first amendment

This is how a dictatorship works.

gregladen — Wed, 28 Jun 2017 07:49:20 +0000

This is how a dictatorship works.

The press has had enough of being called liars by the liars. I'm not a big fan of MJ, but the very fact that MJ has quotable conversation about this is a change in how the world works.

Here's another thing dictators do: Make up accolades. Trump created a fake TIME magazine cover and hung it in several of his golf clubs. It has him on the cover. That issue of TIME never happened. It is not just fake news, it is an entire fake news magazine. Details here.

Here it is. Interesting set of headlines:

gregladen Wed, 06/28/2017 - 03:49

Tags

President Donald Trump

Dictator

first amendment

Press

Trump

So, no mention of CNN having to retract a story? No mention of NYT being sued by Sarah Palin?

I believe that if you watch the video the CNN story is mentioned. I don't think anyone cares a rat's ass about what Sarah Palin is doing.

Your point?

The difference is that CNN admitted it's error and the folks responsible are out of a job. Maybe Kevin doesn't understand what taking responsibility means?

And, as Greg said, nobody cares about Palin's latest attention whore move.

Nice little piece, mentioned in "Signs of Fascism". https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2017/6/28/1676059/-Signs-of-Fascism-Tr…

As to Kevin:
(1) Yup, CNN acted as professionals, retracted a story, and disciplined people for violating standards. Hmmm ... anything similar coming from Trump in terms of accountability for erroneous statements/assertions?
(2) Wow -- Sarah Palin is going to sue, announced after the NY Times had already issued a correction to a piece which had an error in it. Too bad that Democrats haven't been suing people and outlets who have been far more egregious in creating and promoting far more aggressive libel (such as assertions that Michelle Obama is a transvestite, that Barack Obama wasn't born in the United States, ... etc ... etc ... etc ...).
3. And, of course, your comment is simply trolling -- irrelevant to Laden's post.

Kevin's attempt at a false balance fallacy. Trump's putting up fake magazines to try to convince people he is perfect is, in fact, a cliche move of despots. He did this, it is a fact. Greg Laden is under zero obligation to talk about anything else to satisfy YOUR need to forgive Trump for lying by just blaming others for unrelated matters.

And news outlets mess up. In response, the good ones admit it via corrections and retractions. If CNN really was committed to "destroying" Donald Trump, it would double down on the original story...duh.

"So, no mention of CNN having to retract a story?"

No. And that news has nothing to do with this story, so why are you whining here? Butthurt that your tiny tinpot dictator is being accurately identified and categorised so busy shouting "LOOK! SQUIRREL!!!"?

There was also no mention of Jared getting 4x over the odds for his failed purchase by the Chinese, just before China got "good press" from the president, despite all the campaigning about how bad and evil "Chynya" is. Though that DOES have a fair bit to do with what a dictator does.

Again, what is up with neverending moderation?

This is a fascinating test for American democracy - either it proves resilient to a bloke who wants to run his country Putin-style, or it doesn't.

I still think the Bush/Cheney/etc.. period was 100x more of a threat than Trump is though.

You got that right this is planned and we have seen it before via Germany. I cannot believe they think everyone is so stupid. Thank you for speaking out.

Dangerous, maybe: War with Iran could be ... awkward.

Craig T, early days yet. We thought Bush I was OK when he manned up a bit after 9/11 (and mind you, 16 years later, we're several months short of September now). Bush/Cheney were civilized compared to this bunch, and we still had a window of opportunity about climate change (btw, Bush despite his bad actions on that did actually end up acknowledging it).

OTOH, you make a good point; Republican misbehavior is not new, Democracy and the economy do not thrive under their misrule, and that includes Reagan as well.

Re Craig: Only because the orange-utan is a more incompetent and idiotic blowhard than Shrub and employs people not anywhere near as smart as Cheney (as virulently toxic as that intelligence was).

The Trump/Mussolini thing is interesting. Even before the election I noticed that Trump's body language and facial expressions bore an alarming similarity to those of 'Il Duce'. His actions since becoming PotUS have only extended the similarities. Of course Trump was elected (questions about the system and whether it was corrupted aside) and could be removed from power democratically whilst Mussolini seized power via the threat of force so comparisons are, currently at least, largely superficial. But if Trump continues to push his 'cult of personality' then ...........

So a side by side of Trump is a dictator because had a Time magazine cover made?

Then take a look at all these "Dictators"...

http://www.hongkiat.com/blog/create-customized-magazine-covers/

Then take a look at all these “Dictators”…

I dunno. What is allowing you to assume that people requesting such fake covers are balanced people?
(and anyway, this cover is not the only point in the data)

Someone has a fake cover made for him/her or for a friend*, and then the recipient displays it at home or in his office as an obvious joke/conversation piece? No problem here.

The recipient put the fake cover on public display among real newspapers' excerpts, by example in the entrance hall of his building? I would start to get worried.
If he is my co-worker, I would get really worried. If he is my boss, I would quit my job.

But then, I'm a scientist. We are taught that misrepresenting our achievements is a career-ending action. I guess different rules apply for politicians.

* trying to be charitable, here. I dunno if this fake cover was ordered by Mr Trump himself or if this is a gift from a friend. Although I don't know which one is actually the worse possibility: narcissism or gullibility.

This goes along with Trump's lie about the number of times he's been on the cover of Time.

"We are taught that misrepresenting our achievements is a career-ending action. I guess different rules apply for politicians"

It's different for those in the right, since they only let about the poor, women, and minorities -- people they don't believe matter, so the lies don't matter.

dean - "It’s different for those in the right, since they only let about the poor, women, and minorities — people they don’t believe matter, so the lies don’t matter."

So there aren't any poor, women or minorities on the right?

Why the need to lie dean?

There are betula they just don't matter to the politicians, just as they don't matter to you. One of lying, and it is you, as it is what you were born to do.

Betula, do you have a reading comprehension problem?

So there aren’t any poor, women or minorities on the right?

How did you interpret him as saying that?

Batshit just makes stuff up. Ask Jeff if he turns up with the info about what he's been working on here.

re #17, I think the difference goes deeper.

The left thinks of themselves as "the good guys".
The right thinks of the left as "the bad guys".

So the left doesn't do what "bad guys" do, because that breaks their belief in their being good. They complain about others they see as being on the left doing it too, again, because they feel that this proves they're not "the good guys".

Meanwhile the right does WHATEVER THEY CAN THINK OF against the left, and justify it with "the ends justifies the means", so any and all bad things are "fine" *when they do it*, because they're being shitlords to remove "the bad guys". They don't care what they or anyone else on the right does "bad", because it's against "the bad guys", therefore right and just. They DO complain deeply about the left doing the same thing, because "that proves they're the bad guys!".

Wow - "The left thinks of themselves as “the good guys”.
The right thinks of the left as “the bad guys”.

I'm glad you don't think of the right as "bad guys" Wow...it's a rare bit of honesty on your part. Oh wait...

Wow - "They DO complain deeply about the left doing the same thing, because “that proves they’re the bad guys!”.

So the left really does think of the right as bad guys and the right thinks of themselves as the good guys, only the real good guys can prove who the bad guys are by calling them bad for complaining about the good acting like the bad.

Simple Wow logic.

I'm glad you accept that you to all sorts of shitlord bollocks on your side, batshit. In your rush to bash the left (because you think of anyone who disagrees with your politics is inherently and irredemably evil) you managed to score an own goal.

Oh, nope, you made up that last paragraph, batshit.

You bashed yourself Wow....even you can't follow your own logic.

You can't follow logic, batshit.

Coon Rapids Baptist Church: Are they violating IRS law or not?

gregladen — Tue, 06 Nov 2012 07:47:58 +0000

Coon Rapids Baptist Church: Are they violating IRS law or not?

I have no idea if the Coon Rapids Baptist Church, is a real church with tax exempt status, but let's assume for the moment that they are. The question then would be, is this church jeopradizing their tax exempt status by taking and explicit stand on a certain issue and telling people how they should vote on it? Here are two photographs I snapped this morning:

Sign in front of the Coon Rapids Baptist Church and Christian School, North Bound on Hanson Blvd, Coon Rapids, MN, on election day, 2012.

Sign in front of Coon Rapids Baptist Church and Christian School, South Bound on Hanson Blvd, Coon Rapids, MN, on Election Day, 2012.

Clearly the church is saying that people should vote a certain way and clearly this is being done at a time rather close to the election. But, is this a violation of church-state separation?

Here is a document from the IRS (PDF file) that lays out the rules. Most of this is about candidates, not issues. Churches can take a stand on issues, but not if that stand links to candidates. So, for instance, a church taking an explicit anti-Obamacare position in the present election is probably violating IRS regulations. In Minnesota, the "Yes/No" vote being referred to here is an amendment to limit marriage to opposite sex couples, to be added the constitution. Almost every candidate has taken a stand on the issue, and DFLers (those are Minnesota Democrats) say "vote No" and Republicans say "vote Yes" pretty much down the line.

Personally, I think they are probably not violating IRS rules, but I also think the IRS rules could be revised. I think churches should not take positions that tell people how to vote at all, on candidates, and on issues. What do you think?

gregladen Tue, 11/06/2012 - 02:47

Am I asking too little of the First Amendment?

jstemwedel — Tue, 06 Jul 2010 11:51:41 +0000

Am I asking too little of the First Amendment?

I noticed a short item today at Inside Higher Education about Mike Adams, an associate professor of of criminal justice at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington , who is suing the university on the grounds that his promotion to full professor was denied due to his conservative Christian views. (Apparently, this legal action has been underway since 2007.)

I know very few details of the case, so I'm in no position to opine about whether Adams should or should not have been promoted. But there's one element of the case that seems to be legally interesting:

But part of the judge's ruling also rejected the idea that Adams has First Amendment protection for the columns he wrote for various publications (columns known for a mocking tone along with hard line views) because he submitted them as part of his promotion dossier. And the reason that the columns have no protection, the judge ruled, is the Garcetti decision. Because Adams is receiving strong support from conservative groups for his suit, the ruling is drawing their attention to Garcetti's impact on the academy.
The Alliance Defense Fund, which has been backing Adams, issued a statement Monday in which Jordan Lorence, one of its lawyers, said: "We disagree with the court's assessment that Dr. Adams's speech is somehow not protected by the Constitution. Opinion columns are classic examples of free speech protected by the First Amendment, and mentioning them on a promotion application does not change this fact."

Garcetti v. Ceballos was filed by a deputy district attorney in Los Angeles who was demoted after he criticized a local sheriff's conduct to his supervisors. The ruling in the case found that First Amendment protections do not extend to public employees when they speak in capacities related to their jobs. A footnote said that the ruling did not necessarily apply to higher education. But to the dismay of faculty groups, several federal judges have applied it in the higher education context.

Several of those cases have involved faculty members who criticized their administrations. The Adams case is one that might seem quite close to the First Amendment, as it involves controversial stands on political issues.

The ruling in the case said, however, that even if the columns played some role in his treatment, they lacked First Amendment protection. The judge ruled that as soon as Adams submitted them in his tenure dossier, they became part of his work as a professor. And once they became part of his work as a professor, he lost First Amendment protection for them, the judge ruled, citing Garcetti.

A few things have me scratching my head here.

One is the practical question of why a professor going up for promotion would include in the dossier of materials to support that promotion case a series of newspaper opinion columns. If these columns bore directly on the professor's academic work (either in the realm of research or teaching) and stood as shining examples of his or her clear thinking and writing, maybe including them would make sense (and I say this as someone who included some non-traditional items in my own tenure dossier). But if they presented "hard line views" (with which, conceivably, at least some members of one's promotion committees might disagree) advanced primarily by "a mocking tone" rather than cogent arguments, including them, especially if they were written outside the bounds of the job that is being evaluated, seems foolhardy. Indeed, knowing academics as I do, it might be a good bet that some committee members would view unfavorably columns expressing opinions they shared if the columns relied on sloppy argumentation (or on rhetoric in place of argumentation).

Whoever was giving Mike Adams advice on how to compile that promotion dossier may owe him an apology.

Another question I have is from what exactly is the First Amendment supposed to protect me when I include a piece of my writing in a dossier on the basis of which my job performance is to be evaluated?

The freedom to express my view does not come with a guarantee that others will agree with it, or keep their disagreements with it to themselves, or express those disagreements in civil terms. Indeed, in a context where I am presenting the expression of my view for evaluation, I expect that that expression of my view will be evaluated -- perhaps unfavorably. And I expect this for my peer reviewed articles as much as for any other writings I may offer for evaluation. Do you think that, just because the peer reviewers for a journal in your field judged your thinking original and your arguments well supported, your colleagues will refrain from critiquing them? Attend a journal club meeting and your eyes will be opened.

However, the fact that my expression of my view has been evaluated unfavorably does not mean that the person so evaluating it has infringed my right to free speech.

Maybe the worry here is the power of one's employer to stifle one's free speech. Perhaps the problem is that Adams's promotion committees were evaluating the wrong element of his opinion pieces, focusing on his views rather than on the logic and evidence he deployed to defend them. Practically, establishing such illegitimate evaluative focus might be really difficult (although I suppose asking for the detailed critique of one's logic and evidence would be a sensible way to gauge the extent to which these "legitimate" elements for evaluation were judged lacking).

But this strikes me as just another reason to be wary of including writings where academic standards of argumentation are not clearly on display if those writings could be left out of the dossier altogether.

I guess the question here is one of balance. We enjoy the right to speak our minds, but we're not always thrilled by the blowback from having spoken them (even though this blowback is generally a matter of other people exercising their right to speak their minds). We want work in the academic milieu to somehow count our activities in the public sphere as part of the important intellectual work we do, but then we get upset when those activities in the public sphere are subjected to evaluation.

I know some will argue that academics already have much more freedom to exercise their First Amendment rights than do people in other employment settings. (Since almost all of my employment has been in academia, I'm not the right person to ask about whether this is a plausible argument.) Honestly, I like being in a situation where I'm not evaluated on what I think but on how I think (as well as how many students I can get to meet specified student learning objectives per semester). But I reckon my employer has some interests in this relationship, too, and that some of those might play a role in decisions about whether to promote me.

If my activities off the clock might lead my employer to judge that I don't exemplify the qualities of mind the organization values, it only makes sense to keep those extracurricular activities out of the case I make that the organization should promote me. On the other hand, if I orchestrate a situation where worlds collide, I can't count on the aftermath of the collision playing out in my favor.

jstemwedel Tue, 07/06/2010 - 07:51