Chilling Effects and American thinkers

LGATs in the News

Americanthinker.com

November 16, 2012 - Jack Cashill writes in Americanthinker.com of the Peoples Temple group and what they came to realize at Jonestown in Guyana: "What they discovered was a South American gulag equal parts Werner Erhard and Pol Pot."

Those are his words, we can't make this stuff up folks, most interesting references by the above author to Werner Erhard and Pol Pot in the same sentence.

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"Chilling Effects"

Here's how "chilling effect" has been described online at RationalWiki: "A chilling effect describes a situation in which rights, such as free speech, are threatened by the possible negative results of exercising these rights. The effect is to silence criticism and freedom of expression, even in cases where criticism is perfectly valid."

Interesting development at the website ChillingEffects.org, a revealing look at a complaint over a 60 Minutes program by CBS about Werner Erhard from March 3, 1991 and attempts to remove multiple different types of references to it from the Internet.

Some background about prior history of that on the Internet at BoingBoing.net by Xeni Jardin, and more general background history in the biography Outrageous Betrayal by Steven Pressman, see for example some excerpts from that biography at the orange papers website.