Category Archives: Natural Law

UPDATE II (12/21/021): NEW COLUMN: Centralize Liberty: The Solution To Wicked, Woke Tech (Part 3)

Free Speech, Individual Rights, Justice, Labor, Law, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, libertarianism, Natural Law, Political Philosophy, Private Property, Republicans, Technology, The Courts, THE ELITES

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NEW COLUMN: “Centralize Liberty: The Solution To Wicked, Woke Tech,” is now on WND.COM, The Unz Review, CNSNews, and The New American.

This column is Part 3 of a 3-part series. Read Part 1, “Big Tech’s Financial Terrorism And Social Excommunication” and Part 2, “Justice Thomas’ Solution to Big Tech’s Social And Financial Excommunication.”

An excerpt:

It is inarguable that by financially crippling and socially segregating, and banishing politically irksome people and enterprises—the Big Tech cartel is flouting the spirit, if not the strict letter, of the Civil Rights Act.

For how do you make a living if your banking options are increasingly curtailed and constantly threatened, and your ability to electronically communicate with clients is likewise circumscribed?

Do you go back to a barter economy (a book for some bread)? Do you go underground? Cultivate home-based industries? Do you keep afloat by word of mouth? Go door-to-door? Return to stamping envelopes? How can you, when your client base is purely electronic?

Telling an individual he can’t open a bank account on account of the beliefs and opinions swirling in his head teeters on informing your innocent victim he might not be able to make a living, as do other, politically more polite Americans, and despite his innocence: Our only “offenses” as dissidents are thought crimes, namely, speaking, or typing or wafting into the air unpopular, impolite words.

“[I]n assessing whether a company exercises substantial market power,” Justice Clarence Thomas has argued, “what matters is whether the alternatives are comparable. For many of today’s digital platforms, nothing is.”

To paraphrase this Supreme Court jurist: Sure, there are alternatives to The Big Tech, but these make a mockery of the outcast. It would hardly be hyperbole, in driving home Justice Thomas’s point about comparability, to put it thus:

With respect to financial de-platforming, barring someone from PayPal is like prohibiting a passenger from crossing the English Channel by high-speed train, via ferry and by means of 90 percent of airplanes. “Have at it sucker.”

By Deep Tech decree, some Americans are worth more than others, based not on their actions, but on the voiced thoughts in their heads. This cannot stand.

The letter of the law needs changing. Do it.

Civil Rights Act

Thus, the preferred remedy to Deep Tech depredations would build upon existing Civil Rights Act jurisprudence.

As a reality-oriented conservative libertarian, I inhabit and theorize in the real world. From the conservative-libertarian’s perspective, Barry Goldwater got it right. Civil Rights law is an ass, for it infringes on property rights. But the onus is on flaccid Republican lawmakers to ensure that that ass can be ridden by all equally (with apologies to adorable, much-abused donkeys for the cruel metaphor).

These are existing laws that are already enforced. I see no reason to reject the application of civil rights solutions to wicked, woke bullies because existing laws that’ll never be repealed go against my core beliefs. What is libertarianism? The art of losing in life because of a slavish devotion to theoretical purity? …

… NEW COLUMN, “Centralize Liberty: The Solution To Wicked, Woke Tech,” can be read now on WND.COM, The Unz Review, CNSNews, and The New American.

UPDATED (10/26/021) I:

UPDATE II (12/21/021) II: “Berenson v. Twitter“:

Twitter is indisputably a messenger service. A longstanding California law regulates messenger services as “common carriers.” This means that they must accept all messages they receive. Twitter thus must accept all tweets it receives. It has no First Amendment rights to refuse them on the basis that it does not agree with them.
A federal law commonly called Section 230 “preempts” the California law, giving Twitter the right to reject tweets or ban users. (Whether that right is universal or whether Twitter must act in “good faith” in restricting service is a separate question; whether Twitter acted in “good faith” in this case is still another question. But put those issues aside for the moment.)
Section 230 is what enables Twitter to claim a First Amendment privilege that supersedes the California law and restrict my own First Amendment right to speak; thus federal courts have the right to review 230 on First Amendment grounds.

MORE.

DeSantis Law Doesn’t Give Private Citizens Deserving, Unfettered Access To The Social Media Super Highway

Free Speech, Individual Rights, Law, libertarianism, Natural Law, Regulation, Republicans, Technology

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From the fact that Ron DeSantis is the only Republican to have proceeded against Deep Tech in any meaningful way—it doesn’t follow that his bill, the “Big Tech” bill, is useful or fair to the Little Guy or Gal. Not unless he or she is prepared to and can afford to launch law suits.

All you and I really want, as innocent, law-abiding individuals, is to have unfettered access to the social-media public square.

Politicians, of course, get protections, no problems. DeSantis has made “it illegal for large technology companies to remove candidates for office from their platforms in the run-up to an election.”

Close to useless tokenism in solving Deep Tech tyranny.

Yes, the Section 230 grant-of-government privilege should be done away with, but this more conventional solution is insufficient for the reasons DeSantis’ law is insufficent.

The only two best solutions are, my own: 1. Civil rights based litigation and the setting of a Supreme Court precedent, a direction I first floated in “Deep Tech: Locked Down And Locked Out, First By The State, Then By Silicon Valley,” and have motivated for repeatedly.

2. Declare social media platforms to be free speech, censorship-free spheres, a Richard Spencer idea. Republicans will have to contend with speech they don’t like.

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When A Mountain Of Flesh, Ma’Khia Bryant, Attacks …

Crime, Justice, Kids, Law, Natural Law, Race, Racism

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When a mountain of feral flesh, Ma’Khia Bryant, attacks with what appears to be an intent to kill another—a concept is conjured from the Idiot’s arsenal to blame uninvolved whites, and their society at large.

Black girls, explains the New York Times’ resident idiot, have a “unique burden”:

In media coverage, Ms. Bryant has consistently been referred to as a woman, and her behavior and her body size have been scrutinized to suggest that she presented a large, uncontainable threat to everyone at the scene.

“It’s called adultification bias.”

Hard to keep up with how stupid and immoral America has become.

In reality, “Officer Nicholas Reardon’s body camera shows Bryant with a knife in hand, lunging towards a young woman who is pinned against a car. As Bryant reaches back with the knife, Reardon fires four shots.”

That cuddly “kid” was about to kill. She needed killing.

NEW COLUMN: Resist the Left’s Conflation of ‘Racism’ With the Law, for Chauvin and Beyond

Argument, Law, libertarianism, Liberty, Logic, Natural Law, Race, Racism, Reason

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NEW ON CNSNews.com: “Resist the Left’s Conflation of ‘Racism’ With the Law, for Chauvin and Beyond.”

An excerpt: https://tinyurl.com/3j6sdu5z

Racism consists of a mindset or a worldview that boils down to impolite and impolitic thoughts and words written, spoken, preached, or tweeted.

If that’s all racism is, you ask, then what was the knee on George Floyd’s neck? Was that not racism?

No, it was not.

Judging from the known facts, the knee on Mr. Floyd’s neck was a knee on a man’s neck. That’s all that can be inferred from the chilling video recording in which Floyd expired slowly as he pleaded for air.

Floyd begged to breathe. But the knee on his neck—“subdual restraint and neck compression,” in medical terms—was sustained for fully eight minutes and 46 seconds, causing “cardiopulmonary arrest.”

There are laws against what transpired between former Officer Derek Chauvin and Mr. Floyd.

And the law’s ambit is not to decide whether the offending officer is a correct-thinking individual, but whether Mr. Chauvin had committed a crime.

About Officer Chauvin’s mindset, the most the law is supposed to divine is mens rea—criminal intention: Was the officer whose knee pressed on Floyd’s neck acting with a guilty mind or not?

For fact-finding is the essence of the law. The law is not an abstract ideal of imagined social justice, that exists to salve sensitive souls.

If “racism” looks like a felony crime, then it ought to be prosecuted as nothing but a crime and debated as such. In the case of Mr. Chauvin, a mindset of depraved indifference seems to jibe with the video.

This is not to refute the reality of racially motivated crimes. These most certainly occur. It is only to refute the legal and ethical validity of a racist mindset in the prosecution of a crime.

Surely, a life taken because of racial or antisemitic animus is not worth more than life lost to spousal battery or to a home invasion.

The law, then, must mete justice, in accordance with the rules of evidence, proportionality and due process. Other than intent, references to the attendant thoughts that accompanied the commission of a crime should be irrelevant—be they racist, sexist, ageist or anti-Semitic.

Ultimately, those thoughts are known only to the perp….

… READ THE REST ON CNSNews.com: “Resist the Left’s Conflation of ‘Racism’ With the Law, for Chauvin and Beyond.”

*Image via CNS.News (Photo credit: Noam Galai/Getty Images)