Another day, another free speech showdown. This time, it’s in the U.S., where the noted free-speech advocate, blogger and founder of the Journal of Free Speech Law Prof. Eugene Volokh is suing New York’s Attorney General Letitia James over a law intended to crack down on “hateful conduct” online. The law would make a large class of website owners responsible for handling and directly responding to claims of “hateful conduct” about material on their website (e.g. in the comments section), and require them to publish a document setting out their policy on the matter. Failure to comply would carry a penalty of $1,000 per day, per infraction. Showing the intention behind this law, the Attorney General declared in October that: “Online platforms should be held accountable for allowing hateful and dangerous content to spread on their platforms.”
This law goes into effect on Saturday Dec 3rd and will affect any website that allows users to share content (a typically vague definition) and which is accessible to New Yorkers – including the Daily Sceptic. Fortunately for the U.S., they have what is the envy of all free-speech advocates around the world: the First Amendment, and the robust case law surrounding it. New York’s law is blatantly unconstitutional (and also contravenes s.230 of the Communications Decency Act 1996), so it stands zero chance of surviving legal challenge.
But then why has New York passed this law – by “Oceania-sized margins” – and why did the Governor gleefully sign it? Stupidity and squalid political posturing would be my answer. After all, this is a legislature that recently banned the sale of bulletproof vests, and the Attorney General has been spending all her time since being elected in going after political enemies, notably Trump and the NRA. But regardless of whether and when this new law gets struck down, they’ll be able to tell their voters that they’re the good guys, because who wants “hateful conduct”, right?
The Democratic Party – which runs New York – would like nothing better than to scrap the First Amendment. Indeed, they tried to do something like that in the U.S. Senate back in 2014, in a move which Forbes rightly described as “terrifying”. This stemmed from Hillary Clinton being upset about the 2008 film Hillary: The Movie, and because the Supreme Court later upheld the film company’s rights in a landmark First Amendment case (Citizens United v. FEC). Had it passed, the amendment would conveniently have prevented the release of the film Clinton Cash next time Mrs Clinton made a bid for the White House in 2016. But it certainly wasn’t just Clinton – Obama and the entire Democractic Party went along with it.
Fortunately, this was just a stunt, because constitutional amendments are extremely difficult to pass: the normal procedure requires a two-thirds majority in both houses of Congress and the approval of three-quarters of all the state legislatures (i.e., 38 out of 50). There was never any prospect of that, so the terrifying aspect of the Senate vote in 2014 was really the fact that the Democratic Party thought it was a good idea, and was in lockstep behind it. This New York law is just another example of where the majority of threats to free speech are coming from these days: the “socially progressive”.
Unfortunately, it’s not just the socially progressive. Recently, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) had to go to federal court to successfully challenge the Republican Governor of Florida Ron DeSantis’s Stop WOKE Act, which would have limited freedom of expression on campus in a totally misjudged “socially conservative” way. DeSantis is – I am credibly informed – a very smart guy, and as a graduate of Harvard Law School he presumably understood the Stop WOKE Act was always going to be struck down by the first federal judge who so much as glanced at it, which makes me think that – as in New York – it was “performative legislation”, designed mainly to appeal to the grassroots of the party. This is a destructive and time-wasting attitude – but I rather wish the U.K. Conservative Party took more of that kind of view when it comes to freedom of speech!
And even while we at the Daily Sceptic may detest wokeness in all its forms, we have to thank the redoubtable FIRE for their stand for free speech in the Florida case. (Like the Free Speech Union, FIRE has been non-partisan from the beginning – indeed, like Ira Glasser, Harvey Silverglate is on the left.) And it’s FIRE, once again, who are representing Eugene Volokh in the New York case. Other parties to the suit are Rumble (the Canada-based hosts of Trump’s Truth Social) and Locals (co-founded by Dave Rubin), meaning that for the defendant, Attorney General Letitia James, it’s another opportunity to take a glorious (but doomed) stand against Trump and the alt-right – or something.
As for Eugene Volokh, one of the great stalwarts of the free speech movement in the U.S., I wish him every success in this case, and will watch with interest and (I hope) some amusement. However, I have to mark him down for the fact that his legal free speech filing isn’t nearly up to the standard we’ve come to expect in 2022, which would be the standard set by the magnificent Supreme Court brief in Novak v. City of Parma submitted by The Onion, and which has fairly been described as “the greatest brief ever filed”.
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It’s all crap, and it has been since the beginning. Here’s a very simple piece of investigation I performed eleven years ago, in January 2013:
https://public-highway.blogspot.com/2013/01/rainmasterall-since-records-began.html
I’d just love to know what the downtick is about.
Care to stump up a fiver to enlighten little me, downticker?!
These are climate alarmists. And ofcourse their comments here would be welcome as it lets us see how absurd they are.
I do not understand why poorly sited stations are thought to have +\- errors.
All cases I have read about seem to have sited with causes of systematic error and none are negative. I have never heard of a station where there was persistent artificial cooling effects. The only errors I have read about are systematic bias upwards.
The East Park complex is a a glazed roof, which clearly acts as a greenhouse. Here is a view from underneath. No wonder alarmists refer to the greenhouse effect.
We are now about to enter into a Labour Government Green Cloud Cuckoo Land where we will all apparently get cheap clean energy. ——-Except where in the world is there a country with such a thing? Cheap clean energy means only one thing –wind and sun. So what country in the world has cheap wind and sun energy? —–The answer is NONE. The countries with the most wind, Germany and Denmark have the highest electricity prices. So why is the wind in the UK going to be cheap? It certainly isn’t so far. A quick look over our electricity bills since we started going daft for wind will reveal that.
The cretinous Green Goon Ed Miliband who gave us the Climate Change Act in 2008 and therefore all of this wind, surely cannot believe his luck that the Tories had an 80 seat majority and chucked it all away after infighting about a silly birthday cake and now he is going to have his grubby eco socialist hands on our energy supply. Although Boris and the fake Tories were heading down the same sort of Green fantasy land that panders to the UN and WEF Sustainable nonsense, it is Miliband and Labour that will really start to hammer us with this pretend to save the planet communism.
In order to get away with this tyranny you need a very plausible excuse and that excuse is Global warming (climate change). But what you find upon closer inspection of this issue is a smidgeon of the truth elevated into a planetary emergency, but with NO EVIDENCE. So because there is no evidence the climate establishment has resorted to calling failed models evidence instead. They think that if the present some output from a model and refer to it as “science” that the public who hate arguing or discussing science will just accept it and guess what—-they mostly do. So what you get is “warmest ever recorded” and “hottest ever” based on a temperature record that is s complete dogs breakfast of adjusted and manipulated data that if it was happening in any other walk of life the perpetrators would be arrested and charged with fraud.
——OK we are all sick of the fake Tories but if the UK public think life will be sweet under Labour and Miliband than I am sorry but please keep your electricity bills in a folder and see them skyrocket after the phony climate charlatans take over in July.
If we are going to have a Liebour Government with a mega-majority in the HoC, then the opposition has to come from outside on the streets every weekend. We should start next Saturday, BEFORE the election, across the country.
I’m all for that, the Palestine protesters can’t always have the streets to themselves. Though Muslims do seem to be good at dominating public spaces.
Except you would struggle to get everyone in your street to agree to something never mind the whole country. ——-We are about to get what we deserve—An eco socialist pretend to save the planet government that will have smart meters forced into every house to control the supply and cost via dynamic pricing, gas central heating ripped out, taxes on everything based on carbon footprint, priced out of going on holiday or eating eat and astronomical energy bills. If we thought the Green nonsense was bad under the Tories then we “ain’t seen nuthin yet”
As an activist with Reform Uk who are the only party to scrap Net Zero We in our constituency have struggled to get sufficient activists to run a half decent campaign. Can anyone who claims to be worried about rising costs complain yet couldn’t be arsed to get off their butts to help us.
Most will still vote for this parasite political class pandering to the UN and WEF—Traitors
I watched the weather on the news at lunchtime and again in the evening yesterday. The max temperature over the next few days was forecast as 28c at lunch. By the end of the day they’d whacked up their prediction to 31c. Someone obviously said 28c didn’t sound alarmist enough.
Top temp in East Sussex this week, 25c for two days, the back down to 19c to 21c for two weeks.
Forecast today for Milan 24c and Turin 23c
Yes that’s right, a reasonable summer’s day in Southern England.
The red on the weather maps means Communism.
However the Beeboids ( those addicted to the BBC) lap it all up and believe the nonsense. Not only that, but they are bringing their children up to fear our normal mild and temperate climate and then wonder why the children are too fearful to go out into the World.
We are lied to on a daily basis. It’s become quite amusing.
I find this terribly unamusing. The climate changers have gone full-scale COVID a while ago and trying to run their racket on endlessly repeated lies and headlines from perfectly random parts of the world where something happening to suite the narrative is happening. The original attempt was quite successful. I hope the rerun will end up rather less so. But I don’t think this can be taken for granted.
But they are getting away with it
Since they’re controlling the MSM, there’s nobody who could effectively challenge them in public. OTOH, insofar stuff like FB comments go, they’re – at least in Germany – getting nothing but scorn for their claims about breaking heat record after heat record while the temperatures in the real world are rather cool for the time of the year and the weather was mostly rainy so far.
Correct and we all realise that the MSM is just the propaganda department (Public Relations as it is called now) of the Climate Industrial Complex
Met Office monthly anomaly now running at minus 1.2C – the first below “average” month this year. No doubt this will be yet another “warm” month after a few days of sunny weather!
” This might surprise, of course, since the Met Office uses these figures to catastrophise recent increases in national and global temperatures, using measurements down to one hundredth of a degree centigrade”
No it doesn’t surprise, it is the logical conclusion of their mendacity.
How, how, how has every government agency become so corrupt? I feel like we are living through the looking glass. The people who work for the government seem to have no shame about this corruption and lunacy. It is becoming the norm. Nothing can be trusted. Nothing.
I think there is a case for leaving London out of weather forecasts. The large urban heat sink, concrete and tarmac, contributes to an exaggerated temperature.
London is shown with the highest temperature almost every day, even though it it false.
Here’s what chat GPT says. Duh