Maine Legislature Censures Member for Commenting on Male Participation in Female Sports.

Among other things, this situation raises First Amendment issues:

From FIRE:

Three weeks ago, Representative Laurel Libby of Maine’s 64th District posted on Facebook that a high school athlete won first place in girls’ pole vaulting at the Class B state championship after having competed the year before in the boys’ event and finishing in a tie for fifth place.

Libby’s post is constitutionally protected. She was speaking out about the policy in her state, set by the Maine High School Principals Association, that a high school athlete may participate in competitions for the gender with which they identify. Her post was also part of a nationwide debate. Maine Governor Janet Mills and President Trump have publicly sparred over the president’s executive order proposing to cut off education funding if states do not ban transgender athletes from competing in girls’ sports.

But just days after Libby’s post, the Maine House speaker and majority leader demanded she take it down. When she refused, the majority leader introduced a censure resolution — to be heard in the House the next day — because Libby’s post had included photos and the first name of the student, who is a minor. Libby sought to defend herself in the hastily called House vote, but was repeatedly cut off. The censure resolution passed 75-70 on a party-line vote.

If all the censure did was express disapproval of Libby’s actions, that would be one thing.

A state legislative body is entitled to express displeasure with a member’s actions, which by itself does not violate the First Amendment, as the Supreme Court recently ruled.

But in Libby’s case, the Maine House went further, much further. When Libby refused to apologize for her protected speech, the House speaker declared she would be barred from speaking on the House floor or voting on any legislation until she capitulated. Thus, the House majority party has precluded Libby from doing her job and effectively disenfranchised her constituents, end-running Maine constitutional provisions that say a representative cannot be expelled absent a two-thirds vote or recall election.

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About Cleaning House at the FDA

From "A Midwestern Doctor," who I follow. The article is mostly a sharp edged exposé of the gross incompetence and corruption of FDA Director Peter Marks, who was reportedly ejected from the FDA last week. But there is also this:

[C]onsider this quote from Peter Rost, a former executive at Pfizer and one of the few pharmaceutical leaders to speak out against the industry:

It is scary how many similarities there are between this industry and the mob. The mob makes obscene amounts of money, as does this industry. The side effects of organized crime are killings and deaths, and the side effects are the same in this industry. The mob bribes politicians and others, and so does the drug industry … The difference is, all these people in the drug industry look upon themselves – well, I’d say 99 percent, anyway – look upon themselves as law-abiding citizens, not as citizens who would ever rob a bank … However, when they get together as a group and manage these corporations, something seems to happen … to otherwise good citizens when they are part of a corporation. It’s almost like when you have war atrocities; people do things they don’t think they’re capable of. When you’re in a group, people can do things they otherwise wouldn’t, because the group can validate what you’re doing as okay
.

One couldn't conjure up a better real life example of Hannah Arendt's Banality of Evil. Oh, and as independent researchers (and all the rest of us) are denied access to comprehensive vaccine injury data, consider this quote by Arendt:

The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e., the standards of thought) no longer exist.

― Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism…

Here are a few excerpts about the "work" of Marks:

•He asserted VAERS overreports vaccine injuries when in reality less than 1% of injuries make it into VAERS (as the government never wanted a publicly available injury database and once a law forced its creation, the government has worked for decades to undermine VAERS).

•He “compassionately” claimed the Federal vaccine injury compensation program existed to help individuals injured by vaccines and that they could sue a vaccine manufacturer if they were unsatisfied with the verdict—when in reality it is nearly impossible to have most injuries be acknowledged by that program and even harder to be able to sue a manufacturer outside of it).

•He argued that “vaccine immunity is superior to natural immunity” (which is false as vaccine immunity often creates a very narrow immunity pathogens rapidly evolve a resistance to). Then as people started to point that out, he pivoted to stating “vaccines do not put you at risk of infection like an actual infection so they are superior due to the lower risk entailed in become immune” and was not called out for moving the goalpost from efficacy to safety.

Note: there is also strong evidence vaccine side effects are often much greater than those from a natural infection (best demonstrated by how many more people have permanent complications from the vaccines than a COVID infection.

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Tribes and Stupidity

I just wrote this on FB, where I sometimes feel like a pinata by people have allowed themselves to be loyal mouthpieces for one political party.

I stand by my assertion that anyone who allows their facts or opinions to be shaped by party politics has allowed their intelligence to drop by 50 points. All of us should be making our own decisions issue by issue. If your opinions are fully or almost entirely aligned with one particular political party, I'm talking especially to you. If you refuse to publicly criticize at least some of the actions and corruption of both political parties, your brain has been captured by a mind-virus. There are no good or bad people. There are only good or bad ideas. As detailed in the book by Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff, The Coddling of the American Mind, "One of the Three Great Untruths is Us Versus Them: Life Is a Battle Between Good People and Evil People." Excerpt from pages 58-59.

The bottom line is that the human mind is prepared for tribalism. Human evolution is not just the story of individuals competing with other individuals within each group; it’salso the story of groups competing with other groups—sometimes violently. We are all descended from people who belonged to groups that were consistently better at winning that competition. Tribalism is our evolutionary endowment for banding together to prepare for intergroup conflict. When the “tribe switch” is activated, we bind ourselves more tightly to the group, we embrace and defend the group’s moral matrix, and we stop thinking for ourselves. A basic principle of moral psychology is that “morality binds and blinds,” which is a useful trick for a group gearing up for a battle between “us”and “them.”In tribal mode, we seem to go blind to arguments and information that challenge our team’s narrative. Merging with the group in this way is deeply pleasurable—as you can see from the pseudotribal antics that accompany college football games.

But being prepared for tribalism doesn’t mean we have to live in tribal ways. The human mind contains many evolved cognitive “tools.”We don’t use all o f them all the time; we draw on our toolbox as needed. Local conditions can turn the tribalism up, down, or off. Any kind o f intergroup conflict (real or perceived) immediately turns tribalism up, making people highly attentive to signs that reveal which team another person is on. Traitors are punished, and fraternizing with the enemy is, too. Conditions of peace and prosperity, in contrast, generally turn down the tribalism.32People don’t need to track group membership as vigilantly; they don’t feel pressured to conform to group expectations as closely. When a community succeeds in turning down everyone’s tribal circuits, there is more room for individuals to construct lives of their own choosing; there is more freedom for a creative mixing of people and ideas."

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