Censorship

Self Infantilization ~ Democratic Ideals Limiting Academic Excellence

Published by Papa Giorgio

Video Description:

Dennis Prager reads from a New York Times article (http://tinyurl.com/pm886zv) slamming “infantile” persons creating “safe spaces” to act… well… child-like. This is just another example — from the many — of just how the Left in America harms freedom of thinking and freedom of interaction with competing ideas.

How do I look at it? Makes dealing with infantile ideas/position THAT much easier for people who actually engage in the real world. Some liberals get it, like this professor who warns that by doing such (labeling people and blocking out competing ideas) creates a false reality in the classroom and will sneak up on people out in the real world: http://tinyurl.com/dxznh3h

For more clear thinking like this from Dennis Prager… I invite you to visit: http://www.dennisprager.com/

Just a taste of the article… crazy stuff!

KATHERINE BYRON, a senior at Brown University and a member of its Sexual Assault Task Force, considers it her duty to make Brown a safe place for rape victims, free from anything that might prompt memories of trauma.

So when she heard last fall that a student group had organized a debate about campus sexual assault between Jessica Valenti, the founder of feministing.com, and Wendy McElroy, a libertarian, and that Ms. McElroy was likely to criticize the term “rape culture,” Ms. Byron was alarmed. “Bringing in a speaker like that could serve to invalidate people’s experiences,” she told me. It could be “damaging.”…

…read it all…

Are women independent? Tough? Able to do anything a man can do or bear? Or are they children… lesser of the sexes? Needing to be coddled? Protected at all times?

SooperMexican has this humorous post that I found through Gay Patriot:

“Triggering” has become the all-purpose left-wing tool for censoring opinions leftists don’t like on the basis that expressing such opinions produce badfeels.

If these dames can’t handle the stress of interacting with the real world, they should just stay home and knit. Or iron, I got a whole pile of shirts they could get started on.

A Tenured Professor Fired Over “Speech Codes”

Published by Papa Giorgio

FIRE ~ to no avail ~ tried to get freedom of speech to reign at Marquette. The Warrior Has Been Fired. Now come the lawsuits I hope:

…The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) has called for McAdams’s reinstatement in light of Marquette’s egregious violations of his rights.

“If Marquette can fire a tenured professor for criticizing a fellow teacher on a blog, then tenure at Marquette is worthless, as are freedom of speech and academic freedom,” said FIRE Executive Director Robert Shibley. “While this is more than likely just an excuse to get rid of McAdams, the fact that McAdams’s supposed offense was criticizing a teacher for squelching dissenting opinions in class only makes Marquette’s utter contempt for dissenters more obvious.”…

FEC Chair Warns of Democrats “Banning” Conservative Media/Books

Published by Papa Giorgio

I say “ban” in that the Democrat on the Commission seem concerned apparently with conservative media (um, because it rocks the hizznouse… Drudge pulls down mass visits!), so publishing news stories and books may be prohibited during election cycles. The saying goes, there is a little dictator waiting to get out of every Democrat. Here is the Washington Examiner’s story on this:

The chairman of the Federal Election Commission today blasted Democratic colleagues opposed to his effort to protect conservative media after they imposed rules on the publisher of Rep. Paul Ryan‘s new book, opening the door to future book regulations — or even a ban.

“By failing to affirm this publisher’s constitutional right, statutory right, to disseminate a political book free from FEC conditions and regulations, we have effectively asserted regulatory jurisdiction over a book publisher,” warned Chairman Lee E. Goodman, one of three Republicans on the six-person FEC.

“That failure reveals a festering legal uncertainty and chill for the free press rights of books and book publishers to publish and disseminate political books free from government regulation,” he added.

His comments after the FEC OK’d Republican Ryan’s request to promote his new book, The Way Forward, were immediately and sharply rebuked by Democratic Commissioner Ellen L. Weintraub. “No one is banning books,” she said.

Weintraub also hit Goodman for suggesting “that we are motivated by partisan bias, which is really not appreciated and untrue. I want to categorically deny that.”

The hard feelings continued after the morning session when Democrats on the commission refused to attend subsequent meetings, according to an insider.

And Goodman and the two other Republicans on the commission issued a six-page critique [below] of the commission’s vote on the Ryan book that slapped the constraints imposed on the publisher and on how Ryan’s re-election campaign and leadership political action committee, Prosperity Action, can promote the book on websites.

Since becoming chairman, Goodman has been pushing to expand protections for all media and has noted how Democrats on the panel have been eager to nick at freedoms for conservative media while Republicans have been voting for broader protections even for liberals like Democratic financier George Soros.

He recently warned that conservative online media, like the Drudge Report, could face regulation as Democrats move to tighten the so-called “media exemption” that lets the press cover politics any way they want.

…read more…

White Rose [below] and the Night of the Broken Glass were events that didn’t happen over-night. There were small, incremental steps that led to these events/resistance.

Colion`s Response to the NFL banning An Ad by Daniel Defense

Published by Papa Giorgio

The ad is shown before the erudite commentary by Colion Noir:

Investors Business Daily (IBD) on the banned NFL ad:

Politics Of Sport: While ads featuring violent movies and video games regularly appear on NFL broadcasts, pro football has banned an ad supporting the Second Amendment. The NFL is within its rights, since Item 5 in its prohibited list of Super Bowl ad categories includes “Firearms, ammunition or other weapons; however, stores that sell firearms and ammunitions (e.g., outdoor stores and camping stores) will be permitted, provided they sell other products and the ads do not mention firearms, ammunition or other weapons.”

But the ad submitted twice by Daniel Defense does not sell firearms or one of the company’s popular DDM4 rifles. Daniel Defense has a brick-and-mortar store, where it sells products other than firearms.

In fact, the ad does not sell anything. It’s a visual paraphrase of the Second Amendment to the Constitution, which guarantees the right of individuals to keep and bear arms to protect their country, themselves, their property and their families.

The ad doesn’t even mention firearms, but shows a father picking up the Sunday newspaper as a football game plays on the radio.

He goes inside the house, hugs his wife and looks in on his baby as his voiceover speaks of his responsibility to protect them and the house they live in.

To the NFL, apparently, this simple message, subliminally in defense of our Second Amendment rights, is an incitement to violence that can’t be run during a violent game in which players that have had run-ins with law enforcement are often celebrated as role models. Some 683 NFL players have been arrested since 2000, including around three dozen since the 2013 Super Bowl.

Good taste has never been a priority in Super Bowl ads and certainly the NFL is less picky during the regular season. In the aftermath of the Newtown massacre last year, for example, a commercial promoting the shoot-’em-up flick “Gangster Squad” aired during a Colts-Texans game and a spot promoting the M-rated video game “Hitman: Absolution” aired during a postgame show.

…read more…

Stephen Meyer and Michael Medved Discuss Censorship In Science

Published by Papa Giorgio

On the Michael Medved’s “Science & Culture Update,” he and Stephen C. Meyer talk about censorship in science, and calls are taken challenging I.D. — much of which are straw-men positions. In other words, intelligent design is miss-defined and then this position [miss-defined] is attacked.

For more clear thinking like this from Michael Medved… I invite you to visit: http://www.michaelmedved.com/

Ball State Would Censor Thomas Jefferson ~ OBEY!

Published by Papa Giorgio

CBN News via ACF:

The president of Ball State University is forbidding faculty to endorse intelligent design, the belief that the universe is too complex to have evolved by chance.

President Jo Ann Gora has sent a letter to faculty and staff saying intelligent design is not appropriate material for science courses.

Gora said only humanities or social science courses may discuss topics like intelligent design, as long as professors do not openly support it.

That letter comes after an atheist group complained that the school hired a science professor who wrote a book on intelligent design and another professor was accused of teaching creationism….

 

A bit more from Evolution News and Views:

Next time someone tells you intelligent design is “based on religion,” you might point him to American Founder Thomas Jefferson, author of the Declaration of Independence. As I explain in a special July 4th edition of ID the Future, Jefferson not only believed in intelligent design, he insisted it was based on the plain evidence of nature, not religion.

Ironically, the critics of intelligent design often think they are defending the principles of Jefferson. The National Council for the Social Studies, for example, claims that intelligent design is religion and then cites Jefferson’s famous Letter to the Danbury Baptists calling for a “wall of separation” between church and state. The clear implication is that Thomas Jefferson would agree with them that intelligent design is religion. A writer for Irregular Times goes even further, insisting that “the case of Thomas Jefferson makes it quite clear that there was not a consensus of support among the authors of the Constitution to allow for the mixing of religion and government to support theological doctrines such as intelligent design.”

In reality, Jefferson did not believe that intelligent design was a religious doctrine. In a letter to John Adams on April 11, 1823, he declared:

I hold (without appeal to revelation) that when we take a view of the Universe, in its parts general or particular, it is impossible for the human mind not to perceive and feel a conviction of design, consummate skill, and indefinite power in every atom of its composition. (emphasis added)

By insisting that his defense of intelligent design was made “without appeal to revelation,” Jefferson clearly was arguing that the idea had a basis other than religion. What was that basis? He went on to explain:

The movements of the heavenly bodies, so exactly held in their course by the balance of centrifugal and centripetal forces, the structure of our earth itself, with its distribution of lands, waters and atmosphere, animal and vegetable bodies, examined in all their minutest particles, insects mere atoms of life, yet as perfectly organised as man or mammoth, the mineral substances, their generation and uses, it is impossible, I say, for the human mind not to believe that there is, in all this, design, cause and effect, up to an ultimate cause, a fabricator of all things from matter and motion, their preserver and regulator while permitted to exist in their present forms, and their regenerator into new and other forms.

In sum, Jefferson believed that empirical data from nature itself proved intelligent design by showing the natural world’s intricate organization from the level of plants and insects all the way up to the revolution of the planets.

…read more…

Intelligent Design pre-dates even Jesus! [Earthly visit]

“When you see a sundial or a water-clock, you see that it tells time by design and not by chance. How then can you imagine that the universe as a whole is devoid of purpose and intelligence when it embraces everything, including these artifacts themselves and their artificers? Our friend Posidonius as you know has recently made a globe which in its revolution shows the movements of the sun and stars and planets, by day and night, just as they appear in the sky. Now if someone were to take this globe and show it to the people of Britain or Scythia [barbarians at this time] would a single one of those barbarians fail to see that it was the product of a conscious intelligence.” 

[….]

But if the structure of the world in all its parts is such that it could not have been better whether in point of utility or beauty, let us consider whether this is the result of chance, or whether on the contrary the parts of the world are in such a condition that they could not possibly have cohered together if they were not controlled by intelligence and by divine providence. If then the products of nature are better than those of art, and if art produces nothing without reason, nature too cannot be deemed to be without reason. When you see a statue or a painting, you recognize the exercise of art; when you observe from a distance the course of a ship, you do not hesitate to assume that its motion is guided by reason and by art; when you look at a sun-dial or a water-clock, you infer that it tells the time by art and not by chance ; how then can it be consistent to suppose that the world, which includes both the works of art in question, the craftsmen who made them, and everything else besides, can be devoid of purpose and of reason? Suppose a traveller to carry into Scythia or Britain the orrery recently constructed by our friend Posidonius, which at each revolution reproduces the same motions of the sun, the moon and the five planets that take place in the heavens every twenty-four hours, would any single native doubt that this orrery was the work of a rational being? These thinkers however raise doubts about the world itself from which all things arise and have their being, and debate whether it is the product of chance or necessity of some sort, or of divine reason and intelligence…

Cicero, Nature of the Gods, Translated by H. Rackam, p. 207-209.

Via Russell Grigg, A Brief History of Design:

Cicero (106–43 BC), used this concept in his book De Natura Deorum (On the Nature of the Gods) to challenge the evolutionary ideas of the philosophers of his day.

The two main schools of philosophy then were Epicureanism and Stoicism. The Epicureans sought happiness through bodily pleasures and freedom from pain and anxiety. The two chief causes of anxiety were fear of the gods and fear of death, so Epicurus sought to nullify both of these by teaching an evolutionary atomic theory.

He denied that there was any purpose in nature, because everything was composed of particles (atoma: atoms), all falling downwards. He said that these sometimes spontaneously “swerved” to coalesce and form bodies — non-living, living, human, and divine. The gods were made of finer atoms than humankind. They did not create the world or have any control over it, so they were not concerned with human affairs, and there was therefore no need for man to fear them. At death, the soul disintegrated and became non-existent, so there was no need to fear death or the prospect of judgment after death.

Cicero used the Stoic character in his book to refute these ideas with arguments from design, aimed to show that the universe is governed by an intelligent designer. He argued that a conscious purpose was needed to express art (e.g. to make a picture or a statue) and so, because nature was more perfect than art, nature showed purpose also. He reasoned that the movement of a ship was guided by skilled intelligence, and a sundial or water clock told the time by design rather than by chance. He said that even the barbarians of Britain or Scythia could not fail to see that a model which showed the movements of the sun, stars and planets was the product of conscious intelligence.

Cicero continued his challenge to the evolutionism of Epicurus by marvelling that anyone could persuade himself that chance collisions of particles could form anything as beautiful as the world. He said that this was on a par with believing that if the letters of the alphabet were thrown on the ground often enough they would spell out the Annals of Ennius.

And he asked: if chance collisions of particles could make a world, why then cannot they build much less difficult objects, like a colonnade, a temple, a house, or a city?

 

Campus Censorship and the End of American Debate by Whiteboard Videos

Published by Papa Giorgio

Video Description:

For over a generation, shocking cases of censorship at America’s colleges and universities have taught students the wrong lessons about living in a free society. This video explains how higher education fails to teach its students to become critical thinkers by supercharging ideological divisions, promoting groupthink, and encouraging an unscholarly certainty about complex issues.

For more on this issue, read Greg Lukianoff’s new book Unlearning Liberty: Campus Censorship and the End of American Debate.

Visit www.unlearningliberty.com

When A Joke Was a Joke! (Joan Rivers vs Don Rickles)

Published by Papa Giorgio

From Radar Online we have this (I combined this with Big governments post of the video that follows the Joan Rivers news):

Comedienne Joan Rivers revealed she once ditched a joke about First Lady Michelle Obama from her stand-up routine – because she feared she’d be accused of racism.

Recalling the wisecrack to shock Jock Howard Stern, the comedy legend said: “We used to have Jackie O now we have Blackie O!”