Bin Laden’s Plan to Ruin America: Make Joe Biden President!

Now, look, we should not make choices among candidates based on this sort of thing, but gosh, this is probably going to result in some awkwardness in the White House:

Before his death, Osama bin Laden boldly commanded his network to organize special cells in Afghanistan and Pakistan to attack the aircraft of President Obama and Gen. David H. Petraeus.

“The reason for concentrating on them,” the al-Qaeda leader explained to his top lieutenant, “is that Obama is the head of infidelity and killing him automatically will make [Vice President] Biden take over the presidency. . . . Biden is totally unprepared for that post, which will lead the U.S. into a crisis. As for Petraeus, he is the man of the hour . . . and killing him would alter the war’s path” in Afghanistan.

(Source).  My guess is Obama secretly had a laugh, and the secret service agent briefing Biden drew the short straw.

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Follow me at Twitter @aaronworthing, mostly for snark and site updates.  And you can purchase my book (or borrow it for free if you have Amazon Prime), Archangel: A Novel of Alternate, Recent History here.  And you can read a little more about my novel, here.

Friday Frivolity: “Batman, You Sonofabitch!”

On a day we hear of George Clooney getting arrested (I won’t be joking about it, because stopping the genocide in Sudan is actually a serious and noble issue), we get to look back at his... um, less successful movie outing.

You might think that there is nothing that can be done to redeem the movie Batman and Robin, and on this point you are wrong.  It can be fixed... with a cheesy Phantom of the Opera style musical number:

I think what makes it work for me is the dead on imitation of how Ahnold would sound holding a long note.  Or trying to.

It has to be the funniest thing to happen in Batman’s universe since... well... this:

Yes, yes, the infamous shark repellant scene in the 1960’s Batman movie.  For some reason they recently released this movie on blu-ray (seriously, why?), and a long time ago I saw where Conan O’Brien argued that the 1960’s Batman show was actually a brilliant comedy—that the stuff that seemed ridiculous as we were grew out of the show was intentionally ridiculous.  Myself, I don’t know.  On one hand it is pretty absurd that there are multiple types of repellant.  And the shark blowing up (you find out later it was rigged to blow—that all of this was one of the most awkward assassination attempts in history, unless you count all the ways we tried to kill Castro)... it’s hard not to think it is a joke.  But on the other hand, the pacing of that scene is awful.  You watch the shark get creases in its foam from the rope ladder as Robin, supposedly an acrobat, makes an incredibly awkward climb down, complete with his cape batting Batman in the face.  I think maybe the best explanation is that some of the people on the show understood it was a joke and played that up, but others did not.

But it’s really hard not to catch the pitch perfect comic timing in this bit:

Um, yeah, Batman that isn’t exactly going to tamp down those rumors about your relationship with Robin.

And Julie Newmar is cute, but it’s really hard to beat this Catwoman:

 

(That is referred to as Rule 5, folks.)

That would be how she was portrayed in Batman: Arkham City.

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Follow me at Twitter @aaronworthing, mostly for snark and site updates.  And you can purchase my book (or borrow it for free if you have Amazon Prime), Archangel: A Novel of Alternate, Recent History here.  And you can read a little more about my novel, here.

Gloria Allred Hypocritically Tries to Get Limbaugh Prosecuted Under a Sexist Law

Update: Thanks for the linkage from Overlawyered, which correctly notes it might be "counterproductive" to give Ms. Allred additional publicity.  I agree normally, but this is too thuggish to ignore.  They also link to this Volokh piece which goes into more depth about problems with this law.

For some on the left it is not enough to disagree with what someone said.  No they want to see that person destroyed, terrorized and imprisoned, for holding an opinion that they don’t like.  Not everyone on the left, of course.  There are decent liberals who believe in freedom of speech, but there is this creeping fascist tendency.

A case in point is Gloria Allred.  She was last seen simulating masturbation with a baseball bat on national television (yes, really).  And now she has jumped into the Limbaugh/Fluke controversy with a demand to prosecute Limbaugh for calling Fluke a slut and a prostitute.

Let’s take a moment to review what Limbaugh actually said, because it is important.

"What does it say about the college coed who goes before a congressional committee and essentially says that she must be paid to have sex?" Limbaugh continued, “It makes her a slut, right?  It makes her a prostitute. She wants to be paid to have sex."

So based on this statement Gloria Allred, ostensibly representing the Women’s Equal Rights Legal Defense and Educaton Fund (of which she is the President) has demanded that Rush Limbaugh be prosecuted for saying this under Florida Statutes §836.04 which states that:

836.04  Defamation.—Whoever speaks of and concerning any woman, married or unmarried, falsely and maliciously imputing to her a want of chastity, shall be guilty of a misdemeanor of the first degree, punishable as provided in s. 775.082 or s. 775.083.

You can indeed read the letter she wrote demanding this prosecution, here.

Does anyone else see the problem with this law?  It’s very language contains a discrimination based on sex—it applies only to imputations of a lack of chastity against women.  And I thought that this legal organization—and Ms. Allred herself—was opposed to sex discrimination.  Indeed Allred’s site states that she is “a tireless crusader against discrimination in all areas of our lives.”  Oh, except in the criminal law in Florida when a prominent Republican or conservative is involved.  So this attack on Limbaugh is deeply unprincipled as is any "feminist" who cheers it on.

And this is probably a fatal flaw in the statute itself.  I am not being ideological when I say this, but almost any lawyer will tell you that this law is unlikely to be upheld under the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment which prohibits many forms of discrimination.  As the Supreme Court has repeatedly said “classifications by gender must serve important governmental objectives and must be substantially related to achievement of those objectives[.]”  U.S. v. Virginia, 518 U.S. 515 (1996).  It’s important to note that in this case the test wouldn’t apply to the general concept of protecting a person’s sexual reputation, but instead the legislature’s decision to protect a woman’s sexual reputation and not a man’s.  That discrimination has to serve this important governmental purpose, and in my opinion it is unlikely that any court will find that it does.

But sharp eyed lawyers will know that U.S. v. Virginia didn’t even apply this standard, but went with even tougher-sounding language: “Parties who seek to defend gender-based government action must demonstrate an "exceedingly persuasive justification" for that action.”  Court observers interpret this as introducing a new, even higher standard for consideration, but still below the strict scrutiny afforded racial classifications.  For my money, I am not sure if it is supposed to be a higher standard or a clarification of what the old standard means, but I am open to that interpretation.

What kinds of discrimination pass would muster?  Bluntly I think it would have to be something that involves almost tautological truths.  For instance, it will never be considered unlawful sex discrimination to place urinals in men’s rooms and not women’s rooms.  It is unlikely to be considered sex discrimination to provide prostate exams for men only, or for breast exams for women only.  And indeed I doubt the Supreme Court will find that separate bathrooms by sex is sex discrimination the way bathrooms separated by race was considered racial discrimination.

So I can practically see the Supreme Court opinion talking about how this law was based on outdated mores and so on.  One fully expects this passage from Mississippi University for Women v. Hogan, 458 U.S. 718 (1982) to be cited:

Although the test for determining the validity of a gender-based classification is straightforward, it must be applied free of fixed notions concerning the roles and abilities of males and females. Care must be taken in ascertaining whether the statutory objective itself reflects archaic and stereotypic notions. Thus, if the statutory objective is to exclude or “protect” members of one gender because they are presumed to suffer from an inherent handicap or to be innately inferior, the objective itself is illegitimate.

The idea that it is some great harm to attack he sexual purity of a woman, but not a man, is precisely the kind of archaic and stereotypic notion that the courts will frown upon.

And it is worth noting that this law is indeed very rarely enforced and once when it was challenged based on the sex discrimination in the statute prosecutors withdrew the charge.

And one thing that is important to note is that Allred almost certainly knows this law is unlikely to survive any challenge under the Equal Protection Clause, or at least she would if she took five seconds to think about it.  So she is urging Limbaugh to be prosecuted, forcing him to spend time and money, when she knows—or should know—that any prosecution would be unsuccessful.  It is thuggery, pure and simple, mixed with publicity seeking.

And there is indeed another problem with this law, although it is less gloriously ironic than Allred pushing the enforcement of a sexist law: it probably isn’t defamation.  Go back and read Limbaugh’s comments again.  His entire knowledge of this woman’s sexual activity amounts to his knowledge that she wants to get birth control pills.  And based on that fact alone (“It makes her”), he calls her a slut, and based on the fact she wants us to pay for it, he calls her a whore.  This was an uncharitable assessment, and he is right to have apologized for it, but it was his opinion based on undeniable facts and thus is protected speech as “fair comment.”  It was wrong, but it is legally protected.

By the way, do you know how epically silly this is?  A Daily Koser agrees with me.  I discovered this just as I was wrapping up the post:

The Florida statute (which bans all anonymous publication, including many writers on DailyKos) is one of the worst examples of sexist paternalism, pretending to “protect” women by treating them like weaklings needing the defense of the state against offenses to the virtue. It's no small irony that at the bottom of Allred's letter is the text of the never-adopted Equal Rights Amendment: “Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of sex.” Clearly, a law that protects the “chastity” reputation of women but not men fails to meet that equal rights standard....

Sadly, some of the outrage against Limbaugh reflects the very same sexist notions embodied in the Florida law invoked by Allred, that the "chastity" of women is what makes them worthy.

Amen to that, and good catch on the Equal Rights Amendment language.  I frankly missed it.

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* As a side note, Hogan involved a man applying to an all women university so there is no question that the rule applies both ways—to laws that discriminate against men and women.  Indeed this was over a claim that this was a form of an affirmative action, to provide women a “room of their own” and so on.  This probably had a lot to do with the fact that the school in question was a school of nursing, not exactly a profession where women have faced discrimination and indeed one could easily argue that by encouraging women to be nurse and not doctors, Mississippi was not combatting sexism, but encouraging it.

Anyway, in Hogan the Supreme Court has made it pretty clear that there probably cannot be a single gender school, even if there is a separate but equal choice for the other gender.  The Virginia case was even easier because there wasn’t even a separate but equal school for women to match up with the then men-only Virginia Military Institute.

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Follow me at Twitter @aaronworthing, mostly for snark and site updates.  And you can purchase my book (or borrow it for free if you have Amazon Prime), Archangel: A Novel of Alternate, Recent History here.  And you can read a little more about my novel, here.

Friday Frivolity: The “Happy Birthday to Me” Edition!

These frivolous posts are not supposed to be terribly deep and I admit this has to be one of the most shallow.  I have been watching a lot of old shows on my Netflix.  I worked through the entire catalogue of the original Star Trek episodes.  I’m not a hard core Trekkie.  I watched all the original episodes twice when I was in high school and then put them away until... um, let’s just say it’s been a lot of years and leave my exact age out of it.  So enough time had passed that I was curious as to how my more mature eyes would see them, and they had the added bonus of updated special effects.  Actually, they are kind of odd, because they treaded a tough line, making it look much better than the original, but still really fake.  And they couldn’t do anything about the giant Space Lincoln that appeared toward the end.

Let’s face it, that was the moment the original series jumped the shark.  See that look on Sulu’s face?  He’s saying, “dude, that the frak?  Seriously, what the frak, man?”

But still it was interesting to watch them all again, and especially to see how they originally envisioned Captain Kirk.  Originally he was actually much more reserved, much less hammy, and portrayed in Starfleet Academy as being a nerd who had his nose in the books all the time.  Which of course is very different from how he was depicted even in Season Three, or the movies, and especially the most recent Star Trek, although in the last case that difference can be justified by the change in continuity that occurs in that movie.  In the new timeline, Kirk loses his dad as he was being born, so he grows up rebellious instead of nerdy.  It makes reasonable sense.  Certainly more sense than Kirk being marooned on a planet and just happening to run into “Old Spock.”

I Read “The Space Traders” by Derrick Bell So You Don’t Have To!

This isn’t a full on fisking (though it is close), but Derrick Bell’s famous story The Space Traders is in the news again because of Obama’s association with him.  I had actually seen that HBO short based on the story and found it to be racist crap at the time, and continue to hold that opinion.  But I admit I never got around to reading the original.  But you can and I did, here.

The basic set up is that aliens come here in the far-flung year of…  2000!

And admittedly some of the fun here is looking at what Bell thought the year 2000 would look like as he offered the set up:

Those mammoth vessels carried within their holds treasure of which the United States was in most desperate need: gold, to bail out the almost bankrupt federal, state, and local governments; special chemicals capable of unpolluting the environment, which was becoming daily more toxic, and restoring it to the pristine state it had been before Western explorers set foot on it; and a totally safe nuclear engine and fuel, to relieve the nation's all but-depleted supply of fossil fuel. In return, the visitors wanted only one thing-and that was to take back to their home star all the African Americans who lived in the United States.

Stratfor Personnel Guess bin Laden Was Not Buried at Sea and Somehow This is News

Back in my Patterico days, both I and Patrick were very hard on Obama’s decision to have bin Laden buried at sea, supposedly out of respect for Islamic tradition (except it wasn’t) before there was any independent verification that we actually killed him.  We felt that doign it that way robbed the families of the 9-11 victims of closure, and gave fertile ground for conspiracy theories.  And so now today via Althouse we get this article from the Wikileaking of Stratfor’s databases:

Leaked: Bin Laden not buried at sea, body moved on CIA plane to US

The body of Al-Qaeda leader Osama Bin Laden was not buried at sea, according to leaked emails of intelligence firm Stratfor, as revealed by WikiLeaks.

Wow, holy crap, that means the Obama administration was not as dumb about this as I thought.  I take it back, I mean...

Except, um, wait a minute:

Stratfor’s vice-president for intelligence, Fred Burton, believes the body was “bound for Dover, [Delaware] on [a] CIA plane” and then “onward to the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology in Bethesda [Maryland],” an email says.

(Emphasis added.)  Um, he believes?  As in he isn’t sure?

The official version is that the body of Al-Qaeda’s top man, who was killed by a US raid in Pakistan on May 2, 2011, was buried at an undisclosed location at sea in a proper Muslim ceremony.

"If body dumped at sea, which I doubt, the touch is very Adolph Eichman like. The Tribe did the same thing with the Nazi's ashes," Burton commented in another email. Eichman was one of the masterminds of the Holocaust by Nazi Germany. He was captured by Mossad agents in Argentina and, tried in Israel, found guilty and executed in 1962. His body was cremated and his ashes were scattered at sea over the Mediterranean.

“Which I doubt” means he is speculating...

Why Limbaugh’s Comments are Not a Fluke

So for the last few days there has been a dustup because Sandra Fluke testified before Congress about how she was a law student at Georgetown Law and she and other students had trouble affording birth control pills and the school, which is a Jesuit school, didn’t provide coverage.  Then Rush Limbaugh said this:

"What does it say about the college coed who goes before a congressional committee and essentially says that she must be paid to have sex?" Limbaugh continued, “It makes her a slut, right?  It makes her a prostitute. She wants to be paid to have sex."

And then he said this:

“So Miss Fluke, and the rest of you feminazis, here’s the deal. If we are going to pay for your contraceptives, and thus pay for you to have sex, we want something for it. We want you to post the videos online so we can all watch.”

And now we see that Limbaugh apologized, which I think is right.  Using birth control does not mean she is a slut, unless you think a woman is supposed to be chaste until marriage.  And no, this is not prostitution under the D.C. Code or any other jurisdiction that I know of.

But in a way, Obamacare and its mandates make this kind of thing inevitable.

We’ve all been there, 17 or 18 years old, and we get into a fight with our parents or maybe a sibling does.   “You can’t control me!” the near-adult says.

And the parent says, “as long as you live under my roof you will do what I say!”

For two hundred years we have understood intuitively that “freedom” and “independence” are closely related concepts.  Hell, when Destiny’s Child wanted to make a feminist anthem for the movie Charlie’s Angels, they called it “Independent Woman.”

Gerald Ford once said that “a government big enough to give you everything you want is a government big enough to take from you everything you have.”*  It also means that the government gets to scrutinize everything in your life.  It’s inevitable.  If someone has to pay for something, they are inevitably going to ask basic questions, like 1) where is this money going to, 2) is this the most economical way to spend the money, and 3) do you really need what I am being forced to buy for you?

Let’s take a less explosive example: Lipitor.  It’s a drug that reduces cholesterol.  If there was a mandate requiring Lipitor coverage for every single person, then the questions would start.  Why do you need it?  Are you eating right?  Are you exercising?  Or more rudely: why would I have to pay for your unhealthy lifestyle.

Or it might get really rude:

(Language warning.)

Friday Frivolity: The Joustin with Justin Edition!

So apparently there is an app in the iPhone called Joustin Beaver!  Here’s a pic of some of it:

Apparently the idea is that it is a light parody of the life of Justin Beiber where... well, let’s Kotaku explain it:

Joustin Beaver is about a beaver, who looks as much like Bieber as a cartoon beaver can, floating down a river swatting paparazzi and signing autographs, all the while trying to avoid being sucked into the “whirlpool of success”

You can even watch it in action, here:

(“Beaver Exposed”?  Really?  You had to go there?)

Yeah, so it’s kind of the usual silly stuff you see in the iPhone all the time.  I mean it’s not exactly Angry Birds or Jetpack Joyride (which is silly, but also a lot of fun).  This just looks silly and like a waste of a small amount of money.

So then Justin Beiber’s lawyers sent the game company a cease-and-desist letter and the game company responded by suing Beiber and his lawyers.

Now first you might rationally wonder “can they do that?” as in, can they sue preemptively this way, and the answer is yes.  They can do that to obtain a declaratory judgment—essentially what we would normally call an advisory opinion, but of course the courts have refused to give out advisory opinions so we call them declaratory judgments.  It’s a huge difference.  (Note: sarcasm.)

And I suppose there is value to that.  Would you invest in this game company knowing that they faced the threat of being shut down by Beiber’s lawyers?  So the game company has a good reason for wanting to get this issue settled.

But at the same time, this seems kind of dumb on the Beiber camp’s side.  The game is just enough “parody” to be protected speech, in my humble opinion, which means that I don’t believe their chances of winning are very good.  But in doing this, they have given something to the game company infinitely more valuable: publicity.  I am willing to bet that since the suit has been filed, their sales has been at least doubled.

This is what we talk about when we talk about the Streisand effect.  It means that the attempt to suppress speech ends up generating publicity that harms your ultimate cause.  And it is funny that it is a common enough mistake that we have a term for it.

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On the other hand, if you have a smart phone you should check IGN’s mobile site all the time.  They have constant app store updates telling you about tons of apps that are absolutely free that make this game look like the POS it probably is.  My favorite free game right now?  Jetpack Joyride, although I wish it had some of the humor of Halfbrick’s other classic (which also stars Barry Steakfries), Age of Zombies.  Seriously, there is very little reason to pay for most apps on the iPhone unless it is really vital to doing something important.

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Follow me at Twitter @aaronworthing, mostly for snark and site updates.  And you can purchase my book (or borrow it for free if you have Amazon Prime), Archangel: A Novel of Alternate, Recent History here.  And you can read a little more about my novel, here.

On Breitbart’s Death: Why Do They Do This?

So today we get the news that Andrew Breitbart has passed away.  I’ve never actually met the guy, indeed only corresponded with him once, after an interviewer implied he was an alcoholic, and just asking a few follow up questions about that.  He wasn’t in my orbit, so much as in the orbit of people who are in my orbit, if that makes any sense.  I mean it is no great disclosure to say that Patrick Frey and Mandy Nagy are friends of mine.  I know Patrick is in shock, and I suspect Mandy is, too.

And it is shocking.  He wasn’t shockingly young to die.  I mean at 43 you are definitely starting to get the warnings about diet and exercise, and so this isn’t like a twenty year old ball player dying, but it is still on the young end of the spectrum.  But it was still kind of out of the blue, and that is shocking.

And I think it is hard to believe because... you half expect him to show up on Red Eye tonight and explain that this is just a massive prank on everyone, like they suspected when Andy Kaufman died.

And of course like clockwork you see the ugly side of all of this.  You know it without me saying it, but apparently many on the left couldn’t help but dance on the grave of Breitbart.  I mean, look, I am not above dancing on the grave of a dictator.  I was positively overjoyed when Kim Jung Il died, even writing “may you roast in flames you evil son of a bitch.”  But he was a dictator, a tyrant, and well... even my state flag advocates for the death of tyrants:

But all Breitbart was, was a political enemy.  Not a tyrant but just a guy who engaged in speech some didn’t like.  And because of that, many on the left are cheering his death.

I am not going to quote this ugliness to you.  I mean if you have to look, you can find it here, here, here and here, but really do you need to look?  Do you have any doubt what kinds of things they said and will say?  Of course not.  It’s all “yippee! He’s dead!  A person I disagree with is dead!”

Yes, yippee a wife is without her husband.  And his four young children are without a father.  And friends across the country break down in tears:

And the predictability of this ugliness—dancing on his grave before it is even dug—robs me of anything to say.  It’s already been said in other instances where famous conservatives (or libertarians as was the case with Breitbart) have died, or been diagnosed with dread diseases.  And moreover when people have said these kinds of awful things, other people pointed at it and denounced their ugliness, so even that part is predictable.

So we know what they are going to say, and they know we are going to report it and denounce it and it is going to make them and the movements they represent look bad.  And they do it anyway. They know it is going to hurt their pet causes, but they still do it anyway.

And all one can conclude is that they can’t help themselves.  They feel so much joy at his death that even knowing it will hurt their cause, embarrass any publication they work for, and generally convince decent people that they are cretins, they have to do it anyway.

And maybe I am wrong in a way for not recording and reciting the vile things they said personally.  After all, as Jonah Goldberg said in that interview: “One of his favorite pastimes was to retweet all of the hate that people threw at him because he considered it a badge of honor.”  So somewhere up in heaven right now, Breitbart is checking his holy twitterfeed and smiling at all the hate being spewed at him.  And maybe the best tribute to him is to publicize this spewing of hate.

But I don’t have it in me to do that right now.

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Follow me at Twitter @aaronworthing, mostly for snark and site updates.  And you can purchase my book (or borrow it for free if you have Amazon Prime), Archangel: A Novel of Alternate, Recent History here.  And you can read a little more about my novel, here.

Julian Savulescu of the Journal of Medical Ethics Whines That All this Speech is a Threat to Freedom of Speech

So yesterday I told you about a horrifying piece in the Journal of Medical Ethics entitled “After-Birth Abortion: why should the baby live?”  In it they argued that well some babies are so deformed or whatever that they really shouldn’t be allowed to live and so we should be allowed to kill them and call it After-Birth Abortion to make it sound less horrifying than the correct term (which is infanticide)?

You think I am exaggerating?  Well, go and read the original and judge for yourself.

One aspect I didn’t get into in my original post is that, well, this shouldn’t surprise you but some people have had some very strong reactions to it.  So we get Julian Savulescu, Editor, Journal of Medical Ethics writes a piece entitled “Liberals Are Disgusting”: In Defence of the Publication of “After-Birth Abortion.”

Now he starts off reasonably enough talking about how they got death threats.  “This article has elicited personally abusive correspondence to the authors, threatening their lives and personal safety.”

That is undoubtedly wrong, and I hope they have reported such death threats to the authorities and that the authorities take it appropriately seriously.

But then he complains about “abusive emails” writing:

The Journal has received a string [of] abusive emails for its decision to publish this article. This abuse is typically anonymous.

I am not sure about the legality of publishing abusive threatening anonymous correspondence, so I won’t repeat it here. But fortunately there is plenty on the web to choose from. Here are some responses:

“These people are evil. Pure evil. That they feel safe in putting their twisted thoughts into words reveals how far we have fallen as a society.”

“Right now I think these two devils in human skin need to be delivered for immediate execution under their code of ‘after birth abortions’ they want to commit murder – that is all it is! MURDER!!!”

“I don‘t believe I’ve ever heard anything as vile as what these “people” are advocating. Truly, truly scary.”

“The fact that the Journal of Medical Ethics published this outrageous and immoral piece of work is even scarier”

(Comments from http://www.theblaze.com/stories/ethicists-argue-in-favor-of-after-birth-abortions-as-newborns-are-not-persons/#comments)

He goes on (and on) but here is the real whopper, folks, when he says this:

What is disturbing is not the arguments in this paper nor its publication in an ethics journal. It is the hostile, abusive, threatening responses that it has elicited. More than ever, proper academic discussion and freedom are under threat from fanatics opposed to the very values of a liberal society.

I think it is time for a Rule 5 facepalm:

Now of course one of the comments he quoted above borders on an actual threat, saying “I think these two devils in human skin need to be delivered for immediate execution...”  I am not sure that is an actionable threat—and indeed the answer might vary wildly by jurisdiction—but I think perhaps a police officer should go by this person’s house and discuss his or her intent in writing that.

But the other comments?  They are nothing more than citizens expressing their opinions.  And contrary to what Mr. Savulescu says, criticism is not a threat to freedom of speech.  That is indeed, what is supposed to happen in a free society.  When someone says something you don’t like, you don’t threaten them or bomb them, you just counter them with your own speech.