Author: Redactor

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international affairs media and media people

Words Not to Use

China, Taiwan, press conference

“Today, I confess, I am proud — proud of my profession.”

Sky News host Andrew Bolt was referencing the tough questions posed to Xiao Qian, China’s ambassador to Australia, following the ambassador’s speech last week to journalists at the nation’s Press Club. 

After Xiao talked about “a possible opportunity to reset the relationship between our two countries,” what with a new Australian administration — and complained that media coverage of China was “mostly not positive”— the questions began. 

The ambassador was asked first about the arrest, imprisonment and secret court proceedings against journalist Cheng Lei, an Australian citizen. Next, he was questioned on whether China might consider ending trade embargoes imposed after Australian officials requested an investigation into the origins of the coronavirus pandemic. Ambassador Xiao evaded answers on both matters.

Then came the issue of China’s threat to invade Taiwan. “I’d rather not use the word ‘invasion,’” offered Xiao, “when we talk about China and Taiwan.” 

Asked if 24 million Taiwanese shouldn’t get to choose their own path, the ambassador replied, “The future of Taiwan will be decided by 1.4 billion Chinese people.”

“In fact, that’s not even true,” explained Bolt. “It is going to be determined by the Chinese dictatorship,” he added, noting the complete lack of any democracy under Chinese Communist Party rule.

Citing a recent statement by the Chinese ambassador to France that China would “re-educate” the Taiwanese after a military takeover, Ben Packham with The Australian requested a comment. 

“There may be a process for the people of Taiwan to have a correct understanding of China,” Xiao acknowledged.

“Along the lines of the camps you have in Xinjiang?” Packham inquired. “That’s a re-education process isn’t it?”

“I’d rather not use the word ‘re-education,’” offered Xiao.

Words scare the genocidal totalitarians running China.

Speak up.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Illustration done with assist from DALL-E (artificial intelligence that turns text prompts into completely original art)

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Thought

Denis Diderot

People stop thinking when they cease to read.

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Today

Nineteenth

On August 18, 1920, the Nineteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution was ratified, guaranteeing women’s suffrage.

Eighty-eight years later, Pakistan’s President, Pervez Musharaf resigned under threat of impeachment.

Categories
First Amendment rights ideological culture Internet controversy

The Random Malefactor

Matt Walsh, free speech, doxxing, violence

I’m pretty sure I’d never heard the term “stochastic terrorism” until last week; now it’s everywhere.

What does it mean?

It sounds redundant, as if the first word didn’t modify the second so much as define it, but I could be wrong, so I . . . freespoke . . . it.

Freespoke is the new search engine I’m trying out, now that all the old ones seem compromised in weird ways.

Matt Walsh, of his Daily Wire podcast and his documentary film What Is a Woman?, appears to be one of the term’s current honorees. He is said to commit “stochastic terrorism” by calling attention (in one case) to the child abuse going on in hospitals in the form of “gender affirmation” treatments and surgeries. Merely by identifying something that is actually happening and judging it as bad qualifies because it has some unmeasurable likelihood of eliciting violence against those who are thus fingered — not ineluctably or directly or certainly or anything like that. 

Just randomly. 

Stochastic means random.

Of course, the charge against Walsh (or say, Trump, or anyone else) is that by identifying specific people in specific institutions he’s inviting random followers to engage in violence. But what Walsh is doing specifically is inviting his followers to protest and take political action against the malefactors he identifies.  

In familiar terminology, Walsh’s naming of names is similar to doxxing, and can be judged on that basis.

Yet, that hardly justifies calling non-violent speech “violence.”

Furthermore, back to my opening concern, isn’t all terrorism random? Terroristic acts differ from insurrection and assassination in their randomness, the better to elicit a culture of fear in the populace. The randomness in “stochastic terrorism” is not in the targets but the terrorists.

In a heavily polarized political climate, all specific charges by one side against specific people on the other side could be seen as “stochastic terrorism.”

Better to tread carefully. And drop the term.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Thought

C. S. Lewis

I don’t deserve a share in governing a hen-roost, much less a nation. Nor do most people — all the people who believe advertisements, and think in catchwords and spread rumors. The real reason for democracy is just the reverse. Mankind is so fallen that no man can be trusted with unchecked power over his fellows. Aristotle said that some people were only fit to be slaves. I do not contradict him. But I reject slavery because I see no men fit to be masters.

C. S. Lewis, “Equality,” The Spectator, Vol. CLXXI (27 August 1943).
Categories
Today

David Crockett

On August 17, 1786, American backwoods hero and politician, David Crockett, was born. Famous as a politician, he brought personal principle and honor and a “common sense” approach in representing Tennessee in the U.S. House of Representatives. He later served in the Texas Revolution, dying at the Battle of the Alamo.

Crockett grew up in East Tennessee, where he gained a reputation for hunting and storytelling, which helped make him a legend in his own time. After being made a colonel in the militia of Lawrence County, Tennessee, he was elected to the Tennessee state legislature in 1821.

In 1825, Crockett was elected to the U.S. Congress, where he vehemently opposed many of the policies of President Andrew Jackson, most notably the Indian Removal Act.

Crockett wrote a number of books, including a biography of Martin Van Buren.

Categories
general freedom ideological culture Voting

Thoughts on Nothingness

Liberty playing cards with Aristotle by DALL-E

“Democracy has nothing to do with liberty,” the Libertarian Party announced on Facebook, “just as so many of the world’s greatest minds have warned.”

Huh? Just exactly which “greatest minds” are we talking about?

Not Aristotle!

The party’s statement introduced a meme quoting Hans-Hermann Hoppe, the “Austrian school economist and libertarian/anarcho-capitalist philosopher,” Professor Emeritus of Economics at UNLV and Distinguished Fellow with the Ludwig von Mises Institute. It read: “Democracy allows for A and B to band together to rip off C. This is not justice, but a moral outrage.”

Dr. Hoppe has a point, of course. The ‘will of the people’ can be just plain wrong . . . even, at times, malevolent.  A democratic vote can lead to the tyranny of the majority and even to a tyranny of the minority, as those politicians promising to serve ‘We the People’ end up serving themselves and their cronies.

I’ve not read Professor Hoppe’s Democracy: The God That Failed, where he sort of argues for monarchy over democracy, but I offer two points: (1) no one in their right mind talks of democracy without including the protections of basic individual rights, which have become the hallmark of democratic countries across the globe, and (2) no one in the real world thinks democracy is God.

Still, we won’t trade it for monarchy. 

My issue with this social media post, however, is really with the Libertarian Party’s comment that “democracy” — including the democratic means the party has purportedly been employing across the country for decades — has provided no past benefit and offers no future hope for sustaining or expanding our freedom.

So, don’t vote Libertarian this November?

I’ll take that under advisement.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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“Liberty Playing Cards with Aristotle” by DALL-E (note that the AI has chosen to show Lady Liberty as bruised and beaten. Her torch appears to be made of tissue.-)

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Herbert Spencer

The objection made to the hedonistic method contains a truth, but includes with it an untruth. For while the proposition that happiness, whether individual or general, is the end of action, is not invalidated by proof that it cannot under either form be estimated by measurement of its components; yet it may be admitted that guidance in the pursuit of happiness by a mere balancing of pleasures and pains, is, if partially practicable throughout a certain range of conduct, futile throughout a much wider range. It is quite consistent to assert that happiness is the ultimate aim of action, and at the same time to deny that it can be reached by making it the immediate aim.

Herbert Spencer, The Data of Ethics, Chapter IX: “Criticisms and Explanations,” §57 (1879).

Categories
Today

The WINO!

On August 16, 1841, U.S. President John Tyler vetoed a bill to re-establish the Second Bank of the United States (pictured). Enraged Whig Party members — feeling betrayed by the WINO* Tyler — rioted outside the White House in history’s most violent demonstration on White House grounds.

* “Whig In Name Only,” anachronistic joke term. A play on the contemporary initialisms “Republican in Name Only” (RINO) and “Democrat in Name Only” (DINO).

Categories
folly general freedom media and media people national politics & policies

The Natural Immunity We Need

CDC guidelines

“This is two years too late,” said Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, “but it’s a good step.”

Interviewed by The Epoch Times, Dr. Bhattacharya, professor of medicine at Stanford University School of Medicine, is talking about new official COVID-19 guidelines by the Centers for Disease Control.

The CDC no longer recommends

  • the six-foot “social distancing” rule, which led to maximum comfort for paranoiacs, introverts, and Scandinavians in supermarkets and other public spaces;
  • that the unvaccinated quarantine after exposure;
  • testing for the asymptomatic; and
  • contact tracing outside of hospitals and places like nursing homes.

Bhattacharya’s interpretation of all this is that the “CDC is admitting it was wrong here, although they won’t put it in those words.”

Much of the new regimen is the result of understanding that natural immunity is a huge factor in the epidemiology of the disease. Bhattacharya’s complaint is that this has always been the case, and that the CDC and government lockdowners should have recognized this early on.

While the expert class has inflicted much damage, the CDC continues to whistle past the graveyard. “We’re in a stronger place today as a nation,” the author of the new guidelines insists, “with more tools — like vaccination, boosters, and treatments — to protect ourselves, and our communities, from severe illness from COVID-19.” 

But to get those mediocre-at-best vaccines past regulatory hurdles, government-directed medicine suppressed information about (and public discussion of) the most basic tools we have to treat new diseases. Governments at many levels, along with social media companies and CNN and many doctoring outfits, actively suppressed a number of treatments that could have saved lives, with HCQ and Ivermectin being only the most infamous.

The natural immunity we need to encourage most is skepticism toward government bureaucrats and Big Pharma flacks.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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