June 15, 1215 at Runnymede: King John agreed to the terms of the Magna Carta and acknowledged that no one is above the law, not even the king. The document has become a powerful symbol of liberty and resistance to the arbitrary - and therefore tyrannical - (ab)use of power by rulers.
The celebrations are in full swing! Yes, bells and all!
Need a refresher about the Magna Carta? Here is the text. Here is a fun little video from the British Library. (Recognize the voice? It's Terry Jones from Monty Python!)
Want more? Take a look at the resources of the Magna Carta Project. Go on a field trip to the US National Archives and visit one of the few remaining copies of the charter!
Class is in session one last time. Repeat after me: You do not give up your civil liberties and individual rights when you set foot on campus.
Got that? No? Write it out 100 times by hand then.
As a fellow teacher and I were just saying, thank goodness for FIRE. Keep fighting the good fight, my friends. Support and defend academic freedom, uphold the civil liberties of students (and faculty!), and abolish all campus speech codes! (Why? Because they are evil, muzzling, and blatantly unconstitutional, that's why, and because - to put it baldly - you do not have a right to never be offended.)
The umpteenth reminder: free speech also protects speech that you don't like.
Here's a bit of it:
Though some ignorant people argue that "hate speech" is unprotected under the First Amendment, that is not the law and never has been. Nor should it be. The test of our commitment to free expression, after all, isn't our willingness to tolerate speech that everyone likes. If you only support free speech for ideas you agree with, you're a hack. If you only support free speech for ideas that everyone agrees with, you're a coward.
It's not the first lawsuit in educational circles, and it won't be the last. Remember, higher ed is the place that told me to my face, "You don't count as a minority." In all honesty, I don't want different standards; I want to compete on level ground with everybody else - I will go toe to toe with any white guy you please in this field (and I have). Nevertheless, it is neither fair nor right when the gatekeepers pick and choose the "minorities" that they want (and exclude the ones that they don't).
You don't give up your First Amendment protections when you set foot on a campus. I hate speech codes ... and so does FIRE (the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education). It just announced these lawsuits yesterday:
“Unconstitutional campus speech codes have been a national scandal for decades. But today, 25 years after the first of the modern generation of speech codes was defeated in court, 58% of public campuses still hold onto shockingly illiberal codes,” said FIRE President Greg Lukianoff. “For 15 years, FIRE has fought for free speech on campus using public awareness as our main weapon, but more is needed. Today, we announce the launch of the Stand Up For Speech Litigation Project, an expansive new campaign to eliminate speech codes nationwide. We have already coordinated two lawsuits in the past nine months, and this morning we brought four more. The lawsuits will continue until campuses understand that time is finally up for unconstitutional speech codes in academia.”
Here are two related thoughts and quotations on lawlessness in governing.
Thought the first: Charles Krauthammer in the Washington Post (via Transterrial Musings):
We've now reached a point where a flailing president, desperate to deflect the opprobrium heaped upon him for the false promise that you could keep your health plan if you wanted to, calls a hasty news conference urging both insurers and the states to reinstate millions of such plans.
Except that he is asking them to break the law. His own law. Under Obamacare, no insurer may issue a policy after 2013 that does not meet the law’s minimum coverage requirements. These plans were canceled because they do not.
The law remains unchanged. The regulations governing that law remain unchanged. Nothing is changed except for a president proposing to unilaterally change his own law from the White House press room.
That's banana republic stuff, except that there the dictator proclaims from the presidential balcony.
Thought the second: Daniel Hannan on the EU:
Shall I tell you the worst thing about the EU? It's not the waste or the corruption or the Michelin-starred lifestyles of its leaders. It's not the contempt for voters or the readiness to swat referendum results aside. It's not the way that multi-nationals and NGOs and all manner of corporate interests are privileged over consumers. It's not the pettifogging rules that plague small employers. It's not the Common Agricultural Policy or the Common Fisheries Policy. It's not the anti-Britishness or the anti-Americanism. It's not even the way in which the euro is inflicting preventable poverty on tens of millions of southern Europeans.
No, it's something more objectionable than any of these things – and something which, bizarrely, doesn't exercise us nearly as much as it should. Put simply, it's this: the EU makes up the rules as it goes along.
Just think, for a moment, about what that means. It means that any deal you've signed can be arbitrarily altered later. It means that any plans you've made, on the basis of what you took to be binding agreements, can be retrospectively destroyed. It means, in short, that there is no effective rule of law.
A world of arbitrary, whimsical fiat. Laws are for the little people.
Schettino, you'll recall, is the despicable captain of the Costa Concordia. Yes, the captain who abandoned his ship, crew, and passengers when it capsized. (Remember this?) The dirtbag is now on trial for manslaughter.
Seriously. Oh, there's a crime here all right. It's called felony stupidity.
A thought about designating targets:
I hear some people talking past each other on Obama's self-declared right to assemble a Kill List of Americans and order their deaths, sans any kind of external check or procedural safeguards.
Charles Krauthammer says that anyone who has taken arms against America has forfeited his right to citizenship.
I agree -- but agreeing that the power to declare such a person as forfeit[ing] his citizenship is a government power is very much not the same as saying that such power resides within a single person, the President, in his sole discretion.
Agreeing that such a power resides somewhere in the federal government is not the same as agreeing it rests within a single fallible man to decide whom to kill and whom to spare.
Related: the "crazy bastards" standard, Michael Ramirez's latest political cartoon, and Dignified Rant's thoughts.
