Author: Redactor

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First Amendment rights national politics & policies

Say No to Reich-Harris Reich

Kamala Harris, Robert Reich, censorship, X, Twitter, mind control, free speech

Freedom of speech is constantly embattled.

Just one example: government-instigated stomping on social-media speech in recent years, proof of which has been revealed thanks to litigation, freedom of information requests, and the purchase of Twitter by a friend of free speech.

But the embarrassing revelations have not caused our censors to retreat.

They’re not trying to censor people, they suggest, just trying to stop lies, hate, misinformation. And now Robert Reich, former Secretary of Labor, wants to arrest Elon Musk for resisting censorship as Twitter’s new owner.

Reich says: “Regulators around the world should threaten Musk with arrest if he doesn’t stop disseminating lies and hate on X.”

Reich has also said that we must regulate speech to “direct people’s attention . . . to a healthy public conversation that is most participatory.” As Jonathan Turley observes, “the ‘healthy public conversation’ with Robert Reich increasingly appears to be his talking and the rest of us listening.”

Would “regulators around the world” include U.S. regulators? Since the First Amendment has yet to be rescinded, perhaps Reich would prefer other countries to handle imprisoning Elon Musk for letting people speak “too” freely. But I’m guessing Reich would be fine with a U.S. arrest.

Reich would fit right in with a Harris administration, if we get one, led by a woman who calls the First Amendment a “privilege” and has lamented that social media sites are “directly speaking to millions and millions of people without any level of oversight and regulation.” Which, she declares, “has to stop.”

Something has to stop.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Thought

Robert Anton Wilson

On a planet that increasingly resembles one huge Maximum Security prison, the only intelligent choice is to plan a jail break.

Robert Anton Wilson, The Cosmic Trigger II: Down to Earth (1991).
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Today

Yves Guyot

Yves Guyot

On September 6, 1843, Yves Guyot was born.

A journalist, economist, and political activist, he once endured a six-month prison term for his campaign against the prefecture of police. He served as minister of public works under the premiership of P.E. Tirard in 1889, retaining his portfolio in the cabinet of Charles de Freycinet until 1892. A free-trade liberal, he lost his seat in the election of 1893 owing to his militant attitude against socialism. His many books included The Principles of Social Economy (1892), The Tyranny of Socialism (1894), The Comedy of Protection (1906), Socialistic Fallacies (1910), and Where and Why Public Ownership Has Failed (1914). He served as editor of Journal des Économistes, following the Belgian economist Gustave de Molinari. Guyot died on February 22, 1928.

Illustration is a detail from a caricature by artist André Gill (1840-1885).

Categories
national politics & policies regulation subsidy too much government

Stay Puft America

FDA, regulations, food, rules, diet, fads

“It was perhaps just a matter of time before issues of health — not policies over health-care provision but actual human health — would enter into our politics,” surmises Jeffrey A. Tucker in The Epoch Times. “We look at pictures of people in cities or at the beach in the 1970s and compare them with today and the results are shocking. We have changed as people and for the worse.”

Jeff Tucker is trying to explain the background for a big policy-interest shift, as a result of the Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., endorsement of Donald J. Trump. Kennedy’s big issue is health, and Trump’s gone along with it, willing to make it a part of his agenda.

In “How Did Health Become a Political Issue?” Tucker focuses first on the COVID debacle, moving on to the real culprit: government.

Or, technically, government and industry, combined into one huge Stay Puft Marshmallow of Destruction. For behind our changing eating patterns and food habits are government tariffs, subsidies, researchstrategies, diet crazes, and much, much more. 

Perhaps even bigger than Big Pharma is Big Agribiz, a conglomerate of companies pushing lab-created additives and worse on a trusting public, or, as Tucker puts it, “many decades of heavy government subsidies for the worst food, and so much in the way of corn, soy, and wheat are produced that we’ve invented new ways to use it.”

But it’s not really “we’ve.” The Standard American Diet (SAD) wouldn’t have existed were it not for the USDA and the FDA and a whole alphabet soup of bureaus captured by the industries they were assigned to regulate, working together in a Big Biz/Gov partnership to create a Big Problem in the general population.

Somehow, though, when asked about the government causes of SAD, RFKj said he wouldn’t abolish anything. He merely wants “better regulations.”

Someone needs a fast . . .from Big Government.

That someone? Kennedy. 

And America.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Thought

Herbert Spencer

Regarding Science as a gradually increasing sphere, we may say that every addition to its surface does but bring it into wider contact with surrounding nescience. There must ever remain therefore two antithetical modes of mental action. Throughout all future time, as now, the human mind may occupy itself, not only with ascertained phenomena and their relations, but also with that unascertained something which phenomena and their relations imply. Hence if knowledge cannot monopolize consciousness — if it must always continue possible for the mind to dwell upon that which transcends knowledge; then there can never cease to be a place for something of the nature of Religion; since Religion under all its forms is distinguished from everything else in this, that its subject matter is that which passes the sphere of experience.

Herbert Spencer, First Principles (1867).
Categories
election law First Amendment rights

How Deep Is Your Fake?

deep fake, Donald Trump, Joe Biden, lizards

Monday last, a group of Democratic congressfolk “sent a letter to the Federal Election Commission (FEC), asking the agency to adopt regulations prohibiting the creation of deepfakes of election candidates,” Emma Camp tells us in last Thursday’s Reason article, “These Democrats Want the FEC To Crack Down on Elon Musk’s Grok.”

Current law already “prohibits a candidate for federal office or an employee or agent of a candidate from fraudulently misrepresenting themselves, committee, or organization under their control,” the letter states, but candidates have already been caught using “Artificial Intelligence (AI) in campaign ads to depict themselves or another candidate engaged in an action that did not happen or saying something the depicted candidate did not say.”

OK. Regardless of the merit of current regulation, the apparent fact that some political actors have defied the rule (perhaps out of ignorance) doesn’t necessitate more legislation. Why not just let the wheels of justice, or what passes for it in the FEC realm, go on doing what they’re doing?

Because Elon Musk.

Specifically, his X (“Twitter”) platform recently launched “Grok-2,” an AI for the creation of pictorial representations (not unlike those used here at ThisIsCommonSense.org). And, shock of shocks, there are no rules in place for ordinary people to take artistic license at those politicians they hate and and for those politicians they don’t.

As Ms. Camp notes, but the legislators don’t, most of these efforts have been for comic effect.

The Democrats don’t like this.

They request expeditious consideration for the creation, by the FEC, of new rules to “regulate” (suppress) AI by ordinary users to maintain the ostensible integrity of “our democracy.”

We have, Ms. Camp not unreasonably concludes, been pretty good at detecting “deep fakes” so far.

Besides, the big problem in politics is shallow fakes.

They’re everywhere. They’re called politicians.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Today

Rome Fell

Odoacer, a German “barbarian,” ousted Romulus Augustus, the last emperor of the Western Roman Empire, thus ending that empire on September 4, 476 A.D.

Many common people did not notice a change.

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Thought

F. A. Hayek

The idea that the inequalities of incomes can be greatly reduced has come to be recognized as largely impractical. Practically all endeavours at just distribution express more or less arbitrary conceptions of what is just and the central idea of Marxian socialism of a rationalisation of the means of production has been largely abandoned as technically impracticable. I believe that in general the idea of justice is more closely met by a freely competitive market than by any deliberate allocation of income to some imagined ideal of the kind.

Friedrich August von Hayek, as quoted in Alan Ebenstein, Friedrich Hayek: A Biography (2001).

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Thought

Mervyn Peake

To live at all is miracle enough.

Mervyn Peake, title of a poem as well as his epitaph.
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Update

X Brazil

On Friday, Paul Jacob (“Deep State in a Corner”) alluded to Elon Musk’s verbal and legal battles with Brazilian censorship, suggesting “why Musk is pulling out Twitter personnel” out of the Portuguese-speaking country. And as that commentary was “going to press,” as we used to say in the print biz, the story grew much larger.

“X began to go dark across Brazil on Saturday after the nation’s Supreme Court blocked the social network because its owner, Elon Musk, refused to comply with court orders to suspend certain accounts,” explain Jack Nicas and Kate Conger in The New York Times. “The moment posed one of the biggest tests yet of the billionaire’s efforts to transform the site into a digital town square where just about anything goes.”

Yes. It’s called “free speech.” It’s almost as if Nicas and Conger are trying to dysphemize it.

“Alexandre de Moraes, a Brazilian Supreme Court justice, ordered Brazil’s telecom agency to block access to X across the nation of 200 million because the company lacked a physical presence in Brazil.” But remember: X was pulling out so personnel wouldn’t get arrested for not complying with the maniac judge, Alexandre de Moraes.

Moraes’s antics have been covered extensively by Glenn Greenwald of System Update on Rumble. As noted on Friday, Rumble is also not operating in Brazil, nor allowed to be accessed over the Internet.

A “meme” on the subject, found on X.

But there’s a lot more to the censorship story, and some of it expands upon the points in “Deep State in a Corner”: Mike Benz, whom you may have caught on Tucker Carlson’s show, says he was told by a Brazilian congressman that behind all this is a batch of NGOs funded by the United States: “the Brazilian think tanks who are part of the legislative development of these censorship edicts and who pressuring Brazil’s government not to create a carve-X out for congressional parliamentarians because it would give a free pass for Brazilian members of Congress to spread misinformation online.” 

Political. Very political.

Ominous. Very ominous.