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Free Speech, The Goose, And The Gander

June 17, 2017 by Ken White

Last night a popular alt-right troll disrupted a controversial modern production of Julius Caesar staged with a Trumplike figure in the lead role. Some people are incensed at this production and arguing that it depicts and encourages the assassination of Trump himself, and that fury has built to the point that random theaters with "Shakespeare" in their name are being threatened by imbeciles across the land. Never mind, for the moment, that Shakespeare's plays are shot through with blunt commentary on the politics of his time, or that staging Shakespeare to comment on contemporary politics is common and nearly as old as they plays themselves, or that the same thing has been done with an Obama-like Caesar with very little fanfare, or that the entire point of the play is that Caesar's assassination is self-indulgent folly that leads to disaster. People are angry.

One angry justification for disrupting the play goes like this: liberals do this to conservatives, so this is fair play. We're just imposing liberals' rules on liberals. Liberals disrupt conservative speakers on campuses all the time, and if that's okay, why isn't this okay?

This way lies madness and destruction, the excuse to abandon everything we believe. We follow our principles because they're right, not because everyone agrees with them. We follow them in adversity and in the face of opposition and even injustice. We give due process — a jury trial — to a cop who shot a motorist even if a very good argument can be made that the cop executed the motorist without due process. We defend the free speech of Nazis and communists who would deny it to us if they had power. At one point, I would have been able to say that we don't torture people even if they torture.

The "eye for an eye" theory of respecting free speech is particularly pernicious because it represents the worst sort of collectivism, something the principled Right ought reject. Note that people who say "apply the Liberals' own rules to the Liberals" aren't disrupting, say, an Antifa rally or the meeting of some Berkeley student group that advocated shutting down a conservative speaker. They're disrupting other people entirely, on the theory that everyone they deem part of the nebulous collective "Liberal" deserves to be silenced because someone else in that nebulous collective engaged in silencing behavior. The actors and playgoers in New York, under this theory, deserve to be shut down because they stand responsible for the acts of all "liberals" everywhere. (The suggestion that anyone going to see Julius Ceasar must be a liberal does not reflect a very healthy self-image amongst the Right.) This closely resembles the logic of hecklers on college campuses, who argue that nearly any conservative speaker stands responsible for Klansmen and neo-Nazis and overt bigots everywhere. It's contemptible and can be used to justify doing nearly anything to nearly anyone. It's the sentiment behind saying American Muslims may fairly be oppressed because Christians are oppressed in Saudi Arabia — even while celebrating our nation having greater freedoms than Saudi Arabia.

And yet, the "we're just applying their rules to them" theory has some heft. It's not because of the nasty, disruptive little totalitarians themselves. Antifa scum and pseudo-educated campus thugs are not legitimate foundation for any adult's philosophy. No, the bit of plausibility comes from the reaction of people in authority, people who ought to know better, people whose conduct is somewhat more fairly attributed to a larger political groups. A few hysterically censorious kids screaming for a professor's termination for crimethink do not threaten the foundations of free speech, but Yale lauding them does. Relatively few thugs disrupting a speech and even physically assaulting a professor don't call into question the culture's support for free speech, but Middlebury offering weak slaps on the wrist and shrugs for that violent behavior does. A violent mob in Berkeley does not undermine the legitimacy of free speech doctrine — a mob is a mob — but Berkeley's timorousness or indifference in the face of violent censorship does. Students furious at a professor disagreeing with them don't call into question the nation's commitment to freedom, but state officials refusing to guarantee a professor's safety do. In short: the regrettable behavior of officials who have failed to stand up to disruption of speech are the people most responsible for legitimizing further disruptions of speech, whoever commits them.

But we can, and should, do better. Commitment to free speech as an American value — as an element of American exceptionalism — has always required tolerating evil and injustice and idiocy. We don't refrain from disrupting speech because the speakers deserve it, or because we've been treated fairly by the speakers or their allies. We refrain from disruption — and ought to punish those who disrupt — because free speech is the necessary prerequisite of a society based on individual rights and freedoms. It's the right that's the gateway to all other rights. Shrugging and abandoning it as a value is an abandonment of our commitment to all rights.

Last 5 posts by Ken White

  • Now Posting At Substack - August 27th, 2020
  • The Fourth of July [rerun] - July 4th, 2020
  • All The President's Lawyers: No Bill Thrill? - September 19th, 2019
  • Over At Crime Story, A Post About the College Bribery Scandal - September 13th, 2019
  • All The President's Lawyers: - September 11th, 2019
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Filed Under: Law, Politics & Current Events Tagged With: End Of All Things, Free Speech

Comments

  1. SIV says

    June 17, 2017 at 11:11 am

    Protestors engage in peaceful civil disobedience.

  2. Chris says

    June 17, 2017 at 11:19 am

    Not that it makes a difference in the grand scheme of things, but was the version of Caesar with a black man in the role of Caesar actually meant to represent Obama? I didn't see anything to suggest that it was but could have overlooked it.

  3. Sinij says

    June 17, 2017 at 11:21 am

    " A few hysterically censorious kids screaming for a professor's termination for crimethink do not threaten the foundations of free speech, but Yale lauding them does."

    You forgot to add a long list of organizations and left ideologies to that lauding sentence. It isn't just Yale. I would argue that modern Left is largely accepting and encouraging of such behavior.

    It is also foolish of Left to think this won't be escalated and retaliated from the Right.

  4. Inwoods says

    June 17, 2017 at 11:27 am

    >something the principled Right ought reject.

    Probably "ought to reject" unless you're being deliberately Shakspearean.

    "Irregardlessly" this is wrong:

    >nearly as old as they plays themselves

    Great post though! Cheers!

  5. Inwoods says

    June 17, 2017 at 11:30 am

    [free speech is] the right that's the gateway to all other rights.

    I appreciate the rhetoric, but I would suggest the right to live is more fundamental. The dead cannot speak.

  6. Lawrence D'Anna says

    June 17, 2017 at 11:31 am

    It's seriously depressing to see the right starting to adopt these tactics. Apparently they weren't just random thugs either, they work for rebel media. I think it's only going to get worse from here.

  7. Total says

    June 17, 2017 at 11:44 am

    I would argue that modern Left is largely accepting and encouraging of such behavior.

    Two posts in and someone proves Ken's point: " on the theory that everyone they deem part of the nebulous collective "Liberal" deserves to be silenced because someone else in that nebulous collective engaged in silencing behavior."

  8. runbei says

    June 17, 2017 at 11:54 am

    This is why I subscribe. Ballsy clear thinking and fence posts be damned.

  9. PACW says

    June 17, 2017 at 12:06 pm

    Thank you. Once again you express my thoughts – but with clarity and rational arguments.

  10. Bradoplata says

    June 17, 2017 at 12:51 pm

    Sorry smart people, but shots have been fired. The guy that shot the congressman wasn't some nut. He was an older, licensed tradesman that got radicalized like any other terrorist by what he heard.

    Most progs would gladly drive the bus to the re-education camps if not put a bullet in a conservative and therefore the time for principles is indeed over and the time for active, in your face countermeasures has begun. Prog libs won't like the new rules when they find out they apply to them equally.

    Hopefully it ends with just interruptions like the play.

  11. ElSuerte says

    June 17, 2017 at 1:23 pm

    This article both delights and frustrates me, both as a free speech and a popehat fan.

    I fully agree with the this article, but I can't help compare it with Ken's reponse to the Airport AirDrop Pepe Affair. Harrassing some actors and their audience over provocative Shakespearean imagery is bad, but harrassing some rando over provocative frog imagery is good. I'm having trouble seeing how you can resolve this contradiction with out sacrificing a few of the principles laid out in his post

  12. Ken White says

    June 17, 2017 at 1:32 pm

    @ElSuerte:

    If the woman interrupted a talk that Douchebro was giving because she thinks he's an ass, she would be entirely in the wrong. But she responded to an unsolicited interaction with an unsolicited interaction. You might think the response is disproportionate and some of the things she called him are unjustified, but she didn't disrupt his speech. She inflicted social consequences on it. Now she's subject to social consequences in return.

    That's leaving aside what I see as the completely ridiculous view that he was doing something other than sending a black woman a symbol associated with white supremacy in order to be a dick.

  13. SocraticGadfly says

    June 17, 2017 at 1:40 pm

    Ken, good post.

    Total, good comment.

    Bradoplata: Sorry, but per his hauled-down LinkedIn page, he was a Cruz supporter of some sort as well as a big Bernie backer. (Near bottom of link.) http://socraticgadfly.blogspot.com/2017/05/gary-johnson-jill-stein-and-bernie.html

  14. Total says

    June 17, 2017 at 1:51 pm

    Most progs would gladly drive the bus to the re-education camps if not put a bullet in a conservative

    You're a fucking moron with no idea what "most progs" would do.

  15. Nobody says

    June 17, 2017 at 1:53 pm

    Great in theory. The problem people are having is that standing by principles has only lead to an acceleration of the problem. Things are getting worse because the lunatic censors haven't had to play by their own rules. People are getting fed up with it. Standing for one's principles, more and more, feels like putting your head meekly upon the chopping block. I'm not saying that interrupting Shakespeare is the right course of action, but I fully understand the motivation behind it.

    Has Justine landed yet?

  16. Frank Ch. Eigler says

    June 17, 2017 at 2:10 pm

    "a symbol associated with white supremacy"

    The passive voice belies lack of confidence. _Some people_ associate it with white supremacy, or nationalism, or naziism, or whatever not-really-interchangeable slur one likes to use that moment. _Some other people_ associate it with hilarity. _Some other people_ think of it as an anti-PC speech.

    To pretend that there is only one canonical "association" is wrong, and is part of the problem.

  17. Joe says

    June 17, 2017 at 2:13 pm

    I think this post is largely correct – but, I have to agree with Sinij above. Not necessarily that there's some kind of cabal in play here, but there's a very definitive strain of thought on the left – one which runs through the colleges (particularly Ivy League), runs through many left-wing organizations, is regularly seen in left-wing cultural criticism, and on and on – which specficially identifies (what-they-deem-to-be) reactionary thought as not really being worthy of protection, as being functionally equivalent to violence, as the concept of discourse itself being a shadow tool of oppressive systems, and on and on and on. This is not to endorse Posobiec or other idiots (and Sinij didn't do so either), but I don't quite see an equivalent intellectual movement on the right at the moment which grows to that level. It's precisely why the trolls are framing this as "COMEUPPANCE", the regular strain of logic for when you want to be terrible. Writing it off as a handful of overzealous students and some enablers is wrongheaded – the ideas in play are the real problem. Which isn't to say they should be censored, but they should be called out as such. And I loathe Trump and the GOP, lest my intent be misunderstood.

    Again, beyond this point (and siding with the woman at the airport), I think Ken is spot-on that this is the other side of that idiocy, and people are largely opportunistic on this issue.

  18. Thad says

    June 17, 2017 at 2:13 pm

    @Total: Indeed, it seems that this is actually a quantifiable hypothesis.

    First of all, how do you define "progs"? Let's say, for the sake of argument, that all Sanders voters are progressives (since the shooter we are discussing — well, the shooter we weren't discussing, but who Bradoplata seems to feel is germane to the conversation — was a Sanders voter). That means the floor on the number of "progs" in America is the total Sanders vote tally.

    Records indicate that Sanders got 13,168,222 votes.

    So, assuming that there are at least 13,168,222 progs, for the statement "Most progs would gladly…put a bullet in a conservative" to be true, at least 6,584,112 Sanders voters would have to shoot a conservative. (50% plus one.) And not reluctantly, in self-defense, accidentally, etc.; they would have to do so gladly.

    I am aware of one Sanders voter who has (presumably gladly) put bullets in conservatives. If Bradoplata can produce 6,584,111 more examples, I will concede the possibility that he is correct.

    Speaking for myself (a self-described progressive but not a Sanders voter, as I'm a registered independent), I can see few scenarios in which I would ever put a bullet in anyone, and I would not be glad about any of them.

    And I don't even know how to drive a bus.

  19. En Passant says

    June 17, 2017 at 2:17 pm

    … or that staging Shakespeare to comment on contemporary politics is common and nearly as old as they plays themselves, or that the same thing has been done with an Obama-like Caesar with very little fanfare, …

    Fifty years ago, Barbara Garson's and Roy Levine's, Macbird! satirized Lyndon and Lady Bird Johnson as Lord and Lady Macbeth.

  20. SocraticGadfly says

    June 17, 2017 at 2:35 pm

    Bradoplata: Scott Roeder. Eric Rudolph.

    Go away.

  21. Total says

    June 17, 2017 at 2:47 pm

    The problem people are having is that standing by principles has only lead to an acceleration of the problem. Things are getting worse because the lunatic censors haven't had to play by their own rules. People are getting fed up with it

    Yeah, I've noticed how those terrible lefty censors have been so effective that they've completely shut the American right out of the White House, Congress, the Judiciary, state houses, state legistlatures, and so on down to the turtles.

    Do you ever actually listen to what you're saying?

  22. Total says

    June 17, 2017 at 2:55 pm

    legistlatures

    legislatures, sigh.

  23. Jim in Conroe says

    June 17, 2017 at 2:55 pm

    ". . . the regrettable behavior of officials who have failed to stand up to disruption of speech are the people most responsible for legitimizing further disruptions of speech, whoever commits them."

    I note that 100% of the protesters at the play were arrested. Would that the same percentage apply to those of the liberal persuasion, who prevent the exercise of free speech by violence and intimidation.

  24. Mikee says

    June 17, 2017 at 3:15 pm

    Sad how many conservatives blame all liberals for the act of a bad liberal while ignoring the many bad acts committed by conservatives, or just claiming that bad conservative doesn't represent conservatives.

    Did conservatives forget about Gabrielle Giffords? Did conservatives forget about the targeted image that a conservative politician put out about Giffords? Did conservatives blame all conservatives for the cowardly attempted assassination of a member of Congress by a conservative nutjob? Sure as fuck looks like their selective memory has failed them in this instance.

    Fucking brainless morons such as the hypocrite Alzheimer's sufferers in this discussion are why I stopped voting Republican.

  25. David says

    June 17, 2017 at 3:18 pm

    I've read snowflake conservatives say in all seriousness that they are sick of politics in everything and cannot believe a Shakespeare play injects politics into the show.

  26. Cromulent Bloviator says

    June 17, 2017 at 3:19 pm

    The UK, (that place Shakespeare was from) doesn't have freedom of speech, and yet they do have other rights. They have the right of free religious speech, at least.

    If anything, the foundation for the rights of the People is the rights of the Disfavored Wealthy. If even the unpopular wealthy have rights, then it is easy to get them extended also to unknown people. It probably doesn't matter which rights you start with, because Freedom teaches an appetite for more Freedom.

  27. Total says

    June 17, 2017 at 3:20 pm

    Would that the same percentage apply to those of the liberal persuasion, who prevent the exercise of free speech by violence and intimidation

    Hey, Captain Nerf Brain, how many were pepper-sprayed?

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UC_Davis_pepper_spray_incident

  28. Gold Star for Robot Boy says

    June 17, 2017 at 3:34 pm

    Protestors engage in peaceful civil disobedience.

    But when Colin Kaepernick silently took a knee during the national anthem, many on the right lost their damn minds.

  29. DRJlaw says

    June 17, 2017 at 3:41 pm

    @Jim in Conroe

    I note that 100% of the protesters at the play were arrested. Would that the same percentage apply to those of the liberal persuasion, who prevent the exercise of free speech by violence and intimidation.

    Citation needed, since the linked article reads that 50% of the protestors were arrested (1 out of 2), and only after that 50% refused to leave the venue after being ejected.

    In case you missed it:
    "Ms. Loomer, 24, continued to shout from outside the theater after she was removed, and declined requests by the police to step away from the structure; she was then arrested. The New York Police Department said she was charged with criminal trespass and disorderly conduct and was released."

    I do not see any suggestion that O'Keefe was arrested. Thus I can only conclude that 0% of the protesters were arrested for the protest itself, and reality already satisfies, or is already harsher than, the standard that you wish to apply to those of the liberal persuasion.

  30. Jim in Conroe says

    June 17, 2017 at 3:51 pm

    OK, I'll take a 50% arrest rate for the liberal protesters.

  31. SIV says

    June 17, 2017 at 3:53 pm

    something the principled Right ought reject

    My fellow principled Right people…

  32. DRJlaw says

    June 17, 2017 at 3:57 pm

    @Jim in Conroe

    OK, I'll take a 50% arrest rate for the liberal protesters.

    Sorry, it was a 0% arrest rate for the protesting and a 100% arrest rate for refusing a lawful order to leave the property after being ejected.

    You can have that, for the price of surrendering your conservative persecution complex.

  33. cthulhu says

    June 17, 2017 at 4:36 pm

    Oh Mikee, Mikee, Mikee, Mikee, Mikee, you ignorant slut…

    The "Palin was the inspiration for Loughner shooting Giffords" is a bald-faced lie; he was planning that shooting for literally years before Palin's PAC's poster. And Loughner was (is) a paranoid schizophrenic, and neither identified as a conservative nor supported conservatives or conservative causes. That the NYT saw fit to pick up this bilgewater again this week (then retract it a day later) in no way excuses your gross ignorance and incompetence and hate-mongering.

  34. Hans says

    June 17, 2017 at 4:43 pm

    I note that 100% of the protesters at the play were arrested. Would that the same percentage apply to those of the liberal persuasion, who prevent the exercise of free speech by violence and intimidation.

    Urgh. You must think you're clever with comments like this. Look up statistical fallacy. We could just as well say that 1,000% more (or whatever the number is) of those you claim are of the "liberal persuasion" were arrested engaging in violence and intimidation. Would that the same percentage apply, indeed.

  35. Total says

    June 17, 2017 at 4:51 pm

    Since Mike didn't say that Palin said that, what on earth are you wibbling about?

  36. Joe says

    June 17, 2017 at 5:05 pm

    Loughner wasn't even a conservative. In a meaningful sense, he really wasn't anything coherent politically. He shot Gabby Giffords because he thought the government was controlling his mind with grammar. Show me the party arguing to stop this and yeah, I'll say he was an extremist for that side.

    Kind of a non-sequitor to even mention.

  37. Not the IT Dept. says

    June 17, 2017 at 5:18 pm

    I refuse to link to him but if you check out Richard Spencer's twitter feed, he's condemned both perpetrators as "Alt-Light". He also says nasty stuff about Milo, FWIW. Personally I think he's just jealous he didn't think of the idea first.

    I think we should table the whole Left-Right stuff; the antics of the Alt-Right and the Intifas are not on the same page as real political disagreement. (And the idea that the Milos and Coulters of the world don't want protesters is ridiculous – it's the only thing they want.)

    I'm not impressed with the usual commenters claiming that all this proves what they really believed all along – yeah, yeah we know. You're all linear thinkers, not worth reading. Bradoplata would be the first one rolled up in a fetal curl, whimpering in panic, if he was ever confronted with someone willing to shoot him for any reason.

  38. Matthew Cline says

    June 17, 2017 at 6:59 pm

    @SIV

    Protestors engage in peaceful civil disobedience.

    If you're talking about antifa members who commit violence which isn't self defense, they don't consider themselves to be protesters or to be engaged in civil disobedience.

  39. effinayright says

    June 17, 2017 at 7:31 pm

    During WW2 European Jews stood by their principles, too. Look where that got them.

  40. TBlakely says

    June 17, 2017 at 7:57 pm

    The left does love their fake moral equivalencies even if they have to distort and even lie to come up with them. It's like a serial killer complaining that a mugger is just as evil since they also use violence.

  41. WB says

    June 17, 2017 at 8:11 pm

    Hi Ken, did you read the review of the 2012 performance? The reason it wasn't about stabbing Obama to death every time was because it wasn't about Obama at all, it was just a cut down version with a main focus on Brutus and caesar's relationship.

    This 2017 production is plainly about stabbing Trump to death, otherwise why does Calpurnia, Caesar's wife, have an eastern European accent and why does Caesar have Trump hair and wear the Trump suit and tie and coat?

    It's art, sure, but it's also explicit assassination p0rn for anti-Trump Manhattanites so i don't really care if they;re productions get interrupted. Good for the goose and all that.

  42. A republic, if we can regain it says

    June 17, 2017 at 8:17 pm

    Every bully deserves to taste what he dishes out to others. And if–if–he likes it, he should be promised more than he can take. But if he gets the point, he should be given the chance to show that he's learned.
    How are the bullies on the Left to realize the path they are taking us down if we never show them? It is clear they have no education on moral consequences and the rights of others. How can we hope for them to improve if they never learn?
    No one was hurt in the Julius Caesar travesty. And a few people might learn.

  43. ElSuerte says

    June 17, 2017 at 8:19 pm

    Ken, thank you for replying. I hope you won't be insulted if I said that your posts on free speech and other issues helped me become a better thinker.

    Just to nitpick, the guy was at the bar with the friend, she surely disrupted what ever speech they were having.

    The 'associated with' bit is weak thinking. You shouldn't forever surrender a concept just because some asshole takes an interest in it.

    Here's the real kicker though: you couldn't pass your own associations test:

    Remember that post you made where you geeked out about Tanhauser? Alas, Wagner is a cultural touchstone for Nazis and white nationalists. IIRC, several public perfornances of Wagner's music were disrupted because of how offensive and dickish they were to Holocaust survivors and Jewish people in general.

    Need I point out all the attacks people have made against you because of free speech advocacy's historic association with neo nazis and other deplorable groups?

    You've had a much longer association with ametaur phrenology and white supremacy than Pepe has with the AltRight. Notably you wrote an idignant post about your refusal to cut ties with that cob logger. You have agency, cartoon frogs don't. Contrast that with the original creator and his fans disavowel of the AltRight's adaptation.

    Obviously you're not a white supremacist, which is why I think the 'associated with' bit is week..

  44. David says

    June 17, 2017 at 8:24 pm

    Three points:

    1) The Julius Caesar disruption shouldn't be made too much of. I wasn't impressed by it, but at the end of the day, it was good old fashioned civil disobedience. So long as you're willing to go before the judge and take your punishment without any expectation of leniency, I don't see a problem with it.

    2) I quite agree with the observation about the Left and those in authority, such as Berkeley and the riots. The truly pernicious thing is that we are in an age of bizarre pro-Establishment protests where it's really those in authority protesting against themselves via proxies to justify what they want to do anyway. This must be nipped in the bud.

    3) Regarding "playing by their rules", as a general principle, it is horrid. But as a retaliatory tactic under the right circumstances, it is an effective and ethical tool. Case in point is, again, Berkeley. For the Right to counterattack against Leftist rioters is wrong except if a) it is self defence or b) as in Berkeley, the police were ordered to stand down and give Antifa full reign. In the latter case, take the gloves off and start swinging because the State has withdrawn its protection. It's the justification that Washington used during the revolution.

  45. gricky says

    June 17, 2017 at 8:29 pm

    This is a good post, and (in spite of how it might appear below) I strongly agree with every philosophical point made in it.

    What's missing, though, is an understanding of what might be going on in the country. Please indulge my gloom by reading below my guess on where the country is at. Bad news, though: this view of reality also holds that you're shouting into the wind. Here goes.

    This way lies madness and destruction, the excuse to abandon everything we believe.

    We're already there. Expect it to get worse.

    We follow our principles because they're right, not because everyone agrees with them.

    People don't do that when they believe they're at war.

    it represents the worst sort of collectivism, something the principled Right ought reject.

    The principled right is being removed from its position by both sides due to its inability to win in the real world. I wonder who's next.

    This closely resembles the logic of hecklers on college campuses,

    So, the civil order is being challenged from both directions, instead of only from one group. That's worth emphasizing.

    In short: the regrettable behavior of officials who have failed to stand up to disruption of speech are the people most responsible for legitimizing further disruptions of speech, whoever commits them.

    Just like the rest, I think you're totally right that they're RESPONSIBLE, but the practical reality is they're not also held ACCOUNTABLE. And misbehavers of all stripes are reacting to that. For everyone else paying attention, it does look like some of our institutions are failing.

    But we can, and should, do better.

    While correct, that's easier said than done. I imagine if all the pundits were talking like you, they'd influence a lot of people, and, we would do better. I won't try my impression of what I view the pundit-class as being like, but, it sure as hell isn't influencing people to do better. And the trend on pundit behavior, in my opinion, is NOT our friend.

    I liked this post. But, I have so far liked all of your posts on this site that I've read. I'm only singling this one out to add, "have a nice day."

  46. Nevertaken says

    June 17, 2017 at 8:35 pm

    This post is all correct, so I'm only commenting to emphasize one point.

    "They're disrupting other people entirely…"

    Yes, the anti-free speech 'protesters' who interrupted the play were not targeting the other anti-free speech 'protesters' who disrupt conservative campus speakers. But that's the point. If anti-free speech protesters only ever targeted each other, the rest of us could ignore them.

    But if our society is one that tolerates suppression of speech, then we can all expect our speech to be suppressed, whether or not we ourselves have participated in the suppression of others' speech. This is why it is essential to be like Ken, and speak out when speech is suppressed, even if the speech suppressed is not yours or anything you agree with or would like to be associated with.

  47. Matthew Cline says

    June 17, 2017 at 8:40 pm

    @effinayright:

    During WW2 European Jews stood by their principles, too. Look where that got them.

    That's basically the same rationale that antifa uses to justify beating up people that they consider to be fascists.

  48. Lawrence D'Anna says

    June 17, 2017 at 8:42 pm

    The airport Pepe woman wasn't being a censor, she was just being an idiot and a snowflake. And the airport Pepe man wasn't being a harasser, he was just being an idiot and a troll.

  49. Trent says

    June 17, 2017 at 8:43 pm

    It's funny, we used to make fun of tribal cultures in this country, how backwards and stupid it was to decide everything (friendships, associations, work, etc) based on a tribal affiliation.

    Well we haven't got a fucking leg to stand on anymore, significant chunks of our population has gone batshit crazy and bought into the idea that you can't trust the other tribe and no one in your tribe ever does anything wrong.

    Free speech isn't a left or right issue, it's an American issue. It's sad how many people have forgotten that.

    Que the dumbass that complains I'm a member of a tribe and that only their tribe is american.

  50. Vincent says

    June 17, 2017 at 8:50 pm

    What's up with all the vitriol here? The comment section is at its worst. Ken insightfully pointed out the danger of viewing political opponents as a homogenous "other" and then people immediately resort to this fallacious finger-pointing. It doesn't make sense to make accusations against "the Left" or "the Right."

  51. gricky says

    June 17, 2017 at 8:54 pm

    That's basically the same rationale that antifa uses to justify beating up people that they consider to be fascists.

    I spent some hours this year reading Antifa social media and websites; reading far-left social media; and watching videos of Antifa activists speaking about their rationale. One of the key underlying threads that ties them all together is a rationalization of violence as "self-defense," and while I'm still very far from an Antifa expert, I concluded this has been a key rationalization of theirs for at least a couple years (i.e., it didn't just pop up in 2016).

    So, are more factions and groups going to start busting heads and calling it "self-defense"? Nah, I think people are a lot more thoughtful and resourceful than that. They'll probably come up with much more polarizing justifications than that. Have a nice day.

  52. Horkthane says

    June 17, 2017 at 9:05 pm

    I really think this post holds the right to a higher moral standard than the left.

    At almost every institutional level, we see mob tactics work. You piss off the mob you can lose your job, lose your education opportunities, lose your access to social media, the primary means of speech today. I've even seen stories about people being kicked out of gyms and farmers markets by mob pressure. Things you didn't even realize you could lose, the mob has been empowered to take from you. The mob has steadily been empowered for decades.

    Sure, each individual event can usually be defended legally by invoking free association. However, taken in aggregate? Is that really the world we want to live in? Is that really the world you want to banish conservatives to living in? If you answer to that is "yes", do you really expect conservatives to just go "Oh, well, ok then."?

    Why wouldn't elements of the right adopt a winning strategy that has been clubbing them over the head for decades? Principles? How much are people expected to lose on principle?

  53. Thad says

    June 17, 2017 at 9:21 pm

    @cthulhu: You are correct; to all appearances, Loughner was motivated by the voices in his head and not by a specific political ideology. (Nobody but you mentioned Sarah Palin, however.)

    So what about the Stormfront fan who shot up a church, based on reasons that were certainly and unambiguously racially-based? Are you going to argue that he wasn't a conservative either?

    Point is — whether you like the specific example or not — there are certainly examples of politically-motivated shootings on "both sides", if we're going to define this in terms of "sides", and pretending that a single disturbed individual is representative of whatever your personal bugbear happens to be is clownish, no matter what political ideology you subscribe to.

  54. Michael S says

    June 17, 2017 at 9:29 pm

    "The guy that shot the congressman was a Bernie supporter! Face it, progs secretly want to do this to all conservatives"

    "Nuh uh! Remember that time when a conservative shot someone because Trump told him to? Why, that just means that conservatives want to do this to liberals. The monsters!"

    I am (slightly) paraphrasing, but it sounds pretty ridiculous either way. The thing that (mostly) unites "progs" (or "the modern Left", or "conservatives") is a set of shared values and beliefs. If you're going to count some mass murderer as part of their ranks to imply that they're all rotten, then you also have to count the millions upon millions of other boring members who, quite frankly, have done nothing to nobody.

    Of course the headline "Area progressive/conservative/liberal/pony lover makes it through day without killing someone/being a twat on Fuckwitter" will never get published, because it's mostly assholes that crave and command the world's ever-dwindling attention spans. But let's stop pretending that they're any sort of majority.

  55. lagaya says

    June 17, 2017 at 9:55 pm

    Horkthane-

    The mob turned on them because-why? You're a bit nonspecific on that point. Is it because they sexually harassed women, maybe? They were bullies to other races or faiths? Some examples of what you're talking about would make it all a lot clearer if the "mob" was really justified or not.

  56. Michael Hawkins says

    June 17, 2017 at 10:10 pm

    I've always had similar feeling when it comes to people who think it's okay to out someone for being gay because he may be a hypocrite. We've had numerous examples over the years of prominent politicians and others being found to either be gay or bisexual, engaging in secret affairs, only to be proudly outed by those who support equal rights. I get it. They're being hypocritical and detrimental to some pretty basic rights. But I also get that someone shouldn't have their sexuality exposed against their will. Many of my liberal brethren seem to agree with that sentiment until it becomes convenient (or 'fun') to disagree with it.

  57. Ken White says

    June 17, 2017 at 10:41 pm

    @ElSuerte:

    OK. Take me with you on this.

    What's your theory on what the guy was thinking when he sent a Pepe to a stranger — who just happened to be a black woman — in an airport?

    Despite the recent surge of use of Pepe as an explicitly racist meme, he just happened to choose it and just happened to sent it to this complete stranger, not meaning to signify anything in particular?

    And then, when she confronted him, he forgot what it was and why he had sent it and said he didn't really know what it was or why he had sent it?

    I think you're being a defense lawyer, man, but I'm not buying what you're selling. I think you're the guy saying "well actually, a bitch is a dog, you can look it up in the dictionary, and actually breeders say bitch all the time meaning dogs, and it's not offensive to them, and everyone likes dogs, so really I was saying you're someone everyone likes." In fact, I think you're using the silly plausible deniability that the bigots are relying on.

    Or, to use your analogy, I agree it would be wrong to leap to conclusions that someone is a Nazi because they like Wagner. But if they see an orthodox Jew on the street and roll up next to them with the window down and start blaring Wagner at full volume at them, reasonable people might start to draw conclusions.

  58. Marat is my rat says

    June 17, 2017 at 10:50 pm

    Long overdue. Ten thousand more incidents like this, please. The era of Marquis of Queensbury rules on one side and zero rules on the other is finally ending. No more preemptive capitulation. No more unilateral disarmament. Hit back not twice as hard but 1,000 times as hard. Civility is obtained by imposing crushing costs on incivility. Time to start that process.

  59. malclave says

    June 17, 2017 at 11:26 pm

    "Punch back twice as hard."
    "Punish your enemies."

    Maybe the "principled Right" is just tired of being called mass-murdering monsters, especially because there doesn't seem to be much of a "principled Left" calling for civil discourse.

  60. joshua long says

    June 17, 2017 at 11:34 pm

    The production of Julius Caesar is what Kathy Griffin would've done if she had talent.

    The same people who looked at that play and only saw that Trump was assassinated are the same kind of people who looked at Trump and Hillary, and without the slightest sense of embarrassment, thought they were the solution to any problem.

  61. wes george says

    June 18, 2017 at 1:38 am

    Ken, I totally agree that the principled right are the last guardians of free speech, now that the liberals and progs have forfeited that role. We on the principled right should not waver in condemning "direct action" designed to shut down speaking or theatre events. Rational opened debate we must defend! But this direct action was not designed to shut down the event. Clearly, it was staged to make a poignant and ironic interjection before being led away by security.

    Surely, any honestly woke American can relate to how fucking great it must have felt to shout…. NAZZZZIS!!!!… in a crowded theatre that was deep in a pretentiously arty, masturbatory reverie over the political murder of their orange nemesis just days after one of their fellow travellers actually tried – literally – to hand the Democrats a surprise majority in the House via a hunting rifle. There is rough poetic justice here on so many levels! The point was made and the show did go on. Now America discusses and perhaps reflects on and compares this to the errors at Berkley, Middlebury, Yale, etc…. is that a bad thing?

    Of course, you, as a member of the "principled Right" must condemn this puerile, if honestly felt, act of bad manners as irrational. Your logic is good, your grasp of human nature not so much.

    The natural fact is that we are all humans and have human emotions and foibles. The mind-bogglingly self-serving Marxist-based hypocrisy of the Left will be too tempting for some people to resist exposing in the most agitprop way possible. And this too is legitimate free speech. As other commenters have noted: No one was arrested for the protest part of the direct action. Even in the bluest corner of NYC, the act was recognized as protected speech by the cops.

    For too long the principled right has secede culture and arts and protest to the left to direct as they please. We remained aloof, like a character in a bad Ayn Rand novel, concerned only with our private business and not wanting to make a scene. We have long been the silent majority that paid the taxes distributed to others, often the loudest squeaking wheels. The catastrophic failure of the media, our academies, the arts and ultimately the possible intellectual exhaustion of our nation in the not so distant future will one day be understood to be the result of our failure to engage at the most human levels of society, especially if we do not step up to the plate at this critical moment in history.

    O'keefe is our avant-garde. But never mind. Don't celebrate him or he won't be cool. winkwink.

  62. Armst says

    June 18, 2017 at 2:57 am

    One big problem. As soon as you fools wake up and realize you are in a war you will have a better understanding of how to fight it. In this case, throwing the enemies tactics back at them is an acceptable way to fight.

  63. Isotopeblue says

    June 18, 2017 at 4:42 am

    Ken – This is completely unrelated, but I'd be interested in seeing a blog post on the tragic Michelle Carter case. Maybe with comments off – geez!

  64. Jay says

    June 18, 2017 at 5:08 am

    That was a well-written article, and I agree with the main points.

    I'm a little bit confused and disappointed that you included the Yale incident in with your examples of the establishment not respecting freedom of speech. Berkeley is the government. Conservative speakers have a first amendment right to not be discriminated against by the government based on their viewpoint. When the government censors speech, it really does go against one of the core tenets of the United States, and should be condemned in the strongest possible terms, and, more importantly, can and should be fought against through the legal system.

    Yale is not the government. Private institutions are allowed to discriminate based on speech. Lots of private schools discriminate based on speech, including (especially?) conservative private schools. It is not a direct assault on one of the most important rights in the country when a private institution discriminates based on speech.

    Now, if you want to argue that Yale shouldn't discriminate based on speech, I'm fine with that. I think there's a decent argument rooted in a principle of academic freedom that they shouldn't have responded in the way that they did to their professor's speech. But by using that example in an article that is generally about illegally preventing others from speaking, I don't really think that you're being honest about what exactly you have a problem with, and I feel like it's appropriate to quote your own column from just a few days ago:

    But the free speech debate should proceed based on facts and well-established law, not empty rhetoric

  65. Shtetl G says

    June 18, 2017 at 5:30 am

    This tit for tat erosion of our rights and Caesar go perfect together. Because what is happening now is exactly what happened thousands of years ago. Caesar didn't just magically become become a dictator. It took generations of whittling away the rights and rules of the Roman democracy. Each side would chip at or break a rule or a tradition and then the other side would do it in retaliation slowly eroding the foundation of the Roman democracy. Our founding fathers knew exactly what they were doing when they enshrined freedom of speech as a right in our constitution because they studied classical history. They wanted to avoid what happened in Rome. That's why there are checks and balances between the 3 branches of government and the people have the right to say what ever they want to their phoney baloney politicians.

  66. Morgan says

    June 18, 2017 at 6:07 am

    I have a problem with this philosophical stance.

    I am reminded of that Harrison Ford movie 'Witness'. In it, the Philly detective hid out in an Amish community. A younger Amish man went into town with Ford and the lady and met some Democrats. The sat there mocking him, smearing ice cream on his face and making threatening gestures to him. He 'tried to be the better person'.

    Harrison Ford then proceeded to kick the hooligan's butts. The Amish boy GAVE peace and he wanted peace…but he was not GIVEN peace…and did absolutely zero to earn peace.

    I have a significant doubt that those hooligans messed with any more Amish. Just saying!

    The thrust of my point is this: We have a 'rights transaction' going on. I am already 'being the better person'. I am giving free speech rights to the Left because 'that is the deal'.

    THEY are NOT giving free speech rights to ME. Is the right to free speech predicated upon the whims and fancies of any particular Leftist I meet or is it a natural right?

    I reject the 'Gift' premise of the right. It is something hard won and difficult to hold onto.

    Now, optimally, I would be able to 'transfer my insistence' on those trying to steal those rights directly. This is not always practical or possible. So the next best option IS to deal with the entire philosophy.

    Because since their radicals are NOT letting us speak, much less listening to us, we only have three options:

    1) The Lefty leaders strenuously and internally reprimand their philosophical confrères and tell them to stop acting like idiots. This is a dubious proposition since the Left hasn't tried to rein in their radicals since 1968 to any significant degree (though they also pretty much kept them out of power until recently)

    2) a combined operations with the moral force of both the Left and the Right comes down hard legally and if necessary physically upon the barbarian radicals.

    3) The Right is forced to do the job itself and is unfortunately indiscriminate in it's application of force.

    I like the first one, but has anyone seen the Left showing ANY interest in, I don't know, taking ANY action against the Berkeley or Portland mayors?

  67. James says

    June 18, 2017 at 6:07 am

    Yale is not the government. Private institutions are allowed to discriminate based on speech. Lots of private schools discriminate based on speech, including (especially?) conservative private schools.

    Conservative private schools (almost alway religious) are quite upfront about speech restrictions. Yale and similar institutions make claims of both providing and respecting free speech. As such it could be argued that Yale is violating a contractual obligation.

    Yale is committed to fostering an environment that values the free expression of ideas. In 1975, Yale adopted a statement from the Report of the Committee on Freedom of Expression at Yale (the Woodward Report (link is external)) as official university policy.

    http://studentlife.yale.edu/guidance-regarding-free-expression-students-yale

  68. Hugo S Cunningham says

    June 18, 2017 at 6:37 am

    I fail to understand how anyone could confuse Julius Caesar with modern politics. As any Three Stooges fan could tell you, our emperor's name is Octopus Grabus.

  69. SDN says

    June 18, 2017 at 7:12 am

    Yeah, I've noticed how those terrible lefty censors have been so effective that they've completely shut the American right out of the White House, Congress, the Judiciary, state houses, state legistlatures, and so on down to the turtles.

    Do you ever actually listen to what you're saying?

    No, we've been watching to what you on the Left have been doing. And that control of elected offices is ONLY because Leftists haven't completely managed to corrupt the voting process, despite long term attempts as described on video by Hilary's campaign staff. You know, the same one that admitted they were hiring people to incite and commit violence on Trump supporters.

    The voting booth is still private, and we don't have to answer your pollsters, so you can't Brandon Eich us there.

    Keep drawing your false equivalence; we'll just point out the hypocrisy and laugh.

  70. Mickey Dugan says

    June 18, 2017 at 7:24 am

    Laura Loomer is a performance artist who played the role of Rosa Parks to perfection.

  71. rmd says

    June 18, 2017 at 8:04 am

    In short: the regrettable behavior of officials who have failed to stand up to disruption of speech are the people most responsible for legitimizing further disruptions of speech, whoever commits them.

    But we can, and should, do better.

    This is clearly correct but what I'm not seeing here is *how* do "we … do better." I am not an administrator at Yale or a police official in Berkeley nor is Ken nor (I assume) anyone else reading this so my choices seem to be inconsequential unless and until I choose to very explicitly not do better. How do we convince those we are actually in a position to do better choose to do better?

    TL;DR So what's your answer Mr. Smart Guy?

  72. Morgan says

    June 18, 2017 at 8:52 am

    Exactly RMD

    I am not denying anyone free speech rights. I am granting them willy nilly.

    THEY are not offering them. THEY need to do MUCH better.

    And what if they don't?

    That is the weakest part of this essay. "Hope"?

  73. Hugo S Cunningham says

    June 18, 2017 at 8:54 am

    @Jay–
    Yale takes money from the Federal government, both in grants to professors and in student loans, bringing them under Federal jurisdiction– just as an earlier Administration forced Bob Jones University to rescind their ban on interracial dating.

    But would that theory require a Catholic seminary to stop favoring Catholicism? A reasonable compromise might require progressive-minded institutions to drop the "university" and "college" labels, relabeling themselves "progressive seminary."

  74. Total says

    June 18, 2017 at 9:03 am

    And that control of elected offices is ONLY because Leftists haven't completely managed to corrupt the voting process

    Wow, I kind of teared up reading that: the valiant Republicans, struggling to overcome the terrible censorship of the left, fighting their way to the voting booth past hordes of Hillary-bots, and somehow eking out majorities at every level of American government. The Koch brothers, as they overwhelmed by hordes of immigrants assailing their final redoubt, throwing their last few billions to Paul Ryan before they are ground under Obama's jackboot.

    My God, it's an action movie.

  75. DRJlaw says

    June 18, 2017 at 9:26 am

    Long overdue. Ten thousand more incidents like this, please. The era of Marquis of Queensbury rules on one side and zero rules on the other is finally ending. No more preemptive capitulation. No more unilateral disarmament. Hit back not twice as hard but 1,000 times as hard. Civility is obtained by imposing crushing costs on incivility. Time to start that process.

    Oh, look, "Marat is my rat" has recklessly sprinkled in lots of violent language and essentially argued for total civil war.

    As soon as you fools wake up and realize you are in a war you will have a better understanding of how to fight it.

    "Armst" is actually calling it a war.

    Quelle suprise.

  76. jdgalt says

    June 18, 2017 at 9:26 am

    I'm with you. Those who would disrupt or prevent a speech to a willing audience (or prevent the audience going to hear it) need the full force of the law brought to bear on them — not just disorderly conduct charges but felonies such as civil rights violation and terrorism. And that goes no matter which side anybody is on.

    (Aside: You might want to clarify your earlier "lawsplainer" that said the First Amendment is only good against government. Certainly a media owner or meeting hall owner who doesn't let you speak is exercising his rights. But if you pay for the use of the hall and then a bunch of third parties barge in and disrupt your speech, or surround the place so your audience can't get in, then they are very much violating your First Amendment rights even though they are private persons.)

    The bigger problem is what happens in cases like Milo's attempted speeches in Chicago, Berkeley, and now Portland, where local police stood down (or in some cases went out of their way to disarm the victims and then stand down!) rather than haul the disruptors away. What would be the legal position if the speaker or his staff then used force to remove the disruptors? Because we've about come to the point now where either that is going to happen and those who do it get away with it, or the Chinese Cultural Revolution is going to happen again here and those who do it get away with it.

    And as far as I'm concerned it is morally imperative that the latter outcome be prevented by any means necessary, whether law enforcement is willing to do the job or must be fought and defeated to enable it to be done.

  77. rmd says

    June 18, 2017 at 9:38 am

    P
    B

    P

    P

    –
    P

    P

    –
    P

  78. rmd says

    June 18, 2017 at 10:19 am

    Sorry. Don't know how that happened. (insert scolded puppy face here)

  79. Lawrence D'Anna says

    June 18, 2017 at 11:06 am

    @ken is it clear that a Pepe is what he sent, or that he specially choose black women to send them to? All we saw from the screenshot was that his user avatar was Pepe, not the content of the image he sent. And the air drop menu would only show an avatar and a computer name of who he's sending it to. I'm just speculating, but I bet he was sending images to everyone allowing incoming airdrops, not targeting anyone in particular.

  80. neoteny says

    June 18, 2017 at 11:57 am

    The truly pernicious thing is that we are in an age of bizarre pro-Establishment protests where it's really those in authority protesting against themselves via proxies to justify what they want to do anyway.

    I think this is a very important point. Christopher Snowdon of IEA fame made a similar point regarding government-funded NGOs/charities in the UK: Sock Puppets: How the government lobbies itself and why.

    This must be nipped in the bud.

    Easier said than done.

  81. cthulhu says

    June 18, 2017 at 12:27 pm

    Now it's "oh Thad, you ignorant slut…"

    Go back and read Mikee's post. Oh hell, I'll even quote it for you so that you don't have to strain:

    Did conservatives forget about Gabrielle Giffords? Did conservatives forget about the targeted image that a conservative politician put out about Giffords? Did conservatives blame all conservatives for the cowardly attempted assassination of a member of Congress by a conservative nutjob? Sure as fuck looks like their selective memory has failed them in this instance.

    The "targeted image that a conservative politician put out about Gifford" line is very clearly a reference to the "targets"poster from Sarah Palin's PAC, which pretty much everybody agrees was not related in the slightest to the Giffords assasination attempt. So Mikee's vitriol was a total non-sequitor, not related to the real world in the slightest.

    Now let's look at your bilgewater:

    So what about the Stormfront fan who shot up a church, based on reasons that were certainly and unambiguously racially-based? Are you going to argue that he wasn't a conservative either?

    This is pure whataboutism, has zero to do with my comment. It has nothing to do with conservatism either; I'm not a conservative, was not defending conservatives in my post, but was pointing out the complete falsehoods that ignorant Mikee was spewing, which happened to be about conservatives, and furthermore played into the lies that the NYT was promulgating a few days ago. And now you. Maybe you should take a reading comprehension class, along with a logic class. Oh, and learn the rule of holes while you're at it.

  82. anon says

    June 18, 2017 at 12:29 pm

    Right-wingers started this war, and just like the civil war, we're going to end it.

  83. anon says

    June 18, 2017 at 12:35 pm

    ONLY because Leftists haven't completely managed to corrupt the voting process, despite long term attempts as described on video by Hilary's campaign staff

    Yeah, no, fuck you.
    The ONLY reason Republicans have won any election since Nixon has been cheating with gerrymandering and voter suppression.

  84. anon says

    June 18, 2017 at 1:08 pm

    When someone who is supposedly "conservative" commits a violent act, conservatives down play it and say it was just a "lone wolf"/"crazy person", and has nothing to do with other conservatives or ideology (despite ample evidence to the contrary.)
    When someone who is supposedly "liberal" commits a violent act, conservatives lose their collective minds and blame all "liberals" and "liberal ideology" (despite ample evidence to the contrary.)

    Republicans own all the levers of power.
    They don't get to play the victims.

  85. Obama's boyfriend says

    June 18, 2017 at 5:14 pm

    Total

    How much does Soros pay you?

  86. Chris says

    June 18, 2017 at 5:21 pm

    I'm actually disappointed that the Right has even responded to this "protest " at all. Why aren't we collectively shrugging it off and moving the conversation back to James Hodgkinson, the failed assassin of whom the Left cannot defend? Meanwhile, they shrug off an assassination attempt within a 24 hour news cycle. And now high-minded and "smart set" Republicans are scolding anyone who supported this woman standing up and saying "Stop it" to the repeated re-enactment of a violent knife murder of the President.

    Why talk about this at all? The woman was arrested. The "smart set" clearly hasn't learned that the Left uses them against the rest of us. You're either too naive and ignorant (which I doubt) or too full of yourselves to even care, or worse. The conversation we should be having is about the out-of-control political violence and rhetoric of the Left, not some random woman who stood up to it in her own way, albeit in a poorly thought out, but ultimately harmless manner.

    Stay on target and stop scolding people who are essentially on our side.

  87. Morgan says

    June 18, 2017 at 5:24 pm

    Hmm.

    How many Conservative riots have there been the last few decades? Bueller? Bueller?

    How many LEFTY riots have there been? Every year? More and more?

    When a guy goes into a house and kills kids, his motives are…murky. Not so clear.

    When a guy asks 'where is the Republicans baseball game?' as he is carrying a rifle, his motives are FAR more clear.

    This is being laid at the feet of Democrats because they have been using the most horrible rhetoric and imagery for 8 months. They have been pushing harder and harder for '#Resistance!

    Well, now your side drew first blood. You have no moral high ground.

    You use violent rhetoric, you pass laws people hate, you try to import new citizens to replace the old and you call the current batch of citizens racists, sexists and worse…and you want to blame gerrymandering for why you lose elections?

    Self reflection is not your forte, is it?

  88. Total says

    June 18, 2017 at 5:47 pm

    And now Morgan demonstrates that he was unconscious for the entirety of the Obama administration, during which the vitriol directed at the President makes this year look like nothing.

  89. Chris says

    June 18, 2017 at 5:59 pm

    And now Total Fails to prove their point.

  90. Morgan says

    June 18, 2017 at 6:36 pm

    A fig for vitriol. We have political violence of all types being enacted by Leftists all over the country and the general response from the leaders of the Left is muted.

    Riots

    Assaults

    Shootings

    All from the Left. And your Deans and Mayors aren't lifting a finger to stop it.

    When did that happen during Obama's watch?

  91. Michael 2 says

    June 18, 2017 at 6:46 pm

    "Despite the recent surge of use of Pepe as an explicitly racist meme"

    'Surge' might be an overstatement; first I've heard of it. Who or what is Pepe and why does it matter? I vaguely recall a cartoon character from very long ago, Pepe LePew or something like that, a French romantic.

    Is it humanly possible to NOT infer racism over something comic, or ordinary? Probably not; such things are in the eyes of the beholder.

    Principled:

    Peaceful relationships require a negotiated settlement, and that happens when two or more parties can enforce such a negotiated settlement.

    In my Navy days I had some horrible roommates and management failed to do anything about it, leaving it entirely up to me. I eventually discovered the power and true purpose of "tit for tat"; it opened the eyes of my oppressor. I explained we could negotiate a peace without giving up our rights. But to do that he had to face a real possibility of suffering as the alternative to peace.

    So long as the right keeps turning the other cheek signifying weakness there is no incentive for your oppressor to cease oppressing.

    You must have your own teeth and claws and choose not to use them in a negotiated peace of mutually assured offensiveness otherwise. The antifa-bashing fellow at Berkely was a dramatic change from lying-down-and-taking it like a principled right winger is supposed to.

    Darwinian evolution does not care about your principles. It cares about what you DO. Civilized persons can get beyond animal behavior, but only when everyone chooses it; what exactly is the incentive to choose civilized behavior?

  92. Clarence P. Browne says

    June 18, 2017 at 7:18 pm

    "Well, now your side drew first blood. You have no moral high ground."

    Not a student of history, are you, Morgan? First blood was Reverend George Lee of Belzoni, Mississippi. Murdered May 7, 1955 because he used his printing press to urge black folks to register to vote. I will explain as plainly as I can, seeing as so many of you conservatives are so bitterly affronted and confused at being labeled as racists, homophobes, and what have you.

    When you object to those different from you having the same rights you do – you EARN those labels. It's that simple. There are no 'reasonable explanations' or 'rationales', except as some attempt to try to get out from under the label that you feel "doesn't describe who you really are".

    Except it does. It always has. It always will.

    You know why? Because you have to see a problem with something before you try to change it. We already know you don't see any problem with how you've been doing things, because why would you struggle so hard to stop them from changing? Why fight so hard to reframe the narrative and make things like the Confederate Battle Flag symbols of AMERICA when they were created in opposition to it?

    You can spin all you want, but the people that know better will ALWAYS call you on it. Then you can cry about your Freeze Peaches. Some more.

  93. lagaya says

    June 18, 2017 at 8:57 pm

    C. P. Browne-

    Beautifully said. Thank you!

  94. Bert says

    June 18, 2017 at 9:03 pm

    Apparently this disruption of a thinly veiled endorsement of Trump's assassination is a Really Big Deal to Principled Conservatives™.

  95. Chris says

    June 18, 2017 at 9:13 pm

    You're a big fan of James Hodgkinson, aren't you? I can just tell. Apparently you seem to have forgotten the Democratic Party's long history with the Ku Klux Klan. It's one thing to be a student and fan of history. Rewriting it the way you do is unacceptable.

    Democratic U.S. senators such as former KKK Grand Cyclops Robert Byrd of West Virginia, Tennessee’s Albert Gore Sr., and Arkansas’s J. William Fulbright (Bill Clinton’s mentor) stood shoulder to shoulder with Hollings and other segregationist Democratic governors, most notably Arkansas’s Orval Faubus and Alabama’s George Wallace. (Wallace installed the rebel flag over his statehouse in 1963, the day before Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy arrived to discuss integration.) While Byrd and Company filibustered the Civil Rights Act of 1964, these state executives blocked schoolhouse doors to exclude blacks.

    The Right doesn't "own" the Confederate flag, the Left does, and all the violence that went along with it.

  96. Czernobog says

    June 18, 2017 at 10:13 pm

    Guilt by association is a logical fallacy.

  97. Jim Lyon says

    June 18, 2017 at 10:13 pm

    Ken's article (tl;dr: We should respect rights to free speech even though others don't) gives me hope for humanity.

    Unfortunately, the comment stream leads me to despair, being composed almost entirely of:
    1. But they started it.
    2. But we're principled and they aren't, so we need to silence them.
    3. We'll let them speak, but only after they let us speak.
    4. Letting them speak is capitulation, and we can't do that.
    5. Random name calling and guilt by association.
    It's enough to make me cry.

  98. Bob says

    June 18, 2017 at 10:55 pm

    Hahahahahaha. Thanks Chris, that gave me a good laugh. You are aware that labels change meaning over time, right?

    Do you really think the southerners voting to keep racist democrats in power were liberals? Do you really think the KKK consorting with democrats made them liberal? Incidentally, do you also believe that the Republicans of the 1860s working to end slavery were conservatives? Wtf are you smoking!? I could use some of it!

  99. lagaya says

    June 18, 2017 at 10:55 pm

    Well Chris, you made a good point, there. The Democratic party has not changed in 60 years. That is why people of color overwhelmingly choose to vote Republican…oh, wait a minute…

    Personally, I do not vote party. But I do vote progressive. That is most often the Democrats.

  100. IForgetMyName says

    June 19, 2017 at 12:13 am

    @Morgan:

    A fig for vitriol. We have political violence of all types being enacted by Leftists all over the country and the general response from the leaders of the Left is muted.

    I really dislike Bernie Sanders' politics, but I commend him for condemning the shooter who used violence in his name, in the harshest of terms.

    Contrast this with a certain elected official from Montana, who ran as and received direct support from the Republican party and personally perpetrated violence against the "liberal media." The vast majority of his future colleagues in Congress refused to condemn his conduct. Paul Ryan, to his credit, did, but in a pretty lukewarm way.

    Unprincipled, partisan thugs like yourself, Morgan, find it easy enough to cherry pick data to support your assertions, particularly when you use nebulous, weaselly language that you can redraw and redefine when confronted with evidence that contradicts your sweeping, absolute assertions.

    Riots

    Assaults

    Shootings

    All from the Left. And your Deans and Mayors aren't lifting a finger to stop it.

    No, not all from the Left. All from deplorable people. You know, it's funny that one of the statements that probably cost Hillary the election is one of the few statements that I actually agreed with. People like you get so focused on Right vs. Left, but I think there are some issues in which we should be more concerned with decent human beings with principles vs. the deplorable.

    On one level, you're no different than the violent thug who tried to murder elected officials. Like you, he probably doesn't see himself as the aggressor, but rather as someone justifiably responding to violence with violence. Like you, he doesn't care that the people in his cross-hairs might never have personally assaulted someone nor advocated such violence: So long as violence was committed by somebody sharing some arbitrary label with the victim, then you're happy to impute collective responsibility on your victim.

  101. Eric S Atkinson says

    June 19, 2017 at 4:06 am

    At least the hecklers paid for their tickets, which is generally not true of the anti-fascist fascists, SJWs and the BLM idiots.

    BTW ANON, get fucked. I hope you try to punch a real Nazi. I would pay to see that.

  102. dee nile says

    June 19, 2017 at 4:07 am

    Anyone else wondering how anon thinks the Evil Rethuglicans have managed to gerrymander presidential elections?

    I hope he will amuse us with an explanation.

  103. Amanda says

    June 19, 2017 at 4:11 am

    So the Alt Right is considered to be racist.. This journalist is jewish.. why are you calling her "alt right"?

  104. GuestPoster says

    June 19, 2017 at 4:34 am

    I'm not a fan of their actions, but I can at least understand why the very small number of students at a very small number of campuses have decided that, given they're paying tens of thousands of dollars a year to live and study at that campus, they'd like to not be providing a stage to the worst, most hateful speakers the nation has to offer. This isn't really an issue of free speech – they're not suggesting the speakers be sent to jail. They're suggesting that they don't want to pay for a platform for those speakers to speak from.

    Now, I also understand the vocal right here: they've spent decades fighting against basically every US freedom except the freedom to shoot your neighbor, and they've been reveling in the ability to pretend to be the TRUE champions of free speech. That couldn't last, of course: it's not in their mental DNA to ACTUALLY support free speech, much as they'd like to think that trying to silence those small number of students at a small number of campuses who have committed the sin of becoming well educated is, somehow, a protection of free speech.

    But still, here, we get a popularly reported example of push-back, and we get the false equivalence. After all: refusing to provide a platform to speak from, the major thing being done by 'the left', is not at all the same thing as refusing to allow someone to speak at all. Mobs were wrong to prevent Yiannapolis speaking at Berkeley, but he is also a popular figure that has no problems at all getting his words out to anyone dumb enough to want to listen. This is Shakespeare in the park – it's name pretty much explains that it happens in the park. That's it. Sure, you can go to other interpretations of this or other plays, but those wishing to perform THIS interpretation do so at the park, and those wanting to listen gather there. And it hurts exactly zero people who don't want to listen to it – but they chose to try and shut it down anyways.

    The right, as a group, has never really valued free speech. Individuals have: folks like Ken, or David Frum, more than prove that. But the group has absolutely not prioritized it, and has in general reveled in fighting it. It just got to enjoy pretending to have the moral high ground for a few months with just enough plausible deniability to make it seem a tiny bit legitimate.

  105. Morgan says

    June 19, 2017 at 4:57 am

    "I paid a lot of money to be educated but that money also includes free 'Nazi Punching'."

    Good luck selling that.

  106. AntivirusIsTheRealVirus says

    June 19, 2017 at 5:48 am

    "I paid a lot of money to be educated but that money also includes free 'Nazi Punching'."

    Good luck selling that.

    They paid a lot of money for free Nazi Punching?

    Is this really how your brain functions?

  107. Nick says

    June 19, 2017 at 6:29 am

    @Ken

    Being that I love bombastic Wagnerian music, should I avoid NYC in the near future?

  108. Total says

    June 19, 2017 at 6:34 am

    When did that happen during Obama's watch?

    Wow — you really were asleep during the Obama administration. Let's see, a partial list of right-wing violence during 2009-2017 (thanks, Wikipedia!):

    2009 Assassination of George Tiller,
    2009 Holocaust Memorial Museum shooting
    2009 Shooting of Pittsburgh police officers
    2010 Airplane attack on IRS building in Austin, TX
    2011 FEAR group attacks
    2012 Wisconsin Sikh Temple Shooting
    2014 PA State Police ambush
    2014 Overland Park Jewish Community Center Shooting
    2014 Las Vegas ambush on police
    2015 Charleston Church shooting
    2016 Colorado Planned Parenthood shooting.

    That's just attacks with fatalities — I haven't included lesser stuff.

    Neither side should do this, but to blithely say that this is somehow new is so blind to what's been going on that I genuinely wonder about your sanity.

  109. gricky says

    June 19, 2017 at 6:47 am

    Jim Lyon says,

    Unfortunately, the comment stream leads me to despair

    Welcome! Just remember, this isn't even remotely close to the worst of it. And it's going to be really interesting to see how the country ends up after a few more years of this.

  110. NYtheatergoer says

    June 19, 2017 at 6:49 am

    There are quite a few false premises in the first paragraph, not fatal to the defense of the First Amendment, but they reflect a common misunderstanding about the production at issue, which used some Shakespeare framework and lines for quite a different purpose. It was not simply a modernized "Julius Caesar," but lines were cut and added to make the result quite different from anything remotely similar to Shakespeare; some scenes were disfigured to create something like a Saturday Night Live sketch, where the humor relies on the impersonations. A key dramatic scene between Caesar and Calpurnia has become strictly a jokey bit between Trump and Melania (though her heavy accent was more Natasha from Bullwinkle than Melania's, everyone in the audience got the joke, and no one in the audience was viewing the broadly spoofed Trump as Caesar). Mob violence in Shakespeare (the killing of Cinna the poet) has become police brutality in the Central Park version– and other rewrites have been done to change the meaning and tenor of the play in many respects. Shakespeare's Julius Caesar is itself ambiguous on the work of Brutus–the notion of a clear lesson that political assassination must lead to chaos is not a good reading of the play, as Brutus is undone by his yielding his audience to Mark Antony–but the Central Park production, which reimagines the battle of Philippi as a street fight between unarmed protesters in the Resistance and heavily-armed police, champions the cause of the Resistance protesters who assassinate Trump/Caesar.

    In sum, the production cannot be defended as similar to past modernized productions, much less than the play on the Guthrie's tiny experimental stage a few years ago. Its flaws are substantial departures from Shakespeare, with two of the four key roles (Caesar and Mark Antony) are in effect sacrificed for the sake of creating a Trump play. No one should have tried to shout down the performers, or the production, but the action of Delta and American Express in withdrawing financial support was justified.

  111. J Mann says

    June 19, 2017 at 7:04 am

    100+ comments and not one Measure for Measure reference?

    Ken, do you see a future in righties arguing lefties out of using disruption and shaming, so long as those tactics are asymmetrical? I'd certainly like to see both sides stop, but I'm not sure how we get there.

    (Yes, Measure for Measure involves individual guilt and accountability, which is the point of Ken's post, but surely in a discussion of Shakespeare, it's all but required.

  112. DanA says

    June 19, 2017 at 7:43 am

    At least we can find common ground in the fact that the lunatic left and the lunatic right come full circle and sound exactly the same in the end – I genuinely can't figure out which team Marat is batting for in his lunatic call for civil war.

  113. Total says

    June 19, 2017 at 7:59 am

    In sum, the production cannot be defended as similar to past modernized productions

    Oh, for pete's sake. You're acting like every previous production of Shakespeare only made tiny little alterations and presented the play in its entirety. That's so remotely far from the truth I can't even come up with a sufficient measure of distance to describe it.

  114. Cecil says

    June 19, 2017 at 8:15 am

    You never know, @Bradoplata may be a lifetime member of the NRA, may have a license to express his second ammendment rights in a concealed manner and may be fully willing, ready and able to defend himself with violence. After all, most gun carrying Americans are republicans… Including at least formerly, the military. I haven't seen recent statistics.

  115. Michael 2 says

    June 19, 2017 at 8:47 am

    Total wrote "I can’t even come up with a sufficient measure of distance to describe it."

    The usual metaphor is "light years". It is extremely flexible; can be used for both time and distance and can mean anything from one inch and nearly identical to the Andromeda galaxy.

  116. Damon says

    June 19, 2017 at 9:12 am

    I'm a big fan of free speech. I tolerate little those who want to silence it…for any reason. Worse, though is undisciplined protest or objection. Focus drones… Protest the right stuff. Jumping on the meme and protesting summer stock of real Shakespeare? Foolish and hurting the cause.

    But to the issue at hand. When a significant portion of the group no longer choose to abide by to mutually agreed to/consented "rules" then the opposition is free to quite too, and deservedly so. They broke the rules, now we get to throw it in their faces. It's no longer "eye for an eye", it's "you pull a knife, I pull a pistol. You pull a pistol, I pull a shotgun".

    Screw them all. "…let the universe burn…I don't care anymore."

  117. Michael 2 says

    June 19, 2017 at 9:13 am

    GuestPoster writes "given they’re paying tens of thousands of dollars a year to live and study at that campus, they’d like to not be providing a stage to the worst, most hateful speakers the nation has to offer."

    Typically using OPM (Other People's Money) not that this has a lot to do with it. Other students at those same universities wish to provide that stage and hear what Milo (and others) have to say. As I recall, hate seems to come primarily from the audience:

    Pretty good entertainment but remember these are voting for our nations leaders:
    [http]://www.mediaite.com/online/fck-you-protester-flips-out-after-milo-yiannopoulos-says-feminism-is-cancer/

  118. Total says

    June 19, 2017 at 9:17 am

    The usual metaphor is "light years".

    Seemed too short for this purpose. Maybe "megaparsecs"?

    (By the way, nobody tell the alt-right folks about the Sondheim play).

  119. Michael 2 says

    June 19, 2017 at 9:46 am

    IForgetMyName wrote "one of the statements that probably cost Hillary the election is one of the few statements that I actually agreed with."

    So it was with Mitt Romney's observation that 47 percent of Americans aren't going to vote for him anyway; the 47 percent that pay no federal income tax.

    The problem with Hillary's observation is that she was lumping in a good many honorable people in her idea of "deplorable".

  120. OrderoftheQuaff says

    June 19, 2017 at 10:01 am

    If you're gonna disrupt the theater, it's best to do it from the back row. In any other row, you have no idea who that is sitting behind you, or what they're capable of.

  121. Richard says

    June 19, 2017 at 10:14 am

    @Thad:
    Your math is slightly off, but your end result is correct.

    As you are a self-described progressive who is not a Sanders voter, there are at least 13,168,223 progs (the number of Sanders voters plus one: yourself). Of course, because the number of Sanders voters is an even number, adding one doesn't change the number required to get 50%+1.

    @Total:

    megaparsecs

    Wow, that's a long time!

  122. lagaya says

    June 19, 2017 at 11:22 am

    I think Ken made his point, just by the comments here. It's not Liberals or Conservatives, it's not men or women. Like Soylent Green, it's people. We all have a problem we need to face. Most here don't get that.

  123. David Lang says

    June 19, 2017 at 11:49 am

    @guestposter

    so some students who pay a lot of money to the college should have veto rights over who the other students who also pay a lot of money to the college are allowed to invite to speak at their club?

    It's not like the students who dislike the speaker are being required to listen to the speaker, all that they are required to do is to allow those who do want to listen to the speaker and pay to rent the room the civility of allowing them to listen to those they choose to.

  124. Michael 2 says

    June 19, 2017 at 11:54 am

    lagaya wrote "We all have a problem we need to face."

    Flatulence!

    "Most here don’t get that."

    But you are wise and smart and will show us the way.

  125. Total says

    June 19, 2017 at 1:31 pm

    Wow, that's a long time!

    I'm trusting that that was a #starwarsnerdjoke

  126. Jackson says

    June 19, 2017 at 2:10 pm

    Ken, I want to particularly laud you for putting blame where it belongs: on the institutional adults who should have known better.

    Both the left and the right (and any other sufficiently large group) will have a lunatic fringe willing to act like lunatic fringers, but the core brake on that needs to be the disapproval from within their own in-group and responsible authority figures thereof.

    Put differently, if Yale and Berkeley had expelled the asshats abusing the heckler's veto after telling them to vigorously snort their taint (Ken for university president?), I think this all plays out differently.

    However, the abdication of those figures from the less pleasant parts of their role mean I genuinely believe we are only at the beginning, not the end, of this cycle of escalation and retaliation. It probably ends with corpses, and that's unfortunate.

  127. Morgan says

    June 19, 2017 at 5:28 pm

    Total:

    I checked out half your list and I got bored.

    What this was was a mixed bag of racists and people shooting authority figures.

    Hint: Shooting at a cop trying to stop you in commission of your crime is not a POLITICAL CRIME. Maybe the criminal is a gun nut. Maybe he is a racist. That does NOT make him a political actor trying to 'change society by violence'.

    The closest you have is the racists killing Sikhs and Jews. Sorry, these are not Conservatives or Republicans. Conservatism and Republicanism has really nothing to do with White Supremacy or Nazism YOU want to make the spurious connection because you are a political tool, but hey, a hammer has to hammer.

    But even more importantly, the REASON for the violence was not directed politically. Racist McToothless just wanted to kill Sikhs or Jews. He was not trying to shut down free speech. He was not targeting Liberal politicians. Even more importantly, there was no twitter storm on the Right lauding these people or giving excuses for their actions like happens on the Left

    So that VIOLENCE occurred during the Obama administration is true. POLITIAL violence directed toward the Left…not so true.

    Your side has been very bad the last 8 months and you want to pretend other people try to shut down free speech on the Right with riots, assaults, intimidating mobs and now want to kill politicians.

    This is not true to any objective observer.

  128. Total says

    June 19, 2017 at 6:00 pm

    I checked out half your list and I got bored.

    I'm not surprised. You're not interested in anything but the narrative that you've already written. It may not be reality, but it is comforting.

  129. Michael K. says

    June 19, 2017 at 6:01 pm

    @Bradoplata

    Most progs would gladly drive the bus to the re-education camps if not put a bullet in a conservative

    [citation needed]

    @Thad

    If Bradoplata can produce 6,584,111 more examples, I will concede the possibility that he is correct.

    Your example doesn't allow for the possibility that there are even more progressives than you who didn't vote for Sanders. I'd say you're at least an order of magnitude shy of the number of willing prog bullet-in-head-putting bus drivers required for any kind of evidence.

    It's like my leftier-than-I-am acquaintances claiming that most conservatives would be happy to push the poor into a pit and watch them die. I wonder if Brad is one of them.

  130. ElSuerte says

    June 19, 2017 at 6:10 pm

    @Ken

    1) Airdrop doesn't id your race/gender. She also says that he'd sent it to a bunch of other people in the airport. Can't see how this supports targeting.

    2) It matters which pepe it was. (A sentence which I never thought I'd write) The pepe she says she was sent is a generic, vanilla pepe. If it had been a pepe in an SS uniform, or a trump pepe, then I think you'd have a point. I really think you're overgeneralizing.

    3) I don't think it's fair to take being nonplussed when an angry stranger rails at you in public as an indication of guilt.

    4) Silly plausible deniability works both ways.

    What do you think would be appropriate social consequences for both parties? It's an issue I struggle with.

  131. Total says

    June 19, 2017 at 6:19 pm

    It matters which pepe it was

    It really doesn't.

    Is there any plausible story you can write in which someone decides to send a random picture of a frog to random people at the airport?

  132. Michael 2 says

    June 19, 2017 at 7:31 pm

    Total "Is there any plausible story you can write in which someone decides to send a random picture of a frog to random people at the airport?"

    Easy. My daughter would do that and so would my mother. One of my mother's pranks was to dip her feet in paint and then with the help of her roommate walk on the ceiling. My daughter does this sort of thing irregularly (to be regular would violate any principle of principles).

    It doesn't need a conscious reason. In fact, the delight is that there is no conscious reason nor can one be made. The key word, which you used to help me understand this, is random which in teenspeak means unpredictable combined with eccentric.

  133. Michael 2 says

    June 19, 2017 at 7:37 pm

    A problem with rare violent behavior by any class of person is not knowing whether any particular person is going to be violent. Inasmuch as the left does not seem to be strongly bound to enduring principles (but can be tightly bound to ephemeral principles) I tend to think my chances are better around conservatives *unless* I am violating that particular groups sense of right and wrong.

    But even then it ought not to take me by surprise. Leftwing behavior, on the other hand, is almost by definition irrational as it is motivated primarily by empathy, sympathy, feelings in other words easily triggered and then targeted.

    A man walks into a bar…

    If he hadn't been focused on his cellphone he would have seen it.

  134. Total says

    June 19, 2017 at 7:45 pm

    It doesn't need a conscious reason. In fact, the delight is that there is no conscious reason nor can one be made

    So, no, there's no plausible story you can come up with.

  135. Michael 2 says

    June 19, 2017 at 8:37 pm

    Total, having some difficulty with this concept, writes "So, no, there’s no plausible story you can come up with."

    Exactly. Trivially True. Duh. It's like demanding someone come up with an even number that's odd (or vice versa). Why would you even WANT to?

    You have a guy sending frog pictures to total strangers, one of whom is an easily triggered SJW that apparently doesn't know how to prevent total strangers from accessing her computer; but because geeks are usually young white males assumes racist intentions which is of course her own racism on display.

  136. HandOfGod137 says

    June 19, 2017 at 8:51 pm

    It appears more than a little disingenuous to try and claim that the specific sub-type of Pepe has any significant bearing on the level of twatishness that chap who Airdropped it was demonstrating. It's an acknowledged and widely recognised symbol of the alt-right (or, to use the more accurate term, neo-Nazis), the meaning of which would have been obvious to anyone who received it. To wit: "I am a racist who has decided to make every non-herrenvolk who receives this feel that little bit less welcome and safe for teh lulz". I don't see how putting the frog in a dress changes that message.

    I'm also unconvinced that it being random or targetted makes any real difference. You're still putting a communication out there with the intention to cause offence and concern. A pretty shitty thing to do, imo.

    @Michael2

    Inasmuch as the left does not seem to be strongly bound to enduring principles (but can be tightly bound to ephemeral principles)

    I am awestruck at your ability to draw such sweeping conclusions regarding the behaviour of slightly more than 50% of your fellow countrymen (based upon extrapolation of the popular vote in your recent election)

    Leftwing behavior, on the other hand, is almost by definition irrational as it is motivated primarily by empathy, sympathy, feelings in other words easily triggered and then targeted.

    You really must share the data and/or studies that support these revelations. Unless what you're actually trying to say is "I don't like lefties", and you felt it would be more convincing if you tarted it up with some cod-psychology and generalisations so broad and baseless as to be meaningless. Do tell.

  137. anon says

    June 19, 2017 at 8:57 pm

    BTW ANON, get fucked. I hope you try to punch a real Nazi. I would pay to see that.

    Are you offering to take that punch, Nazi piece of shit?

    Anyone else wondering how anon thinks the Evil Rethuglicans have managed to gerrymander presidential elections?

    Here you go:
    http://www.gregpalast.com/election-stolen-heres/
    Now go fuck yourself.

    there was no twitter storm on the Right lauding these people or giving excuses for their actions like happens on the Left

    BULLSHIT and you know it, there is no one applauding or excusing violence from the left.

    There absolutely *were* excuses for right-wingers committing violence.

  138. Eric S Atkinson says

    June 19, 2017 at 11:51 pm

    ANON if you think there is a means of a fucktard fascist such as yourself to attempt to punch anyone you claim to be a Nazi,well you go ahead and try little boy.

    I don't wish you well.

  139. Czernobog says

    June 20, 2017 at 3:57 am

    Just send each other dick pics for comparison and be done with it.

  140. Total says

    June 20, 2017 at 4:46 am

    I fixed a few things for you:

    You have a guy sending racist frog pictures to total strangers, one of whom is an easily triggered SJW perfectly reasonable person that apparently doesn't know how to prevent total strangers from accessing her computer is pretty much like most people in terms of knowing the exact ins and outs of their computers; but because geeks are usually young white males assumes racist intentions which is of course her own racism on display correctly identifies the racist moron yukking it up and gives him a piece of her mind.

    Also? Using "SJW" nonironically instantly identifies as not-credible.

  141. Nullifidian says

    June 20, 2017 at 5:54 am

    …but lines were cut and added to make the result quite different from anything remotely similar to Shakespeare….

    You should get out of NY and start going to theater productions in Europe if you want to see real cuts and interpolations. What you've described sounds like very minimal textual intervention, as shown by the fact that most of what you're complaining about is to do with the staging, rather than the text. Compare your description to this page from the 2013 Berliner Ensemble production text of Kabale und Liebe by Friedrich Schiller. The scenic production was no more faithful to its 18th century roots than the text. It was set against a green-blue brick background with the dominant scenic element being a lighting rig in a ring shape and a red chair and a swing hanging from the flies and all the characters were in modern dress. And yet Claus Peymann says (through the BE website) that he approaches these plays from a perspective of fidelity to the text, clear enunciation, and "proximity to the poetic language" of drama. And from a German perspective, he's right. His is a conservative output in the broader context of German theater, which is even more theatrical, anti-representative, and interventionist than Anglophone theater.

    What you're describing is rather ho-hum and ordinary, barring the fact that one of the figures is clearly based on Trump, and even that isn't that much of an intervention. The idea that American Express and Delta are justified over pulling their funding on the basis that it's not true to Shakespeare is, if anything, even more horrifying and deadly to a vital and continuing theater than interruptions from a couple of grandstanding right-wing plants in the audience.

  142. Michael 2 says

    June 20, 2017 at 7:08 am

    HandOfGod137, in a spectacular demonstration of beams and motes, writes:

    "I am awestruck at your ability to draw such sweeping conclusions regarding the behaviour of slightly more than 50% of your fellow countrymen"

    Followed by a demonstration of it!

    "It’s an acknowledged and widely recognised symbol of the alt-right the meaning of which would have been obvious to anyone who received it."

    Do you not read the words of my fingers? Evidently not. Its meaning would NOT, and still is not, obvious to me had I received it. Had a green frog image popped up on my iPad I would be more concerned about the non-existent security of my iPad that such a thing is not only possible but apparently a feature.

    Obviously this skill I possess to categorize a huge swath of people as "Democrat" you also possess. Perhaps it is not such a rare skill as you think.

    and

    "You’re still putting a communication out there with the intention to cause offence and concern."

    You claim mind-reading skill. I also claim such a skill; but I am not reading minds; I read behavior.

    "Do tell."

    Thank you for your invitation. I have spent decades studying what makes the left the left and the right the right, the most fundamental, probably intrinsic, unchangeable, difficult to observe and yet overruling principles as revealed by various outwards signs whose reliability may be less than perfect.

    How is it possible that my father is so far left he makes Bernie Sanders look like Rush Limbaugh, and yet I am somewhat center-right, libertarian mostly — you choose for you and I choose for me but WHAT you choose for you is not really my business even when I think it is wrong or at least non-optimum.

    Why is it that People of the Left tend to blame parents for the sins of the children, but People of the Right believe in personal responsibility? You don't need to look very far for who is at fault in a shooting — whoever pulled the trigger. People of the Right do not excuse your behavior just because you were "triggered", an automaton incapable of self-choice.

    But the peculiarity is that it is almost an exact description of People of the Left; you *don't* make your own choices and you *can* be triggered into behavior; not always predictable but as you write, this guy may indeed have been seeking easily triggered SJW's for the "Lulz". What could possibly be easier?

    How is it that People of the Left use Apple Macbooks and People of the Right use Windows PCs and Dell laptops? Do these companies know a thing you refuse to acknowledge? Indeed they do.

    Saul Alinsky wrote "Rules for Radicals" knowing that People of the Left have common, predictable behaviors and triggers; that you will do almost anything to escape ridicule.

    The foundational principle is of course survival; and the mechanism of survival is "the herd". Anything that puts your membership in the herd at risk is dangerous, visceral, and any person so moving you to that state of mind is the enemy about whom no longer any concern exists for reason, charity, civility.

    People of the Right have a similar foundation of survival, but the herd is the enemy. Such person may have been bullied by herd members as I was. I don't want to be in a herd. What threatens a Person of the Right is your attempts to render him vulnerable to the herd, starting with gun confiscation. If you want to see a huge surge in gun purchases elect a Democrat.

    You ask for citations from your fellow herd members, someone in authority! It is an inescapable part of your nature to do that. The idea that you, or I, using our own experience, intelligence and education to figure things out, to be our own authority, is alien to your thinking and yet your words show me that you DO consider yourself an authority, an expert, and can flit from one thought to its own opposite within seconds. Inconsistency, situational ethics, what you say is "right" even though it conflicts what you said ten seconds earlier. The epitome of "elite" thinking.

    Hardly anyone advocating for leftwing theory considers himself bound by those theories; everyone else is sheep in the herd but you are the shepherd. Unfortunately most of the sheep have the same thought process; everyone else is sheep, I am wise and smart and will lead them!

    It scarcely needs an "authority". As you write: "you felt it would be more convincing if you tarted it up with some cod-psychology and generalisations"

    That is exactly right. Not only is it more convincing, but you have reacted to it, revealing that my words ARE more convincing, and thus threatening, to your worldview. But you see, I am libertarian, I don't care what you think about my words or me. Not much anyway.

    The reason two modes exist, left and right, and two major parties in the USA; is because of the bicameral human brain. Two halves, each processing what is invisible to the other half. Logic and reason versus emotion. It is common for people to elevate their weak half and call it strong; People of the Left often cite logic and reason when demonstrating precious little of either. People of the Right talk about compassion when demonstrating less of it; because on the occasion a right-winger does express or feel compassion, it feels stronger because of its rarity.

    I feel compassionate, and yet I know I am not. I feel empathetic, and yet I know I am not. You, on the other hand, likely announce yourself as logical, reasonable, rational and yet you are easily triggered to emotional, nearly incoherent writing.

    My comment about ephemeral principles is how I describe the power of the shepherd to move the herd; Antifa comes to mind. Saul Alinsky comes to mind. You designate a target, fire up the hatred and fear in the herd, and cut them loose! The person moving the herd is not usually at the point of the spear; no, the 20-somethings that move in to battle scarcely know why they are doing what they are doing, trying to deprive others of their First Amendment rights.

    You can fire up the fear of the Right, but what they do next is somewhat unpredictable, especially with libertarians. They aren't a herd. You might as well incite fear in a flock of chickens; it won't "herd" them.

    Your turn — show me you aren't anything that I have described.

  143. Michael 2 says

    June 20, 2017 at 7:14 am

    Seems to be a bit of fear and conspiracy ideation among People of the Left.
    http://www.gregpalast.com/election-stolen-heres/

    Is there any election in living memory that wasn't "stolen" by someone's claim? Probably not. Move along, nothing to see here…

  144. Drew says

    June 20, 2017 at 8:09 am

    @effinayright

    "During WW2 European Jews stood by their principles, too. Look where that got them."

    Yeah, what good are principles that don't pay a good return on investment? I mean, what's even the point of having them if they can work against you, am I right? Christians figured it out with the Prosperity Gospel — you can abandon all principles, get rich, and pretend piousness for social benefits — so why do some idiots persist in acting like they believe in things? It's a mystery.

  145. Morgan says

    June 20, 2017 at 8:32 am

    Not a narrative, Total Something. Facts.

    What you listed wasn't political violence or shutting down of any person's rights except the right to life.

    What your side has is THOUSANDS of vocal believers in shutting down free speech.

    What your side ALSO has is authority figures who are doing nothing to stop said barbarians.

    This is a bit of a PR nightmare for you, but you don't want to acknowledge this. The massive losses you have been taking electorally hasn't had an impact on your own narrative so why should the words of a random poster.

    I WILL tell you that the abuses your side engages in and the lack of response by your authority figures to curb violence or to bolster free speech WILL be in political ads.

    This is also Free Speech. Though you might find the results of that rather costly…politically speaking, of course.

  146. Christopher says

    June 20, 2017 at 8:48 am

    Okay, so, like, I assume these people think that they're on the "right", yeah? Apparently radicals who really want to oppose the "left".

    So why are they using left-wing rhetoric about the "normalization of political violence" and saying "“Because of liberal violence like this, a congressman this week was shot in Virginia"?

    I don't know if they think they're appropriating this rhetoric or what, but you can't use the philosophical tools of the "left" to fight the "left" because the tools and the thing you're supposedly fighting are one and the same.

    If we want to talk about normalization, it seems to me that this is normalizing the idea that speech and violence are indistinguishable, by, you know, getting up on stage and shouting it. If you can't ask the question "Is speech the same as violence?" but instead are only capable of asking "Which speech is violence?" then guess what? The "left" is kicking your ass. You've let them dictate the scope of possible questions and the scope of possible responses to those questions, and you're only capable of arguing and jockeying for power within the framework that the "left" built and exerts a huge amount of control over.

  147. Total says

    June 20, 2017 at 9:02 am

    Michael 2’s comment as if he had written it as a poem (with the occasional addition):

    Center-Right At The Local Nazi Party Meeting

    People of the Left,
    People of the Right,
    Just because you were "triggered"
    An automaton incapable of self-choice.
    Triggered into behavior,
    Common, predictable behaviors and triggers
    Escape ridicule!
    SJW's for the "Lulz”…

    Foundational principle
    Survival!
    Membership in the herd;
    Dangerous, visceral,
    Enemy!
    Enemy!

    Bullied by herd members
    As I was,
    I don’t want to be in a herd.
    (I do really)
    Vulnerable to the herd!
    Gun purchases elect a Democrat.

    Alien to your thinking,
    Flit from one thought
    Inconsistency,
    Situational ethics,
    THE EPITOME OF “ELITE” THINKING!

    Everyone else is sheep
    You are the shepherd,
    Sheep?
    Shepherd.

    I don't care what you think about my words or me,
    (NOT MUCH ANYWAY!)
    Libertarian,
    My words ARE convincing,
    ARE convincing!

    Designate a target,
    Fire up the hatred and fear,
    Cut them loose!
    SAUL ALINSKY.
    Chickens.

  148. Michael 2 says

    June 20, 2017 at 9:08 am

    Total, that was amazingly clever. I like it!

  149. Total says

    June 20, 2017 at 9:15 am

    Total, that was amazingly clever. I like it!

    (bows)

  150. Michael 2 says

    June 20, 2017 at 9:30 am

    Christopher writes: "The left is kicking your ass. You’ve let them dictate the scope of possible questions and the scope of possible responses to those questions"

    Maybe. It is a fine art to play the game by the other person's rules while achieving one's own purposes. It is a game played by a person called Jesus long ago; played by the rules of the Pharisees while establishing his own purposes.

  151. HandOfGod137 says

    June 20, 2017 at 9:55 am

    @Michael 2

    Do you not read the words of my fingers? Evidently not. Its meaning would NOT, and still is not, obvious to me had I received it.

    Faux-naïf bullshit. But let's not waste time on you pretending to have missed out on 12 months of popular culture to support your argument, when the following paragraphs have such wonders to behold:

    The reason two modes exist, left and right, and two major parties in the USA; is because of the bicameral human brain. Two halves, each processing what is invisible to the other half. Logic and reason versus emotion.

    I think the correct term from the cognitive sciences for that statement would be "complete bollocks". Much as you'd like to think that whatever political wing you have chosen is the one of logic and rationality and the other side are just inherently less capable of coherent thought, all you are really doing is trying to justify your position with pseudoscience and ludicrously prolix slack-jawed philosophising. Political affiliation isn't determined by the rationality of the individual, you just want it to be so you can feel better about yourself.

    Frankly, all I got from your interminable drivel is that you've misinterpreted neuroscience in pursuit of your pet political theory where everything comes down to herds. Or something. And you really, really want to think of yourself as being a bit superior to the "People of the Left".

    So kudos. In terms of autodidactic bullshit in support of a desperate desire for self-aggrandizement, you've played a blinder. It's got everything: no evidence whatsoever; a rejection of supporting citations and references on the grounds of them being a sign of weakness; non-ironic use of the term "SJW"; social theory apparently based upon seeing a farm once – it's almost perfect. And it's taken you decades to come up with this shit?

    Lol

  152. Michael 2 says

    June 20, 2017 at 10:43 am

    Total responds: "Using SJW nonironically instantly identifies as not-credible."

    On the contrary; you have chosen to argue with me because of my credibility.

    I am not a mind reader and neither are you but I accept the possibility that Jacob intended to trigger SJW's for the pure fun of it, hoping to become the next Hugh Mungus (but lacking his quick wit). But how could he possibly know that the device showing on his list of possible recipients would know what he meant by a green frog and react in an interesting way? He didn't, so he was trying one after the other until something interesting happened.

    I've played some pranks, not very many and somewhat nerdy, so I get the idea.

    I do not ascribe racism to the deed; just prankish behavior, "what happens if I do this?" Maybe he delights in idiots that leave their computers wide open to everyone; a choice made by people with Apple products:

    "In the Control Panel you can tap the AirDrop button to turn permissions from Off to Contacts Only to Everyone. It's usually best to leave it at Contacts Only."
    [https]://www.lifewire.com/what-is-airdrop-how-does-it-work-1994512

    The implication is that the recipient had chosen to accept AirDrops from "everyone". Why anyone would do that is a discussion for another day perhaps. I didn't even know what it was but I turned it OFF on my iPad. Most of the time it is in "airplane mode", no Wifi or Bluetooth, and I also turn it completely off when not in use after I discovered that the screen being off doesn't mean the computer is off.

    The recipients name is "Renee Bracey Sherman" and I don't see that as particularly useful to identify race. I consider it unlikely that he had any idea who actually was receiving green frogs.

  153. HandOfGod137 says

    June 20, 2017 at 11:24 am

    @Michael 2

    I do not ascribe racism to the deed; just prankish behavior

    It doesn't matter if you don't see it as being racist. Regardless of your claims to being the only person in the English-speaking world unaware of the meaning behind Pepe, to everyone else it is definitively a racist symbol associated with the alt-right. This is like broadcasting images of swastikas and then playing the "but it's just the Hindu symbol for the Sun" when people get upset. Grow up.

  154. Frank Ch. Eigler says

    June 20, 2017 at 11:36 am

    HandOfGod137 says:
    "I am awestruck at your ability to draw such sweeping conclusions regarding the behaviour of slightly more than 50% of your fellow countrymen"

    HandOfGod137 also says:
    "to everyone else it is definitively a racist symbol associated with the alt-right"

  155. Michael 2 says

    June 20, 2017 at 11:38 am

    HandOfGod137, overestimating her importance, writes: "all you are really doing is trying to justify your position"

    My position requires no justification and you are not my judge. I describe my thoughts for the purpose of comparison and discussion. Contrary thinking is essential to discover the boundaries of an idea.

    "Political affiliation isn’t determined by the rationality of the individual"

    I believe otherwise. The most rational person will carefully consider each candidate and what is offered in comparison to what such person considers important.

    On average, the feeling dominant person (MBTI "F" dominance) will consider important the values of equality and charity; particularly where no personal sacrifice is involved. This tends to favor women and youth who also tend to prefer the Democratic party.

    Conversely the thinking dominant personality (MBTI "T" trait) will calculate an optimum, usually economic path to success. This is widely regarded as a Republican approach to life.

    An entire society of either probably cannot succeed and no example exists. Attempts have been made; utopian egalitarian societies (fail, the pigs * take over), pure market force societies (fail, breeds monopolies).

    * Reference to George Orwell's "Animal Farm".

    "you just want it to be so you can feel better about yourself."

    As compared to what? My language is usually positive, thoughtful, well-considered. Whether I feel "better" is meaningless.

    "Frankly, all I got from your interminable drivel is that you’ve misinterpreted neuroscience"

    Then let us discuss neuroscience.

    "in pursuit of your pet political theory where everything comes down to herds. Or something."

    Close enough for metaphor. When applied to humans sometimes the words "clan" or "tribe" are used but really those are just human herds. The Christian tradition uses herd quite a bit and few there be confused by it. Sheep, shepherd; useful metaphors.

    "And you really, really want to think of yourself as being a bit superior to the “People of the Left”.

    And to most People of the Right as well. There's not much to envy, quite frankly. There's an old saying, "In the land of the blind, a one-eyed man is king" but this is challenged by an interesting science fiction short story that showed it not to be so. An astronaut crash lands on a planet where the people have no eyes. To escape daytime heat they live in adobe houses and do everything at night. He cannot see in the dark houses and he cannot see at night; so in reality the two-eyed man was treated as an invalid, which in their adapted circumstances was exactly correct.

    What works in any climate or geography is what is found there. Problems arise when a person attempts to import ideas that work in Scandinavia to the temperate zone or even worse, the tropics; or vice versa.

    "it’s almost perfect."

    More practice needed!

  156. Total says

    June 20, 2017 at 11:50 am

    "Using SJW nonironically instantly identifies as not-credible."

    On the contrary; you have chosen to argue with me because of my credibility.

    Actually, now I'm just mocking you, especially since your Native American Name is Bullied By The Herd.

  157. Michael 2 says

    June 20, 2017 at 11:59 am

    It seems my science fiction story was patterned closely after H.G. Wells "Country of the Blind" [https]://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Country_of_the_Blind

    In other words, mutual respect exists with minimum semantic distance between two persons; that is to say, mutual undertstanding because they share cultural norms, language, goals, values and so on. "Superior" in that context means at the top of the gaussian distribution of that distance from "me". The farther that distance the more difficult is judgment and I might well judge someone of superior intelligence to be inferior because the ruler or yardstick by which I take the measure only goes so far.

    One of my friends is absolutely brilliant; I have no idea his I.Q. but he solves the Scientific American Mensa puzzles in his mind taking only moments where I have to struggle with it and don't always succeed. That is the realm of his superiority. But I have many skills that he does not; those are the realms of my superiority.

    So long as a person is employed within the realm of his or her own personal superiority I do not see much value in trying to establish that one of these skills is intrinsically, cosmically, superior to another.

    Am I superior to a lion or tiger? If the goal is to make an airplane or even a chair, then yes. If the goal is to survive in the wilderness of Africa, well then no; the lion is superior.

    But in an argument over who is superior, without any other qualification, that's easy.

  158. Michael 2 says

    June 20, 2017 at 12:14 pm

    HandOfGod137 writes "It doesn’t matter if you don’t see it as being racist."

    It does to me. Mattering is not universal nor a property of a thing. Mattering happens in the minds of beholders and is not subject to universal definition or control.

    "Regardless of your claims to being the only person in the English-speaking world unaware of the meaning behind Pepe"

    I do not use herd language. I do not speak for others. Whether I am the only person in the English-speaking world that does not attribute racism to a green frog is a thing I do not know and neither do you. Where we differ is that I don't care whether others think about frogs as I think; but it matters to *you* to belong to the herd and think as the herd thinks. They of course are doing likewise so the whole herd thought process is a bit circular like herring swimming in a circle because each is the leader of the others.

    The meaning behind Pepe is rightly within the power of the creator of Pepe to decide. I have not studied what its creator means by it, if anything.

    "but it’s just the Hindu symbol for the Sun”

    I suspect the majority of the world populations do not ascribe anything sinister to swastika; a peculiarly western-centric thought process you seem to have that a billion Asians should think the way you think about frogs and swastikas. Frogs seem to be highly revered in Japan; one can purchase little good-luck frogs, gold plated.

    [https]://www.amazon.com/Feng-Shui-Money-Frog-Wealth/dp/B006AV04CC

  159. Michael 2 says

    June 20, 2017 at 12:22 pm

    Total writes: "I’m just mocking you, especially since your Native American Name is Bullied By The Herd."

    You've been remarkably clever; write or speak that name in Native American. You'd be amazed at how it flows through the air like a cool breeze on a hot day!

  160. Total says

    June 20, 2017 at 12:38 pm

    You've been remarkably clever

    Actually, this only really requires a moderate level of cleverness.

  161. Michael 2 says

    June 20, 2017 at 1:01 pm

    Total writes: "Actually, this only really requires a moderate level of cleverness."

    You understate your skill. You have remarkable skill with words, an associative memory and a sense of structure; suggesting a Myers-Briggs type INTP.

  162. william the stout says

    June 20, 2017 at 4:48 pm

    Holy shit. Did anybody commenting here actually read the fucking post?

  163. anon says

    June 20, 2017 at 6:13 pm

    People of the Right have a similar foundation of survival, but the herd is the enemy

    Holy shit, the projection is overwhelming here.

  164. Ann says

    June 20, 2017 at 7:29 pm

    @Ken White —

    And yet, the "we're just applying their rules to them" theory has some heft. It's not because of the nasty, disruptive little totalitarians themselves. Antifa scum and pseudo-educated campus thugs are not legitimate foundation for any adult's philosophy. No, the bit of plausibility comes from the reaction of people in authority, people who ought to know better, people whose conduct is somewhat more fairly attributed to a larger political groups.

    I respect the hell out of you, but I can't for the life of me understand why you subscribe to this mythic worldview per which it's the liberals who suppress speech and the right that champions and protects it.

    Let's talk about people in authority, whose conduct can fairly be attributed to a larger political group. There are sixteen Republican state legislatures that passed or are trying to pass anti-protest laws. Within the last few months, the Republican president asked the FBI director to consider jailing journalists who published leaks; a reporter was arrested for asking a cabinet secretary a question; another was pinned to the wall by security guards at a federal agency for doing his job; and yet another was tackled, slammed to the floor, and throttled for asking a Republican congressional candidate a question about health care.

    The aforementioned president is now considering cutting the WH press briefing down to once a week and requiring the press to submit questions.

    Quite apart from that, there is and long has been a robust tradition of national right-wing organizations dedicated to policing the media for signs of decadence and/or "bias" — eg, Accuracy in Media, Parents Television Council, Morality in Media, etc.

    And that's to say nothing of the "March against Sharia" sub-set of the ideological right.

    This stands in contrast to college students doing stupid things, some of which are supported by faculty and administrators a handful of times a year, plus, more recently, antifa. Furthermore, there's also a very strong pro-speech tradition on the left, as exemplified by 98% of the issues handled by the ACLU.

    A little less partisan profiling and a little more fairness and balance would be a mitzvah, imo.

  165. GuestPoster says

    June 20, 2017 at 7:56 pm

    Yes Ann, you've sort of hit the nail on the head. There are people who identify as left-wing who do things that are against the ideal of free speech. They rarely, very rarely, call out for government censorship, but they do exercise the heckler's veto and such. To some, this is simply free speech countering free speech. To others, it is anti free speech. Either way – they certainly go out of their way to try and get others to shut up, or drown out their voices.

    They are also private citizens with basically no power.

    The right, on the other hand, elects politicians who impose, or attempt to impose, laws that infringe upon free speech. From narrowing the spaces in which protest may occur to making it legal to hit protesters with your car. From denying people who've committed the grievous sin of working for the government from forming a union to privileging christians above those of other faiths, or none, in assorted laws. The right-wing politician these days does everything possible to violate both the spirit and the letter of the first amendment to the Constitution of the United States.

    Above, it was claimed that thousands of liberals are anti-free speech. This is probably true. There's little point arguing. But TENS OF MILLIONS of conservatives are against free speech. And unlike liberals, they work very hard, and rather effectively, to get laws passed to deny speech rights to those they do not like.

  166. Michael 2 says

    June 20, 2017 at 8:43 pm

    anon "Holy shit, the projection is overwhelming here."

    The tweet generation has arrived. All the worlds knowledge in 140 characters or less.

  167. Michael 2 says

    June 20, 2017 at 8:47 pm

    Ann wrote "A little less partisan profiling and a little more fairness and balance would be a mitzvah, imo."

    Who shall police this balance?

    Oh. You.

  168. Michael 2 says

    June 20, 2017 at 9:19 pm

    GuestPoster writes "TENS OF MILLIONS of conservatives are against free speech"

    Maybe. I will suggest that a more fruitful consideration is along the axis of control; liberty versus totalitarian, which is orthogonal to the axis of left versus right.

    Libertarians are on the side of liberty; but on the other axis can be anywhere from left to right (often both at the same time depending on the issue).

    Your typical schoolyard bully, on the other hand, likes control and will take any side that provides it. He doesn't have principles per se; not that he will support even if he is on the "losing" side.

    Both sides offer freedoms — and take freedoms away. So your particular mix of freedoms you seek, versus freedoms you don't mind losing, pretty much decides or political choices of the moment.

    Antifa doesn't have a side. They are whipped into a frenzy, a license to be violent. It takes only a nudge to assuage their guilt. But what about the people fighting back? Not much different to this observer; I sometimes wish I was more of a fighter so I too could take on Antifa pretending to "defend" myself. But I joined the Navy and defended the nation; not just myself.

    But back to free speech. It is contrary to Marxist principles to actually endorse "free" as in unfettered speech on any political topic. Few endorse rudeness and that is not, to me, in the class of free speech anyway but neither is it federal government business. The First Amendment is expressly about political speech. Marxism endorses free, *approved* speech, speech that is not dangerous or traitorous to nation; speech that enhances the state. The right wing, conservatives, endorse speech that protects life, liberty and property (the French original; but as not everyone has property, it was changed to "pursuit of happiness", but not happiness itself).

    Thus, hardly anyone endorses absolutely unfettered drivel; but so long as I don't have to be forced to read or listen to it, I don't really care that much what you do.

    It is clear to me that the left wing does not grant to the right wing any privilege or platform. NPR is hostile to the right; essentially all colleges and universities are "no go zones" for any right wing professor (if any are still employed) or student.

    [http]://www.npr.org/yourturn/ombudsman/2003/031015.html

    Run down this list; left, center or right: Mostly left by my estimation:
    [http]://www.npr.org/programs/all-things-considered/

    The First Amendment assures a right to peaceful assembly. The Federal government cannot take that away; but prior to the 14th Amendment states (and cities and so on) *could*. Some of these federal rights are pushed down on the states, but not quite all of them are thus "incorporated" into state law. if the assembly (Antifa, anyone?) is not peaceful then it loses First Amendment protection.

  169. OrderoftheQuaff says

    June 20, 2017 at 10:07 pm

    I see Donald Trump as more in the mold of Richard III than Julius Caesar. Anybody want to help crowdfund THAT?

    Reading this commentspace made me sad. I'm wondering if Ken should disable comments for his posts, but what would it do to his traffic? For many years friends have suggested to me that I start my own blog "Because you would be good at it" but I have never entertained the notion, and this is why. I have no shortage of chittering, poo-flinging monkeys around IRL, why would I want to engage even more of them online?

  170. Murphy says

    June 21, 2017 at 5:00 am

    @Ken

    And sometimes someone is simply playing wagner on their car radio just because when the pull up to a light at which point someone standing at the pavement happens to be jewish and from a certain subculture and decides that it's a racist attack on them and rejoices because they finally have something to post on their blog.

    I'm reminded of a post I saw on a forum a couple years ago, some student had stuck a cutout of pedobear to the inside of a lift door such that as the door closed the bear would appear to peek in from the side. The reasons were inane and boiled down to someone wanting to get the effect of it peeking in combined with a reference few people would get.

    it's inane but I could understand exactly what he was going for despite not being able to articulate it very well.

    Unfortunately someone who didn't get the reference decided to try to look it up and pretty much got all their summaries of it from websites along the lines of "christian mothers against X" and their bizarre ideas including the belief that it was an advertisement to rally pedophiles to abduct their children.

    That's what pretty much every 3rd party reference to Pepe feels like.

    Somehow it got associated with the trump campaign due to nihilistic teenagers laughing at the prospect of a clusterfuck and then the political equivalents of "christian mothers against" groups were suddenly crowing that it was basically a swastika with green skin.

    Sometimes things are just inane internet in-jokes that 99% of people don't even notice, 0.9% get the reference and roll their eyes or maybe experience a moment of surprise and 0.1% have had their understanding of the world pushed through the "mothers against" filter and decide it's a nazi, illuminati, kkk, pedophile death threat …. and then the fact that it was them that saw it and blew up is used as proof that it's a nazi, illuminati, kkk, pedophile death threat.

    Be better than the Mothers Against.

  171. Michael 2 says

    June 21, 2017 at 7:44 am

    OrderoftheQuaff "why would I want to engage even more of them online?"

    I have no idea why you do or do not.

  172. Oss Ickle says

    June 21, 2017 at 9:18 am

    cthulhu,

    You're quite right about Giffords shooting, and Mikey being mistaken.

    When you have to fight that battle, one thing you can do is point people to these posts:

    http://www.unz.com/isteve/mother-jones-v-new-york-times/
    http://www.unz.com/isteve/nyt-editorial-board-falls-for-its-own-retconning/

    Though of course because of who wrote them, they will disregard them. C'est la vie.

  173. Bret Hamer says

    June 21, 2017 at 11:25 am

    I can not believe that there are multiple morons who read Popehat and whose response to this post is the same "but the liberals all do this and a liberal shot that congressman so all liberals deserve this."

    Go fuck yourselves, crybaby conservative snowflakes. You are exemplifying what Ken was decrying.

    More and more I'm realizing that the number one problem these cavemen had with Obama was that he called racist murders racist murders instead of just turning his fat orange head the other way.

    Poor little conservatives… so desperate for a safe space to be racist and stupid in.

  174. Michael 2 says

    June 21, 2017 at 6:12 pm

    Bret Hamer writes some things best not repeated.

    Seems to me the observation was that leftwingers tend to be rude and uncivil.

  175. Ann says

    June 21, 2017 at 6:13 pm

    @Michael 2

    Who shall police this balance?

    Oh. You.

    Certainly not. I'll just put my argument on the marketplace of ideas, on the grounds that if someone has a better counter to it than whatever knee-jerk ad hominem their persecution complex happens to suggest to them, they'll make it.

  176. anon says

    June 21, 2017 at 7:24 pm

    The tweet generation has arrived. All the worlds knowledge in 140 characters or less.

    You right-wing ignorant trash wouldn't understand the arguments even if your propaganda, err, I mean media, sources spoon fed it to you dripping with righteous indignation and a nice glass of hateful rhetoric to wash it down.

    Seems to me the observation was that leftwingers tend to be rude and uncivil.

    Oh fuck right off.
    Right-wingers have been demonizing the "left" for 40+ years.
    Now that some of us have finally had enough of your bullshit and start fighting back now you get all butthurt and start wanting "safe spaces".

  177. Michael 2 says

    June 21, 2017 at 9:59 pm

    anon wrote "You right-wing ignorant trash wouldn’t understand the arguments even if your propaganda, err, I mean media, sources spoon fed it to you dripping with righteous indignation"

    Insanity is believing this while still trying to do exactly that.

    "Oh fuck right off."

    Another demonstration of the Literate Left.

    Anyway, in one sense you are correct. The right does not understand the left and is probably incapable. The same is true going the other way of course. Left brains do not understand right brains or even acknowledge the existence thereof. Merged brains, typically of older and wiser persons, still have a dominant half but have come to terms with their other half.

    The way these halves deal with it reveals your dominant half. The left half (right wing; logical, rational, mathematical) tries to understand things like emotion but emotion is not logical or mathematical. A person can mimic some emotions with effort but they are not felt. This kind can be dangerous since empathetic persons might believe he feels your pain (Bill Clinton) when in fact that is not nearly true.

    Conversely, the right brain (seat of emotions) really has no idea what logic is, but the word exists so it must mean something so it gets attached to "good" feelings. Therefore since I am "good" I must be "logical" (never mind what exactly it is).

    The enemy must be bad. Therefore the enemy is not anything good; not logical, not rational. The enemy is to be despised. He's the enemy as you aptly illustrate. All of your principles of empathy and charity go right out the window the moment you identify someone as "enemy". You don't need to know the enemy; it could be a fiction of your computer's imagination.

    The George Orwell equivalent is "Goldstein" in the book 1984. It isn't clear whether (even in the fiction) Goldstein existed; it doesn't matter. It was sufficient for the State (Big Brother) to identify an enemy, designate him for hate, and the people suddenly hate Goldstein.

    You are about as autonomous as that. You won't understand a word of what I wrote but most others here *will*. It is neither good nor bad; it just *is*.

  178. Michael 2 says

    June 21, 2017 at 10:09 pm

    "Right-wingers have been demonizing the “left” for 40+ years."

    It goes back thousands of years, eternal conflict between producers and consumers; totalitarian versus libertarian, utopian dreamers versus law-of-the-jungle realists.

    You, for instance, are here this very day demonizing right wingers, making the point of this article — behavior of the other side excuses you doing what you suppose is the same thing.

    But perhaps you can find an example of where I have been uncivil despite your rudest (well, as rude as is likely to be permitted here) commentary.

    Perhaps you could find in me a lack of understanding. It's there; I readily admit I do not "grok" the left despite many years of trying to do that very thing. This whole white guilt, proud of being wrong thing is incomprehensible to me. In the unlikely event I ever get to enjoy any "white privilege" I'll say thank you very much.

    Should it happen that a leftwinger actually shares of his or her own labor and substance, that person I salute, a "doer of the word and not a hearer only."

  179. Michael 2 says

    June 21, 2017 at 10:18 pm

    Anon writes "Now that some of us…"

    How many of you are in there? ;-)

    This is the "tell" of a herd member. It's "us" and "we", but you arrogate to speak for "us" even though "we" have not appointed you to it.

    A libertarian does not say "us" or "we" except in the rare case that this group is clearly identified and the libertarian is authorized to speak on behalf of the others.

    The right wing is pretty much just the mirror image of the left wing; also likely to say "us" and "we", be rude and one-sided.

    "have finally had enough of your bullshit and start fighting back now you get all butthurt and start wanting “safe spaces”."

    Safe spaces seems to be entirely an invention of the left, more particularly the college student left who has re-introduced segregation but calls it "safe spaces." 60 years ago this nation put an *end* to race or color segregated schools and graduations; now they seem to be enjoying a resurgence which I might point out has always been an expectation of mine.

    When the weak achieves equality, what then? His paradigm suddenly changes; now he wants *advantage*. Does anyone really want equality? I doubt it; it is not in human DNA (or that of any animal). You seek equality only when you are behind, but that's not really your goal. Equality isn't when you have a house, it is when you have a big house, and a boat, and two cars, and so on. You set as your definition of equality a thing very few people actually possess.

    For reasons that are unclear, believing that stuff seems confined to New Englanders.

  180. Wintermut3 says

    June 22, 2017 at 12:29 am

    Ken, the world needs people like you, principled, articulate, intelligent people that take a stand on principle and decry taking the easy road, and will hold even "their side" of issues to a stringent moral standard.

    But, we cannot forget, political change also does not come without the bomb-throwers, the instigators, the ones that insist on "no freedom for you until freedom for me", the ones that are willing to smash teeth.

    You can decry the heckler's veto all you like, and I know you really do, but until it becomes inconvenient, it's here to stay.

  181. Ann says

    June 22, 2017 at 11:30 am

    @ Michael 2 —

    It goes back thousands of years, eternal conflict between producers and consumers; totalitarian versus libertarian, utopian dreamers versus law-of-the-jungle realists.

    I'd be curious to know what conflicts between producers and consumers, totalitarians versus libertarians, and utopian dreamers versus law-of-the jungle realists that go back to 1017 A.D. you have in mind. (I'm assuming that the "eternal" is either rhetorical or that you're one of those utopian dreamers, dealing with faith not facts.)

    But perhaps you can find an example of where I have been uncivil

    Sure! I wrote a respectful and snark-free comment, in which I listed approximately two dozen instances of anti-First Amendment actions and endeavors by the organized right-wing, including by its representatives in government.

    I then suggested that it would be nice if those who advocate for free-speech did not confine their complaints to the same half-dozen (or fewer) instances of academics and/or college students doing stupid and suppressive things that had no particular or lasting impact on anyone or on society as a whole.

    You responded by saying:

    Who shall police this balance?

    Oh. You.

    That was uncivil, as well as non-responsive. Logic-free, too, therefore! Seemed to be completely emotionally driven.

    Not that I particularly cared about it. It's just that you did ask.

    Should it happen that a leftwinger actually shares of his or her own labor and substance, that person I salute, a "doer of the word and not a hearer only."

    What an odd thing to say. Are you under the impression that people on the left don't work for a living, same as everyone else, with the same results and on the same terms? If so, that's wrong.

    The way these halves deal with it reveals your dominant half. The left half (right wing; logical, rational, mathematical) tries to understand things like emotion but emotion is not logical or mathematical. A person can mimic some emotions with effort but they are not felt. This kind can be dangerous since empathetic persons might believe he feels your pain (Bill Clinton) when in fact that is not nearly true.

    Conversely, the right brain (seat of emotions) really has no idea what logic is, but the word exists so it must mean something so it gets attached to "good" feelings. Therefore since I am "good" I must be "logical" (never mind what exactly it is).

    You know what doesn't make a logical, emotionless, reason-based impression? Basing your arguments in long-debunked myths about left-brain/right-brain personality traits. That's what.

  182. Ann says

    June 22, 2017 at 11:37 am

    I'd be curious to know what conflicts between producers and consumers, totalitarians versus libertarians, and utopian dreamers versus law-of-the jungle realists that go back to 1017 A.D. you have in mind.

    17 A.D., I mean.

  183. GuestPoster says

    June 22, 2017 at 2:12 pm

    Ann,

    What I love about the claim that the RIGHT is the side of logic, and the LEFT the ideology of emotion, is how easily disproven it is. And, it's easily disproven by right-wing approved facts ™. Remember: those ivy tower liberals in academia are a bad thing. Now, ignoring the 'bad thing' bit – those ivy tower liberals in academia, and we're constantly assured that most academics are liberals, and conservatives aren't welcome in academia… those people are where most of science comes from. Industry doesn't do nearly as much science as conservatives like to imagine, most advances come out of academia. And science, to work, needs quite a lot of logic. How do we know this isn't just imagination? GPS works. Microwave ovens work. Teflon works. Ceramics. Play-doh. Water filtration systems. Immunizations. They all work. So science pretty clearly works. And conservatives tell us, time and again, that academics (ie: the people doing most of science) are all liberals.

    Also, remember how liberal silicon valley is (and CA in general)? Ever try to make a computer work without logic? Doesn't happen. Ever.

    As for emotion, look, liberals ARE driven by emotion: compassion, love, eagerness for learning and betterment – we see evidence of this in how the left is always pushing for better access to healthcare and education, for instance, despite the financial harm it would impose upon those who can pay while barely noticing the cost. Those are all emotions. But conservatives are driven by emotion too: hatred and fear primarily. Want proof? Just look at their campaigns – they try to scare us with tales of 'illegals' doing bad things, or Islamic jihadists killing us (which has a statistical likelihood a bit lower than being struck by lightning twice in a row). They try to convince us that Alice deserves what she earned by being born rich, but Joseph shouldn't be allowed to suck at the public teat merely because his parents died in a car crash when he was 2 and he never had access to a decent public school. Alice WOULD have overcome that, had she needed to, so he SHOULD have too.

    It's sort of funny when they go to such extreme lengths to create their little fantasy worlds, and neglect to realize that the fantasy is 100% different than reality.

  184. Ann says

    June 22, 2017 at 2:42 pm

    @GuestPoster

    Yes, well. I cited a number of facts that would lead an impartial person to logically conclude that it's false to say that the left is anti- and the right pro-speech.

    And Michael 2 responded with petulance, (which I believe is an emotion) to what I can only imagine he felt I was saying, since I did not in fact say anything about thought-policing or political correctness. I was making a strictly reality-based argument.

    He's also the one speaking in highly romanticized, mythological terms about "eternal" conflicts.

    So there's that.

  185. Michael 2 says

    June 22, 2017 at 2:49 pm

    Ann writes: "I’d be curious to know what conflicts … that go back to 1017 A.D. you have in mind."

    Nearly all of them to varying degree back to Australopithecus but some specific examples would include ancient Athens, the city-states whose inhabitants did not grow their own food but depended (and still depend) on "peasants", tenant farmers, slaves to feed them.

    Cities breed a sense of entitlement; a more recent example being the French Revolution. When the starving citizens of Paris went out to the farms in search of food, they found it, but by eating the seeds of next year's crops, induced a severe famine which required to steal food from neighbors and Napoleon Bonaparte was just the man for the job.

    How many farmers were among "Occupy Wall Street" throngs? Not very many, I think.

    ON civility:
    "You responded by saying: Who shall police this balance? Oh. You.

    That was uncivil, as well as non-responsive."

    Your definition of uncivil varies considerably from mine. Perhaps a review of other recent comments will help you calibrate "civil". Uncivil is a substitute for my fist in your face (or yours in mine). I am many things; snarky at times, arrogant at times, but rarely uncivil.

    "Are you under the impression that people on the left don’t work for a living, same as everyone else, with the same results and on the same terms?"

    Some do, some don't. There is no "everyone else". There's a tendency for People of the Left to concentrate into cities; but the causality is not obvious. It may be that cities breed People of the Left. This can be easily seen on the red/blue county voting patterns of the United States.

    [https]://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/3/3f/United_States_presidential_election_results_by_county%2C_2016.svg/1280px-United_States_presidential_election_results_by_county%2C_2016.svg.png

    But that wasn't my comment anyway. I was speaking of sharing; a value of the left which is somewhat uncommonly exercised in a way that involves self sacrifice.

    "You know what doesn’t make a logical, emotionless, reason-based impression?"

    Dragons!

    "Basing your arguments in long-debunked myths about left-brain/right-brain personality traits."

    A reasonably brief discussion on brain lateralization is found in Wikipedia along with many sources cited. Perhaps the true source of laterilzation is in your little fingers but it hardly changes the fact of strong polarization exemplfied by the extreme examples but present in essentially everyone (IMO).

    Assigning causality to biological function suggests that changing one's entire approach to life isn't going to happen just reading a self-help book from Amazon (or dozens of such things); the act of selecting and reading such books is itself just a product, not a cause, of largely invisible and unconscious behavior choices.

    If it was that easy everyone would read a "get rich quick" book and be done with it; everyone would be a leader (there would be no followers), and so on. It would be a disaster.

    [https]://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lateralization_of_brain_function

  186. Michael 2 says

    June 22, 2017 at 3:14 pm

    Wintermut3 suggests: “no freedom for you until freedom for me"

    Typically people do not measure these things in the same way producing great difficulty in knowing when you have "freedom" or more of it, or less of it, than someone else.

    It also produces a circularity from which there is no escape until someone goes first, and is willing to grant freedom BEFORE getting it for herself. Or completely obliterate the other side, then the other town, then the other clan, then the other person, until there's only you left at which point you might be free; but maybe not.

  187. Total says

    June 22, 2017 at 3:18 pm

    It goes back thousands of years, eternal conflict between producers and consumers; totalitarian versus libertarian, utopian dreamers versus law-of-the-jungle realists.

    Oh, no. You're practicing history without a license here, aren't you? Reducing all of history to feed into current day American political issues is just…well, it's kind of the same as talking about how the black hole at the center of the Milky Way is influencing Presidential elections.

    I get (from this thread and others) that you feel that you've figured out how the world works, but let me suggest something: if you had, you wouldn't be commenting in Internet threads.

  188. Michael 2 says

    June 22, 2017 at 3:37 pm

    Total writes: "You’re practicing history without a license here, aren’t you?"

    I do not know how to unambigously answer do-you-dont-you questions. I suppose I could quickly print myself a history practicing license but I'd need a few minutes warning before the history license inspector arrives.

    "Reducing all of history to feed into current day American political issues is just…well, it’s kind of the same as talking about how the black hole at the center of the Milky Way is influencing Presidential elections."

    Or almost any episode of Star {Trek, Wars, etc}, and so on. Yes it all goes in the blender. Game of Thrones is War of Roses.

    "I get (from this thread and others) that you feel that you’ve figured out how the world works, but let me suggest something: if you had, you wouldn’t be commenting in Internet threads."

    That seems like a nonsequitur but I cannot test the theory. I occasionally figure out how a person works; in comparison the world is pretty easy. It spins. How it came to spin is probably good for some discussion. That it spins on an axis misaligned from the orbital plane produces seasons in high latitudes; those seasons in turn compel humans to develop shelter in winter, food storage, hunting; evolutionary forces for intelligence and social cooperation.

    Until finally you arrive at the very pinnacle of human evolution: Norwegians!

    That gave Barack Obama a Nobel Peace Prize somewhat in advance of earning it.

    Which was shaped by seasons, which are shaped by Earths spin and orbital plane, which very likely is indeed influenced by the black hole at the center of the galaxy.

  189. Total says

    June 22, 2017 at 3:59 pm

    Cute. Just smart enough to be stupid.

    That, I think, is probably the story of your life, though you won't have realized it yet.

  190. Chad H. says

    June 22, 2017 at 4:34 pm

    I think a more appropriate reason to disrupt it is because its offensive to the memory of Caesar… He was at least competent.

  191. Roland Jones says

    June 22, 2017 at 9:33 pm

    I'm always baffled by the sheer, visceral hatred you express for protesting college students. It's really alarming and unwarranted, and rarely shows up elsewhere, even for vastly more deserving targets. Neither racists nor people abusing censorious litigation get the pure scorn and loathing from you that college students exercising their right to free speech does. Trump promising to use the full power of the executive branch to crack down on speech he doesn't like is an amusing diversion, but twenty-somethings with no legal power are "destroying free speech". It's a rather glaring double-standard, one that's persistently present in your writing here.

  192. Michael 2 says

    June 23, 2017 at 7:34 am

    Roland Jones writes "twenty-somethings with no legal power are destroying free speech”

    Indeed; so it must not be "legal power" accomplishing this. Perhaps fists and clubs is their secret weapon.

    "Evergreen official asks student vigilantes to stop patrolling campus armed with bats, batons"
    [https]://www.thecollegefix.com/post/33027/

    Syracuse University Prof. Dana Cloud tweeted: “We almost have the fascists in on the run. Syracuse people come down to the federal building to finish them off.”

    "Evergreen State faculty demand punishment of white professor who refused to leave on anti-white day"
    [https]://www.thecollegefix.com/post/32946/

  193. HandOfGod137 says

    June 23, 2017 at 11:54 am

    Christ, is Micheal 2 still going?

    Here's the thing with fuckwit trolls on the internet with their unique "theories" and delusions of intellectuality: they just love this shit. This is probably the most engagement he has had since he last ran out of adult diapers and had to leave his "compound" for the store. In 2003.

    There's a well known phrase from George Bernard Shaw involving pigs and wrestling. This thread has become exactly that for Michael 2. Stop feeding him.

  194. Michael 2 says

    June 23, 2017 at 3:37 pm

    HandOfGod137 asks "Christ, is Micheal 2 still going?"

    I am interested in the answer you get from him.

    "they just love this shit."

    As do you.

    "This is probably the most engagement he has had since…"

    With you, anyway. Seems I last conversed with you in November. I still don't understand your interest in goat-eaters.
    https://popehat.com/2016/11/09/getting-back-to-work-the-day-after/#comment-1349322

    As all have seen, I respond to you with substance and intelligence but you do not answer me with substance or intelligence.

    You could simplify; just say "I don't like you" and be done with it.

    You have inadvertently provided substance in your handle; a comment made by Feynman and the number "137" whose exact relationship I forget but involves electrons and so forth. I understood it for a while.

    [http]://www.fotuva.org/online/frameload.htm?/online/137.htm

    So that was worth looking into. You might consider entertaining your readers with why you chose this particular handle and why you have chosen to disrespect a fellow science fiction reader.

  195. Morgan says

    June 24, 2017 at 12:53 am

    I find it funny that Leftists and Democrats go out of their way to throw protests which are not JUST communicative, which is the point of protests, but are viciously DISRUPTIVE, if not DESTRUCTIVE and VIOLENT.

    WTO Protests, Occupy Wall Street, Anti War Protests, BLM, Portland, California, Berkeley, Middlebury, Mizzou, Berkeley, Evergreen etc. They worked hard to make their presence intolerable with the obvious message of 'we will keep doing this until we get our own way'. The perennial threat of a Bully and Thug.

    They are not content to hold up signs, shout, pass out pamphlets. No. They have to stop you from getting to work, they have to intimidate you into thinking violence is possible, if not likely, that the damages are 'not their fault' or 'just natural to a protest'.

    So when a Republican governor tries to STOP abusive and bullying protests, that is 'shutting down free speech.'.

    No. That is not allowing you freedom to harass and bully. A protest is not harassing or bullying. It does not stop the ability of other people to speak.

    Now, if the cause I was supporting was a matter of life and death, I would break any laws about free speech because it IS a matter of life and death. And I'd go to prison with a smile on my face and a song in my heart.

    No. What they are protesting isn't anywhere near that important. If they aren't willing to go to jail for being bullying disruptive @-holes, then they aren't dedicated to the cause. They are 'talk on the cheap'. Cowards who want no push back.

    But say that the majority of citizens don't like the anti protest laws? They will vote the bums out of office.

    What does it mean if they do NOT 'vote the bums out of office'? Self reflection is not strong here among the Lefties, so I ask it of the moderates and Conservatives to explain it to them.

    For them, free speech means 15 large men surrounding a small Republican woman and screaming imprecations at her. THAT is their version of 'free speech'.

    I have other names for it and have no issues shutting that kind of behavior down. The Constitution is not license for Lefties to take advantage of the good nature of others to be violent and destructive thugs and bullies.

  196. David Lang says

    June 24, 2017 at 1:34 am

    @morgan, the trouble is that they think they are dealing with life-and-death issues (and even worse, the life-and-death of the planet)

  197. HandOfGod137 says

    June 24, 2017 at 3:08 am

    @ Michael 2

    why you have chosen to disrespect a fellow science fiction reader.

    Because you are a tedious, monomaniacal dullard who adds nothing of interest to any discussion, but instead sucks the value from it with your endless determination that it should all be about you and your half-witted theories.

    And that's my final word on it, as you fucking bore me.

  198. Michael 2 says

    June 24, 2017 at 8:32 am

    HandOfGod137 explains: "Because you are a tedious, monomaniacal dullard who adds nothing of interest to any discussion"

    In what way do you differ?

    "And that’s my final word on it, as you fucking bore me."

    See you in six months!

  199. C. S. P. Schofield says

    June 25, 2017 at 11:38 am

    @Morgan;

    There has always been a large segment of society that missed the "Peaceably" in "the right of the people peaceably to assemble".. At the moment the broadest segment seems to lean far Left, but I'm sure there are examples on the other side, or will be shortly.

    @David Lang,

    Funny how the pet peeves of the Hobby Protesters are always Matters Of Life Or Death, but somehow that never applies to causes from any other point of the political spectrum. Like, say, Abortion.

    Mind you, I don't think a fetus is human. But that doesn't give me the right to dismiss people who do and who therefore believe Abortion is a matter of life or death.

    The Hobby Protest Left has gotten its way for far too goddamned long. They need to be reminded that both Martin Luther King and Henry David Thoreau believed that accepting arrest was an integral part of successful civil disobedience.

  200. Ann says

    June 26, 2017 at 9:44 am

    @Michael 2

    Nearly all of them to varying degree back to Australopithecus but some specific examples would include ancient Athens, the city-states whose inhabitants did not grow their own food but depended (and still depend) on "peasants", tenant farmers, slaves to feed them.

    What were the conflicts, though? You may see it that way now, but that doesn't mean there actually were any then.

    Cities breed a sense of entitlement; a more recent example being the French Revolution. When the starving citizens of Paris went out to the farms in search of food, they found it, but by eating the seeds of next year's crops, induced a severe famine which required to steal food from neighbors and Napoleon Bonaparte was just the man for the job.

    The French Revolution was a revolt of the masses, not the urban elites, against, among other things, food scarcity, which was due to the deregulation of the grain market, bad crops, and weather. And as a matter of both logic and plain common sense, if people were robbing farms because they were starving, ipso facto, people were not starving because they'd robbed farms.

    How many farmers were among "Occupy Wall Street" throngs? Not very many, I think.

    I have no idea, but fail to see what it has to do with the ostensibly eternal conflict between producers and consumers; totalitarian versus libertarian, utopian dreamers versus law-of-the-jungle realists, going back thousands of years. Whether there were or weren't farmers says nothing about whether there were or weren't producers, because syllogistic fallacy.

    ON civility:
    "You responded by saying: Who shall police this balance? Oh. You.

    That was uncivil, as well as non-responsive."

    Your definition of uncivil varies considerably from mine. Perhaps a review of other recent comments will help you calibrate "civil". Uncivil is a substitute for my fist in your face (or yours in mine). I am many things; snarky at times, arrogant at times, but rarely uncivil.

    Along with everyone else in civil society, you are actually not the judge of whether what you say and do is or is not civil. Such things are governed by social norms, according to which dismissing someone else's argument by suggesting that she's seeking to impose her standards on everybody when she's actually just pointing out a factual reality is uncivil.

    Unresponsive, too.

    There's a tendency for People of the Left to concentrate into cities; but the causality is not obvious. It may be that cities breed People of the Left. This can be easily seen on the red/blue county voting patterns of the United States.

    That's a recent phenomenon, not an eternal, partisan-characteristic-based verity. Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia, and West Virginia (the "Solid South") overwhelmingly voted Democratic for almost a century, from 1877 to the mid '60s. And the reason for the change was the party's position on race, not a general and organic inclination towards the right.

    So that's not a viable hypothesis. There are plenty of farmers in Alabama, Arkansas, etc.

    I'll do the rest in a separate post.

  201. Ann says

    June 26, 2017 at 10:11 am

    But that wasn't my comment anyway. I was speaking of sharing; a value of the left which is somewhat uncommonly exercised in a way that involves self sacrifice.

    Evidence?

    "You know what doesn’t make a logical, emotionless, reason-based impression?"

    Dragons!

    Agree!

    "Basing your arguments in long-debunked myths about left-brain/right-brain personality traits."

    A reasonably brief discussion on brain lateralization is found in Wikipedia along with many sources cited.

    Yes. And not one word of it supports the idea that there are any such thing as left-brain/right-brain personality traits, because that's a myth.

    Assigning causality to biological function suggests that changing one's entire approach to life isn't going to happen just reading a self-help book from Amazon (or dozens of such things); the act of selecting and reading such books is itself just a product, not a cause, of largely invisible and unconscious behavior choices.

    If it was that easy everyone would read a "get rich quick" book and be done with it; everyone would be a leader (there would be no followers), and so on. It would be a disaster.

    Lovely as this 100% strawman juxtaposition is, it not only has nothing to do with anything I said, it also has nothing to do with what we're discussing, as self-help books are not inherently a left-wing phenomenon (cf. Gorilla Mindset, or, if you prefer a more historical proof of concept, The Power of Positive Thinking.

    It also has nothing to do with the question of whether there are left-brain and right-brain personality types.

    There aren't. That's just the kind of mumbo-jumbo magical thinking that one finds in self-help books that purport to offer a simple, one-stop-shopping explanation for what are actually complex and ambiguous things.

  202. Michael 2 says

    June 26, 2017 at 12:21 pm

    Ann wrote "Along with everyone else in civil society, you are actually not the judge of whether what you say and do is or is not civil."

    Yes, I am; for if it is not me, to whom have I delegated this power? You? If not you, and not me, how is it that anyone else has obtained this judgeship?

  203. Michael 2 says

    June 26, 2017 at 5:31 pm

    Ann writes "self-help books are not inherently a left-wing phenomenon"

    Agreed. In my opinion they tend to feed left-brain, right-wing entrepreneurial types that think simple formulas exist to "success". So far as it goes, they tend to be correct (I am required to read one of these things a month). The problem is after a dozen or so they start to self-cancel and people seldom change to behave according to any of them.

    "It also has nothing to do with the question of whether there are left-brain and right-brain personality types. There aren’t."

    One of the hallmarks of the ES types (Myers Briggs, Extraverted Sensors) is denial that types exist.

    Where the left wing enters the picture is that socialism necessitates that "all men are somehow equal despite having evolved in vastly different circumstances." Thus it is obligatory to deny types and biological factors; my father is a "tabla rasa" communist hopelessly unable to explain why people are DIFFERENT from each other.

  204. Ann says

    June 26, 2017 at 5:34 pm

    Yes, I am; for if it is not me, to whom have I delegated this power? You? If not you, and not me, how is it that anyone else has obtained this judgeship?

    Civility, by definition, is determined by social consensus. This is true of many things, such as, for example, what is or isn't art.

    You're perfectly free to act in accordance with your own definition, if you prefer. You're also free to argue that your own boogers are art, if you prefer. In neither case does your action redefine the social standard, however. It's one of those entitled-to-your-own-opinion-but-not-your-own-facts things.

  205. Ann says

    June 26, 2017 at 5:50 pm

    In my opinion they tend to feed left-brain, right-wing entrepreneurial types

    There is no such thing as a left-brain type. It's an utter myth that's no better or worse than rank superstition.

    One of the hallmarks of the ES types (Myers Briggs, Extraverted Sensors) is denial that types exist.

    From a rational, logical, reality-based perspective, Myers-Briggs types are even more of a joke than left-brain/right-brain-based neurobollocks are.

    Where the left wing enters the picture is that socialism necessitates that "all men are somehow equal despite having evolved in vastly different circumstances." Thus it is obligatory to deny types and biological factors; my father is a "tabla rasa" communist hopelessly unable to explain why people are DIFFERENT from each other.

    Your father's limitations as an interlocutor for the purposes of explaining why people are DIFFERENT from each other are not my problem. It is not a tenet of left-wing thought that all people are the same as one another. On the contrary, the left has a long tradition of celebrating diversity.

    I seriously doubt that whatever you have in mind when you use the word "evolved," it's not actually evolution as recognized by science. Probably something vaguely ubermensch-y, I'm guessing.

  206. anon says

    June 26, 2017 at 6:04 pm

    Oh my word.
    I can't believe you are so fucking stupid that you equate the left/right political spectrum with the left/right brain.

    I just can't even imagine how absolutely fucking stupid one has to be to do so.

  207. Michael 2 says

    June 26, 2017 at 7:40 pm

    Ann wrote "Civility, by definition, is determined by social consensus."

    Which society? Many societies exist and thus many definitions of civility.

    [https]://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/society

    "civility: Politeness; courtesy; an individual act or a manner of behaving which conforms to social conventions of propriety. " [https]://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/civility

    Once again; which society? What convention? What is propriety?

    In some societies it is impolite to look at a person speaking; in others it is impolite to fail to do so. The United States consists of many cultural heritages poorly integrated with each other.

    By my definition, I am civil. I cannot predict how all of the readers, or any of the readers, will react to my writing and I believe it would be dishonest to manipulate specific readers by anticipating their positive and negative emotional triggers.

    Civil does not require agreement. Civil doesn't even require failing to state one's political and religious opinions except perhaps in situations where doing so would result in a sufficient amount of contention as to distract from the purpose of a gathering of people; such as at a family reunion.

    "You’re perfectly free to act in accordance with your own definition, if you prefer."

    I cannot imagine doing anything else since I do not have anyone else's definition. There are times when I go out of my way to learn local customs; such as when I went to the Phillippines. The value of doing so is to stay out of jail, but also, obtain better relationships where such a thing seems desireable (not always the case).

    "You’re also free to argue that your own boogers are art"

    Quite a lot worse (IMO) has been declared to be art.

    "In neither case does your action redefine the social standard"

    On the contrary! "Society" is consensus; influenced by all members hence influenced by ANY member. All by himself Picasso redefined art (to many people, not to me).

    My actions, declared to be civil, go into the great melting pot and by the "butterfly effect" everything I write, and amazingly everything I fail to write, influences social standards.

    "entitled-to-your-own-opinion-but-not-your-own-facts things."

    In a peculiar sort of way you ARE entitled to your own facts where I am entitled to mine. To me I am civil; to you I am not, both claims are true because the scope of relevance of my claims are limited to me, and the scope of your claims are limited to you.

    That may be a bit obscure so I'll try it a different way. Suppose you measure a thing and decide it is one meter tall. I measure it and get 1002 millimeters. Which of these measurements is a "fact"? Since a millimeter is a convention it doesn't have natural, physical existence and neither does a meter. The "fact" is only whether or not one has conformed to convention; but even there it is fuzzy; which measure was more accurate? You generally will not know.

  208. Michael 2 says

    June 26, 2017 at 8:19 pm

    Followup to Ann.

    I lived for two years in Iceland and while there experienced polite behavior as practiced by Icelanders which is quite different than, say, other Europeans particularly the French. The Icelanders were being extremely polite yet were judged by the French as being extremely rude. It had to do with who initiates a conversation (or whether one is desired).

    The Icelanders do not invade your space or your thoughts. Well, they might invade your space but they will ignore you as though you were not there, and you will ignore them as if they are not there, and that's okay because the hot tubs at the municipal pool in Reykjavik are occupied by naked persons.

    I never once had a salesperson ask, "May I help you?" in a store. If I need help, I must ask. Until then, I might be thinking poetic thoughts and it is rude to interrupt.

    To this day I prefer my barbers to remain silent and cut my hair once the style negotiation is concluded. I don't want to answer 20 questions like its an FBI security clearance interview.

    I went to the information desk at the airport. The gentleman seemed busy so I did not ask my question. He puttered around for 5 to 10 minutes or so; I was becoming anxious. Finally I asked. He immediately stopped his puttering and answered my question. I haven't quite figured it out but in stores and at information desks you walk up and ask your question. To me it seems blunt but if you don't, you'll be standing there a long time.

  209. Michael 2 says

    June 26, 2017 at 8:37 pm

    Ann "Your father’s limitations as an interlocutor for the purposes of explaining why people are DIFFERENT from each other are not my problem."

    I look forward to discovering more exciting things that are not your problem. What shall we not talk about next?

    "I seriously doubt that whatever you have in mind when you use the word evolved, it’s not actually evolution as recognized by science."

    Science recognizes NOTHING. Not one bloody thing. PEOPLE recognize things. Depending on who you are, your definition of "evolution" will vary (one variant, for instance, is called Punctuated Equilibrium).

    But to satisfy your curiosity, for purposes of this discussion it doesn't matter *which* theory of evolution is to be considered; all will suffice because all variants of evolution have the same outcome — species, subspecies and breeds will adapt to their environment and having done so are no longer "equal". Equal ended when the very first cell divided and they weren't identical.

    Socialism, and the left, does NOT embrace diversity! There's many entertaining YouTube videos of people like Zarna Joshi NOT celebrating diversity. Dogmatic? Absolutely! Tolerant of others? Not in her lifetime. She's a social justice warrior. There's got to be an enemy to unite The People

  210. ann says

    June 26, 2017 at 8:39 pm

    By my definition, I am civil.

    By and large, I quite agree. As to the question of what social convention:

    Please cite one that you and I might reasonably both be members of according in which it's deemed civil to response to someone's argument by lobbing n unearned and unmerited personal insinuation their way.

    Thanks.

    On the contrary! "Society" is consensus; influenced by all members hence influenced by ANY member. All by himself Picasso redefined art (to many people, not to me).

    Picasso did not redefine art all by himself to many people, ffs. That is, among other things, a fully self-contradicting claim, due to the fact that without the many people, no such (ostensible) redefinition could have occurred.

    But honestly, the number of ways in which that's a wrong statement is almost impressive. Picasso was an influential modern artist and is by far the best-known cubist painter. But cubism did not come out of nowhere. That's why the chorus of the 5 Chinese Brothers song "Paul Cezanne" is "Cezanne, Cezanne, the father of cubism," for example. Furthermore, cubism was just one of many, many influential modern art movements in the pre-WWI/interwar era. And Picasso himself abandoned it pretty quickly anyway.

    I've never been a fan. I'll take DuChamp over Picasso any day of the week. Also Matisse and Norman Rockwell. I've always loved Boucher, too. The rococo is underappreciated, imo.

    My actions, declared to be civil, go into the great melting pot and by the "butterfly effect" everything I write, and amazingly everything I fail to write, influences social standards.

    Not if they're only deemed civil by you.

    You know, I had a whole other post in moderation for links that seems to have disappeared.

    But among other things, it pointed out that Myers-Briggs personality types even more junk-scienc-y than left-brain/right-brain personality types are. Type the words "myers briggs debunked" into any search engine and watch the trashings add up, if you doubt me.

  211. Ann says

    June 26, 2017 at 8:50 pm

    I lived for two years in Iceland and while there experienced polite behavior as practiced by Icelanders which is quite different than, say, other Europeans particularly the French. The Icelanders were being extremely polite yet were judged by the French as being extremely rude. It had to do with who initiates a conversation (or whether one is desired).

    The French are famously inclined to declare others rude, and the complexity of French etiquette is well-known. What that has to do with the civility or incivility of your comment, I cannot imagine. You are not a national culture.

    But to satisfy your curiosity, for purposes of this discussion it doesn't matter *which* theory of evolution is to be considered; all will suffice because all variants of evolution have the same outcome — species, subspecies and breeds will adapt to their environment and having done so are no longer "equal". Equal ended when the very first cell divided and they weren't identical.

    If it was a tenet of the left that all life forms were identical, that would not be a straw man.

    Just by the way.

  212. Michael 2 says

    June 26, 2017 at 8:53 pm

    anon wrote "I can’t believe you are so fucking stupid that you equate the left/right political spectrum with the left/right brain."

    I am glad that you do not believe this. I would be deeply hurt if you did (then again, maybe not, I am not here).

    "I just can’t even imagine how absolutely fucking stupid one has to be to do so."

    Part of your difficulty is mixing "increase" words with "decrease" result. An example is increasing the emptiness of a jug. Nobody increases the emptiness of a jug.

    It seems to me to require a certain minimum level of intelligence and education to know that a human brain has two halves and that they service different functions. One would have to have followed at least some research on this topic over the years in order to form some kind of opinion.

    Finally, one would have to not be threatened by any of this. It seems you feel threatened by something.

    No worries, I am not here.

  213. Thad says

    June 26, 2017 at 9:59 pm

    @cthulhu:

    Now it's "oh Thad, you ignorant slut…"

    Sure, why not; everybody knows forty-year-old SNL quotes only get more clever the more you repeat them.

    So Mikee's vitriol was a total non-sequitor, not related to the real world in the slightest.

    […]

    This is pure whataboutism, has zero to do with my comment.

    If you really can't see how "Mikee's example was wrong, but here's an accurate example that makes the same point" is relevant to the conversation, then I'm afraid I can't help you. If I suggested that you and Mikee are two wild and crazy guys!, would I be speaking your language?

    But oh hey, "reading comprehension", "rule of holes"…I'm one "parents' basement" joke away from filling up my bingo card!

    @Michael K:

    Your example doesn't allow for the possibility that there are even more progressives than you who didn't vote for Sanders.

    I said floor.

  214. Michael 2 says

    June 26, 2017 at 10:16 pm

    ann asks: "Please cite one that you and I might reasonably both be members of according in which it’s deemed civil to response to someone’s argument by lobbing n unearned and unmerited personal insinuation their way."

    At some risk of unintentionally being rude but not meaning to be, that is the most intelligent (and difficult to answer) question I have seen in a very long time. I don't quite get the question but I'll give it a try. My difficulty is with what does "unearned and unmerited personal insinuation" means.

    An illustration of this is found in the movie "Gran Torino" where Clint Eastwood is trying to explain to his young friend (Vietnamese but I think more precisely Hmong) how to get along in the world of blue collar white men; you *must* insult in precise but non-obvious ways in order to be respected.

    As for me, I never used off-color language whatsoever growing up. As part of my Navy training I was given a sheet of paper with a dozen or so epithets used in sentences and I was required to learn how to speak "sailor" convincingly. I pretty much failed at it. I simply do not have it in me to be as insulting as "anon" throwing out cheap four-letter words as if it enhances the communication. It doesn't, and yet, in some realms it is *required* to communicate that way!

    The Navy judges on the correct use of English, but also the effective use of English which might not be very correct.

    A less charitable approach that I sometimes use I call "judo argumentation":

    Essentially all online arguments follow scripts. The idea is that this is a huge waste of time except for the rare newbie that this is the first time he's seen this particular "book move" (a term from playing chess) and finds it stimulating.

    So, get the argument OFF SCRIPT quickly! Where the script calls for agree, disagree! But most scripts assume your opponent is going to disagree, so agree! It is annoying to a person that has scripted your checkmate in three moves.

    It is easy to spot that kind; when I succeed in derailing a script the other guy goes on as if the script is still in play and announces checkmate, he wins, declares MBTI debunked even while proving its effectiveness.

    As to shared culture; I don't have one. I have Scandinavian and Scottish cultural norms but until I was 23 years old I had no idea who my relatives were beyond first cousin. My father went out of his way to cut his children loose from heritage and religion.

    So, overlay that with various religions including atheism, throw in a 20 year Navy career and visits to nearly every state in the USA including Alaska and Hawaii. 12 years there. Almost went native; spoke "pidgin", you know, da kine.

    So what cultural norms might we share? None or many depending on the overlap you wish.

    I am an INTP and when one INTP tells another that he's an "INTP", about three months of getting to know each other has just been accomplished in an instant.

    Then we laugh at the ESFJ's that don't believe this stuff. But what about the ESFJ; could she learn it? No; that's the problem. You have to be analytical; and with emphasis on the first four letters. IF you are analytical, you won't be "E" anything!

    It's not just French; it is *invisible* to the "E" types. But that's okay too because they don't need to analyze how to interpersonally relate. It comes natural to the extraverts.

    Some of this is explored in the movie "The Accountant". Truly excellent, a brilliant piece of filmmaking. I really cannot tell when someone is lying so I lean toward "just the facts". I am nearly immune to ridicule because I don't know what you are thinking and I don't really care what you think and yet I am insatiably curious about other people; but not as a judgment of me (or them). More like a very complex machine; what makes you tick and why don't I tick the same way?

    "I’ve never been a fan. I’d take DuChamp over Picasso any day of the week. Also Matisse and Norman Rockwell. I’ve always loved Boucher, too. The rococo is underappreciated, imo."

    Normal Rockwell is in a class by himself and it is interesting to see a resurgence of his art. I particularly enjoy Maxfield Parrish, particularly the piece "Daybreak" [http]://www.artsycraftsy.com/parrish_prints.html. I've seen several mentions recently of "Dogs playing poker", featured in the movie "The Accountant" but also the Jackie Chan version of "Around the World in 80 days".

    "Not if they’re only deemed civil by you."

    I will restate the "butterfly effect". Everything you do influences every other thing (scientifically, there's a quantum point where the influence probably ceases).

    Every word I write, every word you write, goes into GOOGLE and pops up on counts and searches. The meaning of words is defined by usage; therefore my usage is PART of the process of defining the meaning of words!

    Nice circularity to it, no?

    "But among other things, it pointed out that Myers-Briggs personality types even more junk-scienc-y than left-brain/right-brain personality types are. Type the words “myers briggs debunked” into any search engine and watch the trashings add up, if you doubt me."

    I do not doubt the results you claim; but it is meaningless. It just means how many people consider it debunked. Consensus is not science. People of the Left will then write blogs denouncing MBTI, and Google will count them, and it becomes a herd or a hive; but other herds exist, other hives exist, where MBTI is found to be useful and predictive for certain kinds of things.

    More important to this conversation, once you've been told a thing is debunked, do you continue to study it? Probably not. Once the Magisterium says the earth is the center of the Universe; do you continue to try to show otherwise? That's risky. Google is the new Magisterium; but it can shift its gravity only if enough people (me) stand up for what we believe and be counted by Google.

    Humans would still live in caves if we only ever went with the herd.

    Now it might be a bit like astrology, where it works for its believers because of the power of belief, not because of the gravity of a planet. But it is easy for some of the MBTI types to be observed (that's all it is, a way to categorize some observations: Do you hang out by yourself or with few close friends? You are an "I" introvert. Do you prefer to be with larger groups or at parties? You are an "E" — how exactly were you planning on debunking something as simple and obvious as that?)

    I learned it in the US Navy and within its application realm is quite effective.

  215. GuestPoster says

    June 27, 2017 at 6:54 am

    Soooo…. anybody else wondering if Michael2 and Encinal are the same person? Both make posts characterized by long walls of verbal diarrhea, lack of factual accuracy, insistence that their definition of a word is more valid than the actual definition of a word, etc. Both insist up and down that they are 'courteous' or the like, even while being jerks, simply because they don't use the specific words they consider to be uncivil. And both have, as the major form of argument, a tendency to delve deeply into the exact wording of a phrase, while totally ignoring the obvious meaning (at least, obvious to any honest person), and similarly utterly refusing to engage on the actual merits of a claim – that is to say, making semantic rather than substantive arguments. Finally: we tend to see only one of the two in any given post.

    Not definitive proof by any means, but one does begin to wonder.

  216. Michael 2 says

    June 27, 2017 at 10:02 am

    GuestPoster asks "anybody else wondering if Michael2 and Encinal are the same person?"

    While waiting on the answer I ask why this matters. So what if there are six of me here? Can you not argue with six of me as easily as one or two?

    "Both insist up and down that they are ‘courteous’ or the like, even while being jerks, simply because they don’t use the specific words they consider to be uncivil."

    Language is what is visible on a blog. Good language is civil, bad language is uncivil.

    "And both have, as the major form of argument, a tendency to delve deeply into the exact wording of a phrase"

    Please recognize the importance of carefully chosen words on a law blog.

    "while totally ignoring the obvious meaning"

    I cannot read your mind. I can only read the words you post. Meanings on a blog are not reliably obvious despite words being carefully chosen.

    But I take your meaning; if I believe you are not arguing in good faith but are misrepresenting your opponent so as to make it easier to battle with your own invention, then I may play with your words in a way that ties them into knots.

    "utterly refusing to engage on the actual merits of a claim"

    Were you making a claim? Perhaps I will scroll back and see if you are making a claim somewhere.

    "The right, as a group, has never really valued free speech"

    Agreed. Free speech is a hallmark of libertarian rather than right or left.

    "I also understand the vocal right here: they've spent decades fighting against basically every US freedom except the freedom to shoot your neighbor"

    Your claim is in error. The freedom to shoot your neighbor is not a "US Freedom" but emanates from existence itself. You are free to do anything you are physically capable of doing. Law imposes consequences but is (perhaps unfortunately) not actually able to prevent crime. Law can sometimes prevent a repetition of a crime.

    The First Amendment right of association is defended by libertarians but revoked by the left (Boy Scouts of America). The First Amendment right, or implied right, of belief and behavior is supported by libertarians but attacked by The Left (you WILL bake me a cake or by the power of Grayskull I'll punish you!) The 4th Amendment protection of search and seizure seems threatened by the leftwing wish to go house-to-house seizing guns. The right wing would also dilute the 4th for its own purposes, go house-to-house seizing marijuana.

    "to making it legal to hit protesters with your car. "

    I am starting to see a pattern of misrepresentation. I think you have a worse problem than just being uncivil.

  217. HandOfGod137 says

    June 27, 2017 at 1:48 pm

    @ Guestposter

    Soooo…. anybody else wondering if Michael2 and Encinal are the same person? Both make posts characterized by long walls of verbal diarrhea, lack of factual accuracy, insistence that their definition of a word is more valid than the actual definition of a word, etc. Both insist up and down that they are 'courteous' or the like, even while being jerks, simply because they don't use the specific words they consider to be uncivil. And both have, as the major form of argument, a tendency to delve deeply into the exact wording of a phrase, while totally ignoring the obvious meaning (at least, obvious to any honest person), and similarly utterly refusing to engage on the actual merits of a claim – that is to say, making semantic rather than substantive arguments. Finally: we tend to see only one of the two in any given post.

    Dunno: these prolix bores are hard to distinguish from one another, but anyone making the sort of witless, evidence-free arguments this imbecile pours forth at such ridiculous length really just should be treated as noise.

    I will restate the "butterfly effect". Everything you do influences every other thing (scientifically, there's a quantum point where the influence probably ceases).

    A typical example. Chuck in some non-linear dynamics in a completely inappropriate context to impress the proles, season with "quantum" to make it clear you are operating on a higher intellectual plain to everyone else and there you go: classic internet bullshit from someone who is obviously just spouting terminology they have no fundamental understanding of. See also the Myers-Briggs and right-brain left-brain bollocks he has bought into. Not to mention the relentless tone-trolling to cover for his lack of comprehension.

    Which is why I'm not going to bother interacting with him anymore. It's just feeding a troll. He has no intention of arguing in good faith, he just wants to appear clever on a sea of malapropisms and misunderstood/misrepresented science. And the completely misplaced hubris of the type specimen for Dunning-Kruger.

  218. Ann says

    June 27, 2017 at 2:05 pm

    @GuestPoster

    Soooo…. anybody else wondering if Michael2 and Encinal are the same person?

    Speaking strictly for myself, no.

    That doesn't mean it's not possible, of course. But my feeling has always been that if someone is capable of writing in two such completely different rhetorical styles that they are effectively voicing the thoughts of two different minds, you might as well treat them as different people, for all practical purposes.

    It's not uncommon for people to insist that they weren't discourteous when it's pointed out to them that they were. Factual accuracy is tragically rare. Etc. I don't think those things are distinctive enough to be definitive, basically.

    @Michael 2

    I do not doubt the results you claim; but it is meaningless. It just means how many people consider it debunked. Consensus is not science. People of the Left will then write blogs denouncing MBTI, and Google will count them, and it becomes a herd or a hive; but other herds exist, other hives exist, where MBTI is found to be useful and predictive for certain kinds of things.

    Well….What things, and why, and found by whom?

    I mean, the Rorschach has some utility, but it's not because of anything Rorschach had in mind when he created it. It's purely because there's such an enormous database of test results and takers that it can be used to assess probabilities.

    I took one several years ago, and am very proud to have given an answer to one inkblot that had never been given previously in all of Rorschach history. But that's not pertinent to anything. I'm just boasting.

    It makes so much sense that you like Maxfield Parrish that I'm mad at myself for not having thought of it. He's wonderful, of course. And he's not very different from some artists I do love, such as, for example, William-Adolphe Bouguereau or the pre-Raphaelites. But for whatever reason, he's never been my guy

    De gustibus non est disputandum, yo. I appreciate but do not love him, therefore.

  219. Michael 2 says

    June 27, 2017 at 5:35 pm

    HandOfGod137, in a blast of not interacting, says "should be treated as noise."

    Nice demonstration.

    "I’m not going to bother interacting with him anymore."

    That seems wise.

    "And the completely misplaced hubris of the type specimen for Dunning-Kruger."

    If you want to be understood you need to use epithets properly. D-K is used as an epithet by people who do not understand D-K, which (ironically) confirms part of its theory. The other part of D-K pertains to highly competent persons such as myself.

    [https]://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect

  220. Michael 2 says

    June 27, 2017 at 6:39 pm

    In reply to Ann

    "if someone is capable of writing in two such completely different rhetorical styles that they are effectively voicing the thoughts of two different minds, you might as well treat them as different people, for all practical purposes."

    Brilliant as usual. I have encountered this phenomenon several times in my work even fairly recently. Sometimes it isn't really a different mind; just a different process. ADHD describes.

    "It’s not uncommon for people to insist that they weren’t discourteous when it’s pointed out to them that they were."

    Naturally. This "pointing out" can itself be seen as a discourtesy producing an eternal round of who insulted first? That's why the Christian ideal of turning the other cheek is important. You have only two; if you are struck twice well the third time is no accident but the first two might have been unintentional so absorb the occasional offense.

    "Factual accuracy is tragically rare."

    And as difficult to verify.

    "Well….What things, and why, and found by whom?"

    The MBTI seems to have found its niche in industrial job selection. I encountered in in a leadership training seminar sponsored by the US Navy back in the 1980's or so. Suddenly I had a tool to describe people and an acceptance of variety, that it was okay that I was not like everyone because everyone is not like everyone.

    I have studied it quite a bit as a hobby. It is a derivative of Kiersey-Bates which had 3 axes of consideration (MBTI has four axes). It seems to stem ultimately from Jungian psychology which in a nutshell asserts the existence of nearly universal "archetypes". Nearly everyone on earth has some concept of "dragon" but they do not and never did exist.

    The E/I axis explores your preference for other people. Extraverts are energized by being in crowds, introverts avoid crowds and are energized by alone time. This is innate; I've never seen it change. To be sure over time the Introvert can learn to be with people and even start to enjoy it somewhat; and the Extravert may eventually get tired of endless parties; but after a respite each goes back to type.

    The N/S axis explores whether you imagine things (intuitive) or sense things (touch, taste, smell). Out of this we assume with good reason that "N" persons can be problem solvers and troubleshooters, also fantasy and fiction book writers, artists and musicians; spiritualists, religious. "S" persons are going to be your constructors, engineers, things that are real, concrete, non-religious except in an organizational way.

    The T/F axis is Thinker/Feeler. Do you think about the world and make decisions after calculation? Or do you feel what is right and wrong and base your decisions on that? Obviously the other side of all these is still there, but are your calculations in support of feeling, or is feeling in support of your calculations?

    Finally there's the J/P axis, but it's not really an axis. Some quibble exists about it. As I understand its intended use, it describes whether you use a Perceiving function (N/S) when "extraverting" (dealing with the world) or a Judging function (T/F). However to a certain extent it is also descriptive of whether a person is indeed passive (a perceiver) or active (judger).

    A well balanced person has access to all facilities and can be difficult to "type". He or she will have a natural type but over time the weak functions have become strong, usually by deliberate intention, and could even become stronger than natural functions. But the natural functions are still there and in a crisis will take over autonomous reflexes.

    Testing yourself can be tricky because the questions themselves can change your "mode" in the middle of a test. It helps therefore to say, "I am at work facing my boss" and go through it. Then repeat the test but "I am at the beach at sunset alone" and answer the questions. You will probably get a very different outcome.

    These things are not a continuum with arbitrary boundaries; these axes were chosen because of self-reinforcing characteristics. Extraverts seek other people, and in obtaining success, become more extraverted. Introverts seek solitude, and lacking other people, don't develop extaversion. thinkers think and deprecate feel; feelers feel and feel pity for emotionless thinkers. So these axes tend to be somewhat binary.

    They are also preferential. A person can be a gifted thinker AND possess a fine sense of feeling and emotion; MBTI only reveals preferences, not absolute magnitude.

    "I mean, the Rorschach has some utility, but it’s not because of anything Rorschach had in mind when he created it."

    I've seen it, taken the test. If it is possible to fail, I did. I do not see anything in ink blots but an ink blot. I also don't see sheep and dragons in clouds.

    For that reason, more or less, I don't like most modern art. There's nothing there but ink blots. I like a painting that tells a story, one of my favorite is… here we go again, can I find it? Don Maitz, "It Takes Courage". I bought a poster of it. The dragon seems almost amused. It has just a hint of Norman Rockwell… I am really losing my vocabulary. Whimsy, that's the word.

    http://www.paravia.com/catalog/images/ItTakesCourage.jpg

  221. HandOfGod137 says

    June 28, 2017 at 1:15 am

    How 2 Internet (for the professional bullshitter):

    1) You are engaged in an online "debate" but have no understanding of the subject under discussion. How do you proceed?

    (i) whenever challenged on a verifiable fact, reply with anecdote, but cunningly disguised with random capitalisation and malapropisms so you can tie your opponent up with accusations of incivility when they query your competence and/or sentience (thus avoiding that whole tricky "fact" thing altogether).
    (ii) focus on tone: facts don't matter if you reframe the discussion as online bullying with you as victim. How could the "People of the Left" be so cruel as to actually expect you to be able to justify your position?
    (iii) you are unaware of any problem. Hilariously fail to understand what Dunning-Kruger actually means when it is applied to you. Irony doesn't just mean "has 26 protons".

    2) Crikey! Someone has asked a direct question that requires subject knowledge!

    (i) engage verbosity function. 25,000 words of bullshit is the industry standard tactical response for an idiot under duress. And you are that idiot.
    (ii) cry. This is not debating "in good faith". Where "in good faith" is redefined to mean "you will not question my use of the first hit from Google in lieu of actually knowing what I am talking about".
    (iii) apropos of nothing, tell that story that implies you had some sort of job in the 80s. Now you are both mature AND employable. Who's a good boy!

    3) It is apparent, even to you, that your argument is vapid and without merit. What to do?

    (i) 25,000 words. Prolix bullshit is always the answer. Citation of theories abandoned in 1973 can be stealthed-in if wrapped in a protective armour of adjectives and random capitalisation. Anne Elk's Theory on Brontosauruses refers.
    (ii) verifiable data and logical induction are constructs of the "People of the Left" Hard thinking libertarians craft their own facts in forges they have hewn from the very living rock using only their teeth and the brims of their fedoras. So wing it.
    (iii) this situation is logically impossible given the axioms and data provided. Dunning-Kruger refers. (q.v. "crispy axiom" in "The Lexicon of Clark and other Absurdities", The Stormfront Press, 2015)

  222. Michael 2 says

    June 28, 2017 at 7:25 am

    HandOfGod137, in an example of non-interaction, is well on his way to 25,000 words. TL;DR.

  223. Total says

    June 28, 2017 at 8:57 am

    The T/F axis is Thinker/Feeler

    No one who writes the above sentence should even think about criticizing other people's comments.

    engage verbosity function. 25,000 words of bullshit is the industry standard tactical response for an idiot under duress

    I always find a good response is to read the first two sentences of such a missive, respond to them, and then finish by saying that I'm not reading the rest of the spew. Works a charm with Encinal.

  224. HandOfGod137 says

    June 28, 2017 at 9:00 am

    4) Somebody says something for which you have no substantive response at all (this happens a lot and can be seen as the defining property of your online interactions, possibly as a result of that single neuron rattling around like a dried pea in a gourd being unable to cope with anything that isn't googleable)

    (i) count the words. That'll tell 'em. And then hope nobody does the same to your interminable body of "work"
    (ii) perhaps Myers-Briggs has the answer. Do the test again. Then google what the personality type "boring twat" represents. Vow to struggle on through this difficult time.
    (iii) in an astonishing turnabout, reconsider this whole "wibbling on using terminology solely on the basis of how clever you think it makes you appear" and actually become less tedious. Begin basing your arguments on demonstrable facts supporting logical conjecture. Well, we can but hope.

  225. Michael 2 says

    June 28, 2017 at 9:20 am

    Total demands: "No one who writes the above sentence should even think about criticizing other people’s comments."

    Why? That's about as weird as saying anyone whose favorite color is blue should not comment on blogs. But first I need to know what is your favorite color…

  226. Michael 2 says

    June 28, 2017 at 9:25 am

    HandOfGod137, still not interacting, says "Well, we can but hope."

    We? How many of you are in there?

    I've got your number and apparently so does everyone else. I am smarter than to announce I am not going to interact (followed immediately by intense interaction); but it does seem you are interacting only with me. That being the case, perhaps you can offer some theory of being, your essay on Life, the Universe and Everything [iow, something worth reading].

    There is no "we".

  227. Michael 2 says

    June 28, 2017 at 9:55 am

    Total says "read the first two sentences of such a missive, respond to them, and then finish by saying that I'm not reading the rest of the spew."

    I will read even a lengthy spew provided it is structured reasonably well and is comprehensible; which is to say, makes some sort of point. All blogs (and their comments) are "spews" but some are more interesting than others.

  228. Michael 2 says

    June 28, 2017 at 10:31 am

    HandOfGod137 says "1) You are engaged in an online debate but have no understanding of the subject under discussion. How do you proceed?"

    Bad logic; the scenario cannot happen.

    Debate happens when both persons have knowledge but some aspect of it is disputed. A nuclear physicist cannot have a debate with a six year old normal child on the nature and range of the electroweak force. I cannot, and do not, engage in debates on Standard Model versus String Theory.

  229. Michael 2 says

    June 28, 2017 at 10:53 am

    HoG137 asks "It is apparent, even to you, that your argument is vapid and without merit. What to do?"

    While that has never happened to me (or I don't remember it), it has happened on rare occasions that I find myself debating a topic with a genuine expert. In that case I change quickly from debater to apprentice hoping to glean some new insights, and sometimes apologize for testing someone's "bona fides" whether he is the real deal.

    If a person behaves in narcissistic ways he may well be exaggerating his knowledge and skills. Genuine experts seem rather often to be humble and willing to learn even more. That is the true meaning of Dunning-Kruger.

  230. Michael 2 says

    June 28, 2017 at 11:11 am

    HandOfGod137 says "4) Somebody says something for which you have no substantive response at all (this happens a lot)"

    That's putting it mildly! I suspect it happens several million times every day that someone says something and I have no response.

    The proper response when not having something substantive to say is to say nothing; although at times it can be polite to acknowledge having read something so the writers feel that someone is "out there" reading his words. That I do if it seems nobody else is responding.

  231. HandOfGod137 says

    June 29, 2017 at 8:40 am

    HoG137 asks "It is apparent, even to you, that your argument is vapid and without merit. What to do?"

    While that has never happened to me (or I don't remember it)

    q.v. Unskilled and unaware of it: How difficulties in recognizing one's own incompetence lead to inflated self-assessments

  232. Total says

    June 29, 2017 at 10:36 am

    @Michael 2: Which of your six consecutive comments would you like me to read? Choose one.

  233. Tim! says

    June 29, 2017 at 1:10 pm

    [http]://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lateralization_of_brain_function

    I think you missed some important bits in that article:

    "Lateralization as a concept fails because the brain consistently updates, consolidates, shifts information between the hemispheres."

    "Some popularizations oversimplify the science about lateralization, by presenting the functional differences between hemispheres as being more absolute than is actually the case."

    Like astrology, both brain lateralization and MBTI can provide interesting insights, but cannot be relied upon as the rational basis of anything.

  234. Michael 2 says

    June 29, 2017 at 2:08 pm

    Total asks "@Michael 2: Which of your six consecutive comments would you like me to read? Choose one."

    The one with your name in it; perhaps THIS one!

    One of the terrible burdens of being a libertarian is having to make my own choices about what to read.

    The more important one prior to this would be where I ask for your favorite color. Hopefully by the time you accomplish that I'll remember what I was going to do with it.

  235. Michael 2 says

    June 29, 2017 at 3:07 pm

    Tim! wrote "brain lateralization and MBTI can provide interesting insights but cannot be relied upon as the rational basis of anything."

    That is a reasonably good opinion not far distant from my own. Where we seem to differ is that "interesting insight" signifies to me something real, hence rational.

    A similar kind of thing is IQ tests. Those who have high IQs tend to believe in the accuracy and significance of the process, those who score low tend to dismiss it out of hand.

    It seems to be that a *kind* of mind does not want to be tested; not for IQ, not for personality trait; and declares without evidence that these tests have no meaning.

    But persons with high IQ are demonstrably and reliably superior at certain kinds of tasks, showing that it is measuring something objective and quantifiable. Low IQ persons won't even know there's a high-iq task to be had, and consequently from their point of view nothing is being tested anyway, it's invisible. At the kinds of tasks they CAN do, the high IQ person probably isn't even as adept and the low IQ person, having heard the Big Words "Dunning-Kruger", blurts it out as if it is the Last Word on Everything; forgetting or not knowing that D-K also pertains to highly competent persons assuming everyone else has more competence than is actually the case. In other words, it is as unreliable to see "up" as it is to see "down". You see your peers most accurately.

    MBTI is unique in that it does not attempt to quantify the magnitude of any of its preferences; such a thing is a lot more difficult. It merely denotes preferences and to a certain extent can be applied to total strangers, even fictional characters. [http]://bookriot.com/2016/01/28/myer-briggs-types-202-fictional-characters/

  236. Ann says

    June 29, 2017 at 8:05 pm

    @Michael 2

    I do not see anything in ink blots but an ink blot.

    My first response to being asked what I saw was, in fact, "An ink blot." And the reason I gave it was that it was what I saw. I also responded to one by saying, "Anyone who doesn't say they see a bat for that one is lying."

    But I had no trouble seeing pictures in them, so I did that too.

    I like a painting that tells a story, one of my favorite is… here we go again, can I find it? Don Maitz, "It Takes Courage". I bought a poster of it. The dragon seems almost amused.

    I like it. You have more romantic (in the sense of the movement by that name) tastes than I do. But I knew that from Maxfield Parrish already. I just mean that in a de-gustibus type of way, though. It's certainly not a bad thing. Makes the world go round, I hear.

    Plus I've never seen that picture before. Thank you for allowing me to correct that.

    It has just a hint of Norman Rockwell…

    I had to look really hard to see that, and kind of felt like I wasn't seeing it through my eyes when I did. So I would not have said that, myself. I think of Rockwell as a portrait painter of the human spirit, like Rembrandt (although that's strictly a limited purpose comparison).

    But I can see what you mean.

    I am really losing my vocabulary. Whimsy, that's the word.

    Nah. I think aesthetic emotion is just difficult to express.

    I too like pictures that tell a story, though not exclusively. And in any event, non-representational and abstract art does sometimes tell a story anyway..

    I'm not sure if you will like this or not, but it's a favorite of mine:

    https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/26/Jan_Brueghel_I_%26_Peter_Paul_Rubens_-_Smell_%28Museo_del_Prado%29.jpg

    Jan "Velvet" Breughel and Rubens collaborated on a five-painting allegory of the senses. I like them all, but the one I like best is smell. It's so lovely and Arcadian.

  237. HandOfGod137 says

    June 30, 2017 at 7:12 am

    Re Michael 2's ongoing brainfart

    q.v. On the reception and detection of pseudo-profound bullshit

  238. Michael 2 says

    June 30, 2017 at 12:36 pm

    Ann wrote many interesting things; such as: "My first response to being asked what I saw was, in fact, An ink blot."

    So just now I googled "ink blot test" and was amazed at the outcome. When I was a teenager I saw nothing; now I see things in pretty much all of them, usually people doing things; sometimes a horse or dragon. Quite a few look like human anatomy, pelvic bones seem to dominate.

    I'm not sure what to make of this but between then and now has been hundreds of books, world travels, movies and people. So now my "pattern recognizer" has more to work with.

    "You have more romantic (in the sense of the movement by that name) tastes than I do."

    So I've been told. I'm not sure what it means but there it is.

    "I’m not sure if you will like this or not, but it’s a favorite of mine: Jan “Velvet” Breughel and Rubens collaborated on a five-painting allegory of the senses. I like them all, but the one I like best is smell. It’s so lovely and Arcadian."

    Glorious. I have not seen these artists before. Incredible detailing; evocative; contains many hidden features such as the dark shadowy human figure under the arch on the right. A dog, a serval (cat), two guinea pigs, birds, chipmunk and squirrel and an garden of flowers, tulips in particular. It looks like it was fun to make and doubtless took a long time. It reminds me slightly of "Highlights for Children" where you have a "find the hidden object" page.

    Jean Baptist Corot http://www.jean-baptiste-camille-corot.org/ I like rather well.

    Jiim Kincaide has a series "Along the Lighted Path" that is richly detailed and makes excellent use of the play of light. In one sense these paintings seem a bit less evocative or serious; very fine paintings but don't seem to tell much of a story. Just nice to view. "Home is where the heart is" has people. Still not much drama. More of Bob Ross style of nice viewing.

    I really like Susan Boulet. She blends Jungian archetypes.

  239. Michael 2 says

    June 30, 2017 at 1:20 pm

    Ann, there's an art form that I'm not sure is "art" but something quite a bit more visceral; and that's the art of the Pacific Northwest (Haida, Quileute, and so on). Stylized but in a way that captures an important essence and I doubt that anyone not born to it could replicate.

    http://www.ralphmag.org/HE/pacific-nw-art.html

    http://haroldalfred.com/image/Harbor-Masters-Loon-print2.jpg

    http://www.freespiritgallery.ca/Images/npr-11t.jpg

  240. Ann says

    July 1, 2017 at 6:38 pm

    tulips in particular.

    Well, you know. They're Dutch.

    It looks like it was fun to make and doubtless took a long time. It reminds me slightly of "Highlights for Children" where you have a "find the hidden object" page.

    Allegories can be fun that way. It's also a sometime feature of religious art from back in the Christendom day, when iconography still prodigiously roamed the earth.

    The dog is a basset hound, because smell. Also, I think the serval cat is actually a civet, because musk. I fact, I'm sure of it I don't know about the other beasts and birds. But I presume they're associated with smell in some way.

    Kincaide is not my cup of tea, and Boulet still less so. But that's how it goes. There's no evil in it.

  241. Ann says

    July 1, 2017 at 6:51 pm

    Who doesn't like Corot rather well, though? I forgot to say. I'm totally with you there.

  242. James says

    September 8, 2017 at 12:56 pm

    It's very hard to believe more than about 1% of people actually care about free speech. It's kind of a legal wonk position. People just don't like people they disagree with and they think that fairness and justice mean bad things happening to people they don't like. That's not really a right or left wing position, it's a most-people position.

    The majority who advocate for free speech are like people who advocate the teachings of Christ but are violent to people who are gay. Or like people who rail against discrimination but then readily engage in stereotypes against Italians when they see Scaramucci. Or people who say they are libertarian but advocate for prohibition.

    The gut reaction comes first, the philosophy is the wallpaper for the rationalization.

    The people being written about here aren't "anti-free speech." They are free speech indifferent. The concept means nothing to them, and if it is anything at all, it is just one of many weapons to pull out in an argument you are losing. And honestly I think that's mostly fine. A government taking away free speech seems like an excellent canary to tell us that tyranny is coming, but I don't think free speech has ever proven itself instrumental to stop tyranny. Tyrants just don't like being made fun of because it hurts their feelings.

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