Most people support free speech in the abstract. But give them a tough case, and they'll strain to find a rationale for an exception.

Why? I think it's largely cognitive dissonance. Many people simply aren't comfortable with the notion that we should protect the right of others to say things we hate. They feel, in their gut, that if we're fighting for someone's rights, they had better be sympathetic. They don't like defending hateful people, and feel on some level that if we're supporting the right to say something, we can't also hate that something. It's the same phenomenon that softens support for the rights of criminal defendants in specific situations, however much people might agree in the abstract that people accused of a crime should have rights.

But there's absolutely nothing wrong with simultaneously holding someone in complete contempt for their speech and defending that speech from censorship.

In that spirit, I give you Evan S. Cohen and his daughter, "J.C."

J.C. goes to Beverly Vista High School in Beverly Hills, California. One day, while off campus, J.C. filmed some of her friends ragging on another girl, encouraged them to talk trash about the girl, then posted the resulting video on YouTube. Here's how Judge Stephen V. Wilson, United States District Judge for the Central District of California, described it:

While at the restaurant, Plaintiff recorded a four-minute and thirty-six second video of her friends talking. (PSUF 7.) The video was recorded on Plaintiff’s personal video-recording device. (Id.) The video shows Plaintiff’s friends talking about a classmate of
theirs, C.C. (PSUF 8.) One of Plaintiff’s friends, R.S., calls C.C. a “slut,” says that C.C. is “spoiled,” talks about “boners,” and uses
profanity during the recording. (Defendants’ Statement of Uncontroverted Facts in Support of Defendants’ Motion for Summary
Adjudication [“DSUF”] 7; Declaration of J.C. in Support of Pl.’s Mot. For Summ. Adjudication [“J.C. Supporting Decl.”], Exh. 1 [YouTube
video].) R.S. also says that C.C. is “the ugliest piece of shit I’ve ever seen in my whole life.” (J.C. Supporting Decl., Exh. 1 [YouTube
video].) During the video, J.C. is heard encouraging R.S. to continue to talk about C.C., telling her to “continue with the Carina rant.”
(DSUF 9.)

In other words, J.C. acted like a Mean Girl the way teen girls probably always have. The impact of her loutish and classless behavior was enhanced by modern technology. A number of her classmates viewed her rant against C.C.

The victim of J.C.'s rant complained to administrators at Beverly Vista High School, who suspended J.C. for two days. J.C., represented by her father Evan S. Cohen (a Los Angeles entertainment lawyer with a web site possibly designed by an eight-year-old), sued for violation of her First Amendment rights. J.C. argued that the school had no business disciplining her for speech that occurred entirely off campus.

And she was right. Judge Wilson (who is a bit of a Mean Girl himself, in my experience) granted summary judgment in her favor. Judge Wilson rejected J.C.'s argument that off-campus speech is by definition beyond school regulation, finding that off-campus speech that causes substantial on-campus disruption can be subject to official punishment. However, Judge Wilson also found that the evidence was insufficient to show that J.C.'s speech either causes or threatened substantial disruption, the relevant inquiry under Tinker. J.C. won, and won her father's attorney fees and costs — more than $100,000.

Judge Wilson was right in the result, if not in all of his analysis. Student free speech rights are under assault. The Supreme Court has retreated from the high-water-mark of speech protection under Tinker. Gestures towards criminalizing bullying and "cyberbullying" are in fashion. Schools — in part because they fear being sued for failure to prevent harassment, and in part out of hostility towards unpopular speech — are increasingly aggressive in using a broad, vague, and unprincipled definition of "disruption" to justify censorship. If schools can punish off-campus conduct without (at least) a rigorous and principled analysis of whether the speech caused material on-campus disruption, then schools will have alarmingly broad discretion to censor unpopular viewpoints.

It's a good thing that J.C. won.

But that doesn't mean we can't, or shouldn't, hold J.C. and her father Evan S. Cohen in contempt. Here's a glimpse into Mr. Cohen's parenting skills and sense of humanity:

The lesson Mr. Cohen hopes his daughter learns from the case is about the limits on governmental intrusion. “A girl came to school who was upset by something she saw on the Internet,” Mr. Cohen said in a telephone interview, “and these people had in their mind that they were going to do something about it. The school doesn’t have that kind of power. It’s up to the parents to discipline their child.”

He did chastise his daughter, saying, “That wasn’t a nice thing to do.”

He describes her video as “relentlessly juvenile,” but not an example of cyberbullying, which he said he did not condone. His daughter offered to remove it from YouTube. But Mr. Cohen keeps it posted, he said, “as a public service” so viewers can see “what kids get suspended for in Beverly Hills.”

Yes. Mr. Cohen deliberately keeps his daughter's video — in which she gleefully describes another teen classmate as an ugly slut and encourages friends to bash her — posted on the internet, to show what a free speech hero he is. Mr. Cohen thinks the most important lesson his daughter can learn is not about acting like a decent person (as opposed to a teenager and a bully), but about free speech law. From this we can learn a great deal about Mr. Cohen's character, and the sort of human being his daughter is likely to become with him as a parent. Rejoice — your kids will be out in the world with her.

Embrace the cognitive dissonance. It's perfectly all right to believe simultaneously that Judge Wilson reached the right result and that Evan S. Cohen is a smug and unlikeable douche raising a child to be a sociopath. It's perfectly OK to think that most decent human beings would have decided that the more important lesson to J.C. would have been to punish her for a cruel attempt to humiliate a classmate, and that choosing to vindicate her First Amendment rights instead is pathological. By analogy to another famous Cohen, you can support the right to wear a jacket saying "Fuck the Draft" and still think the wearer is an attention-seeking twerp. Support student free speech rights. It doesn't mean you support the low character of people like J.C. and Evan S. Cohen.

Yesterday, at a Fourth of July barbecue at my sister-in-law's house, I was served a variety of Ben & Jerry's ice cream. I couldn't help but notice that ice cream has a strong liberal bias. Imagine Whirled Peace? (Damn hippies.) Mission to Marzipan? (Clearly an endorsement of reckless government spending.) Phish Food? (I guess that one could have libertarian elements.) Magic Brownies? (OK, guys, we get it.) Cherry Garcia? (No, REALLY, we get it. You like marijuana. Thanks!)

I've got a money-making idea perfect for these politically divided times. Someone needs to compete with Ben & Jerry with a line of ice cream aimed at Tea Party voters. We'll pay Glen Back to denounce Ben & Jerry (assuming he hasn't already) and promote our line of ice cream. Now we just need to come up with flavors:

Limited Govern-mint
Lime Item Veto
Nut My President
Rocky Road to Ruin
'Nilla-buster
Sweet November

Any other suggestions?

You don't believe me?

1.  Scientific and legal proof that every day is July 5.

2.  "How could I go to school after that and pledge allegiance and sit through good government bullshit?"

Every day is July 5.  The 4th of July is a myth perpetuated to keep normals in line, and to oppress God-fearing, and godless, weirdos.

In a word: socialism.

See, it turns out that Google, Yahoo!, and the other big search engines are part of a secret plot to drive traffic to socialist sites rather than decent, God-fearing, pro-American-values sites.

I learned about this courtesy of "Reasonjester" at "Tea Party Nation."

IT IS MY SUSPICION THAT GOOGLE AND YAHOO ARE STEPPING UP GOVERNMENT PROPAGANDA BY MOVING UP SOCIALIST-FRIENDLY (AKA STATE-FRIENDLY) LINKS IN THE SEARCH HITS.

Many people have suspected this before, but I am really starting to see some strange behavior out of Google, in particular. And it is not just a reflection of more aggressive AP and MSM bias, there are numerous leftist blogs that are being moved up.

The explanation is simple: The U.S. government has signaled to the search engines that if you don't play hardball, the government will shut you down. This type of intimidation can be seen with the Chinese instructing Google to censor hits while threatening not to renew its license.

I'm pretty sure Reasonjester meant "if you don't play ball," rather than "if you don't play hardball," but it's possible that incipient socialism has caused me to see mixed metaphors where there are none.

Reasonjester's commenters agree:

Ive also noticed when you try to inter a web sight that is against liberal beliefs the sight freezes up and stalls on you like a connection problem causing you to have to wait forever ,

But a sight that has liberal postings and debates you get in and have no problems .

One of two things .

Either thay are lagging you on purpose are liberal sights are not as active as thay build them up to be making less traffic on the forum's.

So when freerepublic.com crashes, that's because the tubes have been deliberately broken by communists to thwart conservative speech.

I have long suspected it.

Well, as you know, we're total traffic whores here. So we'll be moving to an all-socialist, all-the-time format. I've stopped bathing. Patrick is regrowing the beard he had in grad school. Ezra is — well, Ezra is Ezra.

Fortunately the definition of "socialist" seems somewhat broader than it was when I learned it in school, so we should still be able to bring you a broad range of topics.

Thanks, Tea Party Nation!

Earlier this week I was walking some clients from the courthouse to their car after a particularly unsatisfactory court appearance in which a judge had blamed unavailable research attorneys for his complete abdication of the obligation to make any decisions whatsoever.

The clients, a mother and son, were upset. We had ambled to the courthouse, but their shoes snapped angrily upon the Inland Empire pavement as we hustled back to the parking lot. I sensed they were eager to get into the car and drive off so they could vent out of my immediate presence.

I was not apologizing for the judge, but attempting to place the further delay in context, and they were shaking their heads uncooperatively, when we rounded the corner and saw it. I stopped mid-sentence, they stopped mid-stride, my train of thought derailed as thoroughly and quickly as an Amtrack.

There, in the dirt amongst scrubby brush, was the bra.

Black it was, and chased with even blacker lace. But it was not the color that made it notable. No, a black bra by the side of the road is a mere curiosity, soon forgotten. What cut me short and stopped my clients in their tracks was its size. The bra was not just vast. Vast does not begin to describe it. The strapping was thick and lengthy, the cups heroic, the whole thing looking like the harness of some ancient and improbably muscled gladiator. It looked not real at all, an image of a bra blown up and carelessly cut and pasted upon our reality. My clients stood agape, disappointment in the law's delay temporarily forgotten, and I saw in their eyes that their minds struggled in vain to calculate what mine did — what kind of unearthly bosom did this bra contain? How broad were the shoulders that stretched those straps? How strong and meaty the fingers that fastened it? It staggered the imagination. Extrapolation suggested some giant, towering over the streets of San Bernardino, shambling off now unbound. But what other unspeakable things did that imply? If there be giants, what thing is great or terrible enough to make a giant doff its bra in the bushes along the courthouse in a dusty town?

Slowly we began to walk again. I stammered a few more sentences, but I could not complete them, and it was clear my clients were not listening. Their eyes stared at nothing, their mouths worked at the numbers of it. We did not speak about the bra, for what could possibly be said? They drove away in silence, and I walked the two more blocks to my car, each footfall driving the beat into my mind: the bra. The bra. The bra. The bra.

We're simple people, really, all of us. We don't like ambiguity or nuance, and we don't particularly like new things. We like to put things in tried and true box-like categories. When we argue about how society, or the government, should address a particular issue, we tend to argue Darmok-like, by analogy and allusion to those familiar box-like categories. Hence when our government develops an appetite to ban, say, videos depicting animal cruelty, it tends to do so by analogy, by saying that videos depicting animal cruelty belong in the child pornography box and can be banned on that basis.

Under this approach, a government hungry for unfettered power can achieve it by (a) making us irrationally terrified of the contents one particular box, and (b) selling us on the concept that a wide range of unrelated things belongs in that box.

The box we're most terrified of right now is the one marked "terrorism." The government has very successfully sold most of us on the concept that we're in mortal danger of terrorists killing us right here in America, correctly calculating that our collective innumeracy will prevent us from accurately assessing the actual danger and comparing it to the danger of being run over by an SUV or developing lung cancer from our cigarettes or a heart attack from our Big Macs. With few exceptions, we've bought into the concept that the OMG TERROR!! box is indeed terrifying, and that the government is justified in exercising broad and mostly unfettered power to do what it thinks is necessary to stop the awful things in that box from jumping out and EATING OUR CHILDREN. The Bush Administration got away with quite a bit, and the Obama Administration, despite unkept promises to reign in such exercises of power, has eagerly continued them.

Naturally the government is trying to drop more things in the terror box. Naturally the government wants to use its broad and largely anti-terror power against things other than just Middle Eastern terrorists. It craves the largely uncritical support we give to the War on Terror. It thinks it would be nice if we would support other government functions uncritically. Maybe we will, if the government can convince us that those other functions belong in the terror box.

So the government, having achieved nothing resembling success in its long and costly War on Drugs, tries to drop drugs into the terror box, and see if that will lead us to view its prohibition efforts with the same lack of critical thinking that we view the War on Terror.

But that isn't far enough. There's other problems out there. Like . . . piracy. Like people downloading Lady Gaga or Iron Man for free.

Wouldn't the world be a swell place if people would accept the government's anti-piracy efforts with the same uncritical support that they give to the War on Terror? You can be sure the RIAA thinks so. The RIAA thinks that the War on Piracy is more important than the War on Terror, because the War on Terror is (thanks to 24) mostly profitable to the RIAA, whereas the War on Piracy has cost it money.

Fortunately for the RIAA, the government is obliging; it's perfectly willing to try to wedge the War on Piracy into the terror box. It's win-win. The government gets broader power; the RIAA gets broader support for its propaganda.

That's how you get The Department of Homeland Security involved in pursuing people who download Shrek illegally.

Still, you may wonder … Why is the department of homeland security using federal muscle to protect Shrek?

“The reason the Department of Homeland Security is protecting Shrek is because we are all about protecting the homeland. We’re all about protecting American interests,” says John Morton, assistant secretary of DHS.

And what's good for the green ogre is good for America?

“If you don’t think undermining Hollywood’s ability to produce a "Shrek," undermining the creativity that goes into creating a "Shrek," undermines the United States," Morton says, "you are sadly mistaken.”

We were sufficiently terrified of the contents of the terror box not to flinch when they created something called a Department of Homeland Security. Why would we worry about giving it the job of pursuing illegal movie and music downloaders? Piracy threatens America. Just like terrorists.

Poor Agostino di Duccio.  He had learned his craft under the most innovative and imaginatively expressive sculptural master of the quattrocento, Donatello.  But Agostino could not have been happy on the mountain in Carrara as he oversaw the quarrying of a shallow, broad block of marble some eighteen feet long.  Over the course of his career, Agostino had taken to bas-relief work of the sort one finds on the façade of a church or a palazzo.  He had created grand works in terra cotta, too, but clay is a thing far different from stone.

Nevertheless, here he was, perhaps because the elders in Florence had decided to make good on a fifty year old plan to erect a huge statue of Donatello's making on a buttress of the cathedral.  Then in his late 70s, Donatello was no longer in a position to give more than nominal attention to such a project.  To Agostino fell the labor.

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