Archive for the ‘Oppression’ Category
Posted by Ron Coleman on March 23, 2008
Glenn Reynolds writes:
NETWORK SOLUTIONS SHUTS DOWN A WEBSITE under Islamist pressure. I’m guessing they wouldn’t respond to complaints from Baptists quite so readily.
UPDATE: Reader Antoinette Aubert emails: “Baptists don’t blow people up for disagreeing with them. Heck Baptists don’t even sue you for disagreeing with them. Thus does multi-culturalism make cowards of us all.” Or encourage violence and litigation.
I think Glenn — law professor, right? — just just nipped a piece of the truth on the way out there. The issue is not, really, having your server blown up. In fact, this is not a realistic risk in the vast majority of cases. That risk — and the ability of Muslim extremists to carry out the threatened violence — was overstated in the past, even though the fear of it was very real.
But litigation? Political pressure? Boycotting? Political correctness police? That is what Network Solutions is really afraid of. And for a major company to bow to that — not, in contrast, taking reasonable precautions to real threats of bloodshed — is where cowardice is, indeed, the appropriate term to use.
UPDATE: Here’s the pic.
Posted in Oppression | 1 Comment »
Posted by Ron Coleman on March 20, 2008
ABC News breathlessly reports, “Osama Threatens
Europe Over Cartoons.”
I am certain he has been dead for years, and the more often he is propped up like this with stock photos certainter I get. You can imagine how rock-solid certain that is with a guy like me, already.
Posted in Medialites, Oppression, Orient | 3 Comments »
Posted by Ron Coleman on March 19, 2008
Get this:
New Jersey prosecutors have subpoenaed records of JuicyCampus.com, a Web site that publishes anonymous, often malicious gossip about college students.
Language on the site ranges from catty to hateful and offensive. One thread, for example, on the “most overrated Princeton student” quickly dissolves into name-calling, homophobia and anti-Semitism.
JuicyCampus may be violating the state’s Consumer Fraud Act by suggesting that it doesn’t allow offensive material but providing no enforcement of that rule — and no way for users to report or dispute the material, New Jersey Attorney General Anne Milgram said Tuesday.
What a load of baloney! I have litigated the New Jersey Consumer Fraud Act frontwards, backwards and sideways, and believe me — this would be an unbelievable stretch. If Milgram’s interpretation were to fly, it would make that statute an omnibus be-a-good-person-online law with essentially no meaningful limitations. Not that I doubt that the Attorney General would love to have such power, but that would certainly be beyond anything contemplated by the New Jersey Legislature when it was passed.
Of course beyond what the Act itself provides, such an application of it would be unconstitutional too.
Unfortunately, neither of those are giant concerns to many judges in the Garden State.
By the way, this is not an endorsement of online defamation, especially when done anonymously. On the contrary. But please, let’s call a fraud a fraud.
Posted in Lex scripta, Nuvo-Techno, Oppression | 1 Comment »
Posted by Ron Coleman on March 17, 2008
Nicole Black looks at an issue everyone has an opinion about but few people really understand — what the law does and does not allow school administrators to do to deal with student “dissent”:
It is the thorn in the side of every school administrator: organized student dissent, which “substantially and materially interfere[s]” with schoolwork and discipline.
She writes about a recent Second Circuit case, still pending, that tests the parameters of this issue.
I know, why bother learning about something when you can go straight to havin an opinion, but still — you’d like to have the option.
I actually talked my way into being admitted to the college of my choice largely on the “merits” of a jejune, but nervy, “underground newspaper” that a few fellows had been publishing and invited me to join in on — the Semi-Monthly off the Wall News. It was the beginning of a career in a certain kind of subversion that is still with me.
But I never really doubted at the time that Hightstown High could have shut us down if they’d wanted to. I’m still not so sure.
Posted in Lex scripta, Oppression | 4 Comments »
Posted by Ron Coleman on March 6, 2008
Breaking news:
Two terrorists infiltrated a rabbinical seminary at the entrance of Jerusalem and opened fire after nightfall Thursday, police said. One person was wounded. Ambulances raced to the scene from around the city.
The seminary is the Mercaz Harav yeshiva in the Kiryat Moshe quarter of Jerusalem.
This is, unfortunately, an entirely new front.
And not new at all.
UPDATE (hat tip to Ed Alper):
In Gaza City, residents went out into the streets and fired rifles in celebration in the air after hearing news of the attack on the seminary.
UPDATE: David Linn emails, for purposes of praying for mercy and a complete recovery for victims (it is the first name of each student, followed by ben — “son of” — and his mother’s name):
Here’s the full list of boys injured in the attack:
Naftali ben Gila
Yonatan ben Avital
Shimon ben Tirza
Nadav ben Hadas
Reuven ben Naomi
Elchanan ben Zehava
Posted in Oppression, Orient, Past is prologue | 6 Comments »
Posted by Ron Coleman on March 3, 2008
This place has been a mess, by all indications, since the beginning of time. This blog post at Chicago Boyz not only explains why, but demonstrates the “process” as well as you work your way through the comments!
Posted in Oppression, Past is prologue, Sisyphus | Leave a Comment »
Posted by Ron Coleman on March 3, 2008
A little bit of an overstatement. But happy advocate of good clean American litigation fun and fuzzy fighter for the First Amendment? That’s me!
Posted in Blogophilia, Lex scripta, Oppression | 1 Comment »
Posted by Ron Coleman on February 29, 2008
Instapundit:
DISCRIMINATION IS TERRIBLE, unless there’s money in it: “Cal Poly wants to open a male-only engineering program at a university in Saudi Arabia.” Would they have opened a whites-only engineering school in the old South Africa?
Are non-coed schools really the same thing as racially segregated schools? Of course not. They aren’t even against the law in this country; and Saudi Arabia is a different country with a different culture.
I attended male-only rabbinical schools, and my children are all in male-only schools. Our religious beliefs dictate this. And we’re Americans. It’s not a civil rights issue. Why would a libertarian like Glenn Reynolds object to people making the choice of attending single-sex schools? Is the fact that a school is a “state school” — whatever that might mean in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia — really what makes a difference?
Many non-religious people, notably females, choose to go to schools were interaction between the sexes is not a feature and they can focus on getting educated, not getting something else.
It’s an example of cultural arrogance to assume that Saudi Arabia should be America. It’s something beyond that to apply a standard of “non-discrimination” that isn’t even applicable in this country.
Posted in Faith and Works, Oppression, Orient | 13 Comments »
Posted by Ron Coleman on February 16, 2008
One of my earliest posts here was about the back and forth between Robert Spencer and the Dinesh D’Souza. I hadn’t given D’Souza’s evident crackup a third thought since then (a second thought, I did).
Well, in contrast, Bob is about nothing if not focus:
You may recall that before the illustrious Dinesh D’Souza was a would-be C.S. Lewis, he was a would-be Bernard Lewis — and in his disastrous book The Enemy At Home, surely a candidate to be named The Most Wrongheaded Book of the Twenty-First Century, he declared: “If they want Sharia, let them have it.”And he repeated this grand Let-The-People-Rule sentiment just weeks ago, at which time I first noted the analogy between D’Souza and Stephen A. Douglas, who didn’t care whether slavery were voted up or down as long as it was voted on — and I expressed a preference not for a new Stephen A. Douglas, but a new Lincoln.
But now D’Souza is singing a decidedly different tune, excoriating the Archdhimmi of Canterbury for saying that accommodation of Sharia law was “inevitable” in Britain, saying that the Archdhimmi’s modest proposal was “absurd,” and “a little dangerous to boot.”
It’s just the good old constitutional republicanism against pure democracy question — one that D’Souza seems to be working out very publicly. Which, if you can get book advances to do, is really not so terrible, as long as no one is really listening to you anyway.
Posted in Euroids, Faith and Works, Oppression, Orient | 1 Comment »
Posted by Ron Coleman on February 14, 2008
Combine unparalleled left-wing self-hatred with academic idiocy, and what do you get?
A Hebrew University Sociology department M.A. thesis entitled “Controlled Occupation: The Lack of Military Rape in the Israeli Palestinian Conflict” notes that the relative absence of instances of rape by Israeli soldiers is an alternate method of achieving the same kind of degradation of Palestinian Arabs that would be achieved through a directed policy of raping Arab women. The abstract of the paper, authored by doctoral candidate Tal Nitzan, notes that “the absence of directed military rape constitutes an alternative way of realizing the same political goals [usually achieved by directed military rape]. In the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, we can see that the rarity of military rape only strengthens the ethnic boundaries and clarifies inter-ethnic differences, just as directed military rape would have done.” The thesis, selected for publication by the university’s Shaine Center for Research in Social Sciences, was supervised by Hebrew University sociologist Eyal Ben–Ari and a senior lecturer in education, Edna Lomsky-Feder.
I’ve heard sociologists apeak of “status anxiety,” but for originality and chutzpah, I have to admit that this thesis takes the cake.
Yes, but not taking the cake would be just as bad — if not worse!
Hat tip to Craig Karpel.
Posted in Oppression, Orient, Sisyphus | 5 Comments »
