Enjoying the view from Limbo
Last year, Ted Cruz publicly vowed to boycott Nike products, after the company announced it would stop selling shoes with the Betsy Ross flag on the recommendation of its progressive athlete poster child, Colin Kaepernick. The senate’s great champion of the U.S. Constitution (and of anti-constitutional demagogue Donald Trump) trumpeted his Nike boycott as a proud assertion of the right to free speech....
Today I see that Wendy Mesley, a long-time CBC journalist, has been thrown down the memory hole, like so many these days, for committing one of the cardinal sins in the Marxist faith. Specifically, Mesley’s television program was “suspended” because, during a discussion of racial inequality, she “used a word that should never be used.” That phrase, “used a word that should never...
Today, the so-called conservative media, along with its millions of political-entertainment-addicted dupes, are all riled up about two terrible outrages against freedom: The Supreme Court of Washington State has upheld a lower court ruling against a florist who, on conscience grounds, did not wish to provide flowers for a homosexual wedding, but will now be forced by law to do so. YouTube has...
Facebook, along with its subsidiary “platform” Instagram, has formally banned certain people with views they deem to be in violation of their terms of service, i.e., their political principles. Among these are Louis Farrakhan, a kook; Alex Jones, a kook; and Paul Joseph Watson, an Alex Jones ally and colleague, and therefore, it would be reasonable to surmise, something of a kook. Those...
In Part I of this discussion, I addressed the mistaken view that the alleged suppression of non-progressive (or any other) opinion by a privately-owned internet platform such as Google or Facebook constitutes a violation of the right to free speech. There is another, more subtle argument I have encountered recently, however, one more in the spirit of John Stuart Mill, namely that although...
Kris Paronto, a former private security contractor for the CIA who was in Benghazi during the attack in 2012, has gone on a tirade against Barack Obama and his apologists on Twitter. So far, so good. However, his tweet was based on a careless misrepresentation of Obama’s words, and seemed to promote violence against him, so Twitter suspended him for a few hours....
A nation that no longer lives in accordance with any of the principles and standards that properly defined it may be said to have expired, for all intents and purposes. With that sobering thought, I present a few notes on the current American political climate: In response to my recent essay on the sad, compromised version of Senator Ted Cruz now on display...
Do you think imposing so-called transgenderism on children as a sexual norm might be harmful to their moral development? Do you question the legitimacy of using made-up, so-called gender-neutral pronouns as replacements for the standard English words “he” and “she”? If you answered yes, or even maybe, to either of those questions, then, as of today, you are in violation of Canada’s Human...
(Originally published in February 2016) One of the great dangers of Donald Trump’s candidacy is his casual willingness to exploit legitimate American frustration and anger and stir them into something ugly for his own benefit. But careless anger-baiting has consequences, one of which is that you risk turning your followers into an enemy-eating monster, greedy for your next attack on yet another victim,...
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