Every time I hear someone saying it is okay for all of us to limit freedom of speech because it isn’t the government doing it, I have a problem. Sure, I don’t especially care if people boycott Rush Limbaugh’s advertisers. But a much more likely scenario is that some company is going to fire some woman for what she says on her personal blog. It happens all the time. And people usually don’t care because it doesn’t contradict the Constitution — as though every right that people ought to have is found that the two century old document.

I’ve made arguments along these lines many times before, but I always get the impression that people don’t really get it. It’s really simple. People have a right to life. We no longer have free land where people can just go out and make their own living by hunting and gathering — or by farming. Just try it some time. Go out to an unused field and start developing it. You’ll find very soon that even though the property is not being used for anything, you don’t have the right to farm it. You don’t own the land; someone else does. So if you can’t get a job, you don’t have a right to life. You have a right to beg and maybe a right to starve, but that’s about it.

This is a fact of the world that libertarians in particular do not understand. But it is a fact that is poorly understood by even quite liberal people. Most liberals I know just have a gut feeling about what is right and wrong. They don’t think too deeply about it. And that’s fine! One should have a gut feeling about justice. And I think that conservatives mostly have the same gut feeling. It’s just that they’ve managed to slice and dice the world up into those people who deserve this kind of justice.

But it isn’t just on an individual level that we find this. On Monday, I read a very interesting article by Glenn Greenwald, Court Ruling Against Chicago Sheriff Proves Thuggish Anti-WikiLeaks Blockade Was Unconstitutional. The ruling doesn’t have to do directly with WikiLeaks. It has to do with a classified ads site, Backpage. Cook County Sheriff Tom Dart decided that he didn’t like the barely cloaked prostitution ads in Backpage, so he decided to shut it down.

Now before going forward, I should point out that Tom Dart is not a bad guy. He suspended foreclosures in Cook County, because he said (rightly) that renters were being evicted, based upon their landlords’ being behind in their payments. His legal reasoning was sound. He’s not some yahoo. He has a JD from Loyola University. But that doesn’t stop him from being wrong about other things. He first tried to shut down Craigslist. He did it by filing a lawsuit against the company for its offering of “erotic services.” He lost; the court found that Craigslist was an ISP and therefore not responsible for any illegal things that people using the service did.

So far, so good. But then Dart went over to the dark side. He knew he couldn’t take Backpage to court. So instead, he pressured Visa and MasterCard to not allow credit card transactions through the site. Brilliant, right?! And of course the credit card companies wouldn’t admit that they were doing this because of political pressure. It is, whether done by public or private entities, the perfect way to destroy just about anyone: don’t allow them to make money. The Constitution says nothing directly about that.

Well, the court didn’t buy it. It said that it was clear that Sheriff Dart had violated Backpage’s first amendment rights. But as Greenwald pointed out, back in 2010, this is exactly what Joe Lieberman did to WikiLeaks. And there it wasn’t just some overzealous sheriff with some sexual hangups; this was a sitting US Senator trying to destroy an explicitly political group using underhanded economic tactics because he knew that the First Amendment would never allow the important and legal work of WikiLeaks to be stopped directly. It’s not the government! It’s just a private sector!

Of course, even if the extension of this case to WikiLeaks is clear to Glenn Greenwald, it isn’t mentioned in the case. And you always have to wonder where the Supreme Court would come down on this. This is one of those cases where I actually think that Scalia would come out right. But Thomas and Alito, I feel certain would see things differently on this one. The truth is that we need a new Constitution. The Supreme Court has found far too many loopholes that have empowered the powerful and weakened the weak. This kind of financial extortion should be clearly illegal, and not left up to a bunch of people who owe their jobs to the power elite.

I think we are all in agreement that if Anne Frank had not believed that her diary would be protected for 95 years, well, she never would have written it. Right! I mean, that’s what writing is all about: making as much money as you possibly can for as many years after your death as possible. Because it isn’t even really about you or your family. It’s about the corporation that owns your work. The last thing you would want is for your work to be widely and freely available. Let’s not forget: the world changes a lot faster than it used to, so copyright needs to be a lot longer.

Wait. That doesn’t make sense, does it? I mean, the song “Yesterday” is really old. In any reasonable sense of the term, it is in the public domain. It doesn’t really belong to anyone. Certainly if it had been written in 1865 instead of 1965, it would have been well out of copyright fifty years later. And that was when times were slower. It made more sense. It might take decades to get the whole world humming “Yesterday.” In 1965, it took a couple of months. Today, it takes a couple of hours. Yet copyright length is more than twice as long as it was in 1865.

I started with Frank’s work, because two weeks ago, Michael Hiltzik wrote, The Squabble Over Anne Frank’s Diary Shows the Absurdity of Copyright Law. The Anne Frank Fonds owns the copyright to the diary. It is now 70 years after the murder of Anne Frank. According to the law in Europe, the diary should be in the public domain this January. But Fonds is having none of that! This is because they claim that her father, Otto Frank, is the co-author. He died 1980. Thus, we must wait until 2050 at the earliest for the book to belong to the people.

It turns out that the Anne Frank Fonds does a lot of good work with the money that it makes. But what it is doing with its copyrights is exactly the same as what any other soulless corporation is doing. The most recent US copyright law — the Sonny Bono Act — increased copyright to 95 years. As Hiltzik put it:

It’s just a corporate game. When I last wrote to Dean Baker about Fantasia not being in the public domain, he said, “It’s all about Mickey Mouse (literally).” Indeed it is. Oh, the money that would be lost to a bunch of people who have never had a creative idea outside the realm of finance in their lives! The truth is that I’m sure that the Anne Frank Fonds would get along just fine without the copyright to the diary. And I’m sure that the MLK family would get along just fine with the copyright to his “I Have a Dream” speech.

But these are the “good causes” that are trotted out to justify a totally out of control copyright system — one that does nothing to encourage writing and a great deal to harm it.

I am painfully aware of stereotypes. That doesn’t mean that I am immune to them. But I have no doubt that I am far more immune to them than the vast majority of people I interact with. So whenever I hear of a horrible crime, I always hope that the perpetrator is a white man (or woman, but that’s generally too much to ask for). When a murder suspect’s face is shown on the local news and it is black, I’m saddened. And I spent much of yesterday hoping that the San Bernardino shootings were a bunch of white guys who wanted to play at war.

It doesn’t matter to the victims. But it does matter to the society. And watching the reactions yesterday, I see we are a society cleaved in half. The liberal world was focused on guns and the easy access to them. It is an important issue. But we liberals have a real problem here. Events like this would not be stopped by any of the “common sense” gun control laws that the Democratic Party would propose. The difference on gun control between Bernie Sanders at his most conservative and Hillary Clinton at her most liberal is basically nothing. And it certainly isn’t anything that would have stopped yesterday.

But there are roughly 30 gun murders every day in the US — and twice as many gun suicides. But sadly, that is “dog bites man.” The news doesn’t care. Good God! The news doesn’t even care when shooting sprees don’t end in large numbers of dead. Every day is a good day to talk about gun violence. But if you do, there won’t be anyone listening to you. This is bad news for liberals. There is no time when anyone will listen to a discussion of the real problem. And even if they did, very few in America are open to what would need to be done to address it.

On the conservative side of things, everyone was talking terrorism. God, how I’ve come to hate that word! It’s just the newest racist word that anyone can use without being called on it. We pasty white Americans can’t use the n-word, but we sure can use the t-word. And do we ever! I heard someone talking about nuking ISIS. I guess that’s the new, “Fight ’em over there so we don’t have to fight ’em here.” Except that it is exactly the opposite.

Let’s suppose that these three mass murderers were aligned with ISIS. Let’s further suppose we could wipe out ISIS central command with nukes. Would this really cause resentful Muslims all over the world to just calm down? I don’t think so! I think doing something like that would greatly increase the number of attacks here at home. Nuking them would seem kind of like a trick — an unfair way of winning. Far better to show that ISIS is impotent in the normal ways of war. (It’s also true that the use of nukes wouldn’t be any better at defeating ISIS; it would just be better at killing more civilians.)

Martin Longman noted something really depressing:

This has been the working theory of terrorist attacks in Europe: make the wider population hate the Muslim community. In so doing, give Muslims who just want to live their lives a very good excuse to lash out. In other words, manipulate the non-Muslim community into starting a war. It’s a brilliant strategy. It depends upon stereotypes and they are very dependable.

All Indians walk in single file; at least the only one I ever saw did; so let’s nuke ’em.

I’m half Portuguese. The other half is mongrel, but quite Irish. In fact, since my direct ancestors came from the Azores — you know there is a lot of breeding from the United Kingdom. You know how sailors are. But if people ask me what my ancestors were, I say Portuguese. That’s the most clear thing I am, and I have a Portuguese name, even though it really ought to be spelled, “Morais” (which I much prefer, not least of which because that is closer to the way it is pronounced).

But even with this tenuous relationship to my heritage, I still feel guilt about the Portuguese being really horrible imperialists. And when I first heard the story of Cheryl Araujo being raped by four Portuguese men, I felt ashamed. Again: I’m about as Portuguese as Bugs Bunny. But I still feel that connection — that identity — that makes me cringe when I hear of anyone Portuguese doing something wrong. As a result, I understand it when Christians feel the need to distance themselves for something horrible that other Christians do. But there is a secret weapon that I (and many other people) have against this: I don’t blame groups of people for things that individuals do.

This issue came up in a very big way this last week when Robert Lewis Dear went on a shooting spree. Did he do it because Carly Fioria has been telling lies about Planned Parenthood and because Center for Medical Progress is in the business of stirring up confusion and fear? Does it matter? The truth is that if he did, he is just one of many who have done so specifically because of the anti-choice movement, which has a long history of referring to abortion as murder and putting out false propaganda to paint the whole process as though it were something out of a modern Frankenstein film.

Brian Beutler wrote a very good article about it yesterday, Conservatives’ Planned Parenthood Response: Who Are You Calling a Radical Terrorist? He went through the five stages of conservative reaction to the Dear shooting: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and… denial again. Because it can’t be about them. It can’t be that going on national television and saying that at Planned Parenthood they force women to have late term abortions where the baby is alive, and then they keep it that way so they can “harvest its brain.” I tend to disagree, but I understand the desire to say, “It ain’t me, babe.”

And I would allow them to do just that. There is just this little problem with them being totally self-serving about it. These are, after all, the people who insist upon calling terrorism committed by Muslims as “Islamic terrorism.” In fact, it is such a big deal to them that they seem to think the only reason terrorism still exists is because Obama doesn’t use the exact words that they request. (But didn’t like those words either, not that it matters.) I don’t know about Christian, but clearly Dear’s act is part of the anti-choice movement. And I think there are tons of reasons to blame the movement itself — or at least parts of it. Anyone who has held up pictures of “aborted” fetuses (they are usually still born babies) is culpable in these crimes.

But we aren’t supposed to talk about “anti-choice terrorism.” If we did, we might have to start dealing with the problem here at home. We might even have to talk about easy access to guns. We might require a media that shows that the anti-choice propaganda is false. It would hard. Easy is going after a weak minority in the US, and calling for a halt to immigration, and carpet bombing far away nations. And we are America, so we always do what is easy — not what is right.