The left is redefining free speech

The New Neo Posted on by

The United States is one of the strongest bastions of free speech in the world, and perhaps one of the last. Even Europe doesn’t have anything like our protections for free speech, nor does Canada. Both have hate speech laws, for example.

On US campuses in recent years, however, we’ve seen an erosion of the devotion to freedom of speech. It is common to hear assertions that speech that hurts feelings, is bigoted, or is otherwise offensive isn’t just metaphorical “violence” but actual violence.

It’s not just campuses, either. More law professors have been getting into the act as well. Their goal is justice—and by that they don’t mean what used to be meant by the word. They mean social justice or what Thomas Sowell calls cosmic justice (equality of outcome), impossible to create on earth and dangerous to attempt.

But it sounds so good to the left, and they’re just the ones to accomplish it, right?:

“When I was younger, I had more of the standard liberal view of civil liberties,” said Louis Michael Seidman, a law professor at Georgetown. “And I’ve gradually changed my mind about it. What I have come to see is that it’s a mistake to think of free speech as an effective means to accomplish a more just society.”

To the contrary, free speech reinforces and amplifies injustice, Catharine A. MacKinnon, a law professor at the University of Michigan, wrote in “The Free Speech Century,” a collection of essays to be published this year.

“Once a defense of the powerless, the First Amendment over the last hundred years has mainly become a weapon of the powerful,” she wrote. “Legally, what was, toward the beginning of the 20th century, a shield for radicals, artists and activists, socialists and pacifists, the excluded and the dispossessed, has become a sword for authoritarians, racists and misogynists, Nazis and Klansmen, pornographers and corporations buying elections.”

The left believes that different liberties should be accorded the “powerless” and good (as they define them) compared to the powerful and bad (as they define them). Free speech apparently is one of those differential liberties.

As for Seidman—well, we’ve heard from him before. The following is from a post I wrote about him in 2013, based on an op-ed by him published in the Times:

But author Seidman is a well-known professor of constitutional law at Georgetown, one of the most elite law schools in the nation…

Seidman writes:

As the nation teeters at the edge of fiscal chaos, observers are reaching the conclusion that the American system of government is broken. But almost no one blames the culprit: our insistence on obedience to the Constitution, with all its archaic, idiosyncratic and downright evil provisions…

Imagine that after careful study a government official — say, the president or one of the party leaders in Congress — reaches a considered judgment that a particular course of action is best for the country. Suddenly, someone bursts into the room with new information: a group of white propertied men who have been dead for two centuries, knew nothing of our present situation, acted illegally under existing law and thought it was fine to own slaves might have disagreed with this course of action. Is it even remotely rational that the official should change his or her mind because of this divination?

Read the whole thing if you can stomach it, just for the flavor, and the exposure to the strangely tortured logic (and lack of historical accuracy) of this particular law professor. Seidman not only shows a lack of knowledge (actual? or strategic?) of the true position of most of the Founders regarding slavery, he also expresses the typical leftist position that we should throw away the wisdom of the past (wisdom? how can that be; they’re just a bunch of propertied white guys—just like Seidman, by the way) because we want to do something, and that pesky old white-guy document stands in our way…

As for why the Times decided to publish this piece right now [January 2013], one can only conclude they see the time as ripe for delegitimizing the Constitution in order to further the leftist agenda, and seek to use Seidman’s credentials to make the argument from authority. The ground has been well prepared for this by our president [Obama], the MSM, and our educational system, so their calculations may indeed be correct.

The left keeps testing the waters and waiting for the time to be ripe to destroy our liberties. They must think that anti-Trump sentiment is a good wave to ride in order to attack freedom of speech for those they consider the enemy (not for themselves—of course). Despite the ground having been prepared, particularly by our educational system, I don’t think Americans will buy what they’re selling at this point. I hope I’m right about that.

[NOTE: If you want to read an excellent book that explains how radicals like MacKinnon and Seidman got traction and influence as professors in law schools, read Beyond All Reason. It was published in 1997, which tells you how long ago the phenomenon had taken root.]

Mexico chooses leftist, populist hope and change

The New Neo Posted on by

As predicted, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador won an overwhelming victory in this weekend’s Mexican election. He’s a leftist who made a lot of promises: clean up corruption and illegal drugs, improve the economy, help the plight of the poor.

So, is Mexico poised to go the way of Venezuela? Maybe. Is there any chance he can deliver on any of his promises, much less all of them? I strongly doubt it. But I can understand why Mexicans decided to give it a try. The country’s a mess and they’re desperate. Who wouldn’t want to end corruption and help the economy?

One thing AMLO (that’s what he’s called for short) is not is a newcomer to the political game. He’s sixty-four years old and has been in politics and/or public office for over 40 years (mostly politics rather than office)—in other words, he seems to be a career politician, who’s been involved in a dizzying array of parties. He’s got a Wiki entry a mile long.

Nor is this the first time he’s run for the presidency. In 2006 he almost won:

López Obrador resigned the Mexico City headship in July 2005 to enter the 2006 presidential election, representing the Coalition for the Good of All, which was led by the Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD) and included the Citizens’ Movement party and the Labor Party. He received 35.31% of the vote and lost by 0.58%. López Obrador subsequently alleged electoral fraud and refused to concede, leading a several-months-long takeover of Paseo de la Reforma and the Zócalo in protest.

López Obrador was a candidate in the 2012 presidential election representing a coalition of the PRD, Labor Party and Citizens’ Movement. He finished second with 31.59% of the vote. He left the PRD in 2012 and in 2014 he founded the National Regeneration Movement (MORENA), leading that party until 2018.

His present party is a coalition of the left and right:

The alliance has received criticism as it is a coalition between two left-wing parties (MORENA and the PT) with a formation related to the evangelical right (PES). In response, the national president of MORENA, Yeidckol Polevnsky, mentioned that her party believes in inclusion, joint work to “rescue Mexico” and that they will continue to defend human rights, while Hugo Eric Flores Cervantes, national president of the PES, mentioned that “the only possibility of real change in our country is the one headed by Andrés Manuel López Obrador” and that his party had decided to be “on the right side of history.”

Some of the US coverage plays up a “Trump critic” angle for AMLO, but that doesn’t seem to me to be a particularly important part of his appeal, which is more oriented towards ending corruption and helping the economy, and certainly long predated the rise of Trump. He and Trump exchanged cordial words after his victory, although those cordial words don’t really tell much about the future.

Personally, I get a Peron vibe from him. Populist, hard to pin down, charismatic, appealing to the poor. I Googled his name together with Peron’s, and got this, which is translated from the original Spanish:

From the ideological point of view it is difficult to pigeonhole, although often he is called a leftist politician…After having lost in the elections of 2006 and 2012, in the current campaign he moderated his speech to attract sectors that previously distrusted and slipped more towards the center…

The critics of López Obrador say that he is a populist caudillo and they compare him with the American president Donald Trump [!!] and with the Venezuelan Nicolás Maduro , something that the protagonist rejects…

For the writer and analyst Jorge Zepeda Patterson , López Obrador is more like the personal leadership of Juan Domingo Perón than other leaders with whom he is associated. To me, however, it makes me think of Perón, every proportion saved: his ideological ambiguity, his ability to float above definitions or to summon the most divergent political fractions and his ability to negotiate with the existing union structures remind the figure of the Argentine leader, “he wrote in his column in the newspaper El País .

So apparently I’m not the only one.

Prior to AMLO’s election, there was a big brouhaha about some remarks he made concerning immigration to the US.

Here’s the quote in Spanish:

Y ya pronto, muy pronto, al triunfo de nuestro movimiento vamos a defender a los migrantes de todo el continente Americano y todos los migrantes del mundo que, por necesidad, tienen que abandonar sus pueblos para buscar la vida en Estados Unidos, es un derecho humano que vamos a defender,” El Universal quotes López Obrador saying in a speech on June 19.

My high school Spanish was never very good, and by now I’ve forgotten a great deal of what I knew back then, but even I can translate that pretty well all by myself (I think, anyway). What he seems to have said is that soon “our movement” will triumph and will defend as a human right the migrants who, through necessity, have to abandon their homes (towns?) in order to seek a life in the US. No surprise there.

And how will this defense be mounted? Will it be any different from his predecessor and his attitude towards the “migrants”?

More here:

Mexico runs a NAFTA-protected $70 billion trade surplus with the U.S…The architects of NAFTA long ago assured Americans that such a trade war would not break out, or that we should not worry over trade imbalances, given the desirability of outsourcing to take advantage of Mexico’s cheaper labor costs.

A supposedly affluent Mexico was supposed to achieve near parity with the U.S., as immigration and trade soon neutralized. Despite Mexico’s economic growth, no such symmetry has followed NAFTA. What did, however, 34 years later, was the establishment of a dysfunctional Mexican state, whose drug cartels all but run the country on the basis of their enormous profits from unfettered dope-running and human-trafficking into the United States. NAFTA certainly did not make Mexico a safer, kinder, and gentler nation.

In addition, Mexican citizens who enter and reside as illegal immigrants in the U.S. are mostly responsible for sending an approximate $30 billion in remittances home to Mexico. That sum has now surpassed oil and tourism as the largest source of Mexican foreign exchange. That huge cash influx is the concrete reality behind Obrador’s otherwise unhinged rhetoric about exercising veto power over U.S. immigration law…

Why the U.S. government does not tax remittances and why it does not prohibit foreign nationals on public assistance from sending cash out of the country are some of the stranger phenomena of the entire strange illegal-immigration matrix.

Promises to be—interesting.

Pocket thinks I’d like a NY Times article entitled “How to Clean Your Filthy, Disgusting Laptop”

The New Neo Posted on by

I’m insulted.

My laptop isn’t that filthy and disgusting. Just a little bit filthy and disgusting.

It gets a lot of use. I blog standing up because of my bad back/arms; it’s much more comfortable that way. I stand on a little rug. The laptop is raised to just the right height with an edifice of books (I could buy something nicer-looking, like one of those electrically adjustable stands, but have never bothered). I use a mouse—can’t stand the wheel, it hurts my hands and arms. I wear very comfy clothes; not pajamas, but the sort of clothes that mean I have to get changed if I want to go out in public.

My laptop is basically my keyboard and mother ship, but the whole thing is attached to a larger monitor so I don’t have to squint to see it. The monitor is up on a stand (actually, it’s a little wooden footstool my son made in shop class in junior high, many a long year ago) so that I don’t have to look down much to view it. That protects my neck from kinks and also I have a notion that it keeps me from getting quite as much of a double chin as I’d be getting if I was looking down umpteen hours a day.

Is my laptop filthy and disgusting? Depends how sensitive you are to such things. It looks relatively clean to me, and I swipe it down periodically but hardly obsessively. But sometimes when I’m traveling and I take it out in a very bright light I notice it’s a bit more disgusting and filthy than I had thought.

Anyway, I read the Times article. It’s very big on those compressed air things, but I’ve never found them to be all that effective. Have you?

I also took special note of this:

If your laptop is particularly old, you may not be able to get rid of the shine on the keys; some of us may type like the Incredible Hulk and have worn down the top layer of plastic.

I’ve gotten much teasing about the fact that I’ve done just that. In particular, the “a,” “s,” “m,” and “n” have been completely obliterated. I understand why the first two; after all, my default typing stance has my left pinky and ring finger resting on them. But the last two? I have no idea.

The Democrats are eager to re-live the borking of Bork

The New Neo Posted on by

Ah yes, the Bork hearings—one of the Democrats’ finest hours. Ruth Marcus, among others, would dearly love to revive it:

…[T]his must be another Bork moment — insisting on a nominee that is, to invoke the language of the Bork debate, within the broad mainstream of judicial thought.

And one who, like swapping Kennedy for Powell, will not radically alter the balance of the court.

Can you imagine Marcus and others on the left arguing something like that if Hillary Clinton had gotten the chance to nominate Kennedy’s replacement? Sure thing—they would no doubt be arguing for a swing justice who leaned mostly conservative, in order to preserve the Court’s previous balance.

Riiiight.

And by the way, conservative justices such as those on SCOTUS right now are in fact part of the “broad mainstream of judicial thought.” That’s what the word “broad” means.

Among other things, Marcus mischaracterizes what happened with Bork. It wasn’t a “moment”; it lasted from July to October of 1987. Bork himself actually was a fairly extreme jurist, but of course the opposition didn’t stick to talking about his actual views. Hyperbole and lies about him abounded, and many peopole consider that those hearings marked the beginning of the political hyper-partisanship that has grown so familiar (and so very intense) now.

Ted Kennedy was instrumental in the borking of Bork:

…[H]ere is…[part] of the speech [Kennedy gave]:

Robert Bork’s America is a land in which women would be forced into back-alley abortions, blacks would sit at segregated lunch counters, rogue police could break down citizens’ doors in midnight raids, schoolchildren could not be taught about evolution, writers and artists could be censored at the whim of the Government, and the doors of the Federal courts would be shut on the fingers of millions of citizens for whom the judiciary is — and is often the only — protector of the individual rights that are the heart of our democracy… President Reagan is still our president. But he should not be able to reach out from the muck of Irangate, reach into the muck of Watergate and impose his reactionary vision of the Constitution on the Supreme Court and the next generation of Americans. No justice would be better than this injustice.

First, a fact-check, courtesy of my Times colleague Ethan Bronner, who covered the hearings for The Boston Globe.

Kennedy’s was an altogether startling statement. He had shamelessly twisted Bork’s world view — “rogue police could break down citizens’ doors in midnight raids” was an Orwellian reference to Bork’s criticism of the exclusionary rule, through which judges exclude illegally obtained evidence, and Bork had never suggested he opposed the teaching of evolution…

More troubling to Bronner, and to many other Americans any time a seat opens on the Supreme Court bench, was the precedent being set.

The speech was a landmark for judicial nominations. Kennedy was saying that no longer should the Senate content itself with examining a nominee’s personal integrity and legal qualifications…. From now on the Senate and the nation should examine a nominee’s vision for society … the upper house should take politics and ideology fully into account.

One interesting thing about that quote from Bronner, who wrote for the Globe and later the Times, is that it’s hard to imagine the Globe or Times publishing anything like that today, isn’t it?

The Democrats were fortunate in having Bork to bork. He may have been brilliant, but he was perceived as off-putting and arrogant during his hearing, and lost some Republican support as a result. But subsequent SCOTUS nominees have learned a great deal from his borking—to answer pleasantly and in a bland, general way. Trump will almost certainly choose someone from his previously-approved list who is well aware of the need to appear affable and reasonable.

The stakes are similar then and now, though. In 1987, much of the argument turned on fears that Roe v. Wade might be reversed if Bork was allowed to be seated on the Court. The same fears are being voiced at present.

But what would really happen if Roe were reversed? That’s a big topic that I’ll save for another post in the not-too-distant future.

A modern twist on stalking

The New Neo Posted on by

Stalking isn’t funny; it’s serious and frightening. And this University of Central Florida professor who stalked a PhD student sounds remarkably obsessive about it:

Ali Borji, a 39-year-old assistant professor in the school’s Department of Computer Science, was arrested at his on-campus office Thursday night. He faces two charges of stalking — both misdemeanors.

The victim met Borji last June while she was working on her Ph.D. She told police that Borji reached out to her on Facebook to help with her studies. They went on a few dates before the victim told him that their relationship needed to remain professional, authorities said.

That’s when the trouble began. It ended with Borji’s arrest on two misdemeanor stalking charges and his dismissal from his position at the university.

Note that Borji is an assistant professor of computer science. Two of the facts about his stalking that caught my eye are related to that. The first is that he apparently sent his lady love about 800 texts a day. My guess is that he may have used his computer skills to set up a program to do that automatically rather than manually. After all, if he’s awake 16 hours a day, that would be almost one a minute for every waking hour.

Borji also informed her: “Be happy that somebody likes you this much to stalk you,” which is quite a bit of spin, not to mention chutzpah. But his most creative and really creepy taunt was this one:

He told her that he could create an artificial-intelligence facsimile of her and “do anything he wanted,” according to a police report.

There’s a feeling in the air: hope and change on the right

The New Neo Posted on by

Obama may have commandeered the phrase, but it’s the one that comes to mind at the moment: hope and change.

It has to do with the federal judgeships, and in particular the possibility of a sea-change on the Supreme Court. It’s been an incredibly long time since the Court had a conservative majority, as I mentioned yesterday, probably since before FDR. The right has gotten used to this, and so has the left.

In fact, the right has gotten used to having its victories (Reagan, for example, or Gingrich’s Contract with America) be short-lived. And the left is used to executing the Gramscian march inexorably and successfully. If it doesn’t work today, it will work tomorrow, thinks the left. On the right, it’s more like even if it seems to work today, tomorrow it will stop working.

Or, as Professor William Jacobson has succinctly put it at Legal Insurrection:

We are used to losing institutions. The left is not. They are waking up to the possibility that the judiciary may be restored to the neutral role it should play, and would no longer serve as a liberal super-legislature.

Indeed.

That is one of many reasons that their reaction is so intense. These developments are as much a surprise to them as the election of Donald Trump itself, or their failure to drive him out so far, or his rising public approval rating. But the Supreme Court, which they thought would be theirs for the foreseeable future on Hillary Clinton’s election to the presidency, appears to be escaping their grasp. And it may escape it for a long, long time.

Google glitch?

The New Neo Posted on by

I’m having a weird thing with Google right now. On my computer, it is working perfectly on Chrome, but when I try to do a Google search on Firefox, nothing happens.

Nada. Zip. Zilch. Sometimes the Google page itself (which is my home page) doesn’t even load. Meanwhile, for all other sites, Firefox is working perfectly and loading promptly.

So, is it just me, or is anyone else out there having a similar problem? Does anyone have a clue what might be going on? I certainly don’t.

UPDATE 5 PM: It’s all better—for now. But it’s happened several times before, although never this seriously. I still haven’t a clue why it’s happening and just affecting that one function.

Shooter in the newsroom

The New Neo Posted on by

When mass murders happen, there are usually three stories.

The first is the shooting itself and the violent ending of innocent lives.

The second is the story about the story, told by press and pundits before they know much of anything at all. That second story strongly tends to have a strongly political angle in which the opposition is cast in the role of the villain.

The third story reflects upon the first two, and that’s the sort of essay I’m writing now.

These facts rather quickly became known about the Annapolis shooting: the perp had a longstanding (beginning in 2011) beef with the Capitol Gazette, the newspaper whose office he entered yesterday and killed five people. The paper had published a story about his harassing a woman he knew, and he had sued them for libel and lost (his case had no merit at all; their story was true). After that he also ranted about it all and threatened them online for years, so much so that police had investigated him in 2013, although they were unable to gather enough evidence to charge him.

It is reported that he specifically targeted his victims, and although that may generally be so, I doubt it was true of all of them since one of the dead was a recent hire who had worked in sales.

And in no surprise whatsoever, the left and many journalists have taken the opportunity to blame Donald Trump (see this) for causing this shooting, despite its obvious genesis in events that have zero to do with Trump, and despite the seemingly complete lack of political interest expressed by the perp at any point, then or now.

It quickly emerged that this was “just” a psychopathic crackpot who finally turned extremely violent after simmering for years in the vicious stew of his own rage.

What can be done about people such as this? (I’m talking about the shooter, not the journalists). I don’t know. Most harassing, angry psychopaths do not turn violent but instead continue to engage in more petty undertakings. But some do end up killing people. The Annapolis shooting wasn’t a case in which, on hearing of the murders, everyone ever connected with the newsroom wondered who could possibly have done such a thing. Instead, this was a case in which the former editor had seen the strong possibility of violence, long before the shooting occurred:

“He waged a one-person attack on anything he could muster in court against the Capital,” Tom Marquardt, the newspaper’s editor and publisher until 2012, told the Los Angeles Times in a phone interview.

“I said during that time, ‘This guy is crazy enough to come in and blow us all away,’” Marquardt said, adding that he and other newspaper officials had fretted over how to stop Ramos’ harassment. He even kept a file on Ramos for years after leaving the paper…

As he spoke to The Times, Marquardt’s voice grew tense as he recalled his fear of Ramos, and how he’d felt powerless to do anything to stop the harassment.

“If it’s him, I’m gonna feel … responsible for this,” Marquardt said. “I pray it’s not him.”

But of course it was him.

And yet despite all that foreknowledge, nothing was done to stop the shooter. Civil commitment is hard to accomplish and usually of short duration, although it probably would have been appropriate. The police couldn’t arrest him because he hadn’t done enough yet. There doesn’t seem to have been an armed guard posted at the newspaper, which also might have been in order. And either no one on the staff was armed or whoever was armed didn’t have enough time to react.

RIP.

Kids ? dog

The New Neo Posted on by

I often have reservations about YouTube videos that show kids, because there really can’t be any informed consent. Then again, they are often so adorable that I watch them.

Here’s a case in point. There’s something a bit exploitative as well as slightly cruel going on here, but the girls are so heartwarming I couldn’t help but like it. The younger one is all emotion, the older one all cold reason. Both mount very good arguments against what seems to them like the arbitrary meanness of their parents:

Kids + dog

The New Neo Posted on by

I often have reservations about YouTube videos that show kids, because there really can’t be any informed consent. Then again, they are often so adorable that I watch them.

Here’s a case in point. There’s something a bit exploitative as well as slightly cruel going on here, but the girls are so heartwarming I couldn’t help but like it. The younger one is all emotion, the older one all cold reason. Both mount very good arguments against what seems to them like the arbitrary meanness of their parents:

Kids ? dog

The New Neo Posted on by

I often have reservations about YouTube videos that show kids, because there really can’t be any informed consent. Then again, they are often so adorable that I watch them.

Here’s a case in point. There’s something a bit exploitative as well as slightly cruel going on here, but the girls are so heartwarming I couldn’t help but like it. The younger one is all emotion, the older one all cold reason. Both mount very good arguments against what seems to them like the arbitrary meanness of their parents: