Two on Free Speech

This Spiked piece on the threat to free speech in the UK (h/t Hot Air) begins with "Lucy Connolly’s tweet was despicable, but it shouldn’t have landed her in prison." Back when we were running the think tank, I had a whole series on Free Speech that was part of the permanent sidebar collection. One of the articles was about why you had to defend deplorable cases. The reasons are that (a) it will always be the meanest sort of people who are the first to offend, because they don't care about people's feelings, so (b) it will always be here that you have to defend the principle. 

If you lose the principle, you've already lost the fight and you've lost the liberty. Now we're just arguing about whether the content was sufficiently bad to merit punishment. 

On the subject of the content, there was also the small matter of a hideous crime that provoked strong emotions. 

One speech criminal who has summoned up significantly less sympathy is Lucy Connolly, the Northampton childminder who was sentenced to two years and seven months for inciting racial hatred, over a vile, hateful missive she posted in the wake of the Southport stabbings. Seemingly in response to rumours swirling online that those three girls, slain at a Taylor Swift dance class, had been killed by an asylum seeker, Connolly took to X and said: ‘Mass deportation now, set fire to all the fucking hotels full of the bastards for all I care, while you’re at it take the treacherous government and politicians with them. I feel physically sick knowing what these families will now have to endure. If that makes me racist, so be it.’

Liberal governance fancies itself as committed to "humane" governance, meaning a government that creates the conditions for living a full human life. It would be humane to give people a little space for things like that. Strong emotions can make fools out of most of us. On the principle of the thing, however, it's better that she be allowed to say it -- both because of the core human liberty, and because it gets it out there that this kind of thing provokes a lot of anger that could be dangerous. The UK has a habit of trying to cover these things up instead of addressing them. That's causing a lot more harm than some babysitter fuming online. 

Meanwhile in Germany...

German journalist sentenced to seven months of probation for a Twitter meme poking fun at the Interior Minister's lack of commitment to free speech

Now we don't expect the Germans to be as committed to the principle of freedom of anything as the British once were. This is an egregious violation, however. Apparently in Germany public figures can sue individuals for defamation for saying things about them in public, such as on Twitter. Defamation is supposed to mean, however, that you said something that wasn't true. The very act of filing the suit to suppress the speech proves the journalist's case; yet the court sided with the powerful against the citizenry, as so often, and threatened the journalist with prison for daring to suggest this obviously true and proven thing. 

A TDS Specialist

 

In the Spirit of the Previous Post

 

Rev 21:8

One of my country Baptist friends posted this dire verse  on Facebook. Of course he cited the King James Version: my maternal grandfather, also a country Baptist, explained when I was young that it was the only true and completely accurate Word of God. 

What grabbed my attention was the word, “sorcerers.” What is sorcery exactly? What did they understand it to mean?

So I went to the Sacra Vulgata, and found out that in Latin the word is veneficus. Now we think of sorcerers as being like wizards, and wizards as being old men; so at first I thought the etymology might be shared with venerable. 

But I looked it up and it’s not! It shares the etymology for venomous. The Latin was for a maker of poisons and drugs. 

That reminded me of something that we just saw in the Anabasis. So I looked it up, and sure enough in the original Greek the word is pharmakois. 

This I take to be the meaning of the words, which are necessarily ambiguous, since {pharmakon}, "a drug," also means "poison." Did Cheirisophus conceivably die of fever brought on by some poisonous draught? or did he take poison whilst suffering from fever? or did he die under treatment?

That's true: the word that is the root of "pharmacy" or "pharmaceutical" can mean either "drug" or "poison." And so it is often the case even with true drugs, where the right dosage is efficacious and the wrong one is fatal.

Thus, the sorcerers who are headed to the Lake of Fire are poisoners and makes of false drugs that kill instead — one thinks of dealers of drugs laced with fentanyl, but also of pushers of hard drugs generally. Makers of false medicines. That’s what the word means. 

UPDATE: After I went to bed last night, another thought about this occurred to me. The passage seems on first glance to refer to something from fantasy stories, which in the mind of the modern is the sort of thing that puts the Bible into the genre of fantasy stories. That's how they prefer to think of it anyway, and "sorcerer" at first seems like evidence for that preferred proposition.

Once you understand that they're talking about drug dealers and pushers and makers of false medicines, however, you realize that this is a real and pressing problem that you read about every day in the newspaper. The Bible is suddenly speaking to very real problems that bedevil contemporary society.

Of course, since this is the Revelation of St. John the Divine, you still have the Beast and the Dragon and various other mystic imagery. It only moves the needle a little on that point; but it does move it.

Minus the accent . . . .

. . . . this is pretty much my peninsula.

Musk the Anarchist

Highlighted from a 2021 NYT article today by a book review in the NYT today on the importance of America's early anarchists to freedom of speech. The Times would like you to know that vandalism of Tesla dealerships is a crucial form of free speech, by the way.

Elon Musk, who hoisted a chain saw at the latest Conservative Political Action Conference convocation, saying he hoped to wield it against the federal bureaucracy. The brutality in the message was hard to miss, and yet Musk seemed taken aback when aggressive rejoinders came from the other side, in the form of attacks on Tesla dealerships across the land, one of them by a man who said defacing cars was a form of “free speech.” Absolutely not, said Musk. “Damaging the property of others, a.k.a. vandalism, is not free speech!” A few days later, Donald Trump went further, declaring the vandalism to be nothing less than an act of terrorism.

The antigovernment agitators of a century ago had a useful name for expressive threats of this kind: propaganda of the deed, a phrase whose most vocal proponent in early-20th-century America was the Italian immigrant Luigi Galleani. The provocations could be peaceful, but often enough they included “acts of spectacular violence,” as Willrich writes, meant to “seize the attention of the working people and inspire them to revolution.”

That's clearly not the view of Free Speech that Musk endorses. 

Well, there are often serious differences even between members of the same overarching philosophy. 

I did order the book they were reviewing, however, which I think sounds much better and more interesting than their review of it. Amazon has it for a lot less than the $35 the Times claims it would cost. I just finished the last book I was reading and could use another. 

Memorial Ride

Quite a few people came out. Several clubs joined including out of state charters. They host club, which was the Wingman MC's Western NC chapter, did the traditional pulled pork shoulder barbecue of this region. 

Beer was free and provided by Patch: he had a kitchen refrigerator in his shop he kept full of Natty Light to share with his customers. They brought his old beer over and served it to his friends. A proper wake, really.

I won't post pictures of anyone or of the clubhouse as I don't have permission and that can be sensitive. I was impressed with their leadership and their performance as hosts both. The rules of the road they set were focused on the safety of the riders. They held a brief prayer at the beginning of the ride for safety and fellowship. They had arranged both firefighter units and two deputies to control key intersections to avoid problems during the ride. Their president's speeches were brief, authoritative, and appropriate.

They had a nice little clubhouse down on a creek in the mountains. There was a grand firepit they'd built by cutting the domed top off a big old 1/2in. steel cylinder, which they tilted on a bed of stones back towards the sitting area by the creak so it reflected the warmth of the fire. As is very common with MCs, there were a lot of children present and at least as many women as men: the ethic of the culture draws a lot of women, who find the association one of protection and safety, which are exactly the qualities that also inspire procreation. I really enjoyed watching the happy children playing in the creek.

A very nice afternoon. It was beautiful, too, as if God smiled on the event. Today the heavy rains have come in from the West, and then it will get cold again; but yesterday was as fine as a day in April can be. 

He would have enjoyed it himself, or an event like it: he was too humble have wanted anyone to throw him a party as its guest of honor, but he would have enjoyed attending a party like this.

Riding Out

I haven't had a lot to say for a couple of days. Today I'm going over to my friend Patch's memorial ride. Perhaps that will produce interesting stories. It should be a pretty day for a bunch of motorcycles.

A National Emergency

Because....

Section 1.  National Emergency.  As President of the United States, my highest duty is ensuring the national and economic security of the country and its citizens.  

I have declared a national emergency arising from conditions reflected in large and persistent annual U.S. goods trade deficits, which have grown by over 40 percent in the past 5 years alone, reaching $1.2 trillion in 2024.  This trade deficit reflects...

Is that an emergency? We had a National Emergency already because there was too much immigration. Presidents like National Emergencies because they can assume extra powers. 

Tariffs are hated by all economists and journalists, but I do note that some things were better before we started eliminating them. I supported NAFTA because the logic of the free trade argument made sense to me at the time. In 1998, though, I was working for the Unions in Savannah and really got to see the good they did for workers. Then I watched them dry up and die — not quite all, but all across the South. IBEW and the Boilermakers still exist around the port, but so many went away.

It was a pipeline for the poor from the swamp to ordinary middle-class prosperity. We gave it away for cheap goods from Mexico, which soon enough became cheap goods from China. Chinese control over so many of our basic goods has become, if not quite an emergency, a serious national security concern.

UPDATE: A play for all the marbles. 

UDPATE: A helpful graph of US tariff rates, which shows that we are at an all time, historic low. (H/t Wikipedia).

These new tariffs put us right back in the historic norm. It's only been in the post-WWII world that we've kept the rates so low, trading away our industry for the goods of free trade.

Why Philosophy?

A rant, it claims, but also a good essay.  

He quotes Aristotle differently than I would.  Aristotle agreed that the higher forms of philosophy were useless, because to be useful is to be useful for something else. The very highest things we pursue for their own sake, not because it will get us to some lesser goal. You should aspire to strive for useless things, so high and fine that you would never trade them for anything else. 

That's some mole

I'm at a loss to imagine how this guy got out of Iran alive. I remember that he was under suspicion in Iran at the time of Nasrallah's death. How he escaped with his life then, and how he got out now, I can't even imagine. How utterly demoralizing for Iran.

A Spring Vista

Conan and Stick, Among the Daffodils

He goes through a stick every day. The whole place is covered with splinters. Somehow he doesn’t get them in his gums. 

Gotta Give Him This One

Via Whiskeyriff, a man in Georgia was arrested for leaving his kids to play at the McDonald's playground while he went to a job interview.

Chris Louis was arrested on March 22 after leaving his three kids, including a 1-year old, 6-year old and a 10-year old, unattended at a McDonald’s (which had a playplace, by the way) while he went to a job interview.

Louis reportedly dropped the kids off after walking them to McDonald’s from his apartment, and returned to check on them before leaving again. He then returned to find police waiting for him, and was arrested for deprivation of a minor.

But the internet is rallying behind the father of 3, arguing that he was forced to make a tough decision while simply trying to get a job to provide for his kids.

As many of the comments pointed out, he left them in a place with air conditioner, a bathroom, and adults nearby who could help in case of an emergency, as opposed to simply leaving them alone at his apartment. And while some people were uneasy with the idea of leaving the 1-year old behind, they pointed out that he was forced to make a tough decision in order to try to get a job, and that the 10-year old was old enough to take care of the infant for a short period of time.

It's definitely not ideal, but a crime? The story points out that the 10-year-old was born when the man was 14, just a boy, and here he is ten years later still trying to support his kids. 

Sometimes 'as good as it gets' has to be good enough. It's a hard world. 

Requiescat in Pace Val Kilmer

Without a doubt his most famous and enduring role was as Georgia-born gunslinger "Doc" Holliday in Tombstone. 

However, I particularly loved the performances in Willow. He and his beautiful female opposite in this movie went on to marry in real life and had two children. 

I don't know what to say about a man who played many parts, but about whom I know nothing of himself. Fortunately, E. M. Burlingame -- a fellow Small Wars Journal alumnus --  wrote a poem about it that is worthy.

I Had No Idea 'Star Wars' Was Based on a Norse Saga

 

Remarkable!

Owens Gap

No smoke plume today from the huge Table Rock fire. The storm must have helped. 

Clear skies.

Blindness

A commenter at Althouse responds to a post about art museums:

"Museums, monuments, and public institutions should be spaces where these stories are held with care, not suppressed for political convenience."

A lot easier to do, when so many of the monuments you don't like have already been torn down.

Yes, exactly. So much of this stuff that is arguably wrong from first principles is being done because those principles were already violated by the other side. Somehow they can't see that they did it first, emphatically and regularly. 

That doesn't make it right. There's a sense in which it is fair, because 'turnabout is fair play.' Getting them to at least recognize that they started the ball rolling might help, but how do you do that?

Democracy

I and some friends were asked to test the quality of Egypt's 2018 election. The election was scrupulously fair, down to the maintenance of unbroken, numerically-keyed locks on the ballot boxes. Both the army and the police watched over each polling station as they didn't trust each other. 

They could afford a fair election because they'd removed all the opposition candidates from the ballot beforehand. The only choice except Sisi was his friend who, as a campaign promise, said he'd withdraw if elected and endorse Sisi instead.

We're getting that way in Europe. We almost were that way here, last time around. It's getting dark out there. 

No Third Terms

At least half of what the current administration is doing is highly praiseworthy: the DOGE inquiries into unconstitutional/evil spending, waste, fraud, and so forth; the desire to craft peace out of the bloodbath in Ukraine; the move to shrink the Federal government substantially. 

Some other things are not: the police state tactics, masked Federal agents arresting people off the street, foreign prisons that violate the 8th Amendment, censorship of disfavored words. These are not in line with America's best traditions and deserve outright condemnation. Insofar as we have any power -- one of the dearest fantasies of Americans is that we have some sort of power over the Federal government apart from the occasional elections -- they deserve our opposition.

A third class of things is both at once: bringing in aggrieved non-experts to run agencies is a necessary breath of fresh air, but will inevitably lead to amateur errors because amateurs are employed. They're not bad people, but we have to expect mistakes. That's ok, but there will be errors. 

Two things so far are clearly wrong, at least to me. The desire to take over Gaza from Israel reminds me of nothing more than JFK's decision to take over Vietnam from the French; that's not our fight and we shouldn't want any part of the decades of war it would entail. There should be no third terms, not for anyone. Washington's standard should hold.

That's how it looks to me, at least, so far.

This Is a Song about

Um ...

Can I get an amen?

I heard the optics were great!

This is possibly how I'll go, unless they collapse on me in an earthquake.