Think Freely Media presents Common Sense with Paul Jacob
The U.S. Copyright Office is enforcing an unjust and destructive law merely because it is there. Selectively enforcing. Valancourt Books prints books on demand. It keeps no stocks of books in a warehouse in between orders. Even so, the Copyright Office is demanding to be supplied with physical copies of
In Hawaii, those who would compel others to promote abortion have suffered a well-deserved setback. A U.S. District Court tossed a law requiring pregnancy centers to post ads for abortion clinics. Among the centers that would have been affected was one run by a church opposed to abortion. Of course,
The beginning of the end of actor James Woods’s time on Twitter likely occurred on July 20, 2018. Only recently discovering a tweet that he posted then, Twitter has locked Woods out of a forum where his right-leaning messages have been followed by 1,730,000 people. His delinquent tweet forwarded an
Good Google’s evil twin, Bad Google, is at it again. In addition to doing bad things to advance its political agenda, Google is willing to work with bad governments do bad things. For example, the authoritarian Chinese government. Google is working on a mobile version of its search engine, code-named
“Social media has given extremists a new tool with which to recruit and radicalise,” writes British Labour MP Lucy Powell in The Guardian. And just where are people “being exposed to extremist material”? On Facebook! “Instead of small meetings in pubs or obscure websites in the darkest corners of the
It is hard not to miss the ideological left’s inconsistency regarding “diversity”: demanding diversity of race and gender, they enforce a monoculture that somehow cannot tolerate intellectual and political competition. We see this in higher education, dominated by left-of-center professors and administrators; in the news media, overwhelmingly filled with Democrats;
In the dystopian world of the future, all financial transactions will be made by credit card. In this dark world, the people who run credit-card firms must be appeased. If they dislike what you’re doing, they will have the power to prevent you from receiving financial support for your work
I don’t defend the way Twitter, Facebook, and others target users for expressing views that these firms dislike. I do defend the individual rights of all persons, including owners of companies. Our freedom to act includes the freedom to act in ways others consider to be wrong — if we
Yesterday’s big story? Several major social media platforms have de-platformed Alex Jones and his Infowars opinion (“information”?) show. Most commenters about this happening hasten to signal to their audiences that they do not approve of Alex Jones. Is this really necessary? When we consider a mass de-platforming event, do we
The fashionable campus notion of “microaggressions” blurs the distinction between peaceful speech (offensive or not) and bashing somebody over the head with a club. If courts, police and/or university officials can rationalize regarding the perpetrator of a so-called “microaggression” as initiating force against an offended listener, they can also rationalize
The relationship between the First and Second Amendments is closer than commonly believed. This is especially clear in the 3D gun printing story, the subject of yesterday’s Common Sense, “Progressive Designs.” As I finished the copy, a news story broke: U.S. District Judge Robert Lasnik “muzzled Defense Distributed with a
In February 1979, Professor George Rathjens called the editors of The Progressive, urging them not to publish a story in the works, which included a journalistic best guess as to the design of a hydrogen bomb. The Progressive refused to squelch the story, and the professor of poli-sci (not nuclear