Jim DeMint Wants to Compete With Skype

Finally a politician with the courage to go up against Skype.  A Republican – Doctor* DeMint – who loves government regulation has come out of the closet in favor of barring Skype users from discussing abortion with medical professionals.  No word yet on if he will allow an exception if you are skyping with your [...]

NYPD Police Brutalize Musician, Threaten Crowd

NYPD, as part of a recent crackdown against musicians, arrested a man playing music illegally in a park in Chinatown.  The man, forced face down on the pavement with officers holding him down, displayed a bloodied face.  As of this time it appears he did not resist.  The crowd did voice their opposition quite loudly.  [...]

Police State USA

Just a few words, before the professor Gates arrest and subsequent arrest of DC lawyer Tuma fades into the memory hole. We need abuse of authority laws with the same power as hate crime laws. We need to challenge the culture behind our police state.

Open Letter to a PUMA Follow Up

Diamondtiger has been censoring any comments on his blog that effectively counter his argument (or even reference the censorship).  That’s what passes for free speech with the PUMA crowd I suppose. Talk about hypocrisy: Your Conscience has ended up in the SPAM FILTER because he/she could not be civil and respect free speech. Sorry – [...]

Fox News: Corporate Rhetoric

The Right Wing media loves a chance to present protesters (read “far leftists”) as the dirty unruly mob to their clean authority figures.  Clucking their tongues and barely disguising the pleasure they take in their tacked on umbrage, I’m sure they’ll call the people literally marching in streets “latte-sipping liberal elites” without skipping a beat.  [...]

Everybody Loves Free Speech Zones!

Gary Chapell Hill over at pro-Hillary-at-any-cost blog The Confluence has an important piece up on free speech zones at the Unity event in NH: As soon as we got there they informed us that we would have to move to “free speech zones”.  I will let the video speak for itself, but first I would like [...]

Lieberman Asks Youtube to Remove Terrorist Videos

No word yet on whether or not the videos are under copyright.  From the article: In a blog posting, YouTube said it welcomed the dialogue with Lieberman but noted that “most of the videos” his office had drawn to their attention “did not contain violent or hate speech content” and had therefore not been removed [...]

The Psychological Victims of Fundamentalist Christianity

This is incredibly fucked, but it is a topic of some interest for me, and one I plan on revisiting.  As Amanda notes, this stuff is “fucking frightening”.  Matt Taibi writes in Rolling Stone about his experiences at a three day intensive convert-a-thon.  He starts things off by discussing the contrast between the soon-to-be-converted and [...]

Privacy Rights and Candidates

One year ago today, we found this out (Boing Boing via this Slashdot thread): More information has come to light about the arrest of Josh Kinberg, the hacker who made a “dot-matrix bike-printer” to ride through the streets of New York during the RNC in 2004. The oversize bike had a laptop-powered array of chalk-sprayers [...]

Fuck You Florida (You Fucking Fucktard)

This is a fucking travesty.  Free Speech?  Fuck that.

The MySpace Suicide and Hysteria

This is gut wrenching.  A girl with a history of depression committed suicide, apparently provoked by the comments of a neighboring family posing as a boy who had become her “online boyfriend”. It looks like it was the whole family plus a family friend (St Charles Journal): According to a police report filed by the [...]

Ron Paul Zombies, Racism, and Rights

Some people just don’t get it.  No offense to the intelligent Ron Paul supporters.  I know you’re out there.  We disagree, but you have brains.  Sweet tasty brains.  But some Ron Paul supporters don’t.  They just keep bringing up the same tired arguments and clinging to them like fundamentalist Christians holding onto Creationism and praying [...]

AT&T Censorship Update

Update on AT&T’s censorship of criticism in their Terms of Service (Slashdot): Vox writes “As we discussed here a few days back, AT&T’s Terms of Service has very broad language giving them the right to terminate the account of any AT&T Internet service customer who criticizes the company. Ars Technica notes that such broad language [...]

AT&T Building Censorship into New Terms of Sevice

From slashdot: marco13185 writes “AT&T’s new Terms of Service give AT&T the right to suspend your account and all service “for conduct that AT&T believes”…”(c) tends to damage the name or reputation of AT&T, or its parents, affiliates and subsidiaries.” After cooperating with the government’s violations of privacy and liberties, I guess AT&T wants their [...]

The New York Times Betrays Free Speech

The New York times regrets stepping outside its traditional media role as a state sanctioned news source.  (AFP): The New York Times has expressed regret about publishing a paid advertisement that contained an attack against the commander of US forcers in Iraq, General David Petraeus. The full-page add by the liberal group MoveOn.org appeared in [...]