the pursuit of truth and free expression.

But, while he’s heartened by the growing movement, Christakis is cautious about being too optimistic about the uphill battle for free speech. “I think there’s something up in academia, but whether it’s enough to turn the tide, I don’t know.”

https://nypost.com/2024/02/20/us-news/more-than-100-yale-professors-sign-up-to-protect-free-speech/

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My other blogs. Main ones below:

http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)

http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)

http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)

http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/ (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)

http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)

https://immigwatch.blogspot.com/ (IMMIGRATION WATCH)

https://awesternheart.blogspot.com/ (THE PSYCHOLOGIST)

http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs

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Tuesday, February 20, 2024

‘Article Pfizer’ – France to punish criticism of mRNA vaccines


France, the nation that likes to boast about its approach to liberty and free speech, has passed a law through the National Assembly on Valentine’s Day that appears to impose severe penalties on those who criticise mRNA vaccines.

According to The People’s Network:

‘As of today, criticism of such therapeutic treatments, when deemed obligatory or recommended by the state, could result in up to three years of imprisonment or a fine of 45,000 euros. This bold legislative step, quickly dubbed ‘Article Pfizer’ by critics, represents a significant shift in the balance between public health policy and individual freedom of expression.’

As the LCP explains:

‘Article 4 creates a new offence aimed at punishing “provocation to abandon or refrain from undergoing therapeutic or prophylactic medical treatment”.’

In other words, opposition is considered a ‘sectarian aberration’.

Considering the law is particularly concerned with those who speak against government-recommended mRNA vaccines, and individuals who encourage others to avoid taking them, the natural follow-up question is, ‘Why is the government so desperate for people to take mRNA vaccines?’

It’s not as if the Covid era has delivered a glowing report on the safety and efficacy of mRNA technology. If anything, the fallout continues with serious questions being asked surrounding the rise in excess deaths and otherwise unexplained jumps in heart conditions, strokes, and conditions that have been linked to mRNA vaccine side-effect reports. Nations such as the UK have Covid vaccine compensation schemes already paying out small fortunes to the victims of adverse reactions. Not what you would call a glowing endorsement.

Is mRNA a safe technology? We don’t know – and neither does the French government.

Even if mRNA technology could be proven as 100 per cent safe, criminalising medical liberty is a worrying step in a totalitarian direction for a nation already in trouble for leaning toward draconian measures in other aspects of the nation. It is not as if Paris has been held under siege by the farming community for the best part of a month for failing to listen to citizen concerns…

The excuse given by the creators of the law is that it has been created in the interest of fighting future pandemics and protecting public health. Aside from real-world data suggesting mRNA vaccines did little, if anything, to combat the transmission of Covid – which is the only argument possible when toying with abolishing consent for the greater good – surely the best way to fight the next pandemic is to address gain of function experiments and other dangerous lab work which continues to go on around the world? This would include incidents like what happened in Wuhan earlier this year when a lab created a ‘zombie’ version of the Covid virus.

Regardless of your personal feelings toward mRNA technology, you might imagine that introducing criminal penalties to combat medical criticism would spark a major debate. It didn’t. France, like its Western and European counterparts, is still in the ‘yes men’ phase of nodding Covid-based policy through. It’s as if they are suffering a hangover from the disease of power experienced as a fever among politicians during Covid.

Aligning effective medical mandates to lucrative pharmaceutical products represents a significant shift in the concept of privacy and body autonomy.

Articles critical of the decision have asked what this says about the influence of Big Pharma on public policy… Is there an mRNA experimental vaccine on the horizon they want us to take against our will? Are we placing drug companies beyond the scope of public criticism?

This represents a worrying global precedent.

Since when did ‘science’ need to shelter under the protection of government authority? Most will agree, this is another abuse of the ‘greater good’ ideology slowly eating away the dream that was ‘liberty’.

https://www.spectator.com.au/2024/02/article-pfizer-france-to-punish-criticism-of-mrna-vaccines/

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My other blogs. Main ones below:

http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)

http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)

http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)

http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/ (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)

http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)

https://immigwatch.blogspot.com/ (IMMIGRATION WATCH)

https://awesternheart.blogspot.com/ (THE PSYCHOLOGIST)

http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs

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Monday, February 19, 2024

Italy: Must not defend Israel


After five people were hospitalised on Tuesday in Naples, protesting over the Italian public broadcaster Rai’s coverage of the humanitarian crisis and death toll in Gaza, more protests have been announced for Wednesday in Milan and for Thursday in Bologna.

Five policemen were also injured in the clashes, according to reports. In videos, the protestors are seen moving towards the gate outside Rai’s headquarters in Naples, allegedly to hang a banner.

Access to the gate was blocked by police who attacked the protesters with truncheons. Clashes also happened in Turin. The number of people injured in Turin is not clear, but police identified more than 50 protesters.

The protests follow a statement by Rai’s CEO, Roberto Sergio, read by TV host Mara Venier during her program on Sunday, Domenica In. In it Sergio expressed solidarity with Israel and its “right to defence”, criticising singers Ghali and Dargen D’Amico’s who had called for a ceasefire and accused Israel of “genocide” from Sanremo’s stage on Saturday, the night of the final of Italy’s most important music festival.

https://balkaninsight.com/2024/02/14/italians-protests-national-broadcaster-censorship-of-humanitarian-crisis-in-gaza/

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My other blogs. Main ones below:

http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)

http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)

http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)

http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/ (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)

http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)

https://immigwatch.blogspot.com/ (IMMIGRATION WATCH)

https://awesternheart.blogspot.com/ (THE PSYCHOLOGIST)

http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs

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Sunday, February 18, 2024

The seventh-grader and the First Amendment


by Jeff Jacoby

WHEN LIAM MORRISON, a seventh-grader in Middleborough, showed up at Nichols Middle School last March wearing a T-shirt bearing the message "There Are Only Two Genders," he was ordered by the principal to take it off. He politely refused, so the principal suspended him from class for the rest of the day.

He subsequently came to school wearing the T-shirt with the word "Censored" taped over the original message, so that it read: "There Are [Censored] Genders." The principal, impervious to irony, told him that was banned too. He was allowed to return to class only after putting on a different shirt.

Morrison knew, of course, that the message on his shirt contradicted a view promoted at Nichols Middle School, where students are encouraged in June to "wear your Pride gear to celebrate Pride Month" and there is an active Gay-Straight Alliance club. What he may not have known is that by wearing something to express a view frowned on at his school, he was exercising a right for which another middle school student waged a famous fight half a century ago.

In a landmark decision in 1969, the Supreme Court upheld the right of Mary Beth Tinker, a 13-year-old junior high student in Des Moines, to wear a black armband to class in protest against the Vietnam War. Tinker and some other students decided to wear such armbands after attending an antiwar rally. When school officials learned of their plans, they adopted a policy banning students from wearing armbands on pain of suspension. Tinker and the others defied the policy and were barred from class. With help from the Iowa Civil Liberties Union, the students filed a lawsuit, claiming that the school district had violated their First Amendment right to peacefully express their views.

The trial and appellate courts backed the school board. But when the case reached the Supreme Court the justices ruled decisively the other way. Neither students nor teachers "shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech or expression at the schoolhouse gate," wrote Justice Abe Fortas for the majority in Tinker v. Des Moines. The students who donned armbands had been wrongly punished "for a silent, passive expression of opinion, unaccompanied by any disorder or disturbance on [their] part," the court held. The students had not interfered with school routine. They had not endangered "the rights of other students to be secure and to be let alone." They had merely expressed a view not everyone shared.

The justices emphasized that the Des Moines schools had not disciplined students who wore other "symbols of political or controversial significance." By prohibiting only an antiwar symbol, the schools plainly intended to suppress a particular viewpoint. That, the high court declared, "is not constitutionally permissible."

Now it's Morrison's free speech that is at stake. As in Des Moines, the school prevailed at the district court level. Federal Judge Indira Talwani ruled in June that Middleborough officials were permitted to silence Morrison's speech on the grounds that students who identify as transgender "have a right to attend school without being confronted by messages attacking their identities."

But Morrison attacked no one, nor implied that anyone should be attacked. His first T-shirt merely conveyed his general view that gender is binary. His second T-shirt didn't even do that — it noted only that his view on the subject had been censored.

Mary Beth Tinker (wearing her black armband) sits with her mother at a Des Moines, Iowa, school board meeting in 1965.

Now Morrison has turned to the US Court of Appeals for the First Circuit in Boston. His plea is like that of Mary Beth Tinker in the 1960s: Under the Constitution, even a middle school student may peacefully express an opinion. He is asking the judges to reaffirm the principle that government officers may not stifle certain ideas merely because some people find them offensive.

In court filings, Middleborough's lawyers argue that the school was entitled to suppress Morrison's message out of concern that it could have led to "disruption." Yet contrary messages are permitted. No discipline was imposed when a student came to class in a "He she they, it's all okay" T-shirt. School administrators cannot have it both ways, allowing students to express the popular side of a debatable issue but silencing those who disagree because their opinion might provoke an angry reaction.

The First Amendment does not bow to the heckler's veto. The expression of a disfavored opinion "may start an argument or cause a disturbance," the Supreme Court observed in Tinker, "but our Constitution says we must take this risk."

The bottom line is clear. Liam Morrison's school doesn't have to agree with his opinion. But it cannot punish him for expressing it.

https://jeffjacoby.com/27554/the-seventh-grader-and-the-first-amendment

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My other blogs. Main ones below:

http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)

http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)

http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)

http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/ (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)

http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)

https://immigwatch.blogspot.com/ (IMMIGRATION WATCH)

https://awesternheart.blogspot.com/ (THE PSYCHOLOGIST)

http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs

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