Author: Redactor

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First Amendment rights general freedom ideological culture international affairs Internet controversy

Constant Caved

China, censorship, FreeWeChat, free speech

Sometimes people suggest that the People’s Republic of China is no threat beyond its borders.

You can’t reach this doctrine based on a thorough canvass of the evidence. From China’s perspective, though, it is true insofar as the Chinese government treats its borders as encompassing the entire earth and perhaps even the moon.

What is also true, though, is that not every person or organization outside of China that advances China’s totalitarian agenda is being threatened by China.

For example: the company Constant, which operates the hosting service Vultr. Based in Florida (a U.S. state), Constant has willingly cooperated with Beijing’s censorship agenda as promoted by the China-based conglomerate Tencent.

Tencent owns the social media platform WeChat. As the Chinese Communist Party demands of all such platforms within China, WeChat censors discussion of topics that the CCP dislikes, e.g., Tiananmen Square or Xi Jinping pictured as Winnie the Pooh. 

An organization called GreatFire produces a Chinese-language website, freewechat.com, which archives many of the posts on taboo subjects that get censored on WeChat.

Since 2015, FreeWeChat had been hosted by Constant’s Vultr — until several months ago, when Vultr started receiving harrumphing letters from Tencent, demanding that it stop hosting FreeWeChat. Vultr obeyed; dropped FreeWeChat.

Which, fortunately, managed to transfer its site to another hosting service.

Tencent’s letters offered an array of specious claims that GreatFire refuted in detail. GreatFire’s attempts to communicate with inconstant Constant about the matter have had no effect. Nevertheless, FreeWeChat and its noble mission survive.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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George Santayana

Most men’s conscience, habits, and opinions are borrowed from convention and gather continual comforting assurances from the same social consensus that originally suggested them.

George Santayana, The Life of Reason: The Phases of Human Progress: Vol.II, Reason in Society (1905).

Categories
Today

Citizen Capet

On December 11, 1792, King Louis XVI of France was put on trial for treason by the National Convention of the new, revolutionary, République française. His name had been de-sacralized to Citizen Louis Capet, and he was found guilty and then executed in January of the next year . . . by decapitation.

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ideological culture

Zero/Not-Zero

Fulnecky, essay, trans, gender, Bible

Forty-four million views later, the University of Oklahoma has advised student Samantha Fulnecky that the zero her paper received won’t be factored into her final course grade.

While it’s good that the school won’t hold that zero against her, she deserves a grade — an honest, objective grade — for her work.

Fulnecky did submit a paper, contrary to what is implied by the zero. She did indeed turn in an essay on the topic of “gender, peer relations and mental health” that her class was assigned.

Perhaps the word “gender” has given you the clue. You guessed it: she took the wrong view.

The Washington Post reports that her essay “rejected the concept of multiple genders and cited the Bible to support her view that traditional gender roles should not be considered stereotypes. ‘Society pushing the lie that there are multiple genders and everyone should be whatever they want to be is demonic and severely harms American youth,’ Fulnecky wrote.”

Turning Point USA, which collected 44,000,000 views for its post about the controversy, has also posted the essay itself.

Whether Samantha Fulnecky’s work precisely follows the requirements of the assignment I don’t know; these have not been posted as well. Though not deathless prose, the essay is intelligible and on the assigned topic, if perhaps annoying to those who, like the transgender professor who assigned the paper, disagree with its Biblical perspective and non-novel view of male and female.

In other words, it’s not nothing.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Jean Sibelius

It is so difficult to mix with artists! You must choose business men to talk to, because artists only talk of money.

Jean Sibelius, as quoted by Bengt de Törne in Sibelius: A Close-Up (1937), p. 94.

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Today

He’s Our Huckleberry

On December 10, 1884, Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn was first published. This novel, narrated in the first person by the title character, is a dark comedy of the antebellum South and slavery, and has been considered by more than one literary critic as the “Great American Novel.”

On this date in 1901, the first Nobel Peace Prizes were awarded — to economist Frédéric Passy, co-founder of the Inter-Parliamentary Union; and to Henry Dunant the founder of the International Committee of the Red Cross.

Passy was an admirer of Richard Cobden and an active member in the French Liberal School of Political Economy that developed in the tradition of J. B. Say, Destutt de Tracy, and Frédéric Bastiat. His published works include Leçons d’économie politique (1860-61); La Démocratie et l’Instruction (1864); L’Histoire du Travail (1873); Malthus et sa Doctrine (1868); and La Solidarité du Travail et du Capital (1875).

Categories
ideological culture public opinion too much government

Looking for Work

public sector, civil service, private sector, jobs, employment, DOGE

“Social sector” workers — described by Forbes as “nonprofit organizations and the social sector at-large” — have been losing jobs because of budget cuts and corruption cuts.

Many newly unemployed are unhappy about having to job-hunt. Some complain about having to take jobs from profit-making businesses. Others lament sparse communication from prospective employers.

“When asked about barriers to finding employment, 85% of respondents cited lack of employer response as their primary challenge,” Aparna Rae’s not-very-shocking-at-all Forbes article elaborates. “The irony is stark: a sector built on human dignity subjects job seekers to dehumanizing ‘digital hiring mazes’ where qualified candidates are ghosted after final-round interviews. The disconnect between mission and practice erodes the sector’s moral authority.”

Wow. Dehumanizing to have to . . . look for work (or customers)? Worse because your last job was all about dignity — unlike all those grubby profit-sector jobs or, for that matter, jobs with nonprofits that rely only on voluntary private donations?

“I want to be seen and recognized as a human,” explains one representative job seeker. “The lack of communication and impersonal nature of the hiring process is demoralizing and makes job seekers feel devalued.”

Job hunting can be tough. It’d be nicer if qualified candidates who have been considered but lose out to other qualified candidates were always notified. Sure. But how does failure to do so represent a “disconnect” between mission and practice, and how does it “erode the [nonprofits’] moral authority”?

Job seekers might feel less demoralized if they didn’t take the impersonal aspects of the search so personally.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Hector Berlioz

Le temps est un grand maître, dit-on; le malheur
est qu’il soit un maître inhumain qui tue ses élèves.

Time is a great teacher, but unfortunately it kills all its pupils.

Hector Berlioz, letter written in November 1856, published in Pierre Citron (ed.) Correspondance générale (1989), vol. 5, p. 390; as quoted by Paul Davies in About Time: Einstein’s Unfinished Revolution (1996), p. 214.

Categories
Today

Three Johns + the Anarchist Prince

On December 9, 1958, the John Birch Society was founded in the United States. December 9 also marks the birthdays of

  • Poet and anti-censorship advocate John Milton (1608), author of Paradise Lost (1667), the masterpiece of blank verse narrative, and a classic prose defense of free speech and the press, Areopagitica (1644).
  • Russian prince and anarchist theoretician Peter Kropotkin (1842), author of Mutual Aid and other books and pamphlets.
  • Filmmaker John Malkovich (1953), who directed The Dancer Upstairs (2002) and starred in the odd eponymous film Being John Malkovich (1999).
Categories
First Amendment rights international affairs social media

Don’t Pay, Don’t Play

Elon Musk, EU, regulations, censorship, surveillance, freedom

The European Commission is fining the X platform 120 million euros (140 million dollars), for “transparency failures”: not sharing advertising and user data with the EU and not making it easy to censor account holders.

As Reclaim the Net reports, the European Union wants platforms to open themselves to what it calls “independent research.” In practice, this means that “academics and NGOs, often with pro-censorship political affiliations” get special access to the data, “exactly the kind of surveillance the [Digital Services Act] claims to prevent. . . . The EU is angry that X is not policing speech the way it wants.”

My advice to Elon Musk is to shut down X (formerly Twitter) throughout the EU. And refuse to pay the fine.

X’s departure from the EU wouldn’t need to be permanent. For the censors would then have not only X and its uncooperative CEO to contend with; suddenly, a pro-X lobby of millions of Twitterers would be putting pressure on the censors.

The chances of unilateral surrender by the EU? Pretty high. And that’s the only kind of surrender Musk should accept.

If he agrees to even a little EU repression in return for lifting of the fine, that could lead to a total loss for the freedom-of-speech side; the bureaucrats, spies, and busybodies would likely take that seemingly marginal concession and relentlessly work to enlarge it.

Accept only total victory. And be ready to again leave the EU the instant the EU-crats resume their attacks.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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