Monthly Archives: May 2017

Our Views: Progress but not victory on prison reform – The Advocate

Posted: May 18, 2017 at 2:16 pm

A weekend of tough negotiations has produced a compromise package of bills that represent a constructive effort to tackle Louisiana's bloated prison population.

We hope that legislators in the House will pass three key measures that almost sailed through the Senate Tuesday, as well as the less controversial parts of the 10- bill package working through the session.

The broad goal is to reduce sentences in line with national norms, or to make parole available to deserving inmates who might be able to return to society as productive citizens instead of charges on the taxpayer.

The means include not only better education and workforce training in state prisons and parish jails, but also making pardon and parole work better. That costs money, and in today's world you must get the cash by reducing inmate populations smartly.

Louisiana is No. 1 in its incarceration rate, by a long shot. We can do better for the taxpayer and for genuinely rehabilitated offenders by following the lead of many Southern states in embracing the proposals of the Justice Reinvestment Task Force. These are tried methods and systems from other states, not fanciful theories.

They deserve legislative support and are starting to get more traction because of the compromise talks.

Still, the public ought to be worried that Louisiana is so late to the party of criminal justice reforms.

Nor is it encouraging that exhaustive compromise negotiations in the Legislature were required. The original bills, blessed by the large majority of members of the bipartisan task force, were ambushed in a late-blooming political offensive by district attorneys and sheriffs, some of whom finance their operations with per-diem allocations for keeping state inmates. That resulted in watered-down versions of proposed changes in parole policies, and also in sentencing reforms. In their original form, these proposals weren't radical measures but were in line with changes made in other conservative states.

The ideal of data-driven policy crashed into Louisiana politics, but the deal brokered by Gov. John Bel Edwards reflects real gains. The three Senate bills by the body's president, John Alario, R-Westwego, and by Sen. Danny Martiny, R-Metairie, rewrite sentences for most drug offenses reducing penalties for low-level drug possession and scaling prison terms based on the amount of drugs involved and overhaul the state's numerous theft statutes.

The bills also reduce or eliminate mandatory minimum sentences for some crimes and allow judges to sentence a wider range of people to probation instead of prison.

More must be done. For example, at least a one-year delay in implementing more thoughtful sentencing reforms means that there is a lot left to be accomplished by this year's unusual alliance of business leaders, Christian conservatives and liberal groups.

They have to keep at it, just as Edwards has to work administratively with sheriffs and others in the system to make polices into practices in Louisiana's sprawling empire of punishment that has too often not fit the crime.

After weeks of debate over proposed overhauls to Louisiana's criminal justice system aimed a

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Duterte to Trump: What witch-finders can teach us about today’s popular leaders – Philippine Star

Posted: at 2:12 pm

(THE CONVERSATION) It is hardly a new observation that political leaders seeking populist appeal will exacerbate popular fears: about immigrants, terrorists and the other.

President Donald Trump plays to fears of immigrants and Muslims. Benjamin Netanyahu inflames Israeli fears by constantly reminding citizens about the threats around them. And many African leaders bring up fears of satanism and witchcraft. In earlier times, too, American and European leaders invoked threats of communists and Jews.

Such observations explain how leaders use fear to create popular anxiety. But this focus on fear and evil forces, I believe, does something else as wellit could actually contribute to a leaders charisma. He or she becomes the one person who knows the extent of a threat and also how to address it.

This path to leadership takes place in much smaller-scale situations too, as I have studied in my own work.

In popular parlance, one calls a person charismatic because he or she seems to possess some inner force to which people are drawn.

Social scientists have long perceived this ostensible inner force as the product of social interaction: Charisma, in this interpretation, arises in the interplay between leaders and their audiences. The audiences present their own enthusiasms, needs and fears to the leader. The leader, for his part, mirrors these feelings through his talents in gesture, rhetoric, his conviction in his own abilities and his particular messages about danger and hope.

In sub-Saharan Africa, over the course of the 20th century, charismatic witch-finders swept through villages promising the cleansing of evil. In both Africa and Europe, communities had long been familiar with witches and their modes of attack in general. It has been common in many cultures throughout history to attribute misfortune to witches, who are both a part of society and also malevolent. Misfortunes can thus seem to be the product of human malevolence rather than some abstract divine or natural cause.

Witch-finders, as I see it, have offered four new elements to the basic image of witches:

The witch-finder could show people material evidence of witches activity: grotesque dolls or buried gourds, for example. Herarely shecould coerce others to testify against an accused witch. Often, he would present himself as the target of witches active enmity, detailing the threats they had made against him and the attacks he had suffered.

The witch-finders authority overand indispensability tothe growing crisis of threatening evil shaped his charisma. People came to depend on his capacity to see evil and on his techniques of ridding it from the land. An uncleansed village felt vulnerable, awash in malevolent powers, ones neighbors all suspect; while a village that a witch-finder had investigated seemed safer, calmer, its paths and alleys swept of evil substances.

Of course, in order for a witch-finder to be successful in activating fears, there were many extenuating circumstances, both historical and social, that had to work in his favor. These could be catastrophes like the plague, or new ways of organizing the world (such as African colonialism), or political tensionsall of which could make his identification of evil people especially useful, even necessary. Also, he had to come off as professional and he had to have the ability to translate local fears in compelling ways.

Indeed, there were many situations in both Europe and Africa when such claims to authority failed to stimulate a sense of crisis or to legitimate witch-finders procedures.

For example, in 15th-century Europe, the Franciscan friar Bernardino was able to instigate horrific witch-burnings in Rome but failed to persuade the people of Siena of the dangers witches posed.

But there are times when this pattern has come together and witnessed outright panic and ensuing atrocities. As historians Miri Rubin and Ronald Hsia have described, various such charismatic discerners of evil in medieval and Renaissance Northern Europe (often Christian clergy and friars) promoted false charges against local Jews that they hungered for stolen Eucharists or for the blood of Christian children.

These charismatic leaders organized hunts through Jewish houses to uncover signs of mutilated Eucharist or childrens bones hunts that swiftly turned into pogroms, as participants in these hunts felt a conspiracy of evil was emerging before them.

The contemporary West has in no way been immune to these patterns on both large and more restricted scales. During the late 1980s and early 1990s, the United States and the United Kingdom found themselves facing a panic over satanic cults, alleged to be sexually abusing children and adults.

In this case, a number of psychiatrists, child protection officers, police and evangelical clergy were styling themselves as experts in discerning the abuses of satanists both in daycare centers and among psychiatric patients. Many people came to believe in the urgency of the satanic threat. Yet no evidence for the existence of such satanic cults ever came to light.

In many ways, we can see a similar interplay between charisma and the discernment of evil in those modern leaders that seek a populist appeal.

For example, in his campaign, Trump insisted that he alone could utter the words radical Islamic terrorism which assured members of his audience that only Trump was calling out the terrorist threat. In Philippines, President Rodrigo Duterte threatened publicly to eat the liver of the terrorists there. These leaders, I believe, are trying to convey that there is a larger threat out there and, even more, they are assuring people that the leader alone understands the nature of that larger threat. Trumps several attempts to ban Muslim visitors since his election have made his supporters feel understood and safer.

As my work on witch-finders shows, an anxious culture may invest itself in a leader who, it feels, can discern and eliminate a pervasive and subversive evil. Perhaps, in todays world, the terrorist has become the new witch: a monstrous incarnation of evil, posing a unique threat to our communities and undeserving of normal justice.

Do our leaders provide the charismatic leadership for this current era?

______

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Review: A Mythic Force Rages in the Welsh ‘Iphigenia in Splott’ – New York Times

Posted: at 2:11 pm


New York Times
Review: A Mythic Force Rages in the Welsh 'Iphigenia in Splott'
New York Times
As embodied by the dynamic young actress Sophie Melville, she combines incinerating contempt with the fierce, resilient hedonism that belongs to young adults for whom the day begins when the bars and the dance clubs open. This woman on the prowl ...

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Truth, trust, trend, and Trump – The Prince Arthur Herald

Posted: at 2:10 pm

2017-05-01

Time magazine has lost most of the influence it once had, but not its flair for striking covers. A spring one asked, in bold red lettering on a black background, Is Truth Dead?. They used the same cover format as they had once in 1966, then asking Is God Dead?. But that had been a late popular reflection on Nietzsches philosophical assertion that this was the case. The cover and content this time were current and narrow, and better replaced by Has Trump Killed Truth?.

Either choice recalls G. K. Chestertons wise priest, Father Brown, explaining we should worry less about wrong answers, more whether we are asking the right question. Perhaps Nietzsche was doing so, as was the cooler but epistemologically similar David Hume, but maybe should not have published their obituaries. Both of them were revolutionary philosopher-theologians and historians of ideas, ever afterwards misunderstood and misapplied as destructive gravediggers. All searches for Truth with a capital T can be defined as searches for God with a capital G, including those made by atheists, despite some insisting otherwise. It has been, and likely will continue to be, an eternal and worldwide search. For Western European civilization, it can be traced back to ancient Greek philosophers, Jewish prophets, Roman statesmen, and Christian synthesizers; then only partially recast by Enlightenment philosophers. Later philosophers, in the English-speaking world, after Bertrand Russell, have largely scaled down Truth-seeking to analyses of the language we use when turning to ultimate questions.

For most people most of the time, decisions about what to think and what to do are not made with conscious use of, say, epistemology, ethics, or logic.

University courses in philosophy, if well-taught, may give practical benefits. They can aid thinking to purpose in anything from particle physics research to grocery shopping, as well as helping to refine each individuals search. But for most people most of the time, decisions about what to think and what to do are not made with conscious use of, say, epistemology, ethics, or logic. In personal relationships, in occupations, in politics and public affairs, even scholars, when not using their specialized expertise, are more likely to employ personal general knowledge, as does everyone else. Rival philosophical theories of truth, even pragmatism,are assumed to require more close inspection of single propositions than time allows. Before even considering Truth, the way we accept or reject important claims about the world depends on Trust with a capital T, even to how far we decide to trust Hume, Nietzsche, or Russell, or all quasi-philosophers, disguised theologians, or ideology sales clerks. The alarming Big Question for this century Time might have chosen would be Is TRUST Dead?

Academic philosophers might dislike this choice, as Trust is an even harder term to capture in precise definition than God or Truth. It is more variable, multiply-layered in experience, mixes empiricism and rationalism, and worse, is ultimately intuitive. It embraces stances from dog-like blind faith to assurance strengthened over many years of close attention. Yet even that, once modified by the persuasive but counter-intuitive character of natural science since Galileo and Newton, came to be recognized as permanently divorcing Trust from certainty. Since Hume, for careful thinkers, that noun must be confined to the tautologies of pure mathematics and logic.

Our lives can still be greatly informed and enriched by close attention to history, as truthful as we are able to find it and make it, including empirical and analytical reasoning, aware of fallibility and acceptance of some claims of myth, so long as they are recognized as such. That latter talent is sometimes found, not in academic historians, but among gifted romantic poets. Take Wordsworth:

The world is too much with us, late and soon, Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers; Little we see in Nature that is ours; We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon! The Sea that bares her bosom to the moon, The winds that will be howling at all hours, And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers, For this, for everything, we are out of tune; It moves us not Great God! Id rather be A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn, So might I, standing on this pleasant lea, Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn, Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea; Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn.

In youth, Wordsworth, Coleridge, and many of their young contemporaries, celebrated the French Revolution. In age, they, and others less famous, mostly became conservative, appalled when they came to see that a mistaken trust in the future could produce worse consequences than a partially justified absence of trust in the institutions of Bourbon France. Americans, on the other hand, learned or not, from their less utopian Revolution to the late 20th century, mostly took a different direction. They combined a constitutional and social order both liberal and conservative, radical only in near-uninhibited capitalism and quick adoption of advancing technology. If the world was too much with them, and far more completely than the one that so depressed Wordsworth, it also brought broader and more equally-distributed satisfactions.

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That complacent success, however, also encouraged another general enthusiasm, one always existing, but given exponentially growing intensity, a neophilia that is now Americanizing the whole world. Fashion and pressure on ever-malleable public opinion has made Trend with a capital T another order of the day. For many of the most powerful and influential people, The Trend has been trusted, often worshipped, as much or more than God or Truth.

Distrust has rolled on through history as well, but Americans used to see it as foreign, or as the lot of unhappy individuals, or at the most, of some minorities. But that confidence started collapsing in the last decades of the 20th century with astonishing speed. With hindsight, the most likely causes are so often cited, now by both political left and right, as to scarcely require detailed recapitulation spiralling debt at all levels, the 2008 Crash, years of anaemic growth, increasing inequality, quickening automation, scarcity of well-compensated employment, and increasingly-unwelcome immigration. A related derivative force piles on as well, the triumph of nihilist entertainment over substantial content in TV and social media.

Donald Trump incarnates the public reaction to all of these, more effect than the causal agent he pretends to be, his constant theme being that Trust is Dead!. All serious conservatives should engage in the hard work of reducing the sway of this proposition, which will take years. In the universities, his most politically dangerous accomplices are not his supporters, but, displaying the paradoxical nature of politics, those of his faculty and student opponents who combine TV entertainment hysteria with thuggish censorship. They are trying to become The Trend, and they and spineless administrators should be resisted with firmness, intelligence, decency, and law. Otherwise, Trump may be the prophet of a coming new God, live and terrible.

The Prince Arthur Herald Photo credit: TIME

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A veteran journalist runs away with the circus. – St. Louis Magazine

Posted: at 2:10 pm

A veteran journalistruns awaywith the circus. Minutes after quitting my job last year, as the Protestant ethic trembled, an imaginary chandelier clattered. This imaginary racket set me to thinking I was crazy and to wondering what I might do next. But hallelujah! A zephyr blew my way and gently suggested that the best thing would be to give in to an honorable impulse by running away and joining the circus.

Then clear light shined on my running-away-from-home plan. Genuine long-term, even lifelong disappearance came into sharp focus as impossible, if not immoral. I realized that the circus world, when one is starting out, anyway, is a young fellows endeavor. But hang on. Impossible? Circus Florathe only circus I know anything about and an institution I deeply lovewas pitched nine blocks from my apartment, in Grand Center. So an on-again, off-again running away was clearly possible, in walking distance, familiar. If the new administration would say yes, I was ready to go.

I rode up to meet with the new artistic director, Jack Marsh, and his mother, Cecil MacKinnon, theater director and featured performer. Finding them, I jammed on my brakes and fell into a bloody heap at their feet.

Lets do it, said Marsh, who is boyish but tough, able to execute a head-over-heels flip from standing still and smart and canny enough at only 32 years old to be artistic director, which means not only thinking up stories and acts but also spotting talent and taking care of the wrenching job of firing.

Marsh grew up in New York City and its suburbs. Wherever the circus was, so was I, he recalls. His mother is a circus institution and veteran of the Flora company, appearing in the center ring wearing a commedia dellarte costume and moving the show along with her narrative. As a boy, Marsh would come around and perform, juggling and tumbling. He went on to attend Harvard, then law school at the University of Wisconsin. He worked as a lawyer for a while, including a stint as a district attorney in St. Croix County, Wisconsin. In 2014, he helped his mother produce the amazing Circus Flora performances of A Winter Fable with the St. Louis Symphony at Powell Hall. After that run, it was back to the law. It was so boring by comparison, he said. Now hes back to art and the circus, perhaps for good.

His predecessor, the beloved Ivor David Baldingwho founded the circus and rescued its namesake from poachers when she was a calfdied in 2014, at age 75. Circus Flora folks and, indeed, the entire circus world were staggered. Laura Carpenter Baldinghis wife, soulmate, and creative associateis an accomplished horsewoman and has spent her life with animals at her family farm, Three Creek Farm in Weldon Spring. The family jumped in to help and, as shows must, Circus Flora went on.

I had been in and out of Circus Floras tents for years. Years ago, I showed up to learn to juggle alongside Balding. Later, at Three Creek Farm, I tried and tried to stand up on a galloping circus horses back as it careered around the arena. Most terrifyingly, I tried to walk a high wire stretched over concrete at Union Station (with Tino Wallenda of The Flying Wallendas holding my shoulders).

Dave Barry once wrote of the sea, Staying on the surface all the time is like going to the circus and staring at the tent. Similarly, after stepping into the middle of Circus Floras single ring, I began to understand something that critic Heinz Politzer wrote about the circus: It was a world between.

The magnetism of the circus is far more than entertainment. Though it is amusing or goosebumpy on one levelwith cavorting clowns and up-in-the-air derring-doon another plane it is a stage for the unconscious. Circus life is replete with joy and pain, pleasure and danger.

The appearance of abandon, suggesting unfettered fun and athletic virtuosity, is real up to a point. But then the curtain is rung down, disguising harsh aspects of real life but revealing that it wears a mantle of fantasy and a cloak of security.

As these reflections popped up one after another like popcorn and swirled like cotton candy in production, a simultaneous awareness crackled like lightning in my mind, a pervasive off and on light, illuminating home and all that goes into it, persons and animals and possessions and obligations, a place filled full with staggering anguishes and sweet memories of its own, a life in fact I cherish.

There are all sorts of attendant pleasures: applause under the tent and praise outside on the lot. There are pictures in magazines and the joys of friendship. Although there are no check stubs on which are marked benefits, there is value: maps to freedom, to lessons for life outside the margins, to understanding what swims beneath the surface.

Fun and games of innocence spring up during free time at Circus Flora. A game called soccer-tennis is a favorite. It is played in a miniature tennis court, with the layout drawn in chalk on the circus lots asphalt surface. There are parties to acknowledge holidays, birthdays, and other special days. Many of the circus folks travel in Airstream trailers, and they often gather in the staging areas for cocktails as the sun goes over the yardarm. Dorothy Carpenter, Laura Bladings sister, is the Perle Mesta of Circus Flora, and keeps the parties rolling.

With life lived amongst trained dogs, fiery-eyed Arabians, goats, blue-eyed camels, water-squirting clowns, jugglers, and musicians, life at Flora is a combination of infectious play and serious philosophical complexities that perplex and thrill those who peel the institutional onion.

Hovey Burgess peels the onion without ceasing. Hes the heart and soul of Circus Flora and the curator of knowledge and tradition. Famous in his own right as a historian, teacher, professor, mentor, performer, and author of a multivolume circus encyclopedia, he occupies a special position in the circus universe, reigning as a sort of philosopher-shaman.

Years ago, I asked David Balding for the name and phone number of a juggling expert, and he introduced me to Burgess. Now in his mid-seventies, Burgess is still going strong, living in a Collyer Brothers version of an Airstream trailer parked on the circus lot. Hes told me plenty about juggling, about circuses, about trapeze flying and sawdust. His face radiates the pink-cheeked good cheer of a Coca-Cola ad from 1920, way before the slogan Bring Home the Coke had a different meaning. The cheeks and gentle demeanor mask a formidable intelligence and indefatigable loyalty to the art of the circus.

At 16, Burgess wanted to run away and join the circus. A buddy had warned him that he probably would never come backand he never has used the return ticket. He had good grades in high school but no particular desire to go to a regular college, so he earned his B.A. at Pasadena Playhouse.

For four decades, he was a fixture at New York Universitys celebrated Tisch School of the Arts. His circus course was a requisite. Even if a young artist had no interest in the circus, the skills of what Burgess named equilibristicsconcentration (learned by juggling and plate spinning) and balance (learned on a tightrope) and strength (acquired on the flying trapeze)helped prepare student actors holistically for acting careers.

Im not the first to speculate on this, but it seems Burgess navigates a philosophical tightrope clutched at one end by the Enlightenment trailblazer Benedict de Spinoza, whose understanding of rationalism holds fast today and explains the how of things. At the ropes other end, holding forth on the why and whither, is Ludwig Wittgenstein, whose advocacy of metaphysics and his understanding of the power of goodness are of special importance to those such as Burgess. Wittgenstein and his apostles and other like-minded men and women look at the circus and see beyond the margins of existence and under its surface. They cringe as the world continues to produce increasing horrors, as our leaders concoct lies about them.

With optimism rising above the worlds lethal messes is Burgess, still daring, younga venerable man on an existential trapeze. His advice to those who would run away: Follow your bliss.

At the end of each show, in the grand finale, a hopeful happy ending and a special rumbustious form of rejoicing and redemption spins around, acted out by the blissful ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls of Circus Flora.

As this diverse and radiant rainbow company parades round and round the ring and then out into open air, it is good to remember the suggestion of the 14th-century mystic Mother Julian of Norwich, whose way of saying that the human show must go on is this: All shall be well and all shall be well and all manner of thing shall be well.

For centuries, the circus has been synonymous with impermanence: rail cars, trailers, canvas tents, sawdust-covered floors. Though Circus Flora has always felt its historical roots (The Flying Wallendas are old trapeze royalty, dating back to Europe), its never felt bound to tradition when it could do something better (like being animal-friendly). Take this Februarys big announcement: Thanks to a partnership with the Kranzberg Arts Foundation, Circus Flora has decided to permanently settle in Grand Center. There arent renderings yetor even an address. We can say that we will be in Grand Center, says executive director Larry Mabrey, and that dedicated space wont be in the parking lot of Powell Hall. Though he cant share concrete details yet, he promises that exciting things are in store. Considering the kind of magic Floras able to conjure in Grand Center just during the month of June, that seems like a sure bet.

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National Student Group Seeks To Bolster Campus Free Speech – National Review

Posted: at 2:09 pm

Earlier this month, a professor at California State University, Fresno, berated the schools Students for Life group, going so far as to scrub out chalk messages that were part of the clubs university-approved pro-life display. Fresno State students also tried to efface the display, and the professor insisted that free speech was only permitted in the free speech zone, which had in fact been eliminated by the schools administration two years earlier.

Such incidents occur so frequently on college campuses these days that its easy for them to become white noise. When groups host conservative events on campus, they are most often greeted by protests, some of which have grown violent in recent months like the debacles greeting Charles Murray and Ann Coulter at Middlebury College and UCBerkeley respectively. And frequently, the colleges and universities involved acquiesce to student requests to shut down certain events with which they disagree. While groups such as the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) and the Alliance Defending Freedom have long track records of legally (and successfully) protecting students rights oncampus, there has been little in the way of nationally coordinated free-speech movements bubbling up from students who have had enough of being shut down.

That changed just a few weeks ago, when 22 college students met at the University of Chicago, traveling from across the country, including from schools such as New York University, the University of Michigan, Princeton University, and Chicagos own DePaul University and University of Chicago. At the event, students offered presentations about the state of free speech on their campuses.

One student, Michael Hout, traveled to the weekend-long conference from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where he is a junior. After being involved in Democratic politics in his home state of Georgia, Hout sat on the national council of College Democrats and served as the groups chartering director, in charge of founding new chapters on campuses.

But after volunteering extensively in these capacities, he began to realize how strong his partys tendency to smother free speech truly was, and he eventually decided to leave the Democrats and become a registeredindependent, believing that he could do more to reform the party from the outside than from within. Today, he describes himself as a classical liberal.

Fed up with the lack of respect for free speech on their campuses, Hout and his fellow 21 conference attendees drafted a statement of principles, in which they say that they are united in our shared conviction that free expression is critical to our society, in spite of our differing backgrounds, perspectives, and ideologies.

Emboldened by the gathering, they formed a new, wholly student-run organization Students for Free Expression through which they hope to foster campus atmospheres that permit and even celebrate free speech. So far, their statement has garnered nearly 1000 signatures, and it remains open for anyone to sign.

We want to operate as the counterbalance on campuses, so that if theres an issue, were on the ground, Hout tells National Review in an interview. Though the exact contours of the group have yet to be set in stone, he imagines there will be some sort of education component to explain the value of free expression to fellow students, coupled with hosting events with FIRE speakers.

Were not looking to create another group to sponsor Milo [Yiannopoulos] or Ann Coulter. Thats not what this group is going to be, he adds. Not that theres anything wrong with inviting those speakers. But we want to be a more modest group to be a watchdog for free-speech rights, even at private universities, where students still have natural rights and should be aware of them.

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Here’s How Trump’s FCC Is Threatening Your Free Speech – Motherboard

Posted: at 2:09 pm

Democratic lawmakers took to the Senate floor on Wednesday to warn that the Trump administration's plan to dismantle US net neutrality rules imperils free speech at a time when an open platform for political dissent is needed more than ever.

The outpouring of opposition from Senate Democrats came one day before President Trump's Federal Communications Commission chief Ajit Pai is expected to formally begin the process of killing the Obama-era rules on Thursday, despite broad public support for the principle that all internet content should be treated equally.

Net neutrality is the concept that internet service providers (ISPs) like AT&T and Verizon shouldn't be allowed to prioritize or block legal content on their networks. It also means that they can't set up online fast lanes for deep-pocketed companies at the expense of startups. This open access principle is responsible for establishing the internet as an unprecedented platform for economic growth, civic engagement and free speech, according to net neutrality advocates.

During a series of Senate floor speeches, Democratic lawmakers repeatedly emphasized the importance of net neutrality for free speech online. And they made clear that the internet's role in facilitating unfettered public dialogue is especially crucial now, given Trump's hostile attitude toward the First Amendment, including his characterization of news organizations as "the enemy of the American people."

"Net neutrality has never been more important," said Sen. Richard Blumenthal, the Connecticut Democrat. "Allowing broadband providers to block or discriminate against certain content providers is a danger to free speech and freedom of our press. These principles are fundamental to our democracy. We should safeguard them by stopping this proposed repeal of the internet order."

Sen. Al Franken, the Minnesota Democrat, echoed that sentiment. "I have always called net neutrality the free speech issue of our time, because it embraces our most basic constitutional freedoms," he said. "Unrestricted public debate is vital to the functioning of our democracy. Now, perhaps more than ever, the need to preserve a free and open internet is abundantly clear."

Sen. Maggie Hassan, the New Hampshire Democrat, pointed out the net neutrality is especially important to ensure that the internet is a "platform for traditionally underrepresented voices including women and minorities to be heard, which adds to our economic strength. An open internet serves as a platform to elevate voices that are underrepresented or marginalized in traditional mediaan experience many women in the field know all too well."

The nation's largest broadband companies hate the FCC's net neutrality policy because it subjects them to strict "common carrier" regulations that were originally intended to ensure that phone companies can't pick and choose what callsand callersto connect. These corporate giants have spent millions of dollars in recent years to attack the policy in federal court, Congress and at the FCC.

FCC Chairman Pai, a former Verizon lawyer, appears more than willing to do the bidding of the broadband industry. Last month, he announced a plan to dismantle the agency's net neutrality rules, effectively gutting the agency's ability to enforce strong open internet safeguards, and opening the door for ISPs to favor their own content or create paid online fast lanes in order to boost their profits.

Because Pai effectively controls the FCC, there's virtually nothing that Democratic lawmakers can do to thwart Pai's agenda, other than try to mobilize grassroots opposition "in every corner of the country," which they pledged to do in an open letter "to everyone who uses the internet" published Wednesday on TechCrunch.

Open internet advocates accuse Pai of putting the interests of the broadband industry ahead of the interests of the American people. "The Federal Communications Commission is not trying to help consumers by rolling back net neutrality protections," said Sen. Ron Wyden, the Oregon Democrat. "They are doing it to make it easier for the big cable companies to be in a position to shove out true and real competition."

Pai's crusade against the FCC's net neutrality rules is consistent with the broader campaign by the Trump administration and Republican lawmakers to roll back pro-consumer regulations across broad swaths of the US economy, according to Sen. Edward J. Markey, the Massachusetts Democrat.

"This effort on net neutrality is just one piece of the Republicans' effort to dismantle the basic protections safeguarding American families," Markey said on the Senate floor. "Instead of protecting our privacy, our health care, our environment, or our net neutrality, the Republicans want to give it all away to their friends and allies in big corporations."

Pai's proposal will almost certainly be approved at Thursday's FCC May open meeting, launching several months of public comment and agency deliberation before a final decision.

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How Missouri Used Shared Governance to Preserve Free Speech … – The Chronicle of Higher Education (subscription)

Posted: at 2:09 pm

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The University of Missouri torn by conflict, built trust and crafted a workable campus-speech policy by relying on openness and the combined wisdom of faculty and administrators.

Last week Tennessee enacted a law designed to promote free speech on the states public-university campuses. I support free expression on campus and understand why politicians might have been motivated to protect it with legislation. But this sort of legislation is a clumsy instrument with which to craft academic policy, and university leaders in other states would be wise to quickly address free-speech issues head on. Delay invites speculation that faculty and administrators are at best indifferent to free-speech rights and risks further intervention by impatient politicians. Recent success at the University of Missouri can be a national model of how to do this well.

At Missouri, free speech has been a hot topic lately. In November 2015, the president of the university system and the chancellor of the Columbia campus ("Mizzou") resigned on the same day, in the wake of student protests concerning the universitys racial climate. (The events were vastly more complicated and involved several other issues unrelated to race, but this summary will do for now.)

Some observers denounced the student protesters for dragging the universitys name through the mud, flinging broad accusations of racism, and making unreasonable demands. Others applauded the students for their idealism, their strength of conviction, and their perseverance in the face of intimidation as well their tangible successes. In one particularly unfortunate moment, a professor shouted at a student and then pushed his camera in an effort to stop him from approaching and filming student protesters, and the confrontation became national news. She would ultimately be fired as a result.

Appointed interim chancellor in the aftermath of the resignations, Hank Foley knew he had free-speech problems. Journalists were questioning how the home of one of the worlds first (and best!) journalism schools could allow students to create a "no media" zone on the campus quad, as well as how a communications professor ended up in an argument that got so out of hand. Meanwhile, black students among others continued to face hateful speech, including criminal threats. Events on the quad had made at least one thing clear: Many on campus had no idea just what the rules were.

Responding to someone who posts on the now-defunct social media app Yik Yak, "Im going to stand my ground tomorrow and shoot every black person I see" is not especially tricky as a policy matter. University of Missouri police found him and arrested him. But when white students utter racial slurs near black students, the question is more complicated. In addition to drawing the line between unlawful harassment and criminal threats (which the university may regulate) and garden-variety racist stupidity (which is mostly protected speech), the university would need to decide all sorts of other speech-related questions presented by the protests and likely to recur.

For example, are students allowed to camp on the quad? The former chancellor allowed it (despite existing university rules prohibiting it), but perhaps that was bad policy. Can members of the media be excluded from part of the quad by students seeking refuge from cameras and interviews, and is the answer to that affected by the chancellors implicit permission for the students to erect a tent village? What are the rules concerning electronic amplification of voices and music? What about chalk? And putting aside questions about legal rules, how can we build a campus at which everyone feels welcome, free inquiry is encouraged, and the best ideals of higher education may flourish as a result?

In January of 2016, Mr. Foley, who had seen his predecessor take heat for inadequate consultation with faculty on such matters as governance of the medical school and graduate-student tuition waivers, and I, as chair of the MU Faculty Council, appointed the Ad Hoc Joint Committee on Protests, Public Spaces, Free Speech, and the Press. The faculty contingent included two free-speech experts, one from the law school and one from journalism. Administration members included the vice chancellor for student affairs, the police chief, and the vice chancellor for inclusion, diversity, and equity. We also appointed two student members and invited someone from the general counsels office to attend as an adviser.

Despite the committees broad representation, there were immediate complaints. One journalism student noted the lack of any students from his school on the committee roster. Others wondered whether the six faculty appointees had too little or perhaps too much connection to recent protests. Rather than attempting to please everyone by adding more and more committee members, we reassured everyone that the committees report would be purely advisory.

It would not enact regulations but would instead make recommendations to the chancellor and the Faculty Council, who would then work together to craft a final version. We also promised to publish the committees suggestions and to hold public forums, as well as smaller meetings with student groups especially interested in the committees work. These procedural promises built trust that the substance would eventually prove acceptable to a wide cross-section of the university community.

Further trust accrued in March 2016 when the committee recommended a statement reaffirming the universitys "commitment to free expression" that was modeled on a similar statement released by the University of Chicago and adopted elsewhere. The Faculty Council and the chancellor endorsed it.

Throughout the spring, the committee met to discuss drafts. The student committee members, chosen after consultation with student-government leaders, informed the committee about which proposed rules might incite student discontent. The adviser from the general counsels office provided background on how a Missouri statute could complicate the First Amendment analysis concerning regulations of university property.

In late May 2016, the committee chair transmitted the committees detailed recommendations to the chancellor and me. I shared the report with the Faculty Council, and the chancellor emailed all faculty, staff, and students a link to the committee web page where the draft rules had been posted. It didnt take long for suggested improvements to appear in my inbox. This past fall, we held public meetings, and the committee prepared updated drafts incorporating changes suggested in written comments and at the forums.

Eventually, the Faculty Council approved a set of policies, and the chancellor directed staff to distill them into new provisions of the "Business Policy and Procedure Manual." A few days before leaving for his new job, Interim Chancellor Foley announced his formal approval of the policies, effective June 1, 2017.

The rules represent the shared wisdom of faculty and administration, as well as the staff who will enforce them and the students they will regulate. With a combination of expertise, patience, and goodwill, we have shown how shared governance is supposed to work and how free speech can be protected.

Ben Trachtenberg is an associate professor of law and chair of the Faculty Council at the University of Missouri.

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The States Where Campus Free-Speech Bills Are Being Born: A … – The Chronicle of Higher Education (subscription)

Posted: at 2:09 pm

Updated (5/15/2017, 4:57 p.m.) with information on legislation under consideration in Louisiana.

A wave of proposed legislation on campus free speech is making its way through statehouses across the nation. Last week Tennessees governor, Bill Haslam, signed into law a measure that the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education called the most comprehensive state legislation protecting free speech on college campuses that weve seen passed anywhere in the country.

That new law, among other things, bars public colleges from establishing free-speech zones and requires them to adopt broad statements of support for free expression. Read more about the new law.

The new crop of bills is broadly based on a model designed by the Goldwater Institute, a conservative think tank. The American Association of University Professors said in a statement on Thursday that it opposes any legislation that interferes with the institutional autonomy of colleges and universities by undermining the role of faculty, administration, and governing board in institutional decision-making and the role of students in the formulation and application of institutional policies affecting student affairs.

Heres a rundown of similar measures across the country that The Chronicle could find, and where they stand. Did we miss one? Send it to chris.quintana@chronicle.com.

A lawmaker this month introduced a bill that would prevent people on Californias college campuses from disinviting speakers and would remove existing free-speech codes. It is very similar to the Wisconsin bill (see below).

The states governor signed into law in April a measure that bars free-speech zones on public campuses throughout the state. According to The Denver Post, the University of Colorado system voiced opposition to an early version of the bill, but eventually supported it.

The Illinois House of Representatives is considering a bill that would require public colleges and universities to suspend or expel students who twice infringe on the expressive rights of others. It was introduced in February.

The Louisiana House of Representatives is considering a bill that would require the Board of Regents to create a committee on free expression and a freshman orientation focused on free-speech issues. Those who violate free-speech policies twice would face expulsion or suspension. Violators could also be open to legal action.

Lawmakers this month introduced a bill in the states Senate that would require public universities and colleges to punish students who twice prevent others from speaking on a campus.

Lawmakers are considering a measure very similar to the one in Wisconsin (see below). The legislation is intended to ensure the fullest degree of intellectual freedom and free expression. The bill cleared the North Carolina House of Representatives and is now bound for the State Senate.

The Texas Senate approved a bill last week that bars free-speech zones on public campuses.

The governor signed a bill in March that outlines a free-speech policy and states that those who violate it can face legal action, including fines.

Lawmakers approved and the governor signed into law a measure that states: No public institution of higher education shall abridge the constitutional freedom of any individual, including enrolled students, faculty, and other employees and invited guests to speak on campus.

The law does not have the prescriptive provisions featured in bills modeled on the Goldwater legislation.

A bill modeled on the Goldwater Institutes proposal would prohibit students at public colleges from interfering with the free-speech rights of others, and would require an orientation on free-speech issues for freshmen, among other things.

Critics said at a public hearing last week that the bill contains unnecessary provisions that actually would infringe on the rights of students.

Chris Quintana is a breaking-news reporter. Follow him on Twitter @cquintanadc or email him at chris.quintana@chronicle.com. Andy Thomason oversees breaking-news coverage. Send him a tip at andy.thomason@chronicle.com. And follow him on Twitter @arthomason.

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On the subject of Freedom of Speech – Nolan Chart LLC

Posted: at 2:07 pm

Yes, Larry Flynt was right when he said that Freedom of Speech is not for the kind of speech you like, its for the kind of speech you hate. And Oliver Wendall Holmes was ignorant and wrong when offering his example of Fire in a Crowded Movie House. That being said, yes there are limits to Free Speech!

Death Threats are a good example of limits of Free Speech and common sense grounds for a restraining order. Treason and Sedition are another example of limited Free Speech. Openly advocating the violent overthrow of the US Government, even with the leadership as ignorant and embarrassing as the current administration, is a good reason for someone to go to jail for what they advocate. Inciting a Riot is not only a good example of limited Free Speech but also why it is important that the same rules apply to the Right and the Left.

And please, kind reader, if you could have the decency not to bring up the odious and false example of shouting Fire in a crowded theatre ever again, that would be most wise and benevolent of you. That example was from a famous Supreme Court Case and is attributed to Justice Oliver Wendall Holmes. But the thing is, the defendant in that case was not being charged with shouting Fire in a crowded theatre. He was being charged with writing an anti-war pamphlet in Yiddish at the outset of World War 1 in which he correctly compared the 13th Amendments ban on involuntary servitude to the Draft.

So the question of just when, in the modern discourse, the line has been crossed regarding the other side, Right or Left, going too far has come up recently.

Portions of the Left (specifically the Academic Left) do have censorious elements present.

Often dubbed Social Justice Warriors they are often portrayed in a contradictory manner. One one hand, they are a menace that is out of control and a direct threat to Freedom of Speech as they assert a non existent right not to be offended. And the same people decrying this out of control menace will often deride them as Special Snowflakes who have been triggered and need to go back to a safe space.

Yknow, just like Special Snowflake Jeff Sessions when he is laughed at by an activist or Special Snowflake Tim Price after being asked questions by arrested reporter Daniel Heyman who was just doing his job.

We are hearing insincere snide bleatings referencing Freedom of Speech aimed at the SJW left from people who throw conniption fits when Happy Holidays is said instead of Merry Christmas and by those who are more outraged at Colin Kaepernicks silent but visible protest than at the murders of unarmed black people by law enforcement with little or no accountability.

Its important to note that when criticizing SJWs, that they be both horrible threats AND pathetic scapegoats. Think of the role Emmanuel Goldstien played in Orwells 1984! Thats what the groundwork is being laid for. Its the groundwork for a political narrative akin to where Goldstien is the enemy, not Big Brother! In a similar vein, SJWs are your enemy, you can trust the Authoritarian State!

And this is coming from someone who is actively repulsed by unneeded academic censorship. I believe that there are two views you can have on Freedom of Speech. You are either for it or you are against it. And Freedom of of Speech is for the kind of Speech you hate.

And I do hate pretty much everything which comes out of the mouths of sad demented racist transphobic thugs. So, do those same sad demented racist transphobic thugs have Freedom of Speech?

Of course they do. But heres some more questions-

Do sad demented racist transphobic thugs in Berkley have the right to incite a riot and not be charged ?

Or how about- Do sad demented racist transphobic thugs have the right to threaten the lives of people they consider less than human? The words I intend to kill you (taken in a real life threatening context) are enough to get you a visit from the police and a restraining order.

So what about when that sentiment is made en masse?

Of course they dont have that right! Threatening others is not protected Free Speech nor is inciting a gathering of like minded people to do violence.

As a matter of fact, it meets the US Armys definition of Terrorism.

The U.S. Armys Field Manuel defines Terrorism as calculated use of unlawful violence

or threat of unlawful violence to inculcate fear. It is intended to coerce or intimidate governments or societies [to attain] political, religious, or ideological goals. U.S. Army Field Manual No. FM 3-0, Chapter 9, 37 (14 June 2001).

These dim witted hate filled buffoons are emboldened by what they perceive as a sympathetic administration where their use of violence of threat of violence wont be a priority.

Arresting a reporter for doing his job or an activist for laughing at a pompous well entrenched moron are clearly priorities to this administration over the presence of domestic terrorists. And I do not think that the same objective standard that gives leniency to pro-fascists would be applied if the same behavior was engaged in by those on the Left!

This bunch of dolts is truly proof of the unthinking hypocritical jackbooted thuggery of the Executive Branch of the US government. Look no further, there it sits!

But I do hope for a liberal prosecutor who, in the oncoming backlash against this Administration and Agenda, can find time in his schedule to apply statutes already on the books to those inciting violence for political gain! I would advise said brave prosecutors and legal SJWs that you take a two pronged attack to pro-fascists. They should after these domestic fascist terrorist in criminal court with the book thrown at them as well as civil court to go after their assets will make the ink jump off of those 1488 tattoos higher than Pepe the Frog!

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