“‘Safe Spaces’ and the Mote in America’s Eye.” For some time I’ve been mean to university students who feel entitled to a “safe space” — by which they seem to mean a space where they are insulated from ideas they don’t like. I call these young people out for valuing illusory and subjective safety over liberty. I accuse them of accepting that speech is “harmful” without logic or proof. I mock them for not grasping that universities are supposed to be places of open inquiry. I condemn them for not being critical about the difference between nasty speech and nasty…
Category: Official thuggery, bad prosecutions, and bad law
Immune-system drug combo “melts” tumors. Yeah, I know there are always reports like this that eventually come to nothing. But this is pretty dramatic. Are you nuts, Mr. Cop??? Officer shoots (at) dog in a crowd. Fortunately misses. Dog just looked as if it was being rambunctiously friendly, too. (Here’s the video if you can’t see it on that page.) If you’re going to have anti-abortion laws, you’re going to have to be prepared not only to prosecute every doctor, nurse, and med-tech for murder, but to investigate every miscarriage as a potential homicide. Some countries do. Results aren’t pretty.…
Where were you on April 19? On April 19, 1993 I was on a long drive toward a client’s headquarters when I heard the Branch Davidians were burning. For some reason I hadn’t taken the siege very seriously to that point (even though I’d taken the earlier Weaver siege as seriously as I’d ever taken anything in my life). Just a bunch of Jim Jonesy cultists, I thought. I figured the FBI would wait them out until Koresh got done with his preposterous “seven seals” manuscript, then peaceably arrest and later release most of them. Cause you know, why would…
The story of the reserve deputy who killed a pinned-down suspect in Tulsa County gets worse and worse. Wonder who this cop is or who he knows that entire chains of officialdom were ordered to falsify records for him? Ohhhh, wait. It says right there in the article … Don’t be nervous now. It probably means you’re a terrorist. In the future your insurance company (ugh) will know when you’re having sex. And of course so will “security” ‘crats in DC. ‘Cause you know we still don’t have enough surveillance. I wonder … why don’t these people ever get that…
“Oh crap! More ammo for the ‘ban body armor’ people.” Something on the lighter side from Y.B. ben Avraham. And exactly who here terrorized and abused those free-range kids? Just another example of why people are fleeing the biggest nanny states. Schadenfreude is so very ignoble. Still, it’s a delightful thing to see some of the greatest supporters of Obamacare getting skewered by it. This is one of those things you might have intuitively perceived but never quite believed: we recall better (especially recall concepts better) when we write notes by hand rather than type on a keyboard. Those “racketeering”…
Ban the trebuchet! (And while you’re at it, tell that writer that 1895 wasn’t “medieval.”) H/T MJR Princeton opts for insensitivity discursive rape hurting people’s itty-bitty widdle feewings free speech and free thought. And does it for the right reasons. Seattle. Cops. Humanity. Hm. We’ll see how this works out I used to know a fair bit about the pre-WWII history of aviation. I could have bored you silly with tales of how Henri Coanda almost invented a jet plane in 1910 and how Jacqueline Cochran won the Bendix Race. But I never knew this. It’s touching that after all…
The poor WaPost is worried about the “growing insurrection.” So very, very much the poor WaPost fails to understand. Just how bad is the growing growing student loan mess? More info on why the DoJ is so desperate to conceal info about its stingray searches and interceptions. Oh, there’s so much to hide! What? You didn’t already know this? And this, too: “When everything is a crime.” UPDATE on Joel’s siding bleg. He’s getting there, but could really, really use another $400. Just that much more. Yeah, I know it’s tax time and the fedgov thinks you should give your…
Seems cops and the U.S. Justice (sic) Department will go to amazing lengths to hide their newest tracking methods from us. A must-read for philosophical Libertopians: “Welcome to the Arena in the Clouds” by Max Borders. Guerrilla civic improvement. (H/T AG) It takes 13,000 words for the Columbia Journalism Review to say it and those words are thoughtful and worth reading. But bottom line: in their zeal to confirm an agenda, Rolling Stone’s staffers chose to mistake the behavior of a manipulative liar for the behavior of a poor, traumatized victim. (To their credit, RS and writer Sabrina Erdely cooperated…
MamaLiberty reviews Jackie Clay’s Summer of the Eagles. Somebody in the mainstream media finally questions whether it’s right to destroy mom & pop businesses that aren’t sufficiently politically correct. Glad ordinary folk don’t even need to ask questions like that. Back when the RICO statutes were first passed, libertarian alarmists predicted that they’d be so misused that the feds would soon be busting penny-ante poker games. Well, it seems they’ve been misused for just about everything except that. But here’s one of the most creative turns of the RICO story. David Boaz notes that the final stage of socialism is…
Drat! I told Jim I’d include his latest in yesterday’s links post. Then I forgot. So here you go. A question follows. President Obama recently suggested that mandatory voting could cure some of the ills of American democracy. Mr. Obama observed that compelling everyone to vote is one way to “encourage more participation” — perhaps the same way that the specter of prison sentences encourages more people to pay taxes. While there are many good reasons to oppose mandatory voting, compulsory balloting could help Americans recognize what their political system has become. Mr. Obama declared that “the people who tend…