Berkeley cancels Ann Coulter performance

What's even more ridiculous is Janet Napolitano our former Homeland Security Director, is head of UC Berkeley security, no wonder they can't handle a bunch of snowflake communist.

 

Coulter can go to the White House and do the warmup act for Trump where he pulls stuff out of a hat to enthrall senators.

 

Their standing down is quite intentional. Make no mistake about that.

 

Maybe she will serve the chocolate cake.

 

PUNCH BACK TWICE AS HARD: It’s official: Berkeley hit with lawsuit over Coulter lecture.

The University of California, Berkeley was just slapped with a lawsuit over its mishandling of Ann Coulter’s scheduled lecture on campus.

Young America’s Foundation (YAF) and the Berkeley College Republicans (BCR) filed a suit in federal court suing the school for violating their rights to free speech, due process, and equal protection on Monday. The suit, which is available on YAF’s website, names several Berkeley administrators along with University of California President Janet Napolitano as defendants.

“Though UC Berkeley promises its students an environment that promotes free debate and the free exchange of ideas,” the suit says, “it had breached this promise through the repressive actions of University administrators and campus police, who have systematically and intentionally suppressed constitutionally-protected expression by Plaintiffs … simply because that expression may anger or offend students, UC Berkeley administrators, and/or community members who do not share Plaintiffs’ viewpoints.”

Citing the school’s adherence to its vague “high-profile speakers” policy, the suit charges Berkeley with applying the policy in a way that discriminates against conservative speakers.

Since that’s clearly true, they should have a strong case.

 

i and other folks would have more sympathy for folks like Milo and Coulter, if not for the fact that they were such attention-whoring trolls, desperate to cause trouble.

 

And that comes off in such a way as to say:

Them accepting invitations to speak is causing trouble.

Which when it comes right down to it, means don't let them speak.

 

the school did not invite them to speak.

 

Groups on campus did. Which they received permission to do and are allowed to do.

 

well then, they might as well invite David Duke to speak, and get all butthurt when there is an angry reaction.

 

And it is their right to do so.

I personally wouldn't attend any of these events. It's not my place to say what others may want to hear and then force what I want to happen.

 

i agree

however, when racist *******s are invited to speak, no one should be shocked that there is a very angry response

 

And everyone should be shocked when those angry people behave violently.

You seem to be ok with it.

I am not.

 

did it shock you when Jews reacted violently in the Warsaw Ghetto?

 

No. I wasn't alive and they were in a war, actually fighting for their very existence, or did you forget about the Holocaust? Or are you comparing the holocaust to somebody accepting an invite and people getting angry and violent and attacking people over a speech?

Damn dude, you may want to rethink your position.

 

The NYT appears to support speech restrictions. Read the whole thing at the link:

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/24/...type=article&smid=fb-nytupshot&smtyp=cur&_r=1

What ‘Snowflakes’ Get Right About Free Speech
The Stone
Ulrich Baer
THE STONE APRIL 24, 2017
An Auburn University freshman, right, clashed with a supporter of Richard Spencer on Tuesday in Alabama. Credit Albert Cesare/The Montgomery Advertiser, via Associated Press
This article has been updated to add a disclaimer.

At one of the premieres of his landmark Holocaust documentary, “Shoah” (1985), the filmmaker Claude Lanzmann was challenged by a member of the audience, a woman who identified herself as a Holocaust survivor. Lanzmann listened politely as the woman recounted her harrowing personal account of the Holocaust to make the point that the film failed to fully represent the recollections of survivors. When she finished, Lanzmann waited a bit, and then said, “Madame, you are an experience, but not an argument.”

This exchange, conveyed to me by the Russian literature scholar Victor Erlich some years ago, has stayed with me, and it has taken on renewed significance as the struggles on American campuses to negotiate issues of free speech have intensified — most recently in protests at Auburn University against a visit by the white nationalist Richard Spencer.

Lanzmann’s blunt reply favored reasoned analysis over personal memory. In light of his painstaking research into the Holocaust, his comment must have seemed insensitive but necessary at the time. Ironically, “Shoah” eventually helped usher in an era of testimony that elevated stories of trauma to a new level of importance, especially in cultural production and universities.

During the 1980s and ’90s, a shift occurred in American culture; personal experience and testimony, especially of suffering and oppression, began to challenge the primacy of argument. Freedom of expression became a flash point in this shift. Then as now, both liberals and conservatives were wary of the privileging of personal experience, with its powerful emotional impact, over reason and argument, which some fear will bring an end to civilization, or at least to freedom of speech.

My view (and, like all the views expressed here, it does not represent the views or policies of my employer, New York University) is that we should resist the temptation to rehash these debates. Doing so would overlook the fact that a thorough generational shift has occurred. Widespread caricatures of students as overly sensitive, vulnerable and entitled “snowflakes” fail to acknowledge the philosophical work that was carried out, especially in the 1980s and ’90s, to legitimate experience — especially traumatic experience — which had been dismissed for decades as unreliable, untrustworthy and inaccessible to understanding.

The philosopher Jean-François Lyotard, best known for his prescient analysis in “The Postmodern Condition” of how public discourse discards the categories of true/false and just/unjust in favor of valuing the mere fact that something is being communicated, examined the tension between experience and argument in a different way.

Instead of defining freedom of expression as guaranteeing the robust debate from which the truth emerges, Lyotard focused on the asymmetry of different positions when personal experience is challenged by abstract arguments. His extreme example was Holocaust denial, where invidious but often well-publicized cranks confronted survivors with the absurd challenge to produce incontrovertible eyewitness evidence of their experience of the killing machines set up by the Nazis to exterminate the Jews of Europe. Not only was such evidence unavailable, but it also challenged the Jewish survivors to produce evidence of their own legitimacy in a discourse that had systematically denied their humanity.

Lyotard shifted attention away from the content of free speech to the way certain topics restrict speech as a public good. Some things are unmentionable and undebatable, but not because they offend the sensibilities of the sheltered young. Some topics, such as claims that some human beings are by definition inferior to others, or illegal or unworthy of legal standing, are not open to debate because such people cannot debate them on the same terms.

The recent student demonstrations at Auburn against Spencer’s visit — as well as protests on other campuses against Charles Murray, Milo Yiannopoulos and others — should be understood as an attempt to ensure the conditions of free speech for a greater group of people, rather than censorship. Liberal free-speech advocates rush to point out that the views of these individuals must be heard first to be rejected. But this is not the case. Universities invite speakers not chiefly to present otherwise unavailable discoveries, but to present to the public views they have presented elsewhere. When those views invalidate the humanity of some people, they restrict speech as a public good.

In such cases there is no inherent value to be gained from debating them in public. In today’s age, we also have a simple solution that should appease all those concerned that students are insufficiently exposed to controversial views. It is called the internet, where all kinds of offensive expression flourish unfettered on a vast platform available to nearly all.

The great value and importance of freedom of expression, for higher education and for democracy, is hard to underestimate. But it has been regrettably easy for commentators to create a simple dichotomy between a younger generation’s oversensitivity and free speech as an absolute good that leads to the truth. We would do better to focus on a more sophisticated understanding, such as the one provided by Lyotard, of the necessary conditions for speech to be a common, public good. This requires the realization that in politics, the parameters of public speech must be continually redrawn to accommodate those who previously had no standing.
The rights of transgender people for legal equality and protection against discrimination are a current example in a long history of such redefinitions. It is only when trans people are recognized as fully human, rather than as men and women in disguise, as Ben Carson, the current secretary of housing and urban development claims, that their rights can be fully recognized in policy decisions.

The idea of freedom of speech does not mean a blanket permission to say anything anybody thinks. It means balancing the inherent value of a given view with the obligation to ensure that other members of a given community can participate in discourse as fully recognized members of that community. Free-speech protections — not only but especially in universities, which aim to educate students in how to belong to various communities — should not mean that someone’s humanity, or their right to participate in political speech as political agents, can be freely attacked, demeaned or questioned.

 

America rejected the Thought Police when they elected Trump.

THEY TOLD ME IF TRUMP WERE ELECTED, SECRET POLICE WOULD ROOT OUT IMPROPER THOUGHTS ON CAMPUS. AND THEY WERE RIGHT! U of Arizona is Hiring ‘Social Justice Advocates’ to Police Fellow Students for ‘Bias Incidents.’

“Bias” isn’t actually a crime, you know, and “policing” speech looks a lot like a conspiracy to deprive people of their civil rights, which is both a felony and a source of civil damage actions. If the right had as well-developed a legal infrastructure as the left, there would already be lawsuits and criminal prosecutions along these lines. There probably still will be, eventually.

 

Uhh... that's retarded.

Last month, former Vermont governor Howard Dean announced that "hate speech is not protected by the first amendment." Specifically, Dean was opposing a proposed speaking engagement for columnist Ann Coulter, whose ideas are apparently so offensive to Dean, that even the most fundamental freedoms cannot be allowed to endure.

Dean no doubt thought he was striking a great blow against the fascists who would deprive us of our fundamental rights. However, if Dean wants to attack speech that is actually connected to mass murder and the destruction of human society, he might want to look somewhere other than Coulter's enthusiasm for a border wall.

Indeed, if Howard Dean is so concerned about hate, he's likely find a lot more of it among communists than among people like Coulter, despite her faults.

A Truly Deadly Ideology
Recently we commemorated another Victims of Communism Day, which is sometimes euphemistically referred to as May Day. This time, there were riots in Paris as “protesters” committed all sorts of vandalism, assault, and mayhem. In addition to the standard Che shirts and the like, there were actually people holding banners with Stalin’s face on it!

In Berkeley, and really across the United States and Europe, we’ve seen various Antifa communists commit all sorts of violence against anyone they deem to be a fascist. And as far as I can tell, Antifa defines a fascist as anyone who isn’t a communist. They’ve pepper sprayed women and hit men with bike locks. These folks certainly aren’t run-of-the-mill left liberals. Indeed, as Antifa has so helpfully told us, “Liberals get the bullet too.”

This shouldn’t be particularly surprising. Going back through the twentieth century communists generally fall into two categories;
1) Mass-murdering, totalitarian dictators when in power and
2) terrorists when not-in power.

“People have completely forgotten that in 1972 we had over nineteen hundred domestic bombings in the United States,” noted retired FBI agent Mark Noel. Most of these bombings were committed by terrorist groups such as the Weather Underground. Which is just one in a long list of communist terrorist organizations including FARC, M-19, the Symbionese Liberation Army, the PKK and, let’s be honest, Antifa. In fact, a 2001 Department of Energy study found that,

From an international perspective, of the 13,858 people who died between 1988 and 1998 in attacks committed by the 10 most active terrorist groups in the world, 74 percent were killed by leftist organizations.

Still, that amounts to only about 1000 deaths per year, which is nothing compared to what happens when communists actually take charge of the reins of government. When communists finally do come to power, you get Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Lenin, Castro, Kim Jong-Il, Kim Il-Sung, Ceausescu and Tito.

You get the Holodomor, the Killing Fields, the Great Purge, the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution, the NKVD, the Stasi and the KGB.

In short, you get 100,000,000 dead people.

That figure comes from The Black Book of Communism and has been disputed. Although some, such as R.J. Rummel, put the figure substantially higher. He comes up with 150 million! To put that in perspective, fascist governments, along with every other type of government in the 20th century combined, as bad as they were, killed far fewer than the communists did even though far less than 50 percent of the world’s population lived under communist tyranny in the 20th century.

Indeed, prior to 1917, there were no communist governments. And after 1991, there were effectively only two; Cuba, which is bad and North Korea, which is essentially an open-air gulag holding 25 million de facto slaves.

Thus, we have to ask the hard questions: Can we allow communists and communist sympathizer’s free reign to spread their dangerous ideas? Can we give them a platform to preach their blood-soaked pinko nonsense? Is commie speech free speech?

When asking yourself this question, it’s probably worth remembering that during the Great Leap Forward, Mao’s troops forced dissidents to bury their own children alive. Can we really risk allowing apologists for such things the right to speak because of some 18th-century notions regarding free speech? If the politically incorrect utterings of a columnist are to be declared verboten, then surely speech in favor of modern history's most murderous ideology might be suspect as well.

Modern day communists may say “real communism has never been tried” and that their version of communism will be all peace and friendship. But just because something has failed every single time it has been tried does not mean it has not been tried. When you have a 0.000 batting average, it’s time to retire.

If Howard Dean is looking to condemn something that has perpetuated hate to an unmatched level throughout much of the last century, the answer should be plain as day.

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-05-15/communist-speech-free-speech