From: matt@smoke.brl.mil (Matthew Rosenblatt)
Newsgroups: misc.legal
Subject: Re: Skinhead speech protected, Supreme Court says
Summary: Is the kitchen too hot for sensitive souls?
Keywords: In brightest day, in blackest night
Date: 30 Sep 92 21:24:17 GMT
Organization: U.S. Army Ballistic Research Lab, APG MD.

In article <1992Sep23.194930.19840@Princeton.EDU> 
egnilges@phoenix.Princeton.EDU (Ed Nilges) writes:

>     *  The twelve years of ReaganBush have seen an increase in savage
>        verbal attacks on liberals, . . .  [Ed Nilges]

Hey, they've seen an increase in savage verbal attacks on non-liberals,
too!  And that's not all: they've seen men like Adolfo Calero, a leader
in the fight that freed Nicaragua from Marxist tyranny, physically prevented
from speaking at a University by some hairy-legged Marxist professorette
who declaimed that Mr. Calero was lucky she let him off with the right
to live, let alone the right to speak.

>        . . . which I've shown act as a barrier
>        to entry to sensitive souls (and it is macho and chauvinist to
>        restrict speech only to right wingers and the occasional 
>        brave, even foolhardy, liberal such as myself.)   [Ed Nilges]

"Sensitive souls" can't stand criticism or ridicule, can they?  Are we
suppposed to suspend the freedom to criticize or the freedom to ridicule
so that the sensitivities of these sensitive souls won't be offended?
Who says that whatever the sensitive souls have to contribute will be
more worthy than the criticism and ridicule that we would have to suppress
in order to coax them into the rough-and-tumble marketplace of ideas and
invective?

>     *  The campaign against Frug of Harvard Law  . . .

Of *where*?

>                                              . . . has included an
>        offensive "humorous" sketch that hurt her family, character
>        assasination, misrepresentation here on the net (she was
>        killed by an unknown WHITE assailant, guys), and possibly
>        murder (it has not been demonstrated that her unknown assailant
>        was not a crazed right winger or in the pay of the right wing.)
>        [Ed Nilges]

Another argument _ad ignorantiam_.  Where'zat old bogosity meter?

>>What this is really all about is that Professor Fish and his
>>radical ideological allies (surely not all or even most liberals) 
>>feel threatened and insecure.  They *know* that their prescriptions
>>for society run counter to five thousand years of human nature.
>>[Matt Rosenblatt]

>Perhaps five thousand years of human nature have made a mess of the
>planet.  Humans existed for thousands of years before the Sumerians, and
>in a sense this "five thousand years of human nature" is merely the
>history of the dominant cultures.  Perhaps (gasp) human-nature is not a
>given but is revealed through history, . . .  [Ed Nilges]

How about, human nature is an unchangeable given, and what history
has revealed is just how unchangeable human nature really is?  And
does Mr. Nilges deny that twelve years of Reagan/Bush backlash
against 'Sixties radicalism has made a good many former 'Sixties 
radicals feel more than a little threatened and insecure?

>. . . and perhaps (gasp gasp) thinkers
>like Fish are a (tiny) part of that process.  Boggles the mind, doesn't
>it, Matt?   [Ed Nilges]

What boggles the mind are the atrocities committed throughout history
by dreamers who thought that they could change human nature, that they
could bring into existence a "New Soviet Man" (or whatever) who would 
magically be immune to the Evil Inclination.  This kind of dreaming
has littered the Eurasian land mass with tens of millions of corpses
in this century alone.

>>They *know* that their "dream" can be imposed on us only by 
>>coercion comparable in degree to that of the recently dissolved
>>Red Soviet Bol'shevik Evil Empire.  [Matt Rosenblatt]

>From Katrina vanden Heuvel's "Women of Russia, Unite!", New York Times,
>9/12/92:
>
>     As the Soviet welfare system collapses, the feminization  of
>     poverty has become the new Russia's largest and cruelest
>     problem...Alisa, a new brokerage house, published announcements
>     seeking women aged 18 to 21 for secretarial positions.  Applicants
>     were told to come to an interview wearing a miniskirt.  An
>     advertising firm requested that applicants for a receptionist
>     position submit a full-size photo, preferably one showing them
>     in a bikini... 
>
>Ah, freedom.   [Ed Nilges]

So, freedom in this case has led to "the feminization of poverty."  Was
it better when both men and women were both poor and unfree?  Would the
elimination of the sort of noxious hiring practice that Mr. Nilges cites
justify the re-imposition of the Red Soviet Bol'shevik totalitarian 
Marxist-Leninist tyranny that butchered millions of _kulaks_ and
deliberately starved to death eleven millions of Ukrainians?  Give 
us a break!

>Horowitz was slime then and he's slime now.  [Ed Nilges]

Nice talk.

>. . . He was looking forward to a penurious old age
>and for this reason elected to be a turncoat, and his association in his
>left days with known criminals means that he is not to be trusted.  
>[Ed Nilges]

Who's a criminal?  Why, someone who violates a criminal law, that's
who! That oughtta be obvious here on misc.legal.  I seem to remember
that a good many of the antics of the "Students for a Democratic
Society" (anyone else catch the irony of a bunch of hyper-elitists
including the word, "Democratic," in the title of their gang?) were
performed in violation of assorted criminal laws.  After all, the
"Days of Rage" were not exactly a tea party.  Strictly speaking, the
Vietnik rabble who burst into a mathematical seminar at the University
of Wisconsin in Madison on October 15, '69 -- "Moratorium Day" --
shouted, "Ho,Ho, Ho Chi Minh!  The NLF is gonna win!" and then
proceeded to splash baggies of red, white, and pink paint over those
of us attending the seminar, were *criminals*, because it is against
Wisconsin law to go around splashing paint on people.  Are *these* the
criminals with whom Mr. Horowitz associated during his "left days"?
Or is Mr. Nilges talking about the "Weathermen" whose bomb at UW's
"Army Math Research Center" snuffed out the life of a physics student
named Robert Fassnacht?

>Give me a man with integrity, even Barry Goldwater (who was a right wing
>nutcase before it was so fashionable), . . . [Ed Nilges]

Talk is cheap.  I *voted* for Barry Goldwater.  Can Mr. Nilges say the same?

>>     "Everyone who does evil hates the light,
>>      and will not come into the light
>>      for fear that his deeds will be exposed.
>>      But whoever lives by the truth
>>      comes into the light, so that 
>>      it may be seen that what he has done
>>      has been done through G-d."
>>                   -- John 3:20-21 NIV

>Wow, death to unbelievers or what?  This is free speech?  [Ed Nilges]

Where exactly is the death threat embodied in the above quotation
from the New Testament?  Is the mere exposure of evildoers' deeds
the equivalent of killing them?  Do we need a "confidentiality law"
to protect evildoers from the consequences of having their evil
deeds brought to light?  Does John 3:20 threaten that a Green Beam 
will zap those who do evil?  And even if it did, is Mr. Nilges 
prepared to argue that free speech does not extend to the text 
of the New Testament?

Note: Today, Wednesday the 30th of September, was the last day
of the Ballistics Research Laboratory's existence upon this earth.
_Ave atque vale!_

					-- Matt Rosenblatt
                                        (matt@amsaa.brl.mil)

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