Quotulatiousness

October 3, 2024

Refuting one old myth about “shouting ‘fire’ in a crowded theatre”

Filed under: Law, Liberty, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In the visible portion of a pay-walled post, Andrew Doyle explains why we should stop using the hoary old anti-free speech cliché that was refuted nearly 50 years ago by the US Supreme Court:

There are few people who are courageous enough to openly admit that they oppose freedom of speech, and so we would be forgiven for thinking that the authoritarian mindset is rare. In truth, those who believe that censorship can be justified typically resort to a set of hackneyed and specious arguments. It doesn’t seem to matter how often these misconceptions are conclusively rebutted, they continue to be trotted out with depressing regularity.

Take yesterday’s Vice Presidential debate between JD Vance and Tim Walz, in which one of these very misconceptions was parroted once again. This is how it happened:

    JD Vance: You guys attack us for not believing in democracy. The most sacred right under the United States democracy is the First Amendment. You yourself have said there’s no First Amendment right to misinformation. Kamala Harris wants to …

    Tim Walz: Or threatening, or hate speech …

    JD Vance: … use the power of government and big tech to silence people from speaking their minds. That is a threat to democracy that will long outlive this present political moment. I would like Democrats and Republicans to both reject censorship. Let’s persuade one another. Let’s argue about ideas, and then let’s come together afterwards.

    Tim Walz: You can’t yell fire in a crowded theatre. That’s the test. That’s the Supreme Court test.

The cliché that “you can’t shout ‘fire’ in a crowded theatre” originates in the 1917 United States Supreme Court ruling against Charles Schenck, a socialist who had issued a broadside calling for young men to refuse military conscription and was convicted under the Espionage Act. These were the circumstances under which Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote the statement: “The most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man in falsely shouting ‘Fire!’ in a theatre and causing a panic”. Note that the word “falsely” is invariably dropped when quoted by advocates for censorship.

Leaving that telling little edit aside, it should be remembered that this was never a legally binding statement. Walz maintains that this is “the Supreme Court test”, but Holmes merely used the analogy to justify upholding Schenck’s prosecution. In fact, the decision of the court in Schenck v. United States was overruled in 1969.

Do I need to say that I didn’t watch the debate? I don’t even watch the debates when I actually have a vote to cast, so I’m going on highly selective sources to at least pretend to care about the VP debate. I do like a waspish line on almost any politician, so Bridget Phetasy’s description gave me a mental image of the event that seems highly truthy: “The vibe of this debate is adult confronting the coach who molested him”. J.D. Tuccille has more:

To illustrate the contrast between the recent presidential debate and this week’s vice-presidential match, I’ll say that I dread either Donald Trump or Kamala Harris taking office as president, but I fear the policies of veep hopefuls J.D. Vance and Tim Walz. At the top of both party’s tickets are individuals of uncertain competence and shaky basic decency, while their sidekicks come off as the designated adults, ready to step in if the winning presidential candidate falters, and more than excited to implement their chosen programs, God help us. That said, Vance had a much better night than Walz.

From the very beginning, J.D. Vance gave us a glimpse of what Trump might be like minus a personality disorder and with focus. He looked cool and collected, with his arguments organized in his head. He was also able to quickly pivot to address — or dodge (this is politics, after all) — the CBS moderators’ questions.

By contrast, Walz appeared like he was sweat-soaking his notes into illegibility as he tried to remember which part of the previous night’s memorized cram session he should spit out. He eventually regained some of his footing, though he generally seemed nervous and unprepared.

“The vibe of this debate is adult confronting the coach who molested him,” quipped podcaster and writer Bridget Phetasy, who isn’t known for being merciful.

The Democrat’s discomfort probably came to a head when he was asked to explain why he long claimed to have been in Hong Kong in 1989, with front-row seats to the Tiananmen Square massacre, when news reports and photographic evidence showed he was at home in Nebraska. Much hemming, hawing and references to a small-town upbringing ensued, which was painful to watch. The closest he came to admitting he lied was conceding, “I’m a knucklehead at times” and that he “misspoke.”

August 31, 2024

Kamala deigns to speak to the loyal, pantingly eager sycophantic press … briefly

Filed under: Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

At Spiked, Brendan O’Neill seems somehow underwhelmed by Kamala Harris and Tim Walz descending from Olympus to grace poor mortals as they appeared on CNN on Thursday night for their first big media appearance:

Yesterday, finally, the kween deigned to engage with her subjects. Yes, Kamala Harris did her first sit-down media interview since replacing Joe Biden on the Democratic presidential ticket nearly 40 days ago. For more than a month she’d maintained a monarchical distance from the grubby presses, flat-out refusing a one-to-one with any of its probing hacks. Now she’s relented and had an exclusive chat with CNN’s Dana Bash. The end result? Only one word will do, and it’s a word normally aimed at the other side: weird.

Seriously, can we talk about this shitshow? It is hands down the oddest “first big interview” I’ve seen with a candidate for high office. It took place at Kim’s Cafe in Savannah, Georgia and none of it made sense. Even the lighting was off – it’s the first time I’ve seen Kamala look bad. The angles were all wrong, meaning Harris, the supposed colossus of joy who will transform America, looked scrunched and tiny between Tim Walz and Ms Bash. And what was VP pick Walz even doing there? Chaperoning? “Strong, Capable Woman Asks Man To Come With Her To Job Interview In Case They Ask Any Hard Questions”, quipped the Babylon Bee.

They had no worries on that front. There were no hard questions. The ass-kissage was off the scale. Bash didn’t only give Harris easy questions – she gave her the answers, too. The most extraordinary moment was when she gently prodded Harris on her flip-flopping over policy. Finally, I thought, a tricky query. But then she told Harris what to say. “Is it because you have more experience now and you’ve learned more about the information?”, she wondered. The way Harris’s face lit up when she was handed this oven-ready excuse for her chameleon-like politics – even in the bad lighting you could see her glee at CNN’s servility to the Kamala cause.

A more objective broadcaster – hell, a kid with a camera fresh out of journalism school – would have dragged Harris for her vagueness. She issued flat platitudes. She engaged in Orwellian gobbledygook about how her policies might have changed but her “values” haven’t – eh? She spoke in tongues about climate change – it’s “an urgent matter to which we should apply metrics that include holding ourselves to deadlines around time”, she said, like a schoolkid padding out an essay with superfluous adjectives. And Bash just sat there, smiling. Maybe everyone in DC speaks like this?

Some of Harris’s volte-facing really is extraordinary. She once said she would ban fracking, now she says she won’t. And how on Earth did she go from comparing US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to the KKK and saying “an undocumented migrant is not a criminal” to now saying we must sternly enforce our nation’s borders? “I think the most important and most significant aspect of my policy perspective and decisions is my values have not changed”, she said. There’s that padding again. Sixteen words in that sentence are unnecessary. And the remaining five – “My values have not changed” – are not true.

August 19, 2024

If you’ve never worked in the private sector, you have no idea how regulations impact businesses

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Business, Government, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

In the National Post, J.D. Tuccille explain why Democratic candidates like Kamala Harris and Tim Walz who have spent little or no time in the non-government world have such rosy views of the benefits of government control with no concept of the costs such control imposes:

The respective public versus private sector experiences of the 2024 Presidential/Vice Presidential candidates.
New York Times

In broad terms, Democrats have faith in government while the GOP is skeptical — though a lot of Republicans are willing to suspend disbelief when their party controls the executive branch.

The contrast between the two parties can be seen in stark terms in the resumes of the two presidential and vice-presidential tickets. The New York Times made it easier to compare them earlier this month when it ran charts of the career timelines of Trump, J.D. Vance, Kamala Harris and Tim Walz. Their roles at any given age were colour-coded for college, military, private sector, public service or politics, federal government and candidate for federal office.

Peach is the colour used by the Times to indicate employment in the private sector, which produces the opportunities and wealth that are mugged away (taxation is theft by another name, after all) to fund all other sectors. It appears under the headings of “businessman” and “television personality” for Trump and as “lawyer and venture capitalist” for Vance. But private-sector peach appears nowhere in the timelines for Harris and Walz. Besides, perhaps, some odd jobs when they were young, neither of the Democrats has worked in the private sector.

Now, not all private-sector jobs are created equal. Some of the Republican presidential candidate’s ventures, like Trump University, have been highly sketchy, as are some of his practices — he’s openly boasted about donating to politicians to gain favours (though try to do business in New York without greasing palms). I’m not sure I’d want The Apprentice on my resume. But there must be some value to working on the receiving end of the various regulations and taxes government officials foist on society rather than spending one’s career brainstorming more rules without ever suffering the consequences.

In 1992, former U.S. senator and 1972 Democratic presidential candidate George McGovern penned a column for the Wall Street Journal about the challenges he encountered investing in a hotel after many years in government.

“In retrospect, I … wish that during the years I was in public office, I had had this firsthand experience about the difficulties business people face every day,” he wrote. He bemoaned “federal, state and local rules” passed with seemingly good intentions but little thought to the burdens and costs they imposed.

The lack of private sector stints in the career timelines of Harris and Walz means that, like pre-hotel McGovern, they’ve never had to worry about what it’s like to suffer the policies of a large and intrusive government.

That said, it’s possible to overstate the lessons learned by Republicans and Democrats from their different experiences. Vance, despite having worked to fund and launch businesses, has, since being elected to the U.S. Senate, advocated capturing the regulatory state and repurposing it for political uses, including punishing enemies.

Not only does power corrupt, but it does so quickly.

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