U.S. and Texas: It is too Dangerous to Vacation in Mexico

Texas Travel Advisory regarding Mexico:. See also here for similar U.S. warnings.

The Texas Department of Public Safety warned Americans to skip spring break vacations in Mexico, noting that ongoing violence poses a significant safety threat.

The warning —which adds to State Department advisories not to travel to large swathes of the country — comes in the wake of the kidnapping of four Americans in Mexico earlier this month. There's a "Level 4: Do Not Travel" advisory for Tamaulipas, the Mexican state the Americans were in when they were kidnapped.

In the meantime, here are the numbers of murders over the past year in various American cities:

Portland Oregon: 93 Philadelphia: 516 San Antonio: 231 Saint Louis: 200 Memphis: 288 New Orleans: 280 Chicago: 697 Houston: 435 Washington DC: 203 Kansas City: 167

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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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Scott Nugent, Featured in “What is a Woman,” Challenges the News Media to Ask Real Questions on Transgender Issues

Scott Nugent, mother, lesbian and trans man, giving an impassioned scolding to a room filled with reporters. Scott is challenging them to ask real questions about the claims of profit-seekers to help struggling children instead of naively accepting the rhetoric of trans activists.

Continue ReadingScott Nugent, Featured in “What is a Woman,” Challenges the News Media to Ask Real Questions on Transgender Issues

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.

Continue ReadingProtect the Censors!