Maverick Philosopher

Footnotes to Plato from the foothills of the Superstition Mountains

Category: Free Speech

  • Safe Speech

    "No man speaketh safely but he that is glad to hold his peace. " (Thomas à Kempis, The Imitation of Christ, Chapter XX.) Excellent advice for Christian and non-Christian alike.  Much misery and misfortune can be avoided by simply keeping one's  mouth shut.  That playful banter with your female student that you could not resist indulging in…

  • Once Again: Dissent is not Hate

    'Liberals' have a strange tendency to conflate dissent with hate.  Obviously, if I dissent from what you maintain, it does not follow that I hate you.  And if I express my dissent in speech, it does not follow that my speech is 'hate speech.'  More here.  

  • Extend First Amendment Speech Protection to Twitter and Google?

    A tough bunch of issues. You figure it out.  For me to expatiate further would require doing homework I don’t have time for.  No job, no kids, no social commitments, no time! Related: Free Speech: PragerU sues Google  

  • Free Speech: PragerU Sues Google

    It is surely an outrage that Google would limit access to PragerU videos on YouTube given their high quality and educational value. So it is good news that Dennis Prager is punching back with a lawsuit: The lawsuit, filed in federal court in California, details upwards of 50 PragerU educational videos that YouTube has, in…

  • Robert Spencer’s Ban from the U.K.

    The following from a London correspondent: Quite incredibly, Spencer is still banned from visiting the UK because of what he says in this short (2:07) YouTube video. The letter from the Home Office, then under the auspices of Theresa May, said: You are reported to have stated the following: >>It [Islam] is a religion and a…

  • Coded Speech and the Hermeneutics of Suspicion

    To understand the Left you have to understand that central to their worldview is the hermeneutics of suspicion which is essentially a diluted amalgam of themes from Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud. Thus nothing has the plain meaning that it has; every meaning must be deconstructed so as to lay bare its 'real meaning.' Nothing is…

  • Heterodox Academy

    We are a politically diverse group of social scientists, natural scientists, humanists, and other scholars who want to improve our academic disciplines and universities. We share a concern about a growing problem: the loss or lack of “viewpoint diversity.” When nearly everyone in a field shares the same political orientation, certain ideas become orthodoxy, dissent…

  • What Ever Happened to Mario Savio? From Free Speech to No Speech

    Well, he died at age 53 in 1996.  Some of us are old enough to remember Mario Savio and the 1964 Free Speech Movement. Unfortunately, the young radicals of those days, many of whom had a legitimate point or two against the Establishment, began the "long march through the institutions" and are now the Establishment, still…

  • The Left versus Free Speech

    By the way, it is important not to forget that the rights enshrined, not conferred, by the First Amendment find their concrete, real-world, back-up in the rights, not conferred, but enshrined in the Second Amendment. This is why it is so important who sits on SCOTUS. Donald Trump and his team have accomplished a lot…

  • Hate Speech

    There's no such thing. Glenn Reynolds talks sense against such liberal knuckleheads as Howard Dean: The other hallmark of constitutional illiteracy is the claim that the First Amendment doesn’t protect “hate speech.” And by making that claim last week, Howard Dean, former governor of Vermont and Democratic presidential candidate, revealed himself to be a constitutional…

  • Middlebury Shouts Down Charles Murray

    Here: It’s been exactly 40 years since my late wife and I quit as English profs at Middlebury College, where hundreds of screaming students wouldn’t allow Charles Murray, one of the nation’s foremost conservative intellectuals, to speak to them yesterday, as a campus conservative group had invited him to do. See also The Middlebury Meltdown.

  • Why Milo Scares Students and Faculty Even More

    Here

  • Sunday Cat Blogging!

    Pussy riot, American style. An impotent response to Inaugural balls. Cultural polluter Madonna has crowned herself poster girl of the pussy riot. Destructive leftists will justify as free speech her border-line incitement to violence.  But the right to free speech is not absolute. Observations on Free Speech, #9: 9. To say that the right to…

  • The Right to Free Speech is Unalienable

    This important point is explained clearly here: We do not derive our right to freedom of speech from the Constitution. More specifically, it does not “come from” the First Amendment. [. . .] The Constitution is not the source of our right to freedom of speech because freedom of speech is an unalienable right. What…

  • You Know Free Speech is on the Wane . . .

    . . . when YouTube restricts access to the wholesome and avuncular and innocuous Dennis Prager.  Well, maybe he is not so harmless in the eyes of a leftist: he defends traditional American values. If Hillary wins, free speech will come under increasingly vicious attack. Don't forget: the Left thinks it owns dissent. Conservative dissent,…