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Governor Rick Scott (R) has declared a state of emergency in the county where the University of Florida lay, due to a planned speech by Richard Spencer. According to NPR:
When Hurricane Irma was bearing down on Florida last month, Gov. Rick Scott declared a state of emergency. On Monday, he did the same thing in Alachua County, ahead of a speech by white nationalist Richard Spencer at the University of Florida in Gainesville.
"We live in a country where everyone has the right to voice their opinion, however, we have zero tolerance for violence and public safety is always our number one priority," Scott said in a statement. "This executive order is an additional step to ensure that the University of Florida and the entire community is prepared so everyone can stay safe."
"I find that the threat of a potential emergency is imminent," Scott declared in his executive order, noting that Alachua County Sheriff Sadie Darnell had requested the state's assistance. The order will make it easier for various agencies to coordinate a security plan for Thursday's speech at the university.
[...] No campus group invited Spencer to speak, and the university is not hosting or sponsoring the event. Spencer's group, the National Policy Institute, is paying the university $10,564 for facility rental and security.
And it looks like it could get expensive:
The speech and accompanying protests are also a major expense: The university as well as state and local agencies expect to spend more than $500,000 to provide additional security.
And the University of Florida can't demand that Spencer pay the full cost of protecting him, because of a 1992 U.S. Supreme Court ruling, Forsyth County v. Nationalist Movement.
In that decision, the university explains, "the Court clarified that the government cannot assess a security fee on the speaker based upon the costs of controlling the reaction of potential hostile onlookers or protestors," under legal doctrine known as the "heckler's veto."
Well, that is the cost of free speech in a free country.
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 19 2017, @01:33AM (4 children)
Quisling [...] was a die hard communist [...] in 1918
Well, apparently, he mistook Leninism for what Marx called Communism (commune-ism).
In 1928
Stalin took power in 1924 when Lenin died.
If you think that Lenin was an Authoritarian (and, boy, was he ever), take a look at what a Totalitarian Stalin was.
Communism is an extension of Socialism, with Socialism being empowerment of The Workers.
Ask The Workers of the USSR or North Korea if they felt/feel empowered under a top-down Authoritarian government.
WRT "communist", the Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea still isn't "democratic".
-Calling- yourself something doesn't make it so.
Quisling shortly after fell hard for Hitler and Nazism
The phrase "true colors" applies at this point--if not before.
...but I'm sure that you have a point--besides the one at the top of your head.
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Arik on Thursday October 19 2017, @07:07AM (3 children)
Words drained of blood, pinned on a page for display, with no life left in them.
How, precisely, do you "empower the Workers?" Who, precisely, are "the Workers?"
I mean it sounds great, of course, the people that do the work should be empowered, err, whatever that means, and non-workers? Who are they? What's their excuse?
In reality, EVERY SINGLE TIME this has been implemented it's been a horrible bloodbath. Stalin. Mao. Pol Pot. The Kims etc.
In reality, this is the oldest scam. The original.
Oh, it's gotten much bigger and more wordy and more complicated and more prestigious as time has gone on. But it's still roughly the same game that was played in the stone age.
You split everyone up into two sides. This is called 'dialectic.' It doesn't exactly matter how you split them up, light and dark, tall and short, whatever. What matters is that having done so, you can make a convincing argument to 'your' side that they should be much better off, and that the reason they aren't much better off is that the other group are snakes who steal from them, who hold them down, who oppress them and backstab them etc.
Once you get that idea across, of course, humans tend to move pretty inexorably towards the idea of "let's kill these snakes and take our stuff back!"
Now maybe you just wanted their stuff, and if so, this is one way to grab your share of it for sure. But maybe you're really evil and you don't even care about the stuff, even more opportunity in this for you. But either way, eventually, say you finally manage to wipe out the other. That's what you've been working for all this time but when it happens suddenly you realize this ruins everything. But the solution is easy too. You just divide the group again.
Traitors. Fifth columnists. Backsliders.
See the devils in the details. Empower the workers. But how, and who are the workers, and who are the nonworkers? Who decides?
Someone has to decide, and once we have a decider, we have a tyranny. Someone, a person or a committee, will decide who is a non-worker and who is a worker. It will take all the power of the non-workers, and it will hold it in trust for the workers. Should any worker disagree with the arrangement, he or she can become a non-worker and be dealt with accordingly. All the pretty words are only props for the con.
Take that stone age con into the industrial age and the outcome is as predictable as it is tragic. It doesn't matter whether your dialectic is between bourgeois and prole, or between aryan and non-aryan. Nazism and Communism are not opposites, they are close cousins. The portrayal of each other as opposites is a ruse that both implicitly preserve because both benefit from it. Each uses the other as a bogy man to motivate their supporters, and ultimately each worships power, not truth.
https://archive.org/stream/AleksandrSolzhenitsynTheGulagArchipelago/Aleksandr_Solzhenitsyn_The_Gulag_Archipelago_djvu.txt
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 19 2017, @06:53PM (2 children)
Slight nitpick
Almost correct, but we generally deprive NK of any kind of status such as evil. Instead, end it with Venezuela. Observe.
OMG Socialism! Hitler! Stalin! Mao! Pol Pot! Venezuela!
See, two syllables max per chant beat until the very end where a four syllable word makes a very good coda. The problem with "the Kims" is that "the" is not stressed, so you have this awkward thing where you have to stress the second syllable, which completely destroys the solid rhythm from "Hitler" through "Pol Pot." That doesn't work for chants, and it also clashes with the other names since they have emphasis on the first syllable.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 19 2017, @10:36PM (1 child)
...and a major rebuttal:
Top-down is NOT Socialism.
It is the antithesis.
Again: Calling your thing by a name that is completely inappropriate doesn't magically make your thing into that thing.
Example: USA claims to be a Democracy, yet the desires of supermajorities of USAians are routinely ignored by their gov't.
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Thursday October 19 2017, @10:52PM
Agreed. Fully. There does come a point where every instance of a thing being called Thing ever put into practice changes the meaning of the word though. It offends my sensibilities but language does evolve if you don't put your foot down.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.