Utopia, you are standing in it!

I learned about a new Norwegian law from this tweet by Bari Weiss, who links to a report in Out Magazine.

What struck me, as a free-speech absolutist who adheres to our courts’ interpretation of the American First Amendment, was the notion of “hate speech”, which is slippery at best, as well as the part of the Norwegian law that allows imprisonment for comments made in private. I read the out.com article and also one from the charitable Thomson Reuters Foundation (click on screenshot below).

An excerpt from Thomson Reuters:

Norway’s parliament outlawed hate speech against transgender and bisexual people on Tuesday, expanding its penal code which has protected gay and lesbian people since 1981.

People found guilty…

It’s pretty clear by now that there was no widespread vote fraud in the election, as Trump keeps insisting, enabled by Mitch “666” McConnell and the silent Republicans who won’t speak up out of fear of Trump.  The New York Timescalled election officials in all 50 states, asking them about voter fraud. The results won’t be appealing to Republicans:

The New York Times contacted the offices of the top election officials in every state on Monday and Tuesday to ask whether they suspected or had evidence of illegal voting. Officials in 45 states responded directly to The Times. For four of the remaining states, The Times spoke to other statewide officials or found public comments from secretaries of state; none reported any major voting issues.

Statewide officials in Texas did not respond to repeated inquiries. But a spokeswoman for the top elections official in Harris County, the largest…

I’ve maintained that becoming a determinist leads many people to promote criminal-justice and prison reform. This comes from realizing that people have no choice in their actions—including committing crimes—and so criminals should be treated as if they were broken machines to be fixed (if possible) rather than as “people who made the wrong choice.” Readers have responded that promoting prison reform can also come from non-deterministic world views, and that’s true. But I believe that “hard” determinism, not sullied by the semantic taints of compatibilism, leads more automatically and naturally to criminal justice reform.

Well, you might disagree, but that’s not important for today’s post. I think most of us will agree that American prisons are cruel, inhumane, and do a lousy job of rehabilitating prisoners. That’s largely, I suspect,  because American prisons are directed more toward punishment than rehabilitation, and what you learn in prison is how to…

If this wasn’t so unbelievable this would be hilarious. ABC News reports two environmentalist campaigners with the group Protect Country Alliance named Lauren Mellor and Conrad Rory were accused of vandalizing Australia’s Northern Territory Parliament’s lawn during a protest their organization held last year. The hooligans were charged with using a bobcat to drill holes in the parliament’s lawn.

The judge stated that, while he agreed that the two hoodlums were guilty of vandalism, but dismissed the case. The judge decided the prosecution did not establish the NT Parliament owned the property in the first place and that the protest was unlikely to have any impact on the government’s decision.

No proof of the NT Parliament constructing, maintaining, or even having the grounds policed to establish some sort of common law ownership? This is how environmentalist and other Leftist hooligans continue their destructive activities when they’re enabled by legal…