Civil Liberties

“We Live Here Together” – Comments?

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Executive Order on Combating Race & Sex Stereotyping

A taste

Context: “From the battlefield of Gettysburg to the bus boycott in Montgomery and the Selma-to-Montgomery Marches, heroic Americans have valiantly risked their lives to ensure that their children would grow up in a Nation living out its creed, expressed in the Declaration of Independence.”

Descriptions of critical race theory workshops subsidized by the government.

Its position:

But training like that discussed above perpetuates racial stereotypes and division and can use subtle coercive pressure to ensure conformity of viewpoint. Such ideas may be fashionable in the academy, but they have no place in programs and activities supported by Federal taxpayer dollars. Research also suggests that blame-focused diversity training reinforces biases and decreases opportunities for minorities.

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Have we been played?

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Somebody phoned Rush Limbaugh: the listener posited that Democrats were in league with the Chinese, sharing a desire to take Trump down. He gently moved on, noting he’d never seen proof. But the last months have reminded us that just because you are paranoid doesn’t mean someone’s not out to get you. I do feel played about Covid, about Russiagate, about police brutality, about, well, a lot at this point. I suspect it is simple: the media is dominated by those wearing blinders, whose reality is a narrow sliver of the world. Of course, it would be nice if such heavyweights as Dianne Feinstein and Biden didn’t owe so much to the Chinese. But then there’s a lot of Chinese money and a lot of Congressional graft a corrupt swamp isn’t necessarily a treasonous one. (Was Hillary’s sale of the nation’s plutonium a conspiracy or just the usual Clinton graft? Was Brennan someone who plotted or just closed his eyes?)

This summer’s incidents are enlarged versions of Ferguson’s riots and the smearing of Zimmerman. For three months Portland has been ablaze; literally hundreds of police have been attacked and will bear the scars of this summer’s work. Dozens have died amidst the riots and many more indirectly as these affected the morale and morals, the aggression of mobs and hesitancy of police. Minneapolis was torn apart, but so were many cities; his funeral was a multi-day spectacle moving through three towns. I shared with most Americans revulsion at the face of the officer whose knee seemed pushed into Floyd’s neck, calmly staring out as he kept Floyd down.

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So, we drive on the right and our homes are our castles – or not

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Freedom is greatest within restraints and boundaries. Sure, on some slippery slope with no constraining adverbs, this seems contradictory, but we recognize daily that minimal, enforceable and enforced, laws provide predictability, enable true freedom. Would my freedom be enlarged without the first limit society imposes as I leave my house: driving on the right? Seinfeld’s Kramer attempted to “free” the lanes but caused chaos. I cheerfully accept it because it simplifies more than limits; I go over my grocery list or laugh with Limbaugh; someone more productive might create a poem or solve a physics problem. Without limits, we would be on guard, slow to a crawl, choose a tank, hoping, as my brothers put it, to be the shearer and not the shearee in an inevitable collision. I remember a homesick Iranian engineer telling us still he didn’t want to return here drivers stop at red lights, even alone at night; there, every intersection was a free for all. Too much order suffocates but with too little concentration is difficult.

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Father Damien

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I don’t think many people at this site are in need of an explanation as to what was wrong with Alexandria Occasio-Cortez’s objection to the statue of Father Damien.  So I’ll just link a couple of songs about Damien, from Tom Russell’s album The Rose of Roscrae.

The Hands of Damien

A Crust of Bread, a Slice of Fish, a Cup of Water

The protagonist of the album, which is set in the American West, is an Irish immigrant and outlaw named Johnny:  when he hears Damien’s story, it inspires him to seek his own redemption.

Smashing the Soapbox

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The attack on free speech is gaining speed. Indeed, we shouldn’t expect the Internet to be a realm of free expression for much longer. Consider, for instance, an initiative named Stop Hate for Profit, which is calling on Facebook to “find and remove public and private groups focused on white supremacy, militia, antisemitism, violent conspiracies, Holocaust denialism, vaccine misinformation, and climate denialism” and to adopt “common-sense changes to their policies that will help stem radicalization and hate on the platform”; an allied group named Change the Terms has helpfully provided definitions of these so-called common-sense changes and says they should apply to Internet platforms for social media, video sharing, public or private group communication, message boards, online payments, ticket purchasing, marketing, advertising, blogging, website hosting, and domain name registration.

In the revolutionary environment we find ourselves in, where definitions change almost weekly and purity spirals are the order of the day, this is chilling. Consider, for instance, white supremacy, which theorists like Robin DiAngelo have transformed from something like “a violently fascistic ideology based on the purported natural superiority of lighter-skinned people” into something like “the global, modern society that emerged in mostly Christian Europe and North America based on reason, science, objectivity, individual autonomy, free thought, and free markets.”

Let’s put two and two together, shall we? (Yes, I realize mathematics is racist too, but so be it.) If expressing any fact or opinion that doesn’t conform to the ever more rigid ideology of anti-racism can subject you to effective removal from the Internet, then free speech is dead.

Way back in 1996 at the dawn of the Internet Age, John Perry Barlow penned A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, which among other things proclaimed “We are creating a world where anyone, anywhere may express his or her beliefs, no matter how singular, without fear of being coerced into silence or conformity.”

How quaint.