Laptop tab clearance...

Well, a browser crash cleaned out my desktop tabs for me quite some time ago, but my laptop browser is slowing down under the weight of tabs, so let's clear some out...

A reminder that white supremacists will say or do anything to strike at their enemies. They don't care about justice or law except where it serves their ends.

NBC and Weinstein: Rich white men look after their own.

A glimpse in the mind of President Used Car Salesman.

What the two previous articles have in common. Simply put, we enable abusers in America.

Another thing Trump and Weinstein have in common: organized and criminal cover-ups of their wrongdoing.

Glimpses into the minds of people who, despite all the evidence, despite everything, still support Trump. And the reaction other people have to those people.

ALL OF THIS. And more, probably. Republican policies are intended to concentrate wealth and crush the poor... and Democrats have failed to provide any serious pushback, never mind policies that would actually fix the problem. (And no, job training is NOT a solution, not when you're training people to compete with China and India and when the jobs in question will never come to the people being trained.)

And this is WHY Democrats have no answers: their leadership is filled with the same kind of people who are squeezing the rest of us.

Yet another chapter in the politicization of the bench. Electoral politics have no place in a courtroom NONE. (This judge will be on the bench until at least 2021, by the way.)

Burger King says no to bullying... sandwiches.

Fascism spreading around the world...

Yet another reminder that when a conservative says "voter fraud", what they mean is, "only wealthy white men should vote." (And incidentally, this isn't the only con game Kris Kobach is involved in.) (Not that he's the only Republican blocking people from voting...nor is this in any way a recent development...)

A reminder of how Republicans got this way.

You know how Trump just ordered his attorney general to perform selective declassification of FBI records in order to prove the Russia investigation was politically motivated? Not the first time he's declassified records for purely political ends. This is what a dictator does.

And you know how Trump is rumored to be considering pardoning war criminals? Might be because he doesn't think it's a crime to kill families of terrorists or innocent bystanders."Not white" is enough for him. And he knows his followers agree.

This is another thing dictators do: attempt to change the facts to match their beliefs.

 All part of the Big Lie Trump is employing, a tactic which his supporters embrace wholeheartedly.


 That's going to do it for this one...

Free speech needs limits if other freedoms are to be respected.

I do not believe freedom of speech is, or ought to be, absolute. I believe words matter, that words have consequences, and that words can be used and are being used to harm others and to tear down our society.

I have a couple simple rules that guide what I consider speech not worthy of protection by our society.

If you tell a deliberate lie which can be objectively proven to be a lie, with any reasonable expectation that it will be taken as the truth by a normal listener, that speech should not be protected.
If you advocate for the physical harm, dispossession, separation, or expulsion, either directly or as a proposal for public policy, of a group of people as a group, without regard to justice for any individual within that group, with any reasonable expectation that other people might be persuaded to act upon your advocacy, that speech should not be protected.

I'm sure, with enough careful parsing, I could come up with one or two more, but these two are the big ones. Deception should never be free speech; and bigotry should never be free speech.

This is why, for example, I regard Colin Kapernick's protest as free speech, but I do NOT regard InfoWars and Breitbart's lies as free speech. The former told no lies and did not advocate for anyone else's harm. Alex Jones and Steve Bannon do both on a daily basis.

Likewise, I don't regard the neo-Nazi rally in Charlottesville as free speech. I regard it as a terrorist rally advocating the destruction of democracy and equality in the United States- in short, as an act of war against the rest of us.

I take seriously how important freedom of speech is, both as a creator of fiction and as someone who spends a lot of time thinking about political matters. For example, if you tell a lie not knowing it was a lie, that is defensible up to the point you are informed otherwise. As much as I would like to say, for example, that spreading anti-Semitic conspiracy claims, not objectively disprovable but designed to make people more likely to accept violence towards Jews, shouldn't be protected... I don't see any way of doing it without also taking away the right of voters to hold elected officials under suspicion without obvious evidence of wrongdoing.

But although there may not be a clear line to show where a speaker's good faith ends, lying and demonizing others by race, religion, gender, or sexuality are so far beyond that line that there ought not be any doubt.

And I believe it's high time that we, as a society, quit holding the viper to our breasts. Totalitarians will always use a society's freedoms as a tool to bring that society down... but it is possible to maintain most of those freedoms without letting the totalitarians win.

No deception. No advocating pogroms. Not even as jokes (or, as Alex Jones and Rush Limbaugh continually claim in court, "non-factual entertainment programming").

Because your right to free speech ends where your fellow man's right to not be attacked in the streets begins- even if you're not the one doing the attacking.