Showing posts with label intolerance. Show all posts
Showing posts with label intolerance. Show all posts

John Stossel: Censorship In America

Hate speech is less dangerous than censorship. Support for the idea that it's good to hear all opinions, even offensive ones, is thin. A plurality of Americans now support laws against "hate speech." Conservatives once wanted to ban Playboy magazine, violent rap lyrics and offensive depictions of Jesus. Leftists then were right to fight    ... MORE

Brendan O'Neill: Contempt For Free Speech - Why Are Students Cheering About The Massacre At Charlie Hebdo?

The sad decline of American principles.     I witnessed something genuinely disturbing at Trinity College Dublin last night: trendy, middle-class, liberal students cheering and whooping a man who had just given the closest thing I have yet heard to a justification for the massacre at Charlie HebdoIt was as part of a debate on the right to offend. I was    ... MORE

Political Correctness At Colleges Is A Real Problem

by Ana Kasparian.     Obama gets it right. During a recent town hall in Iowa, President Obama addressed the issue of political correctness on college campuses. He specifically called out liberal students who have protested or banned conservative speakers at commencement ceremonies. “I’ve heard some college campuses where they     ... MORE

Rachelle Peterson: Divesting From Free Speech

Environmentalists shut down debate on campus.     Students campaigning to get universities to divest from fossil fuels are in two minds about free speech. They want it for themselves, but don’t seem keen on free speech for their opponents. The divestment movement didn’t invent free-speech hypocrisy, but divestment activists offer a range of  ... MORE

Political Correctness Makes College Students Mentally Ill

by Daniel Greenfield.      The biggest emotional bully wins. First, complaints of emotional distress are way up. Nearly all of the campus mental-health directors surveyed in 2013 by the American College Counseling Association reported that the number of students with severe psychological problems was rising at their schools. The rate of   ... MORE

The State Of Free Speech In America: Panicked Shopper Sees Nazi And Confederate Geer At Flea Market, Calls 911

by Mary Ellen Godin.       Not yet a crime. Local police received a complaint when a shopper discovered Nazi and Confederate merchandise at a popular flea market last weekend, according to Chief William Wright. An officer responded to the Redwood Flea Market on South Turnpike Road Sunday to investigate the report and found Nazi and       ... MORE

Brendan O'Neill: The Illiberal Persecution Of Tim Hunt

PC continues to run amok.    If you were in any doubt that a dark cloud of illiberalism has descended over the Western academy, then the case of Tim Hunt should put you straight. Hunt is a British biochemist. A really good one. In 2001 he won the Nobel Prize for his breakthrough work on cells. He's a fellow of the Royal Society in London, founded in  ... MORE

Pamela Geller’s Critics Are Proving Her Point

by David French.     Let’s be clear: The great freak-out over Pamela Geller’s “draw Muhammad” contest isn’t about love for Islam or for robust and respectful religious pluralism. Indeed, many of those expressing anguish over blasphemy against Islam show no such concern over even the most vile attacks on the Christian faith. Beyond that, they’re     ... MORE

Rich Lowry: Why Won’t Pamela Geller Shut Up?

Real hate speech is shut up or I'll kill you.   How dare Pamela Geller get targeted by terrorists bent on committing mass murder. That’s been the reaction of a portion of the opinion elite to news that Geller’s “draw Muhammad” contest in Garland, Texas, was (unsuccessfully) assaulted by two heavily armed Muslim men in an attack the   ... MORE

Robby Soave: Frat Brothers Make Execrable Racist Statements, America Forgets The First Amendment

Intolerance is all the rage at college campuses.    Outrage over racist chanting at a Sigma Alpha Epsilon event at the University of Oklahoma is spilling over to other campuses, prompting concerns about systemic racism at that fraternal organization and within college Greek life as a whole. At the same time, lots of people who should know   ... MORE

After Copenhagen: The Myth of Civilized Censorship

by Brendan O'Neill. Hate speech laws legitimize violence against those who offend. The two recent acts of censorship-by-murder in Europe—first at the offices of Charlie Hebdo in Paris, and then at a free-speech debate in Copenhagen—have put the continent's political classes in a pickle. For as much as European rulers want to, and do, condemn the brutal    ... MORE

Matt Agorist: Good Samaritan Saves Woman’s Life After Overpowering The Cop Who Was Trying to Kill Her

Protection from predators just his day job.     Louis Mossey was driving down a county highway when the car in front of him unexpectedly swerved off the road and hit a tractor in a John Deer store parking lot. He had no idea what he was about to witness. When Mossey gets out of the vehicle to check on the wellbeing of the occupants in the     ... MORE

Glenn Greenwald: Some More Blasphemous Cartoons

In solidarity with a free press.     Defending free speech and free press rights, which typically means defending the right to disseminate the very ideas society finds most repellent, has been one of my principal passions for the last 20 years: previously as a lawyer and now as a journalist. So I consider it positive when large numbers of     ... MORE

Why Did Chris Rock Stop Performing For Students?

by Robby Soave.    Everything offends them. There's plenty to dissect in Frank Rich's comprehensive interview with Chris Rock. The comedian covers everything from Bill Cosby (he hopes the allegations are false) to the federal bailout of the auto industry (he was against it). I found Rock's remarks about why he no longer performs at college campuses   ... MORE

Elizabeth Nolan Brown: What Libertarianism Isn't

Obscured by cloudy thinking.      At my first real journalism job, I started off covering personal finance. Not having the first clue about financial topics going in, I ended up asking patient sources a lot of questions like, "So tell me who should consider an REIT—and also what are they?" In my naivety this seemed very crazy to me, that people    ... MORE

Ben Shapiro: The Rise Of American Totalitarianism

Fascism is coming with the promise of a better world.     Last Thursday, Mozilla, the company that's home to the web browser Firefox, forced the resignation of CEO Brendan Eich. What, precisely, had Eich done wrong? Back in 2008, Eich had donated $1,000 to the Proposition 8 effort backing traditional marriage in California. Dating websit    ... MORE

Another Obama Assault On Free Speech

by Robert Spencer.   The Obama Administration’s latest assault on the freedom of speech is so audacious that it leaves me speechless – and that’s the idea. According to Politico, Bill Killian, the Obama-appointed U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Tennessee, “is reportedly vowing to use federal civil rights statutes to clamp down on offensive    ... MORE

Walter E Williams: Hating America

Indoctrination against liberty.      Brothers Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, who are accused of setting the bombs that exploded at the Boston Marathon, attended the University of Massachusetts. Maybe they hated our nation before college, but if you want lessons on hating America, college attendance might be a good start. Let's look   ... MORE