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  • #61
    Well he's got you there Doktor. He visited in 2016 so he's an expert on the local scene and you're not allowed to comment. But when it's more convenient in an argument to distance himself from Berkeley the tune changes...

    Mod Edit: Please refrain from making fake quotes from members, for whatever reason.

    Say anything to be right. No interest in honest discourse. At least they're consistent.
    Last edited by TopHatter; 03 May 17,, 17:34.

    Comment


    • #62
      What is the Law on Campus Free Speech and What Should Berkeley—and all Universities—Do to Protect It?

      While the thuggish and grotesque riot that forced the cancellation of the January appearance at Berkeley of conservative provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos was inspired largely, but not exclusively, by students, the University’s craven administrators were certainly complicit in the exclusion of conservative views from campus. They were also instrumental in causing the cancellation of a scheduled appearance by conservative author David Horowitz earlier in April, and, as documents leaked as part of the current lawsuit over the Coulter affair reveal, administrators intentionally created a Byzantine system to help prevent any conservative voices from having a platform at Berkeley.

      As the lawsuit, filed on behalf of Young America’s Foundation and Berkeley College Republicans, the groups that invited Coulter in the first place, observed, the Berkeley administration had concocted an unconstitutional policy to govern whether or not permission would be granted for controversial (read: conservative) speakers, the so-called High-Profile Speaker Policy. “It appears that the true aim of the High-Profile Speaker Policy,” the complaint asserts, “is to make it as difficult as possible for a disfavored speaker to hold a successful event at UC Berkeley.”

      As they did with David Horowitz, and in behavior they repeated with Ann Coulter, administrators violated the content-neutrality requirement for free speech, instead penalizing groups that invite conservative speakers with onerous time, place, and manner restrictions, as well as arbitrary and onerous “security” fees that effectively served as a speech tax on certain, unwelcome speech.

      The Plaintiffs contend that Berkeley administrators “selectively impose their unwritten, unpublished High-Profile Speaker Policy based on their subjective beliefs that the anticipated content of the speaker’s speech is likely to spark ‘public outrage,’ . . . thereby triggering ‘security’ concerns and leading to the need to restrict the speaker to a ‘securable” facility and time of speaking.’ For the Horowitz event, for example, just six days before the scheduled appearance, the administration demanded that the sponsoring student group suddenly pay a security fee of $5,788, something that made it impossible for the speech to be held.

      Of course, the security fee practice serves as a perverse incentive for those who wish to disrupt or have canceled events by conservatives, since threats of protests and disruptions prior to the event can necessitate the security fees and, often, the eventual cancellation of the event as a result of this penalty—the so-called ‘heckler’s veto.’ If there are legitimate security concerns over potential reactions by protestors to the speaker’s words, that is an issue that can addressed through law enforcement, suspensions, or other appropriate punishment for offenders. But the prospect for violence—on the part of the listeners—is not sufficient cause to suppress the First Amendment rights of the speaker.

      The security fee unconstitutionally punishes the speaker for the real or imagined future behavior of his or her audience, and when the university—a public actor—invokes the security claim based on a conservative speaker’s controversiality for liberal audiences, it “offends the First Amendment when it imposes financial burdens on certain speakers based on the content of their expression,” the Supreme Court found in 1992 in Forsyth County v. Nationalist Movement. Moreover, even the determination that a Yiannopoulos, Horowitz, or Coulter appearance is likely to provoke a violent reaction—based on their previously articulated views—is itself violative of the First Amendment, since the Court also noted that “[l]isteners’ reaction to speech is not a content-neutral basis for regulation . . . Speech cannot be financially burdened, any more than it can be punished or banned, simply because it might offend a hostile mob.”
      full article: http://www.educationviews.org/law-ca...do-protect-it/

      Comment


      • #63
        Please keep things on subject and refrain from attacking another poster's honesty. Calling someone a liar is a very big line to cross.
        “He was the most prodigious personification of all human inferiorities. He was an utterly incapable, unadapted, irresponsible, psychopathic personality, full of empty, infantile fantasies, but cursed with the keen intuition of a rat or a guttersnipe. He represented the shadow, the inferior part of everybody’s personality, in an overwhelming degree, and this was another reason why they fell for him.”

        Comment


        • #64
          Originally posted by Wooglin View Post
          Well he's got you there Doktor. He visited in 2016 so he's an expert on the local scene and you're not allowed to comment. But when it's more convenient in an argument to distance himself from Berkeley the tune changes...

          Mod Edit: Please refrain from making fake quotes from members, for whatever reason.

          Say anything to be right. No interest in honest discourse. At least they're consistent.
          Excuse me, fake quote?!?! That's a direct quote from here...

          http://www.worldaffairsboard.com/sho...=1#post1024180

          Comment


          • #65
            Originally posted by Wooglin View Post
            Excuse me, fake quote?!?! That's a direct quote from here...

            http://www.worldaffairsboard.com/sho...=1#post1024180

            My mistake, I apologize. I didn't see the usual link back and jumped to a conclusion



            “He was the most prodigious personification of all human inferiorities. He was an utterly incapable, unadapted, irresponsible, psychopathic personality, full of empty, infantile fantasies, but cursed with the keen intuition of a rat or a guttersnipe. He represented the shadow, the inferior part of everybody’s personality, in an overwhelming degree, and this was another reason why they fell for him.”

            Comment


            • #66
              Originally posted by TopHatter View Post
              However it didn't put a telegraph in the pocket or on the desk top of the vast majority of grade schoolers, even those whose parents were of the most modest means....a pocket telegraph that could reach nearly every corner of the globe just as easily as it did the next town over.

              This time is most definitely different.
              This is of course just one study, but it's emblematic of "This time is different". Make of it what you will.
              ______________________

              Tablets and smartphones damage toddlers' speech development
              By Sarah Knapton

              Putting babies in front of iPads before the age of two stunts speech development, a new study suggests.

              In Britain children under the age of three spend an average of 44 minutes a day using smartphones and tablets but it is the first time researchers have shown it can impact language skills. (In the United States, a 2015 study showed 92.2 percent of 1-year-olds had already used a mobile device and a majority of 2-year-olds use them on a daily basis.)

              Researchers from the University of Toronto and The Hospital For Sick Children in Toronto found that every 30 minutes of screen time increased the risk of delayed speech by 49 percent.

              By the age of two to three, infants should be able to communicate in sentences of between three and four words. But those who spent the most time on handheld devices were found to struggle with communication skills.


              Although guidelines exist for screen time, many parents do not realise that it also applies to handheld devices, the authors warn.

              "Handheld devices are everywhere these days," said Dr. Catherine Birken, staff pediatrician at The Hospital for Sick Children.

              "While new pediatric guidelines suggest limiting screen time for babies and toddlers, we believe that the use of smartphones and tablets with young children has become quite common."

              “This is the first study to report an association between handheld screen time and increased risk of expressive language delay."

              Every extra 30 minutes of screen times was associated with an increased risk of speech delay

              The study involved nearly 900 children aged between six months and two years and was presented at 2017 Pediatric Academic Societies Meeting in San Francisco.

              Dr. Birken said all screen media should be discouraged in children younger than 18 months.

              A recent study by University College London found that screen time can also impact the sleep of infants, and possibly harm brain development.

              The British study found that every hour infants spent on such devices was linked to a 16 minutes less sleep. Sleep is important for the development of the brain, especially during the first few years of life, when “neural plasticity” is at its greatest.

              The researchers believe that blue light from screens can affect the bodyclock, disrupting circadian rhythms while the stimulation caused by the content of the games or programmes can cause psychological and physiological arousal. Link
              “He was the most prodigious personification of all human inferiorities. He was an utterly incapable, unadapted, irresponsible, psychopathic personality, full of empty, infantile fantasies, but cursed with the keen intuition of a rat or a guttersnipe. He represented the shadow, the inferior part of everybody’s personality, in an overwhelming degree, and this was another reason why they fell for him.”

              Comment


              • #67
                Originally posted by TopHatter View Post
                This is of course just one study, but it's emblematic of "This time is different". Make of it what you will.
                ______________________

                Tablets and smartphones damage toddlers' speech development
                By Sarah Knapton

                Putting babies in front of iPads before the age of two stunts speech development, a new study suggests.

                In Britain children under the age of three spend an average of 44 minutes a day using smartphones and tablets but it is the first time researchers have shown it can impact language skills. (In the United States, a 2015 study showed 92.2 percent of 1-year-olds had already used a mobile device and a majority of 2-year-olds use them on a daily basis.)

                Researchers from the University of Toronto and The Hospital For Sick Children in Toronto found that every 30 minutes of screen time increased the risk of delayed speech by 49 percent.

                By the age of two to three, infants should be able to communicate in sentences of between three and four words. But those who spent the most time on handheld devices were found to struggle with communication skills.


                Although guidelines exist for screen time, many parents do not realise that it also applies to handheld devices, the authors warn.

                "Handheld devices are everywhere these days," said Dr. Catherine Birken, staff pediatrician at The Hospital for Sick Children.

                "While new pediatric guidelines suggest limiting screen time for babies and toddlers, we believe that the use of smartphones and tablets with young children has become quite common."

                “This is the first study to report an association between handheld screen time and increased risk of expressive language delay."

                Every extra 30 minutes of screen times was associated with an increased risk of speech delay

                The study involved nearly 900 children aged between six months and two years and was presented at 2017 Pediatric Academic Societies Meeting in San Francisco.

                Dr. Birken said all screen media should be discouraged in children younger than 18 months.

                A recent study by University College London found that screen time can also impact the sleep of infants, and possibly harm brain development.

                The British study found that every hour infants spent on such devices was linked to a 16 minutes less sleep. Sleep is important for the development of the brain, especially during the first few years of life, when “neural plasticity” is at its greatest.

                The researchers believe that blue light from screens can affect the bodyclock, disrupting circadian rhythms while the stimulation caused by the content of the games or programmes can cause psychological and physiological arousal. Link
                Should this not be in another thread. Not that it isn't important because it is and it isn't the whole of it. What starts happening with ocular function in the teens now resembles symptoms I am used to seeing in far older adults.

                The blue light issue can affect anyone but worse for toddlers.

                Comment


                • #68
                  Originally posted by Wooglin View Post
                  Excuse me, fake quote?!?! That's a direct quote from here...

                  http://www.worldaffairsboard.com/sho...=1#post1024180
                  Crap article in the first paragraph and there was no need to read further.

                  Comment


                  • #69
                    Originally posted by tbm3fan View Post
                    Crap article in the first paragraph and there was no need to read further.
                    In other words...

                    Click image for larger version

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                    • #70
                      So true...

                      College campuses still appear superficially to be quiet, well-landscaped refuges from the bustle of real life.

                      But increasingly, their spires, quads and ivy-covered walls are facades. They are now no more about free inquiry and unfettered learning than were the proverbial Potemkin fake buildings put up to convince the traveling Russian czarina Catherine the Great that her impoverished provinces were prosperous.

                      The university faces crises almost everywhere of student debt, university finances, free expression, and the very quality and value of a university education.

                      Take free speech. Without freedom of expression, there can be no university.

                      But if the recent examples at Berkeley, Claremont, Middlebury and Yale are any indication, there is nothing much left to the idea of a free and civilized exchange of different ideas.

                      At most universities, if a scheduled campus lecturer expressed scholarly doubt about the severity of man-caused global warming and the efficacy of its government remedies, or questioned the strategies of the Black Lives Matter movement, or suggested that sex is biologically determined rather than socially constructed, she likely would either be disinvited or have her speech physically disrupted. Campuses often now mimic the political street violence of the late Roman Republic.

                      Campus radicals have achieved what nuclear strategists call deterrence: Faculty and students now know precisely which speech will endanger their careers and which will earn them rewards.

                      The terrified campus community makes the necessary adjustments. As with the German universities of the 1930s, faculty keep quiet or offer politically correct speech through euphemisms. Toadies thrive; mavericks are hounded.

                      Shortchanged students collectively owe more than $1 trillion in federal student-loan debt — a sum that cannot be paid back by ill-prepared and often unemployed graduates.

                      Test scores have plummeted. Too many college students were never taught the basic referents of liberal education. Most supposedly aware, hip and politically engaged students can’t identify the Battle of Gettysburg or the Parthenon, or explain the idea of compounded interest.

                      Many students simply cannot do the work that was routinely assigned in the past. In response, as proverbially delicate “snowflakes,” they insist that they are traumatized and can only find remedy in laxer standards, gut courses and faculty deference.

                      “Studies” activist courses too often are therapeutic. They are neither inductive nor Socratic, and they rarely teach facts, methods and means of learning without insisting on predesignated conclusions. Instead, the student should leave the class with proper group-think and ideological race/class/gender fervor of the professor — a supposed new recruit for the larger progressive project.

                      Universities talk loudly of exploitation in America — in the abstract. But to address societal inequality, university communities need only look at how their own campuses operate. Part-time faculty with Ph.D.s are paid far less than tenured full professors for often teaching the same classes — and thus subsidize top-heavy administrations.

                      Graduate teaching assistantships, internships and mentorships are designed to use inexpensive or free labor under the protocols of the medieval guild.

                      One reason that tuition is sky-high is because behind the facade of “trigger warnings,” “safe spaces” and “culture appropriation” are costly legions of deputy associate provosts, special assistants to the dean, and race/class/gender “senior strategists” and facilitators (usually former faculty who no longer teach).

                      Few admit that a vastly expanding and politically correct administrative industry reflects a massive shift of resources away from physics, humanities or biology — precisely the courses that nontraditional students need to become competitive.

                      One of the great mysteries of American life is nontransparent university admissions. No one knows quite how alumni legacies, deference to college athletics, or poorly defined affirmative action and haphazard diversity criteria actually operate.

                      At the California State University system — the nation’s largest — nearly 40 percent of incoming students need remediation in math and English after failing basic competency tests. Universities are now scrambling to offer university credit for what are in truth remedial high school courses, apparently to prevent eager (but entirely unprepared) students from hurt feelings when they butt up against the reality of college classes.

                      Careerist university administrators more often make the university change to accommodate the student rather than asking the incoming student to prepare to accommodate the time-honored university.

                      The results are watered-down classes, grade inflation — and student frustration and anger upon learning that entering college is not quite the same as graduating from college.

                      The way to ensure student confidence and self-reliance is not through identity-politics courses that emphasize racial, sexual and religious fault lines. Instead, only classes ensuring that students are well trained in writing, speaking, computing and inductive thinking will give assuredness of achievement — and, with it, self-confidence.

                      Apart from the sciences and the professional schools, campuses are a bubble of unearned self-congratulation — clueless that they have broken faith with a once-noble legacy of free inquiry and have lost the respect of most Americans.

                      The now melodramatic university has become a classical tragedy.
                      http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/o...504-story.html

                      Comment


                      • #71
                        Originally posted by Wooglin View Post
                        In other words...

                        [ATTACH=CONFIG]43802[/ATTACH]
                        So that is you? A selfie, huh. You know I have never taken one personally. What kind of camera?

                        Me, authors have agendas and AGENDAS. Research articles are independent and/or are sponsored by a firm. I discount those sponsored by firms and I discount those with AGENDAS from either side unlike you. This author had an AGENDA in the first few lines that screamed out into one's face. Of course you wouldn't understand as you apparently never listen from looking at your picture.
                        Last edited by tbm3fan; 05 May 17,, 08:36.

                        Comment


                        • #72
                          Originally posted by Wooglin View Post
                          That is absolutely hilarious. I don't think there has been an honest to God campus radical at U.C. Berkeley since the 70's. Certainly none there from 1977-81 that is for sure. Snowflakes who can't do the work yet have beyond an entering gpa beyond 4.0. I do believe someone is jealous. There certainly isn't the room here for me to name every single student, who I personally know, who went there and who are all pursuing advance degrees in physics, chemistry, genetics and engineering to name a few. I leave out those who went into finance and international affairs who were truly and exceptionally talented. This author harbors some hidden issues about their own education.

                          Comment


                          • #73
                            Originally posted by tbm3fan View Post
                            Crap article in the first paragraph and there was no need to read further.
                            I don't understand. The link leads to a DOR post, not an article?
                            In the realm of spirit, seek clarity; in the material world, seek utility.

                            Leibniz

                            Comment


                            • #74
                              Originally posted by tbm3fan View Post
                              So that is you? A selfie, huh. You know I have never taken one personally. What kind of camera?

                              Me, authors have agendas and AGENDAS. Research articles are independent and/or are sponsored by a firm. I discount those sponsored by firms and I discount those with AGENDAS from either side unlike you. This author had an AGENDA in the first few lines that screamed out into one's face. Of course you wouldn't understand as you apparently never listen from looking at your picture.
                              You discount anything that doesn't support your worldview. We already know this, and I couldn't care less what you think about it, or what excuses you find to discount it. There's no hope for honest discussion with you, so cry to someone who cares.

                              Comment


                              • #75
                                TRIGGER WARNING: TRIGGER WARNING: Article contains arguments and opinions you may disagree with, which can cause some extreme emotional distress! Safe space is available here for the more reactive snowflakes amongst you.

                                Liberals' free-speech amnesia

                                This is a moment of extreme hyperbole in America, with words like "fascism" and "Russian coup" mixing in seamlessly in our superlative-heavy political discourse with "creeping sharia" and "Mexican invasion." But perhaps no phrase is deployed as recklessly as "hate speech," a nebulous non-legal term of which there is no agreed-upon definition.

                                While neither red nor blue America has a monopoly on trying to use the force of government or the violence of the citizenry to silence its opponents, the idea that the most vulnerable among us can be protected from the wounds of "hate speech" through loopholes in the First Amendment has been gaining disquieting momentum among liberal thinkers who should really know better.

                                Howard Dean recently demonstrated his mangled misunderstanding of Supreme Court jurisprudence when he followed up a widely mocked tweet asserting hate speech is not protected by the First Amendment with later tweets and media appearances in which he repeatedly cited a Supreme Court decision that deemed certain speech to constitute "fighting words." The physician and former DNC chair was arguing that conservative gadfly Ann Coulter's well-worn shtick constitutes both "hate speech" and "fighting words," and is therefore not constitutionally protected.

                                That is simply nonsense.

                                "Hate speech" as a legal concept does not exist, which is a good thing, because hate is subjective and anything from the most vile forms of bigotry to opposition to abortion to support for gay rights to criticism of religious institutions have all been deemed beyond the pale of public discourse by various groups and individuals. Offensiveness lies in the eye of the beholder. Thankfully, the right to express offensive ideas persists.

                                To be clear, there are jerks out there who have no desire to engage in good faith debating and who profit off of deliberately causing offense, the receipt of which only makes them more popular with their audiences. They promote noxious ideas and stand on "free speech" the way a child would claim to be standing on "base" in a backyard game of tag. Coulter is one of these jerks, and one only needs to recall the outrage she helped stoke over a Muslim community center opening a few blocks from the World Trade Center back in 2010 to be aware of how little she truly values free speech, freedom of religion, and private property rights when she and her comrades demanded the "Ground Zero mosque" be stopped.

                                These characters might not "deserve" free speech, but they are entitled to it. Rights are not earned by the righteousness of one's values. They're just rights. And the right to freedom of expression is the tool that cultivated the fight to win every civil right in this country's history. There is no civil rights movement, no gay rights movement, no feminist movement, and no anti-war movement without broad free speech protections for unpopular expression.

                                The good isn't safe unless the bad is, too.

                                Considering the former governor of Vermont made his name on the national stage as the most strident anti-war candidate of the 2004 presidential campaign, it's particularly ironic that Howard Dean would cite Chaplinsky v. State of New Hampshire, a case centering around a Jehovah's Witness named Walter Chaplinsky who had been passing out anti-WWII materials, attracted a hostile crowd, and then was arrested after a town marshal deemed him to be the cause of the unrest. What "fighting words" did Chaplinsky utter? He called the marshal "a damned fascist."

                                Never mind the details of the case or how many anti-war protesters have used that other "f word" to describe any number of people both in and out of government. Dean's citing of Chaplinsky ignores the history of the Supreme Court repeatedly clarifying and narrowing the definition of "fighting words," as well as the fact that the Court has never cited the case as a precedent to curtail freedom of speech. In fact, some legal scholars even consider the fighting words exception to be for all intents and purposes a pile of dead letters, if not explicitly overturned by the Court.

                                Though Dean would like to believe Coulter's tasteless musing about wishing Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh had instead targeted The New York Times is unprotected speech, it is. Like a great deal of Coulter's output, it is mean-spirited and — if intended as a joke — of miniscule satirical value. But the right to speech does not require a value test. And yet, a value test is exactly what was advocated in The New York Times recently by NYU vice provost and professor Ulrich Baer:

                                The idea of freedom of speech does not mean a blanket permission to say anything anybody thinks. It means balancing the inherent value of a given view with the obligation to ensure that other members of a given community can participate in discourse as fully recognized members of that community. [The New York Times]
                                This appears to be a wish-fulfillment fantasy on the part of Baer, because the freedom of speech requires no "balance" or "obligation to ensure" anything, primarily because someone would have to determine when sufficient "balance" had been achieved. Who does Baer think should be the arbiters of such balance? Why, right-thinking administrators like himself, who breathlessly determine that "there is no inherent value to be gained from debating" certain ideas in public.

                                Australian professor Robert Simpson, in a recent article at Quartz, also advocated for benevolent authority figures separating "good speech" from "bad speech." After cursory nods to the value of the right to free expression unencumbered by government interference or violent mobs ("Free speech is important … However, once we extrapolate beyond the clear-cut cases, the question of what counts as free speech gets rather tricky"), Simpson argues for putting "free 'speech' as such to one side, and replace it with a series of more narrowly targeted expressive liberties."

                                Like Baer and Dean, Simpson assumes that those in power will always be as right-thinking as he, and that if the price of squashing the Ann Coulters of the world is abandoning the principle of universal free speech so long as it doesn't rise to direct threats or incitement to violence, well, that's a price they're willing to pay.

                                Erstwhile anti-war presidential candidates and distinguished professors should know better than to put their faith in authority when it comes to the competition of ideas. That they don't shows how little faith they have in the ability of the "good" to beat the "bad." Call me a hopeless optimist, but the value of robust free speech — especially the right to offend — has helped to facilitate the changing of minds regarding civil rights and has helped end or stop wars. That's why free speech, and not well-meaning censorship, will continue to be perhaps our greatest bulwark to tyranny.

                                This country has seen bigger threats to the republic than Ann Coulter and her ilk, and we should resist the urge to use state power or approvingly wink at masked, firework-wielding LARPers from creating "security threats" that prevent her from plugging a book to a few dozen young Republicans and a few hundred protesters on a college campus.
                                http://theweek.com/articles/694398/l...speech-amnesia

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