Tagged: free speech

You Are Living Through It

An Orwellian entity called the European Court of Human Rights has declared that duly elected governments which pursue paths of fiscal responsibility and rational restraint with regard to the neo-Marxist demands of climate activists are by definition guilty of violating human rights, such rights now implicitly including the right to have one’s society and economy micromanaged by unfettered climate communists. In Scotland, it is...

Candy Floss Conservatism

Candace Owens, a profiteering self-promoter and political putterer who barely saves herself from being dismissed as equivalent to the blustering conspiracy buffoon Alex Jones by being cuter and blacker than Jones — two qualities always valued at a premium in the popular “conservative media” — has been cut loose by The Daily Wire, a nonsense outfit most closely identified with a slightly cleverer...

Speaking of Ireland (While One Still Can)

Ireland, whose most influential modern artist described its capital, a century ago, as “that hemiplegia or paralysis which many consider a city,” and which seems to have been a country on the edge (or further) of collapsing into some strange combination of drunken suicide and murderous self-indulgence for centuries, finds whatever life force it has left (not at all paradoxically, but rather characteristically)...

Free Speech

Whatever one thinks of the ultimate validity or political importance of the right to free speech, there is an ironclad condition that must be understood as essential to the concept, and no free speech defense which ignores or seeks to limit this condition can amount to anything but a self-contradiction.

Reflections on the Elon Musk Twitter Cataclysm and Dire Threat to Democracy

The notion that democracy is best served by restricting the public exchange of ideas to only those ideas pre-approved by one political party or faction is absurd. The notion that allowing ideas with which you disagree to be uttered in a public forum constitutes a threat to your freedom is a clear admission that you lack confidence in your own ideas or your...

The Statement Spotify Will Never Issue

Joni Mitchell has joined Neil Young in demanding that Spotify remove her music from its platform, in protest against Joe Rogan’s podcast, which discusses the Covid-19 pandemic in terms that do not perfectly align with the Biden administration’s official statements. Since Young and Mitchell are both Canadian by birth and upbringing, it is not surprising that they are so quick to favor authoritarian...

Rusted Out

Neil Young is attempting to put the final seal on any pretense that rock music was ever about “speaking truth to power” or any such nonsense — not a moment too soon in my opinion. He is threatening to pull all of his music off Spotify unless that online service removes podcasts that “spread misinformation” about Covid-19 vaccines, specifically focused on the most...

Reflections on Disinformation and the Disinformed

U.S. President Joe Biden has taken the official position that people spreading social media “disinformation” (a word now used by the U.S. government and media interchangeably with “misinformation,” effectively blurring the lines between the debatably false and the intentionally fake) regarding Covid-19 or the vaccines are “killing people.” In other words, Biden, speaking as the U.S. Federal Government, is holding private individuals personally...

Shutting Down the Discussion

As happens frequently these days, the cancel culture mob has once again tried to deny its own existence by screaming from the rooftops, “There is no such thing as cancel culture! We are the cancel culture mob, so we ought to know!” In the latest case, the victim of the mob’s spiteful claims of non-existence was a popular podcaster, as described in a...

Making the Cosmos More Inclusive

Jumping on the Civilizational Suicide Express, NASA has announced that it will cease using nicknames for planets and other cosmic objects that might be considered “offensive.” The prime examples of “offensive” names offered by the space agency: “Eskimo Nebula” and “Siamese Twins Galaxy.” Yes, really. The first example has gone by that nickname due to a feature well-represented in a spectacular NASA photo...