Can liberty be born from the bosom of despots? and shall justice be rendered by the hands of piracy and avarice?
Constantin-François de Chassebœuf (1757–1820), Comte de Volney, The Ruins; Or, Meditation on the Revolutions of Empires: And The Law of Nature, Chapter II (Thomas Jefferson, translator).
On April 24, 1792, the French national anthem, “La Marseillaise,” was composed by Capt. Claude Joseph Rouget de Lisle.
Eight years later to the day, the United States Congress approved a bill establishing the Library of Congress.
“A rapidly increasing number of American families are opting out of sending their children to school,” Erin O’Donnell informs in the May-June issue of Harvard Magazine, “choosing instead to educate them at home.”
Yippee! Thanks for the great news — right?
Not to O’Donnell, or to Harvard Law Professor Elizabeth Bartholet. O’Donnell’s article is something of a friendly regurgitation of Bartholet’s Arizona Law Review article, entitled, “Homeschooling: Parent Rights Absolutism vs. Child Rights to Education & Protection.”
Bartholet “recommends a presumptive ban on homeschooling.” Why? Because, as O’Donnell offers, it “violates children’s right to a ‘meaningful education’ and their right to be protected from potential child abuse . . .”
Her evidence? Professor Bartholet offers none. Harvard Magazine does not need any.
Avoided, perhaps, because research shows students educated at home significantly outperform public school students on standardized tests.
As for the specter of homeschooling as massive smokescreen enabling vicious child predators? “The limited evidence available shows that homeschooled children are abused at a lower rate than are those in the general public,” Dr. Brian Ray reported in 2018, adding that “an estimated 10% (or more) of public and private schoolchildren experience sexual maltreatment at the hands of school personnel.”
So, what is going on here?
Perhaps O’Donnell provides the explanation, writing that “surveys of homeschoolers show that a majority of such families . . . are driven by conservative Christian beliefs, and seek to remove their children from mainstream culture.”
Oh, my, can that be permitted? Should people choose their own religious and cultural beliefs? May parents freely educate their kids?
Bartholet calls that “essentially authoritarian control,” which is “dangerous.”
There, she is correct. Homeschooling is dangerous . . . to experts hell-bent on telling us what to think.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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Has dissent about pandemic policy been outlawed?
I mean, “for the duration”?
Well, no.
The Internet displays every possible view of policy and epidemiology, expressed with every possible degree of temperateness or intemperateness.
Yet we are indeed seeing signs of indifference to freedom of speech even when that speech cannot entail breathing a coronavirus on anybody.
According to CNN, Facebook told the network: “Anti-quarantine protests being organized through Facebook in California, New Jersey, and Nebraska are being removed from the platform on the instruction of governments in those three states because it violates stay-at-home orders.”
Online posts “violate stay-at-home orders”?
Who knew?
Obviously, a protest that violates social-distancing rules (if it does) is not the same thing as a communication about the protest.
Apparently, Facebook is a willing functionary of whichever state governments will instruct it to carry out their censorship. Tyler O’Neil opines that “it is disconcerting that Facebook would work with local governments to remove pages organizing protests against them.”
Yes, indeed.
But such reports have been disputed. Facebook may be acting on its own. For example, a spokeswoman for New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy says that his office “did not ask Facebook to remove pages or posts for events promoting lifting the provisions of the Governor’s stay-at-home order.” Nebraska also denies making such a request.
Which version of the story is true?
Which is worse?
Both are creepy.
I just hope that this muzzling-speech-just-to-help thing doesn’t start spreading like a virus.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob
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“[A]t a time of rising tensions with China” is “the objectivity of news” . . . dead?
Wounded?
So wonders Arthur Bloom, lamenting for The American Conservative, in “China’s Long Tentacles Extend Deep Into American Media.”
“We’ve got this tremendous disconnect between what the American people actually think about China and what the media has been telling us,” Bloom explained to Fox New’s Tucker Carlson. “Something like 70% of Americans blame China for [the spread of the coronavirus], and yet that’s not what we’ve been getting. So, why?”
Bloom suggests part of the reason is that media corporations are “in business with them.”
“Comcast which owns NBC Universal” is “building a big theme park in Beijing” offered Bloom . . . “a multibillion dollar investment.”
Last December, the Free Beacon informed,“China routinely broke federal law by not disclosing how much it spent to publish regime propaganda in the New York Times, the Washington Post, and other newspapers,” adding that “China Daily gave media outlets millions to publish ads disguised as news stories.”
During his short-lived presidential run, Michael Bloomberg soft-peddled China’s totalitarian threat to its own people, Hong Kong, neighboring democratic Taiwan and the rest of us. With Bloomberg News having done business in China for years, the former mayor told Americans that President Xi Jinping was “not a dictator.”
“Six years ago, Bloomberg News killed an investigation into the wealth of Communist Party elites in China, fearful of repercussions by the Chinese government,” National Public Radio revealed last week. “The company successfully silenced the reporters involved. And it sought to keep the spouse of one of the reporters quiet, too.”
Using legal non-disclosure agreements.
Regarding China, is non-disclosure the operating principle of our media?
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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