Maverick Philosopher

Footnotes to Plato from the foothills of the Superstition Mountains

Category: Free Speech

  • Je Suis Charlie?

    In reaction to the murderous attack by Muslim terrorists on Charbonnier and Co. at the offices of Charlie Hebdo in Paris, many have jumped on the "I am Charlie" bandwagon.  It is quite understandable.  But perhaps a little thought should be given to the question whether one ought to endorse a political pornographer who publishes…

  • Intolerance for Free Expression Rooted in Classical Islam

    Andrew C. McCarthy maintains.

  • A Dog Named ‘Muhammad’

      There is a sleazy singer who calls herself 'Madonna.'  That moniker is offensive to many.  But we in the West are tolerant, perhaps excessively so, and we tolerate the singer, her name, and her antics.  Muslims need to understand the premium we place on toleration if they want to live among us.  A San Juan Capistrano councilman named his…

  • Conservative Marquette Poly Sci Prof Suspended for Blogging

    Via John Pepple, I just learned that John McAdams, a tenured associate professor of political science at Marquette University, has been suspended with pay and barred from campus for criticizing a graduate student philosophy teacher who shut down a classroom conversation on gay marriage.  As McAdams puts it at his weblog Marquette Warrior: It created…

  • The New Threats to Free Speech

    Here. 

  • The Orwellian Inversion of the Free Speech Movement

    We are coming up on the 50th anniversary of the Free Speech Movement  spearheaded by Mario Savio at the University of California,  Berkeley.  Sol Stern remembers in The Unfree Speech Movement.

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

    Some of us are old enough to remember Mario Savio and the 1964 Free Speech Movement.  But then 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 fancying that they are "speaking truth…

  • 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…

  • Gun Control and Speech Control

    A reasonable person advocates both, but limited  versions of both.  Liberals, however, tend not to be reasonable.  If they interpreted the Second Amendment in as extreme fashion as they do the First, gun ownership would be mandatory.

  • Should Newspapers ‘Out’ Those With Whom They Disagree?

    Which is morally worse, killing a pre-natal human being or keeping a loaded gun in the house for self-defense?  The former, obviously.  Both abortion and gun ownership are legal, but one would have to be singularly benighted to think that the keeping is morally worse than the killing, or even morally commensurable with it, let alone…

  • Speech and Guns

    It is time to trot out my old gun posts to counteract the tsunami of leftist Unsinn washing over us because of the recent massacres in Oregon and Connecticut.  Here is one from December of 2010, slightly revised. ……………. How should we deal with offensive speech? As a first resort, with more speech, better, truer,…

  • Am I a Raving Liberal? The Problem of Ideological Extremism

    I happened across a post from a couple of years ago on a defunct blog named Throne and Altar.  For some reason the post's title drew me in: Another Casualty: Maverick Philosopher Embraces Tolerance.  The author, one "bonaldo," claims that Islam has turned me into "a raving liberal."  The entry of mine that drew his…

  • The Danger of Appeasing the Intolerant

    What follows is a slightly redacted post from three years ago whose message bears repeating, especially since Barack the Appeaser, Barack the Bower-and-Scraper, has been reelected. …………. Should we tolerate the intolerant? Should we, in the words of Leszek Kolakowski, . . . tolerate political or religious movements which are hostile to tolerance and seek…

  • National Public Radio and Big Bird Need Your Support!

    This is something I wrote 10 March 2011.  The points still hold and the piece is relevant because of Governor Romney's 'attack' on Big Bird in his first debate with President Obama.  Lefties have a hard time understanding why we mean-spirited conservatives would want to deny such a loveable critter Federal bird seed.  Maybe this will…

  • A Free Press?

    Victor Davis Hanson: There is not really any free press anymore, but instead a Ministry of Truth, in which PBS, NPR, the New York Times, the Washington Post, CBS, ABC, NBC, MSNBC, CNN, Newsweek, Time, AP, McClatchy, and Reuters are de facto extensions of the Obama campaign — far more highbrow and adept in disguising…