Schmidt Meister's Grab Bag

[Schmidt Meister]

The Gaur, AKA Indian Bison. World's Largest Breed Of Cattle.

[Schmidt Meister]

[Schmidt Meister]

[Schmidt Meister]

[Schmidt Meister]

Can you find the deer?

[miketx]

[miketx]

Can you...

 

 

[miketx]

2 hours ago, Schmidt Meister said:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w-tr0pVynJs&ab_channel=FunnyCommercial

[Schmidt Meister]

"We've been able to move that all the way up to the end of May to have enough [vaccines] for every American, to get every adult American to get a shot," Biden told reporters from the White House Wednesday. "The last thing we need is the Neanderthal thinking." Biden - March 2021

[Schmidt Meister]

5 minutes ago, miketx said:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w-tr0pVynJs&ab_channel=FunnyCommercial

I already posted the clip ... ?

[Schmidt Meister]

9 minutes ago, miketx said:

You reposted the picture ... did you find the deer?

[miketx]

You don't see the red circle I drew around the deers head?

[miketx]

8 minutes ago, Schmidt Meister said:

I already posted the clip ... ?

Sorry, I only saw what appeared to be a gif.

[Schmidt Meister]

5 minutes ago, miketx said:

You don't see the red circle I drew around the deers head?

LOL, I don't think there's no deer in that tree .... Somewhere in that picture is a real deer. I'll give you a clue, you can only see his head ... but it is a real deer.

[miketx]

Looked like one. Oh well.

[Schmidt Meister]

3 minutes ago, miketx said:

Looked like one. Oh well.

It's hard to see. I'll post the picture again with the deer circled tomorrow.

[Schmidt Meister]

Pat Condell - A Crisis Of Free Speech

Well, here in the UK we have a crisis of free speech because the law has become a lot more progressive and therefore a lot more authoritarian in enforcing the various vetoes that now govern our speech, like the heckler’s veto, the rioter’s veto, and in particular the safe space poor me crybaby’s feelings veto. Not only that, the law is enforced selectively and politically by police who are less concerned with catching criminals than with telling us what to think. How different things were in this country when you could say pretty much whatever you liked, as long as it was true and didn’t directly incite violence. Back in the days when we thought that this was the home of free speech, where ideas could be freely and robustly expressed, and where you couldn’t be arrested for a tasteless joke. But things have changed radically in recent years and now we are policed by subjectively enforced hate speech laws, where you can be arrested if you say something that may cause alarm and distress to people who are determined to be alarmed and distressed by your free speech. But if the suppression of your birthright causes you alarm and distress, you won’t see anyone arrested for that. Yours is the wrong kind of alarm and distress. Your alarm and distress is hate. It has become quite fashionable to accuse people who express unwelcome opinions of abusing free speech to spread hate. Even though hatred is a very powerful intensely focussed emotion that can cause people to do some truly terrible things. It is the darkest emotion, the most violent emotion. It is very, very, extreme. Yet the word ‘hate’ is thrown around today like a frisbee. Just casually tossed at people like verbal acid, at the slightest excuse. Every unwelcome opinion is hate. Every unflattering remark is hate. Every unpleasant truth is hate. If you vote for an insufficiently progressive political candidate, you will be told that you are voting for hate. And now this very extreme word has been crowbarred into the law, as if everyone who says something offensive or insulting to another person is consumed by this volatile and dangerous emotion. It doesn’t even have to be a crime for the police to stick their nose in and label it hate. They’re far too busy violently attacking the peaceful protestors and taking the knee for domestic terrorists to investigate actual crimes like burglary, theft, or assault, but if you say something that hurts somebody’s feelings, even if you’re breaking no law, the police will take the trouble to record it as what they call a non crime hate incident, that’s ‘hate’ incident,  that then goes on to a database that can affect your future employment prospects.
Do you like where this is heading? It’s all part of the Common Purpose. And if you don’t know what Common Purpose is, I suggest you look it up.
‘Hate speech’ is a progressive term, and, like most progressive terms, it is a shameless lie. The word ‘hate’ has been cynically misapplied to falsely ascribe the darkest of motives, and to make whatever it’s attached to sound as if it’s the worst thing in the world, when it isn’t. Being offensive or insulting is not hate. Unkind words, disparaging remarks, mockery and ridicule, even based on personal appearance or sexuality or religion or race. These things might not be very nice, but they are not hate. Dislike and unfriendliness, despite what our politicized Common Purpose-riddled police will tell you, they’re not hate either. They are not even close. Nor is stating the simple truth when discussing the latest progressive obsession, transgender, a fashionable neurosis and a minority freak show that has become a full frontal assault on the female identity, and is being allowed to ruin women’s sports and to mentally scar a generation of impressionable children. The truth is that a man can no more become a woman than a monkey can become a pig. A that is a widely held view in our society, but if you express it you will be accused of hate speech, even though there is no hate in that statement at all. It’s an opinion about reality, or unreality in this case. The term ‘hate speech’ is not only an abuse of the language, it is an abuse of the law. In policing opinion and elevating feelings over truth, the law is making a claim on our liberty to which it is not entitled. We have always had laws, and we need laws, to deal with genuinely harmful words, like malicious falsehood or direct incitement to violence. But when the law interferes with the expression of opinion, however offensive or provocative that opinion may be to some, it is a step too far. Every human being without exception has the right to speak from the heart. There is no more fundamental a right, and it is beyond the law’s legitimate jurisdiction in the liberal society that we claim to be. Any politician who has to legislate for the censorship of opinion is a failure and a fraud. If you’ve screwed up your society so badly that you need to stop people talking about it, you are the problem. If, thanks to your reckless policies, your incompetence, and your duplicity, shutting people up is the only way to keep public order,  then let there be public disorder, and deal with it. Curtailing free speech because some people might be violent is like blaming a rape victim for dressing the wrong way. The violence is the problem, not the free speech, which is as vital to the health of our civilization as oxygen is to our blood. And there is no place in a healthy society for the heckler’s veto, there is no place for the rioter’s veto, and there is certainly no place for the safe space poor-me crybaby’s feelings veto. They called me an ugly name, boo-hoo. It’s just too important for that.
This is the genius of the US First Amendment. The people who drafted it knew what they were doing. They knew that the law can’t be trusted with freedom of speech because the law is made by career politicians who can’t be trusted with anything. If you have a vested interest, and all career politicians do, you will be subjective, you will be selective, you will be expedient, you will be biased, you will be fallible. You will drop the ball. And so it has proved here in the UK, formerly we thought the home of free speech, where our speech is now so micromanaged that the police will contact you to check your thinking if you say the wrong thing online.
As most people know by now, the problem with the British police is too much Common Purpose and not enough common sense. So we can always rely on them to provide a timely example of why the law can’t be trusted with freedom of speech. Whether it’s arresting people for harmless jokes, or threatening a  journalist with investigation for the words of the person he was interviewing, and now recently see Liverpool police posing in front of a billboard that reads: ‘Being offensive is an offense.’ You wouldn’t even know this was Britain any more. In Scotland, where they’ve got their own mini government, they have just passed a law that will get you arrested in your own home for expressing opinions likely to stir up hatred, a charge so vague it can mean whatever they want it to mean, which is why it’s there. What exactly are we so afraid of that we need to desecrate the language and render powerful words like ‘hate’ virtually meaningless? And why are we so terrified of words that we need to pretend that they’re the equivalent of violence?
It’s no justification for censorship to say that bad ideas might become popular if we don’t shut people up. If they’re bad ideas, show us how they’re bad, and they won’t become popular. That’s how it works in a sane society that trusts itself to get things right. And it’s the only way to get rid of bad ideas. Censorship is like painting over a damp patch on the wall and pretending it isn’t there. IT’s going to come through anyway and the longer you ignore it, the more damage it will do.
Words are just words. They are not violence, not even racist insults, unpleasant though they are. The word ‘racist’ has been drained of all meaning, of course, but we all know what real racism sounds like, and anyone expressing genuinely racist and hateful opinions nowadays in Britain will always lose more friends that they gain. They should have the liberty to speak from the heart, as is their right in a liberal society. The price for denying them that right is just too high. Ridicule is the best disinfectant for stupid ideas and for ugly ideas. Let everyone express what is in their heart, even if it is hateful. Then let it be challenged, rebutted, refuted, exposed to the light, made credulous, and laughed at. What are we afraid of? Our society is more than capable of eliminating bad ideas organically without the law’s size fourteen Common Purpose boots trampling all over our freedom of speech. The law can’t be trusted with freedom of speech because the people who make the law can’t be trusted not to literally take liberties, and the people who enforce the law can’t be trusted not to behave like the Gestapo.
Benjamin Franklin famously said: ‘Whoever would overthrow the liberty of a nation must begin by subduing the freeness of speech.’ and that is what is happening to us in Britain. Our liberty is being overthrown. We are less free to speak our mind than ever before in my lifetime. Our police have become thought police. Enforcement of the law has become political and subjective. If we accept this as a governing principle, the authoritarian Common Purpose mentality that is shoving these laws down our throat will never run out of dangerous ideas that must be suppressed for the common good. If our country is not to descend into tyranny, we must decouple the law from speech, and from the right to free expression, however offensive that expression may be. We need our equivalent of the US First Amendment. Nothing less will do. A constitutional guarantee that our government can pass no law that prevents us from speaking our mind. We’ve seen enough now to know that without such a guarantee, we will never live in a free county again.

 

 

[Schmidt Meister]

17 hours ago, miketx said:

The deer is looking straight at the camera.

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The Avenue of the Baobabs in the morning mist -  Madagascar.