It is finals week at Yale. The Yale Daily News does not normally publish after the last day of classes. That could explain why nothing is on their site yet.
Close your eyes and just listen to the soundtrack. To me, it’s clear from the tone of the voices that just about everyone involved knows they are being filmed and realizes that it is some kind of joke.
@fenwaypark “Could be”?
We can be now. Why don’t you see pornography on CBS? Tried shouting “fire” in a crowded theater recently? Time, manner and place are–currently–regulated.
People can try to paint these issues as banning all guns or punishing people for speaking–but the issue really comes down to the appropriate level or balance point of regulation, I think "
Agreed. However, these TPM restrictions are supposed to be permitted only if they are: “content neutral,… narrowly drawn, serve a significant government interest, and leave open alternative channels of communication.” (Farlex legal dictionary). However, you raise an interesting point. The first amendment may not have to be repealed in order to get the chilling effect Horowitz pretended to desire. TPM restrictions could also be a vehicle for government overreach. Depending on how our political culture evolves over the next few decades, speech restrictions may creep in under the guise of hate speech regulations, civil rights violations, etc. I wonder if today’s youth would support the Klan’s right to march in Skokie, Illinois as the ACLU did back in the 70s? This generation needs to be reminded how important the first amendment is. (Remember, we’re talking about religion, press, and association, too).
I’m personally surprised how open Horowitz was about his petition. Although I strongly disagree with his position that the first amendment be banned, I admire his bravery in believing in what he stands for. Though I wonder why the all the criticism is on the people who signed the petition, and not on Horowitz for creating the petition in the first place.
^I imagine he created the petition to show how stupid some people can be.
warbrain: He says on his website the petition was a joke. He says he’s a satirist. Maybe your post is a joke? I am losing track here.
I thought PG was making a joke, but evidently not.
If no one gets a joke, can it still be defined as a joke???
Our Bill of Rights are under attack and nobody seems to notice or care. Pitiful.
Indeed.
I have deleted literally dozens of off topic posts about guns and the 2nd Amendment, and a few about health care, abortion, etc. And it will keep being done since they are all wildly off topic for this thread. There are NUMEROUS threads about these other topics. Come on, people.
Sad. This is a private website. No free speech expected or implied. One of my pet peeves is when people try to apply constitutional restrictions on the government to private individuals or businesses.
For whomever thinks the ACLU is a classical liberal organization…that is truly sad. They do not advocate for liberty unless it is in lockstep with their modern liberal ideals. I recommend reading John Stuart Mill and John Locke.
*I am deleting 3 posts that commented on my above post regarding moderating this thread. First, commenting on moderation violates the Terms of Service (a contract) YOU agreed to when you signed up. Also in those Terms it is spelled out that this is a MODERATED forum (I am capitalizing to emphasize things I thought were obvious but apparently are not) and a PRIVATE site. Do I really need to explain what the First Amendment and free speech are actually about? It means the GOVERNMENT cannot put you in jail or fine you or otherwise restrict your speech (obviously there are exceptions), it says nothing about private entities. For example, if you work at a private company, you cannot stand up on your desk and spew any garbage you want without risking getting fired. You have the right to that speech for the time it takes to have security hustle you off the premises, or in this case for me to delete the post. Similarly, the New York Times is under no obligation to print an op-ed or a letter to the editor you wrote, and if you post such a letter (comment) on their web site they are absolutely free to remove it and they frequently do. And that is a newspaper!!
This is exactly the same. It does no good to have every thread about free speech devolve into the same debate about guns or abortion or AA. MODERATION keeps these threads as absent as possible from abusive language, insults, spam, and all sorts of things that prevent it from being the wild west like so many other sites, where they have over 1000 comments on every topic and most are cursing and baiting of other posters. One cannot find any sense of discussion on those sites without getting lost in a forest of banality. There is no irony in this case, as one member called my action, in the least. To think so reveals a fundamental lack of understanding of basic civics.
If we warn a member about taking a thread off topic, and they do it again, and after another warning yet again, you can count on there being a high probability that they will be banned from the site, and it would be entirely because of their speech. Not the content necessarily, although that could be part of it if it contains profanities or other violations, but the placement of the speech. There is little preventing anyone on here from starting an on-topic thread about almost any subject. In this case, however, as I said above there are any number of threads already regarding guns, the Second Amendment, health care, abortion rights, etc. I really am sorry if you don’t get that, or the idea of keeping threads on topic so the discussion has some continuity and rationale to it.*
This makes me want to hit my head against a desk. The radical socialist opinions of college students are getting way out of hand.
Wow, sorry, fallenchemist. It was a joke.
Please mods–take no offense at this, but this illustrates a point I am trying to make here (and was joking about in the deleted post). Yes, private entities can impose speech limits, like CC. Would these kids actually want to live in a world where speech in the PUBLIC SQUARE is limited and imposed on everyone and backed by law? I am with Ohiodad51 in that I think some of those kids who signed actually saw such a world as a beautiful thing: no N words, no religious dogmatism, no “you’re going to hell”, no Jesus is the only way to God, no homophobic speech, no slurs or jokes against queers or transsexuals, no allahu akbar, no sex jokes, no ____(whatever might offend you). To some of these kids, this is a dream world. To many of the rest of us, it is a nightmare.
Like John Lennon’s Imagine. Honestly, the song has great sound, but the vision he articulates is actually quite scary to me. THIS is what I think some of the kids were envisioning when they agreed to sign.
If they did, then they would have been misinformed about the First Amendment and clueless about how our government works, which is the point of a lot of other posters.
Where to begin?
–The First Amendment protects not only free speech, but freedom of religion, freedom of the press, freedom to assemble, and freedom to petition the Government–which happens to be, presumably, what they were doing. (I have used shorthand to describe these freedoms). As far as we know, the petition signed by the Yale students referred to the First Amendment, not just free speech
–Abolishing the First Amendment does not equate to abolishing the freedoms listed there. It would just mean there is no Constitutional protection for those freedoms. Congress could turn around the day after abolition and adopt the exact text of the former First Amendment as law. The distinction is that it is a big headache to amend a provision of the Constitution and a relatively minor headache to change mere laws.
–If the signatories had a mindset as you describe, they should have been supporting a campaign to abolish the free speech clause of the First Amendment–along with–along with–a call for legislation immediately thereafter to ban all those things you listed. Without the second part, the first part would not accomplish their perceived goals, and I see no evidence they realized that.
I’ll stop there for now.
@julliet
The article says he spent an hour and collected 50 signatures, doesn’t it? That’s little less more than minute to catch each person, ask them to sign and then have them sign. Hardly any time in between for approaching those who declined. In other words, practically every one he approached said yes. So Very Sad.
*Well, even so I would have to enforce the ban on publicly commenting on moderation. [-X But for future reference, ironic or sarcastic humor is often VERY hard to pick up on in this medium. No body or facial language, no tone of voice. Emoticons help. 
I seem to be alone in this, but I am giving the signatories of this petition more credit than most of you seem to grant them. I assume that kids at Yale understand that the Constitution applies to government action, and that there are laws that exist outside of the explicit clauses contained in the bill of rights. I imagine there are kids from other countries in many of their classes or in their residence, and that they understand that the First Amendment is not universally applicable, that other countries have different levels of protection for different types and categories of speech. In other words, I assume they are basically aware of how their government operates.
I assume that there are students at Yale, and lots if not all other colleges, that would support a repeal of the First Amendment on the assumption that it could be replaced with something more in line with their belief that their should be strictures against hate speech, trigger warnings, etc. Many of these kids exist in a bubble where their ideology is the dominant or at least most vocal ideology within their circle. Certainly at some of the nation’s elite schools students are conditioned to believe that they are the intellectual leaders of their generation. That there current perspectives are not only fixed, but that their opinion will carry the day. It is not hard to believe that many such students lack the prospective that comes with age, and do not appreciate that the First Amendment provides both positive and negative protection. In other words, they do not yet realize that much of the country does not agree with them, and absent the protections in the Bill of Rights, they may not long enjoy their ability to protest Halloween costumes (Yale), menu items (Oberlin) or the name of buildings (Princeton).
Ask yourself, honestly, do you think the kid yelling at the master of her college about his wife daring to express an opinion about Halloween costumes would have a problem replacing the First Amendment with something similar to what exists in Canada or the United Kingdom?
@fallenchemist Got it. Thanks #:-S
Ohiodad, I agree with you in that I think some of these kids’ idealism and naivete led them to fall for Horowitz’s prank. But it still scares me. Maybe you think there’s nothing to be afraid of because they will eventually grow up and realize how wrong they are. I’m not so optimistic as you.