Getting the balance right between freedom of thought and the disciplines we need.

People who hate freedom were much too hard on Donald Trump for his disinfectant comment. He was wondering out loud if the corona-killing properties of disinfectants could be used medically. He could have phrased it better. But in the current climate thinking outside the square should be encouraged not ridiculed. Who agrees?

Is it possible that Corona-virus is God’s way of a human cull in an over populated world?

You can see a little more from me on these questions here: https://freedom-demokrasi-and-civilised-humanity.com/2020/04/29/obeying-the-law-but-staying-free-to-be-as-smart-as-we-can/

was just about to post this, when Tucker has it on his show today.

25 Apr: The Atlantic: Internet Speech Will Never Go Back to Normal
In the debate over freedom versus control of the global network, China was largely correct, and the U.S. was wrong.
by Jack Goldsmith, Harvard Law School professor & Andrew Keane Woods, Professor of law at the University of Arizona College of Law
Today, the platforms are proudly collaborating with one another, and following government guidance, to censor harmful information related to the coronavirus. And they are using their prodigious data-collection capacities, in coordination with federal and state governments, to improve contact tracing, quarantine enforcement, and other health measures. As Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg recently boasted, “The world has faced pandemics before, but this time we have a new superpower: the ability to gather and share data for good.”...

As surprising as it may sound, digital surveillance and speech control in the United States already show many similarities to what one finds in authoritarian states such as China...
In the great debate of the past two decades about freedom versus control of the network, China was largely right and the United States was largely wrong. Significant monitoring and speech control are inevitable components of a mature and flourishing internet, and governments must play a large role in these practices to ensure that the internet is compatible with a society’s norms and values...
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/04/what-covid-revealed-about-internet/610549/

The Atlantic writers - both connected to Lawfare!

Wikipedia: Jack Goldsmith
In addition to being a professor at Harvard, Goldsmith is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University.

***He is a co-founder of the Lawfare Blog along with Brookings fellow Benjamin Wittes and Texas Law professor Robert M. Chesney
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Goldsmith

loads of stuff by Woods on their website:

18 Oct 2019: Lawfare Blog: China and the Hypocrisy of American Speech Imperialism
By Andrew Keane Woods
(Andrew Keane Woods is a Professor of Law at the University of Arizona College of Law. Before that, he was a postdoctoral cybersecurity fellow at Stanford University. He holds a J.D. from Harvard Law School and a Ph.D. in Politics from the University of Cambridge, where he was a Gates Scholar)
There is no easy answer to the very difficult question of if or how American firms should do business in China. But, unfortunately, resolving this question is made harder because the debate is marred by a general lack of analytical clarity and is instead being driven by uninformed moral outrage, free speech absolutism, and American exceptionalism...

The first problem is the sheer hypocrisy of those most loudly critical of American firms self-censoring in order to appease the Chinese government...
Another distasteful and unconstructive thread running through the current debate is America’s moral superiority because of its robust speech rights. At the core of the argument that U.S. firms should not do business in China—or if they do, they should somehow not comply with Chinese rules—is an argument about China’s speech constraints and, therefore, its moral inferiority. But, as I’ve said before, evaluating China along welfare or human rights grounds is not so simple. Speech rights are much less robust than in the West, to be sure, but China has shown extraordinary concern—and done more than any other country—for its poor...
https://www.lawfareblog.com/china-and-hypocrisy-american-speech-imperialism

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.