A Statement from #ConstitutionalLaw Scholars on the government's funding cutoff at #ColumbiaUniversity

— Eugene Volokh, Michael C. Dorf, David Cole, & 15 other scholars

The #USgovernment may not threaten #funding cuts as a tool to pressure recipients into suppressing #First #Amendment protected #speech.

#law #Constitution #CivilRights #FreeSpeech #RightToProtest #FreedomOfAssembly #ThoughtPolice #ViewPointDiscrimination #dissent
https://www.nybooks.com/online/2025/03/20/a-statement-from-constitutional-law-scholars-on-columbia/

https://www.wacoca.com/1960961/ 国宝の新たな魅力、吉沢亮と横浜流星を称賛した中村鴈治郎 #automation #Male #Python #RyoYoshizawa #speech #YoshizawaRyo #吉沢亮

Real Chilling Effects — https://donmoynihan.substack.com/p/real-chilling-effects
#HackerNews #Real #Chilling #Effects #technology #censorship #freedom #speech #privacy

#Linus #Torvalds full #keynote #speech https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OM_8UOPFpqE #opensource #c #rust #gnu #linux

Watch Trudeau speak directly to Trump during blistering speech

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wz_42pckM7w

#Trudeau #speech #Trump #tarriffs #politics #resist #fuckTrump #boycottUSA

I don’t believe the Democrats should boycott the president state of the union address.
I would think it would be better if they all showed up, stood up and turned their backs on him during the whole thing. That would make a great statement. Just a thought. tell your representative about it.
#USA #America #POTUS #Congress #senator #capital #speech

YouTube Tipp
#Flow Wins #BestAnimatedFeatureFilm | 97th #Oscars #Speech (2025) #animation
https://youtube.com/shorts/ZciQwixydqA?si=ZOP_UMjv9CaDJxKu

V1.0

PodcastPlugins is a set of Free and Open-Source speech-enhancement audio plugins for podcasters.

vst + vst3 + clap + LV2 + AU
Linux + macOS + Windows

Enjoy :)

Huge thanks to @falktx <3

@x42 @magnetophon @jkdb

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https://github.com/trummerschlunk/PodcastPlugins

Apparently BlueSky is censoring the AI video of the felon catering to the unelected co-president's toes because it was non-consensual explicit material. I wrote some thoughts about this complex matter on someone else's thread, but I'm re-posting them as a top-level post to not distract from other conversation where I originally posted...

- - - - - -

There is a lot of other stuff happening our budding dictatorship that is non-consensual. Will the fact of it be tolerated and the speaking of it be an offense?

If this were a matter between private citizens, I would absolutely applaud an action such as this. But rights of people are sometimes in tension. Privacy sometimes comes into conflict with free speech. There is no way to always preserve one person's rights without risking not preserving someone else's. That's just a fact. A balance must be struck on a case-by-case basis, uncomfortable as that is.

The cryingly sad irony is that this specific act is intended to draw attention to and protest the fact that soon no one will care about our rights at all. If the conversion to a totalitarian state (which so far mirrors what happened in Nazi Germany and other places) follows the obvious plan, law will soon be used in a meaningless way as a club to beat up people who are just politically unpopular, regardless of whether there's any offense at all.

The problem is that what's happening as we become a totalitarian dictatorship is shocking. People are seeking to use nonviolent means to wake the public up to the shocking nature of what's going on. In context, that video is mild. I wish as much public discussion came from attempts to cut medicaid, from firing people who maintain our nuclear, aviation or public health operations, or from inciting mob violence.

An unelected billionaire, someone where it's not clear he even works for the government, or whether the government works for him, has access to all of our private data and is acting swiftly in a way that is plainly not consistent with the Constitution, hoping to have severe damage fast enough to disable the various systems that might put him in check in our system of checks and balances.

The felon that our Constitution says should not have been allowed to even run for President is turning a blind eye to what this unelected billionaire is doing. A man who speaks of grabbing women by whatever he likes, and how if you're rich or powerful, they just let you. This is the person whose rights are being protected? We have rights so that the weak are protected from the powerful. Is that what this particular act of censorship has achieved?

Too many people are not seeing and taking seriously that very real issue. That anyone thinks this censorship act will do anything to create justice or preserve freedom is evidence.

I'm sure whoever did the censorship will later say they were "just following orders". But it's important for each of us to understand that the US as we've known it may soon not exist, in part because the people attacking us are not following rules, and the people defending us are thinking somehow if they just do their job in the ordinary way, the system will protect us.

Media operations are taking sides, and an uncomfortable number of them seem to be hoping that if they just "obey in advance" (to use Timothy Snyder's term -- read On Tyranny if you do not know this term), they'll be spared the wrath of the incoming dictator. They seriously need to re-read Niemöller's poem, "First they came".

Cory Doctorow's (@pluralistic) blog post for today is a speech he gave last night at the University of Toronto, the annual Ursula Franklin Lecture at Innis College.

It's worth reading:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/02/26/ursula-franklin/

It connects the dots between anti-circumvention copyright laws like the USA's Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) (and the Canadian copycat legislation) and the enshittification that ensues when Big Tech does ... well, practically anything. There's a specific example he uses that is horrifying. He also shows exactly how Big Tech has escaped what he identifies as the usual four factors for keeping the worst instincts of companies in check.

I agree with him that we should annul the anti-circumvention law on the books, and would go further in saying that we should explicitly enshrine in law the rights to alter, repair, remove etc. any functionality of products and services that we choose to use. I was one of the original 6,000 Canadians who submitted comments warning against the implementation of these restrictions to our government at the time, and my feelings in support of this are stronger than ever.

Give it a read.

Attached image: I think this is probably overdue.

New post on Werner Herzog's voice, accent, mimics, and related matters:

https://stancarey.wordpress.com/2025/02/25/werner-herzog-on-his-voice-and-its-mimics/