Free Speech – Page 9 – Maverick Philosopher

A Free Press?

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 their partisanship than an overt Hannity or Limbaugh. Their “journalists” are fed favorable administration leaks when in the old days they had to sue to publish a hit piece. They care little whether ambassadors are left unguarded, or that the U.S. suffers the most costly attack on its air assets since Vietnam, or that administration officials offer lies about Libya that they know cannot be true.

"Ministry of Truth" is an allusion to an eponymous agency in Orwell's 1984. Hannity and Limbaugh announce their conservative tilt; the lamestream media shills mendaciously refuse to admit their bias.

Islam is a Radical Threat to Free Speech

Diana West:

It’s important to realize sharia’s prohibition of criticism of Islam is basic Islam: There is nothing “radical” about it. Indeed, it is this basic Islamic censorship that is at the crux of why Islam itself — not “Islamism,” not “radical Islam,” not “Islamists,” but Islam — is an existential threat to the survival of any free society. It is why free societies, once penetrated by a Muslim demographic over 1 percent, begin to lose their liberties as a means of “accommodating” — appeasing — their new Islamic populations.

Regulating Political Speech

A good article by John Stossel. Punch line:

It is shameful that leftists let their hatred of corporations lead them to throw free speech under the bus. There is a smarter way to get corporate money out of politics: Shrink the state. If government has fewer favors to sell, citizens will spend less money trying to win them.

Or as one of my aphorisms has it: The bigger the government, the more to fight over!

A Prime Instance of Political Correctness: The Blackballing of Nat Hentoff

Nat Hentoff is a civil libertarian and a liberal in an older and respectable sense of the term. He thinks for himself and follows the arguments and evidence where they lead. So what do contemporary politically correct liberals do? They attack him. His coming out against abortion particularly infuriated them. Mark Judge comments:

Hentoff's liberal friends didn't appreciate his conversion: "They were saying, 'What's the big fuss about? If the parents had known she was going to come in this way, they would have had an abortion. So why don't you consider it a late abortion and go on to something else?' Here were liberals, decent people, fully convinced themselves that they were for individual rights and liberties but willing to send into eternity these infants because they were imperfect, inconvenient, costly. I saw the same attitude on the part of the same kinds of people toward abortion, and I thought it was pretty horrifying."

The reaction from America's corrupt fourth estate was instant. Hentoff, a Guggenheim fellow and author of dozens of books, was a pariah. Several of his colleagues at the Village Voice, which had run his column since the 1950s, stopped talking to him. When the National Press Foundation wanted to give him a lifetime achievement award, there was a bitter debate amongst members whether Hentoff should even be honored (he was). Then they stopped running his columns. You heard his name less and less. In December 2008, the Village Voice officially let him go.

When journalist Dan Rather was revealed to have poor news judgment, if not outright malice, for using fake documents to try and change the course of a presidential election, he was given a new TV show and a book deal — not to mention a guest spot on The Daily Show. The media has even attempted a resuscitation of anti-Semite Helen Thomas, who was recently interviewed in Playboy.

By accepting the truth about abortion, and telling that truth, Nat Hentoff may be met with silence by his peers when he goes to his reward. The shame will be theirs, not his.

Hats Off to Hentoff: Abortion and Obama

Hats Off to Hentoff: "Pols Clueless on Ground Zero Mosque"

Nat Hentoff on 'Hate Crime' Laws

Helen Thomas Disgraces Herself

Hentoff thinks that one cannot consistently oppose abortion and support capital punishment. I believe he is quite mistaken about that.

Fetal Rights and the Death Penalty: Consistent or Inconsistent?

First John Derbyshire, then Naomi Riley

John Fund in Censoring Naomi Riley comments on the latter's dismissal by the The Chronicle of Higher Education:

Earlier this week, the Chronicle of Higher Education, the trade paper for faculty members and administrators in universities, fired Naomi Schaefer Riley, a paid blogger for its website. Her crime? She had the courage to respond to a Chronicle story called “Black Studies: ‘Swaggering Into the Future,’” which stated that “young black-studies scholars . . . are less consumed than their predecessors with the need to validate the field or explain why they are pursuing doctorates in their discipline.” The article used five Ph.D. candidates as examples of those “rewriting the history of race.” Riley looked at the subject areas of the five proposed dissertations and concluded that they were “obscure at best . . . a collection of left-wing victimization claptrap at worst.”

John Fund goes on to make a number of obvious points in protest of the illiberalism of contemporary liberals.

But Fund neglects to comment on the irony of publishing his piece in National Review Online, which recently defenestrated John Derbyshire. (My posts on Derbyshire are in the Race category.) What makes it worse is that NRO is supposedly a conservative publication. We have a supposedly conservative publication publishing a piece that criticizes The Chronicle for dumping a blogger who bravely spoke her mind and expressed some unpleasant truths that many acknowledge but few have the courage to express. But this same publication did exactly the same thing to John Derbyshire. We expect craven acquiescence to race-baiters from politically correct liberals, but not from so-called conservatives such as Rich Lowry and Andrew McCarthy.

Why doesn't Fund stick up for Derbyshire? (Perhaps he has in some other venue.) I could be wrong, but Derbyshire is a more substantial commentator on the passing scene than the blogger Riley.

Chris Hedges on Pornography

Yesterday I said that there are some decent liberals. Having listened to a good chunk of a three-hour C-SPAN 2 interview with Chris Hedges this morning, I would say he is a good example of one. On some issues he agrees with conservatives, pornography being one of them. Both liberals and libertarians have to lot to answer for on this score. That the freedom of speech clause of the First Amendment could be so tortured as to justify pornography shows their lack of common sense and basic moral sense. This is made worse by the absurd interpretation they put upon the Establishment Clause of the same amendment which they take as sanctioning the complete expulsion of religion from the public square when it is religion that delivers in popular form the morality the absence of which allows the spread of soul-destroying pornography. Hedges has the sense, uncommon on the Left, to understand that the spread of this rot is a major factor in our decline as a nation.

The Victims of Pornography is a an excerpt from his latest book, Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle. (What a great title!)

And another thing. If liberals care about women, how can they defend pornography? Apparently they care only up to the point where it would cost them some agreement with conservatives who they hate more than they love women. Similarly, liberals are all for women, so long as they are not conservative women, as witness the unspeakably vicious attacks on Sarah Palin and Michelle Bachmann. Ed Schultz, prime-time scumbag, the other night was mocking Michelle Bachmann and gloating over her withdrawal from the presidential race. If he had an ounce of decency he would have praised her for being in the arena and participating courageously in the grueling process while respectfully disagreeing with her positions. But respect and decency are what you cannot expect from leftist scum of his ilk. You think my calling him a scumbag is too harsh? Then read this.

On Toleration: With a Little Help from Kolakowski

1. Toleration is the touchstone of classical liberalism, and there is no denying its value. Our doxastic predicament requires it of us. We have beliefs galore but precious little knowledge, especially as regards the large and enduring questions. Lacking knowledge, we must inquire. For that we need freedom of inquiry, and a social and political environment in which inquiry is, if not encouraged, at least allowed. But people who are convinced that they have the truth would stop us. "Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies." (Human All-Too-Human #483) This is typical Nietzschean exaggeration, but there is a sound point at its core: People who are convinced that they have the truth will not inquire whether it really is the truth. Worse, they will tend to impose their 'truth' on us and prevent our inquiry into truth. Many of them will not hesitate to suppress and murder their opponents.

My first point, then, is that toleration is a good because truth is a good. We must tolerate a diversity of views, and the people who maintain them, because we lack the truth and must find it, and to do so we must search. But we cannot search if we are under threat from fanatics and the intolerant. Freedom of inquiry and freedom of expression are important because truth is important.

This implies that we must tolerate many views and actions and people who are deeply offensive to us. The 'artist' Serrano of "Piss-Christ" notoriety is a good example. He has a right to express himself as he does, just as we have a right to protest against him. He has no right to taxpayer money, however, and any liberal who thinks that a refusal of government sponsorship amounts to censorship is an idiot pure and simple.

2. But how far does toleration extend? Ought one tolerate those who do not respect the principle of toleration? To me it is self-evident that one ought not. If toleration is truly a value, then one ought to demand it not only of oneself but of others. My toleration meets its limit in your intolerance. I cannot tolerate your intolerance, for if I do, I jeopardize the very principle of toleration, and with it the search for truth.

Radical Islam, in its fanaticism and murderous intolerance, has no claim on the West's tolerance. It is no breach of tolerance on our part to demand that they behave themselves. We must also demand of them that if they want to be tolerated, they must tolerate others, Jews for example. They must not be allowed to benefit from the West's tolerance in order to preach intolerance and hate. Just as they have right to their beliefs, we have a right to ours, and a right to enforce our beliefs about toleration on them if they would live in our midst.

3. Toleration is a value because truth is a value. A toleration worth wanting and having is therefore not to be confused with indifference towards truth, or relativism about truth. Leszek Kolakowski makes this point very well:

It is important to notice, however, that when tolerance is enjoined upon us nowadays, it is often in the sense of indifference: we are asked, in effect, to refrain from expressing — or indeed holding — any opinion, and sometimes even to condone every conceivable type of behaviour or opinion in others. This kind of tolerance is something entirely different, and demanding it is part of our hedonistic culture, in which nothing really matters to us; it is a philosophy of life without responsibility and without beliefs. It is encouraged by a variety of philosophies in fashion today, which teach us there is no such thing as truth in the traditional sense, and therefore that when we persist in our beliefs, even if we do so without aggression, we are ipso facto sinning against tolerance.

This is nonsense, and harmful nonsense. Contempt for truth harms our civilization no less than fanatical insistence on [what one takes to be] the truth. In addition, an indifferent majority clears the way for fanatics, of whom there will always be plenty around. Our civilization encourages the belief that everything should be just fun and games — as indeed it is in the infantile philosophies of the so-called 'New Age.' Their content is impossible to describe, for they mean anything one wants them to; that is what they are for. ("On Toleration" in Freedom, Fame, Lying, and Betrayal, Penguin 1999, pp. 36-37.)

4. To sum up. A toleration worth wanting and having is valuable because truth is valuable. It is threatened in two ways. It is threatened both by those who think that have the truth when they don't and those who are indifferent to truth. What is interesting is that the postmodernist nincompoops who deny truth in the name of toleration are powerless to oppose the fanatics who will impose their 'truth' by force. If all is relative, then the fanatics have all the justification they need to impose their 'truth' on us: it is true for them that they possess the absolute 'truth.'

Toleration Extremism: Notes on John Stuart Mill

Here are two passages from Chapter Two of John Stuart Mill's magnificent On Liberty (emphases added):

But the peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is, that it is robbing the human race; posterity as well as the existing generation; those who dissent from the opinion, still more than those who hold it. If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth: if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error. [. . .] We can never be sure that the opinion we are endeavouring to stifle is a false opinion; and if we were sure, stifling it would be an evil still.

[. . .]

Strange it is, that men should admit the validity of the arguments for free discussion, but object to their being "pushed to an extreme;" not seeing that unless the reasons are good for an extreme case, they are not good for any case. Strange that they should imagine that they are not assuming infallibility when they acknowledge that there should be free discussion on all subjects which can possibly be doubtful, but think that some particular principle or doctrine should be forbidden to be questioned because it is so certain, that is, because they are certain that it is certain. To call any proposition certain, while there is any one who would deny its certainty if permitted, but who is not permitted, is to assume that we ourselves, and those who agree with us, are the judges of certainty, and judges without hearing the other side.

Evaluation of the First Passage

As sympathetic as I am to Mill, I am puzzled (and you ought to be too) by the last sentence of the first quoted passage. It consists of two claims. The first is that " We can never be sure that the opinion we are endeavouring to stifle is a false opinion . . . ." This is plainly false! The opinion of some Holocaust deniers that no Jews were gassed at Auschwitz is an opinion we can be sure is false. We are as sure of this as we are sure of any empirical fact about the past. Or suppose some fool denies that JFK died by assasination or maintains that McCain won the last presidential election. Those are fools' opinions we know to be wrong. There is no lack of examples. What was Mill thinking? "We can never be sure," he writes. A modal auxiliary married to a negative universal quantifier! To refute a 'can never' statement all you need is one merely possible counterexample. Think about it.

Mill's second claim is that even if we are sure that an opinion we are trying to stifle is false, stifling it would nevertheless be an evil. Mill is here maintaining something so embarrassingly extreme that it borders on the preposterous. Consider again an actual or possible Holocaust denier who makes some outrageously false assertion that we know (if we know anything about the past) to be false. Suppose this individual has the means to spread his lies far and wide and suppose that his doing so is likely to incite a horde of radical Islamists to engage in an Islamist equivalent of Kristallnacht. Would it be evil to 'stifle' the individual in question? By no means. Indeed it could be reasonably argued that it is morally imperative that such an individual not be permitted to broadcast his lies.

How could anyone fail to see this? Perhaps because he harbors the notion that free expression is unconditionally worthwhile, worthwhile regardless of the content of what is being expressed, whether true or false, meaningful or meaningless, harmful or innocuous. Now I grant that freedom of expression, discussion, inquiry and the like are very high values. I'm an Enlightenment man after all, an American, and a philosopher. Argument and dialectic are the lifeblood of philosophy. But why do we value the freedom to speak, discuss, publish, and inquire?

I say that we value them because we value truth and because the freedom to speak, publish, discuss, and inquire are means conducive to the acquisition of truth and the rooting out of falsehood. It follows that we do not value them, or rather ought not value them, for their own sakes or unconditionally. We ought to accord them a high value only on condition that they, on balance, lead us to truth and away from falsehood.

So the Holocaust denier, who abuses the right to free speech to spread what we all know (if we know anything about the past) to be falsehoods, has no claim on our toleration. For again, there is no unconditional right to free expression. That right is limited by competing values, the value of truth being one of them. The value of social order is another.

As I see it, then, Mill makes two mistakes in his first passage. He fails to see that some opinions are known to be false. Now there may not be many such opinions, but all I need is one to refute him since he makes a universal claim. I will of course agree with Mill that many of the doctrines that people denounce as false, and will not examine, are not known to be false. The second mistake is to think that even if we know an opinion to be false we have no right to suppress its propagation.

Now of course I am not claiming that all, or even most, known falsehoods are such that their propagation ought to be suppressed. Let the Flat Earth Society propagate its falsehoods to its heart's content. For few take them seriously, and their falsehoods, though known to be falsehoods, are not sufficiently pernicious to warrant suppression. Obviously, government censorship or suppression of the expression of opinions must be employed only in very serious cases. This is because government, thought it is practically necessary and does do some good, does much evil and has a tremendous capacity for unspeakable evils. It was communist governments that murdered 100 million in the 20th century. And when the Nazis stripped Jews of their property and sent them to the Vernichtungslager, it was legal. (Think about that and about whether you want to persist in conflating the legal and the moral.)

Mill's mistake, as it seems to me, is that he allows NO cases where such suppression would be justified. And that is a position whose extremism condemns it. Toleration extremism, to give it a name.

Evaluation of the Second Passage

Mill only digs his hole deeper in the second passage. "Strange it is, that men should admit the validity of the arguments for free discussion, but object to their being "pushed to an extreme;" not seeing that unless the reasons are good for an extreme case, they are not good for any case." Surely the bolded principle is a bizarre one. Consider respect for human life. Respecting human life, we uphold a general prohibition against homicide. But it is not plausibly maintained there are no exceptions to this 'general' prohibition where the term does not mean 'exceptionless' but 'holding in most cases.' There are at least five putative classes of exceptions: killing in self-defence, killing in just war, capital punishment, abortion, and suicide. Now suppose someone were to apply Mill's principle (the one I bolded) and argues as follows: "Unless the reasons against killing humans are good for an extreme case, they are not good for any case." Would you not put such a person down as a doctrinaire fool? He holds that if it is wrong to kill human beings 'in general,' then it is wrong to kill any human being in any circumstance whatsoever. It would then follow that it is wrong to kill a home invader who has just murdered your wife and is about to do the same to you and your children. The mistake here is to take an otherwise excellent principle or precept (Do not kill human beings) and remove all restrictions on its application.

There are plenty of counterexamples to Mill's bizarre principle that "unless reasons are good for an extreme case, they are not good for any case."

We conservatives are lovers of liberty and we share common ground with our libertarian brethren, but here we must part company with them.

The Bigger the Government, the More to Fight Over: The NPR Case

An excellent illustration of this truth is the current brouhaha over the defunding of National Public Radio (NPR). Why is time and money being wasted debating this? The short answer is that government has assumed a function that is obviously inessential to it and arguably illegitimate. If government stuck to its essential tasks, one of which is obviously not public broadcasting, then we wouldn't be having this debate which is not only unproductive, but also distractive from truly pressing issues such as 'entitlement' reform. (A curious coinage, wouldn't you say? As if prosperous oldsters who, having had a lifetime to accumulate substantial net worth in a relatively stable political and economic environment, are entitled to intergenerational wealth transfer payments even in excess of what they have contributed plus a reasonable return.)

The quality of the NPR debate in the House of Representatives was truly depressing. (I have watched a good portion of it on C-SPAN — which is not supported by Federal dollars and is as objective as an media outlet gets.) It's as if the participants live on different planets. One expects liberals and their opponents (both conservatives and libertarians) to disagree about the role of government. But they can't even agree on the 'green eyeshade' issue. A sensible Republican gets upon and explains how the defunding of NPR will save taxpayers' dollars. Then a Dem rises to flatly deny that there will be any savings.

Liberals and conservatives will argue until doomsday about the size, scope, and legitimate functions of government. Those arguments are unavoidable and intractable due to profound axiological and philosophical differences. But one would have thought that agreement could be reached about simple economic facts. A husband and a wife might argue over whether the tax rebate should be spent on upgraded carpeting or on security doors. That would be par for the course. But if they argue about the size of the rebate or about whether or not cancelling their subscription to cable TV will save them x dollars per month,then they are in deep trouble and headed for divorce court.

The Dems are either lying or engaging in some other less blatant form of prevarication when they claim that defunding NPR will not affect the Federal budget deficit.

The liberal case is exceedingly weak, an indication being the rhetorical tricks and distortions liberals sink to. For example, Representative Louise Slaughter claimed that the Republicans are out to "destroy" NPR. See here at :34. That's an outright lie. Or is she so stupid as not to know that defunding a program which its own officers admit does not need Federal funding is not to destroy it? Contemptible. Another Dem claimed that the Republicans are ought to"silence" NPR. Another outright lie.

By the way, here is where civility meets a limit. One is under no obligation to be polite to a liar.

But Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee takes the cake. She claimed that defunding NPR is an affront to the First Amendment. How stupid can a liberal be? Apparently she thinks that the First Amendment protects a government-funded propaganda arm of the Left from the people when it is the other way around: the First Amendment protects the speech rights of the people against the government.

Of course, no liberal will admit his bias, either out of mendacity, or more likely, because he is simply incapable of seeing it. For a typical liberal, his view of the world is the world. Hence liberals are mostly incapable of seeing that NPR pushes a liberal-left point of view. The problem, again, is not that they have that point of view, but that they feel justified in using taxpayers' dollars to promote it. Part of the problem is that they do not understand how anyone could reasonably disagree with them.

The bigger the government, the more to fight over. Do you like pointless bickering? Then support an ever-expanding state.

For more on NPR, see here and here.

National Public Radio Needs Your Support!

If you like NPR programming, as I like some of it, write them a check! Just don't demand that they receive taxpayer support. At least not now. We are in fiscal crisis, and budgetary cuts must be made. If such inessentials as NPR, PBS, NEH and NEA cannot be defunded, where will the cuts be made? Think about it. If these small allocations cannot be zeroed out or placed on moratorium, how are we going to tackle entitlement reform?

So one good reason to defund NPR is that we cannot afford it.

Some think that a refusal of sponsorship amounts to censorship. But that is stupidity pure and simple and duly refuted here.

But even if we could afford it, NPR in its present configuration should not receive Federal support. And this for the simple reason that it is plainly a propaganda arm of the Left. Now that should be obvious to anyone who has been following current events, including the firing of Juan Williams, the exposure and sacking of the two Schillers, etc. If you deny the Leftward tilt of NPR in its present incarnation, then you are delusional and not worth talking to. So let's assume that you are sane and admit the bias. The next question is whether you think it is morally right that tax dollars be used to push points of view that most of us in this conservative land find objectionable. I say that it it is not morally right that you take my money by force and then use it for a purpose that is not only inessential and unconnected to the necessary functions of government, but also violates my beliefs.

Perhaps, if NPR were balanced like C-SPAN, it could be tolerated in times of plenty. But we are not in times of plenty and it is not balanced.

So that is my second reason for defunding NPR.

Note that a reasonable liberal could accept my two reasons. I am not arguing that government must not engage in any projects other than those that are strictly essential such as those connected to the protection of life, liberty, and property (the Lockean triad). I leave that question open for the space of this post. I am arguing that present facts dictate that defunding NPR is something we ought to do.

I love Garrison Keillor and his "Prarie Home Companion" and tune in whenever I can. "Guy Noir" is one of my favorite bits. So I hope NPR stays on the air — on its own fiscal steam. Hell, if they wean themselves from the mammaries of massive Mama Obama Government I may even send them a check myself! And the same goes for PBS.

Sponsorship and Censorship

Lefties often conflate lack of sponsorship with censorship when it suits them. It is not that they are too dense to grasp the distinction, but that they willfully ignore it for their ideological purposes. If a government agency refuses to sponsor your art project, it does not follow that you are being censored. To censor is to suppress. But there is nothing suppressive about a refusal to fund.

If you are a serious artist, you will find a way to satisfy your muse. On the other hand, if you expect to dip into the public trough, be prepared to find some strings attached to your grant. Don't expect the tax dollars of truck drivers and waitresses to subsidize your violation of their beliefs.

Speech and Guns

How should we deal with offensive speech? As a first resort, with more speech, better, truer, more responsible speech. Censorship cannot be ruled out, but it must be a last resort. We should respond similarly to the misuse of firearms. Banning firearms is no solution since (i) bans have no effect on criminals who, in virtue of being criminals, have no respect for law, and (ii) bans violate the liberty of the law-abiding. To punish the law-abiding while failing vigorously to pursue scofflaws is the way of the contemporary liberal. The problem is not guns, but guns in criminal hands. Ted Kennedy's car has killed more people than my gun. The solution, or part of it, is guns in law-abiding hands.

Would an armed citizen in the vicinity of the Virginia Polytechnic shooter have been able to reduce his carnage? It is likely. Don't ask me how likely. Of course, there is the chance that an armed citizen in the confusion of the moment would have made things worse. Who knows?

But if you value liberty then you will be willing to take the risk. As I understand it, the Commonwealth of Virginia already has a concealed carry law. Now if you trust a citizen to carry a concelaed weapon off campus, why not trust him to carry it on campus? After all, on campus there is far less likelihood of a situation arising where the weapon would be needed. Conservatives place a high value on self-reliance, individual liberty, and individual responsibility. Valuing self-reliance and liberty, a conservative will oppose any attempt to limit his self-reliance by infringing his right to defend himself, a right from which one may infer the right to own a handgun. (As I argue elsewhere; see the category Alcohol,Tobacco and Firearms.) And appreciating as he does the reality and importance of individual responsibility, he will oppose liberal efforts to blame guns for the crimes committed by people using guns.

Nothing I have written will convince a committed liberal. (As I have argued elsewhere, the differences are rooted in value-differences that cannot be rationally adjudicated.) But my intention is not to try to enlighten the terminally benighted; my intention is to clarify the issue.

Persuasion and agreement are well-nigh impossible to attain; clarification, however, is a goal well within reach.

Legality and Propriety: What One Has a Right to Do is Not Always Right to Do

What do the following have in common: Flag burning, Koran burning, suspending a crucifix in urine and calling it art, building a mosque near Ground Zero, calling a black person 'nigger,' affixing a 'Fuck Your Honor Student' bumpersticker on your car?

They are all offensive, but they are all legal.

Flag burning. If you steal my flag and burn it, then you violate my property rights and do something illegal. If you burn a public flag, then that is illegal on grounds of vandalism. If you burn a flag you own but in a way that causes a public disturbance or endangers members of the public, then those acts fall under other existing statutes. But if you buy an American flag and burn it on your property, then you are within your legal rights. You are in the vast majority of cases a contemptible punk if you do so, and I have a right to my opinion on this score. But you are within the law. That is why calls for a flag-burning (or rather anti-flag-burning) amendment to the U. S. Constitution are pointless and just so much political grandstanding. Such appeals are just another way politicians evade the job of making tough decisions about matters of moment.

Ought flag burning come under the rubric of protected speech? Logically prior question: Is it speech at all? What if I make some such rude gesture in your face as 'giving you the finger.' Is that speech? If it is, I would like to know what proposition it expresses. 'Fuck you!' does not express a proposition. Likewise for the corresponding gesture with the middle finger. And if some punk burns a flag, I would like to know what proposition the punk is expressing. The Founders were interested in protecting reasoned dissent, but the typical act of flag burning by the typical leftist punk does not rise to that level. Without going any further into this issue, let me just express my skepticism at arguments that try to subsume gestures and physical actions under speech. But the main point is that we don't need a flag-burning amendment and we ought not have a general legal prohibition on the burning or other desecration of privately owned national symbols if the burning or other desecration is done in a way that does not violate existing laws.

Koran burning. If it is legal to burn the flag in certain circumstances, then it it legal to burn the Koran or any book in similar circumstances. If you own a copy of the book, you can do anything you want with it. You can use it for toilet paper. So if the Gainesville yahoo wants to organize a Koran burning on private property with privately-owned copies of the Muslim holy book, that must be tolerated no matter how stupid and offensive it is.

But there must be no double standards. If you condemn Koran burning, then you ought to condemn crucifix desecration and flag burning. And if you tolerate the latter, then you ought to tolerate the former.

The media both Left and Right are piling on Terry Jones, the Gainesville pastor, while failing to see that his brand of red-necked push-back is exactly what one should expect in the face of Islamist provocation.

And there must be no kow-towing to Muslim hypersensitivity.

Continue reading “Legality and Propriety: What One Has a Right to Do is Not Always Right to Do”

Soul Food

People are generally aware of the importance of good nutrition, physical exercise and all things health-related. They understand that what they put into their bodies affects their physical health. Underappreciated is a truth just as, if not more important: that what one puts into one's mind affects one's mental and spiritual health. The soul has its foods and its poisons just as the body does. This simple truth, known for centuries, goes unheeded while liberals fall all over each other climbing aboard the various environmental bandwagons.

Why are those so concerned with physical toxins so tolerant of cultural toxins? This is another example of what I call misplaced moral enthusiasm. You worry about global warming when you give no thought to the soul, its foods, and its poisons? You liberals are a strange breed of cat, crouching behind the First Amendment, quick to defend every form of cultural pollution under the rubric 'free speech.' But honest dissent you label as 'hate speech' and you shout down those who disagree with you.

Free Speech and the Fairness Doctrine

(Written 29 July 2007)

Philip Terzian gets it right in his piece Radio Free America:

Revival of the Fairness Doctrine is not intended to facilitate "both sides of the story" but to shut down conservative talk radio. Why? Because efforts to invent a successful left-wing Limbaugh have consistently failed, and what Jim Hightower, Mario Cuomo, and Al Franken's Air America cannot manage on the air might be accomplished by congressional action. This has been a forlorn cause of the left since the Fairness Doctrine was repealed 20 years ago; but now that Democrats control Congress, new life has been breathed into the effort. A Democratic president could appoint enough compliant commissioners to the FCC to accomplish the mission. Or Congress could act.

The threat is not idle. Left-wing activists are not especially enamored of free speech–especially when the open marketplace of ideas puts them at a political disadvantage. [. . .]

Continue reading “Free Speech and the Fairness Doctrine”