Intellectual historians sometimes refer to the “climate of opinion” as a means of marking one historical era from another. On a more granular level, folks speak of the so-called “Overton window” as the range of acceptable opinion at a given moment in time. (This latter concept takes its name from Joseph Overton, who wrote a series of papers on the concept almost a decade ago.)
Swim too far outside the mainstream, and you become an outcast, crank or conspiracy theorist.
The fact is that at any given moment in time some ideas...
November 17, 2020
Social media censorship is a red-hot topic now. Conservatives are outraged by a perceived bias against their content by the likes of Facebook and Twitter; liberals want to avoid hate speech and misinformation by adopting standards; and techies have all but resigned themselves to some level of government regulation.
Each of these groups have it wrong.
There is a simple fix: Require social media companies to adhere to first amendment standards. We don’t need a complex new body of law to govern social media’s treatment of speech. We already...
November 13, 2020
The pandemic, I am afraid, is showing no signs of easing, and that means that the courts, at least in Connecticut, my home state, will remain shuttered for the foreseeable future. Amazingly, nine months into this and there is still nothing like a reliable clearinghouse for information about what is going on in the courts.
How can this be?
In the federal courts, the last general announcement about court operations took place in late September. We are now apparently in a period during which each lifetime appointee has the discretion to hold trials...
November 10, 2020
(Originally published earlier this summer at about the time of George Floyd's death. More timely now.)
We finally learned what all the fuss has been about for the past month. It’s not about police reform. It’s not about systemic racism. It’s about race-based transfer payments, or reparations. At least it is according to the ideologues calling the shots at The New York Times.
What are reparations?
How about a cash payment of $350 thousand dollar to every African-American. That’s a good start, according to Robert Johnson, founder...
November 6, 2020
October 29, 2020
Spotify just earned my respect. It did so by looking cancel culture in the eye, and saying: ‘f@ck you.’ I’ll be taking...
October 28, 2020
Viktor Frankenstein had a vision, a dream, really. Could he create life? He left his hometown of Geneva, Switzerland for a local...
October 22, 2020
Does the State of Connecticut have a coherent statewide plan for the resumption of jury trials? If so, it is one of the best-kept secrets in the...
November 13, 2019
UNITED STATED STATES DISTRICT COURT DISTRICT OF CONNECTICUT
CAMERON L. ATKINSON, Plaintiff, :
v.
FACEBOOK, INC., : MARK...
November 2, 2020
We’re approaching the ninth month of this pandemic, and the good news is that books written about it are hitting the press. The...
November 5, 2020
I’ve been troubled and deeply pessimistic about the future of the republic throughout the 2020 campaign season. Last night, I sat...