Category: Freespeechers

Mann Overboard

Democrats Freespeechers The Tolerant Left 2 Comments

Jonathan Turley;

University of Pennsylvania Professor Michael Mann is the Vice Provost for Climate Science, Policy, and Action and has pushed candidates to commit to major environmental reforms. Notably, he seemed to pivot in an interview with Peter Dominick on a podcast last week, calling for all Democratic candidates to face a litmus test on committing to pack the Supreme Court: promise to pack or get the sack. It is only the latest example of how the hostile takeover of the Court is now the priority for many Democrats in removing a barrier to a radical agenda. […]

Mann has had his own conflicts with the courts. He was sanctioned last year after winning a defamation case against bloggers Rand Simberg and Mark Steyn for attacking his climate control research.

At the time, some of us questioned the award, which awarded just $1 in actual damages but $1 million in punitive damages. In 1996, the U.S. Supreme Court decided a case, BMW of North America v. Gore, striking down a punitive damages award. The case involved the company’s practice of repairing and repainting cars damaged in transit without telling the customers. The jury in the original trial awarded $4,000 in compensatory damages for the car’s lost value due to the lack of a factory paint job and other damage; it then imposed $4 million in punitive damages for the company’s dishonesty.

D.C. Superior Court Judge Alfred S. Irving Jr. reduced the award against Steyn to just $5000 after finding the original award to be “grossly excessive.”

The court later learned that Mann’s defense team had allegedly presented false accounts of his losses after the criticism. Mann’s legal team was accused of presenting a chart that listed a grant that Mann allegedly lost due to the defamatory remarks as $9.7 million when it was later found to be worth $112,000. Irving also found a disparity in the grant income figures given to the jury.

The court found the alleged misrepresentations to be “an affront to the Court’s authority” and sanctioned Mann and his legal team “for bad-faith trial misconduct.” After reversing the jury verdict, the court ordered Mann to pay $1.1 million of his critics’ legal expenses.

Now, Mann is calling for all Democratic candidates to pledge to pack the Supreme Court as a condition for running. So any Democrat who believes in our institutions and resists this mob will be a persona non grata in the party as an “institutionalist” captured by “nostalgia.”

It’s the birth of new cultural pejorative, keep your eye on that.

How Dare She Swim Against The Current!

Freespeechers Groomers Our Diversities 15 Comments

What else do you expect from the denizens of Hogtown? Sophie Cunningham deserves applause, not boos, for speaking out against the risk of getting plastered onto the floor by a player who might be 50 percent bigger than her.

Sophie Cunningham tried to laugh off the boos that dogged her at Scotiabank Arena on Tuesday night.

Cunningham said in an interview with ESPN on July 21 that WNBA players shouldn’t have to play against “biological men,” referring to transgender women.

Frankly, My Dear

Frankly, My Dear New Rules Protected Class 34 Comments

The Death of Academic Fraud Jason Arday Won’t Shut Us Up

Of course, the entirely predictable response of the institutional left to his cowardly and apparent self-deletion has been to insist, loudly and with quivering outrage, that his death is our fault. You see, we normal people pointed out that he lied about his background, his achievements, his credentials, and his work. The fact that we did what a functioning institution should’ve done itself outraged his boosters, so these moral illiterates now invert the moral calculus to keep the exposure of academic fraud from happening again. Arday lied pathologically and endlessly, enabled by a ridiculously solicitous academia, then likely killed himself when his lies were exposed. Obviously, the villains are the people who did not lie and did not choose to end his life.

And you’ll never guess their key accusation in a million years.

The Closure of the Internet

Freespeechers 10 Comments

Until 2015, an optimistic and liberal (in the best sense) ethos pervaded the Internet. Major Internet platforms were open and had little content policy beyond bans on real-life criminal activity (stalking, selling illegal goods, child pornography, etc). Aside from these narrow and reasonable explicit exceptions, anyone could go online and converse with interested people around the world about whatever they wanted in public. These platforms had no real means to control what people talked about on them even if they wanted to, which they didn’t; to the extent an organization can have views all believed in free1 and open online discourse, which promised to make censorship impossible and end the hegemony of 20th century broadcast media.

In this, they were backed up by major non-tech institutions, such as the UN, the EU, the US State Department, and the New York Times, all of which saw Internet freedom as a corollary of offline freedom, and one which would liberalize the world’s remaining non-democratic states in time. These institutions both supported Internet freedom rhetorically and spent hundreds of millions of dollars creating and disseminating technical tools to evade Internet censorship and preserve online anonymity.

I remember the old internet. It was a better place.

British Columbia Has a DEI Sickness

Baiting The Left Freespeechers Vast Right Wing Conspiracy 7 Comments

Ben Mulroney shares his thoughts.

Carney’s Canada: Free Speech No More

Baiting The Left Freespeechers 36 Comments

Zachary McRae shares his thoughts.

When will the Alberta Ministry of Justice start prosecuting members of the Edmonton Police Department?

In The Mail

Freespeechers Protected Class Turtle Island 30 Comments

One of SDA’s regulars sent me the following message today:

What follows is a news letter from the People’s Party. They have raised a valid point that none of our Political Parties have touched: once truth is prohibited, a nation can no longer be considered a democracy.

“You’ve probably heard about the Assembly of First Nations passing an emergency resolution demanding that the government make residential school “denialism” a criminal offence.
Grand Chief Garrison Settee believes that demanding evidence of unmarked graves should be considered “residential school denialism” and made into a hate crime.

But here’s the problem: at sites like the one in Kamloops, ground-penetrating radar flagged anomalies that the tribe itself said it “suspects” are unmarked graves.

No excavations have been done. No bodies have been found. And yet, asking for proof could soon land you in prison.
Continue reading →

The “W” Word

Frankly, My Dear Our Diversities The "W" Word 50 Comments

You’re a decade or two late to the party, Ben – but thanks for showing up.

For Ben’s next assignment: Picture the hard working civil servants who authorize the project funding at the Department of Global Affairs.

He, Too, Admires Their Basic Dictatorship

Chinada Freespeechers New Governor Tech The Libranos 7 Comments

An Act to Fortify The Surveillance State;

The Liberals are gearing up to force Bill C-22 through committee and the House of Commons in just days.

This is an insane abuse of parliament to ram through a bill fraught with privacy, security, and civil liberties concerns.

This motion curtails committee scrutiny, limits MPs’ ability to debate and amend the bill, and rushes Bill C-22 through Parliament on the government’s timetable rather than allowing full parliamentary review.

Michael Geist unpacks.

Buried in the second half of Bill C-22 is a provision granting the government the power to require “core providers” to retain categories of metadata, including transmission data, for up to one year. This is mandatory metadata retention that would require telecom and electronic service providers to store information about the communications of all their users, regardless of whether those users are suspected of anything. It is one of the most privacy invasive tools a government can deploy and the international experience suggests that there are major privacy risks.

Related.

“I am a Canadian, a free Canadian.”

Freespeechers I, Napoleon 20 Comments

From Diefenbaker to the post-national state where free speech went to die.

Today the @CDNConstFound is in court intervening in a judicial review of a Human Rights Tribunal of Ontario decision that saw a small-town mayor personally fined for voting against a request to proclaim June as Pride Month. The case is Borderland Pride v Emo

Related. ‘If you feel discomfort, go to the front counter, we can reimburse you, and you can go swim somewhere else.’” (h/t MW)

Don’t Let The Door Hit You…

Cancelled Embrace Hollywood Frankly, My Dear Media The Tolerant Left 30 Comments

As someone who could never stand Stephen Colbert’s overtly partisan, sanctimonious political cheerleading for more than a couple of seconds, I don’t think that any new void is being created by his departure; there was nothing but a void to begin with.

Among those sorry to see Colbert go is astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, a frequent guest. Johnny Carson used to book scientists, but Tyson notes wryly that not many TV hosts do these days.

Brehm saw Colbert make himself into a sort of moral authority and lean into the social justice camp of progressive Catholics: “He is playing up that moral quality by standing up for American moral values like freedom of speech, freedom of expression, and he’s doing it with a Catholic jargon, with Catholic language.”

Cry Me A River

Embrace Hollywood Frankly, My Dear 25 Comments

I assume his political and cultural views are pretty similar to his old man’s, so I’m surprised he didn’t cancel the US tour out of spite. I had no idea he even had musical talent in the first place, and even if I did I doubt I’d be rushing to get show tickets.

Kiefer Sutherland is the latest artist to be struck down by the so-called ‘Blue Dot Fever,’ cancelling his upcoming U.S. tour over poor ticket sales.

Sutherland has been playing shows overseas in support of his new album, Grey, and posting videos documenting his experience to social media.

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