The Danger of an “Inert People”

"Without free speech and assembly discussion would be futile; that with them, discussion affords ordinarily adequate protection against the dissemination of noxious doctrine; that the greatest menace to freedom is an inert people; public discussion is a political duty." Justice Louis Brandeis, Concurrence in Whitney v California

"A man dies when he refuses to stand up for that which is right. A man dies when he refuses to stand up for justice. A man dies when he refuses to take a stand for that which is true." -Martin Luther King Jr.

“You can't be neutral on a moving train.” Howard Zinn

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Stanford Law School Earns an “F” in Student (and DEI Administrator) Behavior

FIRE's letter to Stanford Law School, based on behavior as bad as what we saw last year at Yale Law School and see here.

Dear President Tessier-Lavigne:

FIRE is once again deeply concerned about the state of free expression at Stanford University after a student-organized Stanford Law School speech by U.S. Circuit Judge Stuart Kyle Duncan was disrupted last night,2 with at least one report that his remarks ended some 40 minutes earlier than planned as a result. The apparently successful exercise of the heckler’s veto by attendees determined to disrupt Judge Duncan’s remarks, at a Federalist Society- sponsored event, is troubling enough. But FIRE must also express our deep concern regarding Associate Dean for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Tirien Steinbach’s temporary removal of Duncan from the podium—against his wishes—to offer commentary appearing to promote censorship. Dean Steinbach pinballs between praising free speech, accusing Judge Duncan of “harm,” and asking him if what he has to say is important enough to justify upsetting students. She ultimately suggests Stanford may wish to consider abandoning its free expression commitments altogether to prevent the “harm” allegedly inherent in hearing views with which one may disagree in the future . . .

[added March 11, 9pm CT]

Stanford issues a not-very-serious apology to Judge Duncan. Obvious step #1 would be to fire the DEI representative of Stanford. It is my suspicion that this is the kind of behavior that DEI departments promote, totally in line with what occurred at Judge Duncan's lecture. How about looking into that? How about suspending/expelling numerous law students?

Continue ReadingStanford Law School Earns an “F” in Student (and DEI Administrator) Behavior

Protect the Censors!

I’m worried about the people who censor us. Who protects THEM from dangerous information? Who keeps THEM safe from words? They are constantly subjected to misinformation. We need censors for the censors!

My above attempt to mock the censors carries an important point: Censors think of themselves as immune from the danger of bad words and ideas. How could that possibly be? I'm sure they believe that they are intellectual superior or else they wouldn't risk their mental health and their LIVES to protect us. I suspect they don't worry at all about workplace self-contamination. It's much more likely that they laugh at what what they are paid to do: pretending to protect the rest of us. They think of us as rubes, as the hoi polloi. Just keep those paychecks coming! As Matt Taibbi recently stated in his Congressional testimony, they are part of the Censorship-Industrial Complex. They think they are super-smart, certainly smarter than the rest of us because they are being paid to be full of shit and anti-American.

The belief of censors that they are immune to the dangerous ideas they filter for us is a classic case of myopic, one-level reasoning. It is as bad as the traditional theologian "tennis without a net that many people have tried to jam down my throat my entire life. It goes like this:

Everything must have a cause.

The universe must have had a cause.

God caused the universe!

[At this point they are finished and they stare are you smugly]

Normal people should then speak up: "Hey, I thought your first premise is that EVERYTHING must have a cause, right? Who caused "God"?"

That's when they claim that "God" doesn't need to have a cause or some similar BS. Or they change the topic.

Censors who claim to be immune to the effects of dangerous words and cause-less causers are classic cases of motivated reasoning, social intuitionism, emotional security blankets dressed up in fancy words.

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How to Blame a Bat, Using Immense Research Funding as Bait

The story of one of the greatest tragedies and deceptions of all time is finally coming out. You won't find it in the corporate media yet, because the message has been controlled upstream through the powerful incentive structure of billions of $ of scientific research funding and Machiavellian pinpoint control of three historically prestigious science journals upon which corporate media outlets rely. But the narrative is starting to crumble thanks to recent Congressional hearings and this excellent article by Ashley Rindsberg. Once this entire story works its way into wider public understanding, Anthony Fauci will not be invited to throw any more ceremonial opening day pitches.

Here are a few excerpts from Rindsberg's article at Tablet,"Treason of the Science Journals: How Anthony Fauci manufactured consensus on the origins of COVID-19 with the help of science writers and the media."

At the government level, pandemic preparedness is as much about protecting critical supply chains as it is about administering medical treatments. What the COVID-19 pandemic showed is that the flow of information, which may be the single most vital resource in the supply chain, is utterly broken. In many cases, it was actively undermined by senior public health officials including the former chief medical adviser to the president, Dr. Anthony Fauci.

New emails released in a congressional probe show that Fauci helped direct the publication of “The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2,” an influential scientific paper published in Nature Medicine on March 17, 2020, that claimed COVID-19 could not have leaked from a laboratory. Fauci then cited the paper—in effect quoting himself, since he coordinated the article behind the scenes and was given final approval before it published—as if it was an independent source corroborating his assertions that COVID could only have come from a bat and not from a lab.

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Crickets . . . The Sound We Will Hear from Corporate Media Instead of Apologies

The Washington Post reported a story today without mentioning that until today, the paper has been engaging in reckless journalism for many months prior. Here's today's headline:

"‘Havana syndrome’ not caused by energy weapon or foreign adversary, intelligence review finds: After a years-long assessment, five U.S. intelligence agencies conclude it is ‘very unlikely’ an enemy wielding a secret weapon was behind the mysterious ailment.

To be a modern corporate journalist, you don't need any evidence to publish a story. All you need is to know someone in the federal government who whispers something to you that furthers your employer's favorite narrative. Just look at these clowns go at it, convincing each other that the sounds made by crickets were caused by a Russian high tech weapon that was frying the brains of U.S personnel. WaPo published DOZENS of these xenophobic articles. How much of our Russia-hate these days is because of journalistic malpractice?

Glenn Greenwald adds (and I agree that this is an easy bet):

This is yet another hoax where any ethical and actual news organization would go on air and say: "for years we told you something that turned out to be false. Here's why we did it. We apologize and retract our stories."

That they don't tells you all you need to know about them.

I just checked (March 1, 2023 at 11pm CT): The corporate media refusing to mention that the story was a hoax include: NYT, Washington Post, NPR, MSNBC and CNN.

Continue ReadingCrickets . . . The Sound We Will Hear from Corporate Media Instead of Apologies