Open Levinson

Paul Levinson's Open Salon Blog

Paul Levinson

Paul Levinson
Location
New York City, New York, USA
Birthday
March 25
Title
Professor
Company
Fordham University
Bio
Paul Levinson's The Silk Code won the 2000 Locus Award for Best First Novel. He has since published Borrowed Tides (2001), The Consciousness Plague (2002), The Pixel Eye (2003), and The Plot To Save Socrates (2006). His science fiction and mystery short stories have been nominated for Nebula, Hugo, Edgar, and Sturgeon Awards. His eight nonfiction books, including The Soft Edge (1997), Digital McLuhan (1999), Realspace (2003), and Cellphone (2004), have been the subject of major articles in the New York Times, Wired, the Christian Science Monitor, and have been translated into ten languages. New New Media, exploring how Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and blogging have changed our lives, was published in September 2009. Paul Levinson appears on "The O'Reilly Factor" (Fox News), "The CBS Evening News," the “NewsHour with Jim Lehrer” (PBS), “Nightline” (ABC), and numerous national and international TV and radio programs. He reviews the best of television in his InfiniteRegress.tv blog. Paul Levinson is Professor of Communication & Media Studies at Fordham University in New York City

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OCTOBER 30, 2011 1:22PM

The First Amendment =Is= Our Permit

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Someone on Facebook sent me an image of this sign - speaks for itself as something to be shown to every cop menacing every Occupy Wall Street demonstrator in the United States.



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You and I normally agree on these 1st amendment issues. I think the idea here though misdirects people so will challenge you.

Yes, people have a right to speak.

The right to speak does not mean that they have a right to stay on someone else's property. The permit is to use the space.

They are always free to find someone who wants them and then they can stay all year speaking.
Right, but if you follow the facts in NYC, for example, Zuccotti Park is privately owned property in which the owners have given the Occupy people the right to peaceably assemble. So the government - that is, NYPD - has no right to ask them to leave. In other places in the country, where the Occupy people are peaceably assembled on public property, the government similarly has no right to require them to leave.
Here in Tennessee, they tried to confine free speech to the hours of 9:00 a.m. to 4:0o p.m., and to close a large public plaza that had never been closed before, between the hours of 10:00 p.m. and 6:00 a.m. A federal judge has disagreed.
Kudos to the Fed judge - it's good to see that someone in government understands the Constitution. Apparently this is too much for many municipal and state officials, not to mention out of control cops.