Paul Jacob isn’t threatening the Fates or upsetting the moral order in any way to elicit Nemesis. But our politicians sure do. That’s for sure.
Author: Redactor
Categories
P.J. O’Rourke
There is only one basic human right, the right to do as you damn well please. And with it comes the only basic human duty, the duty to take the consequences.
Categories
U. S. Military Zones
February 19, 1942, was a sad day for constitutional rights, with President Franklin D. Roosevelt signing Executive Order 9066, authorizing the Secretary of War to prescribe certain areas of the country as military zones. These zones were used to incarcerate Japanese Americans in internment camps.
“China censors Olympic gold medalist’s defense of China’s internet censorship . . .” informed Mashable.com’s ironic headline.
The medalist in question? Eileen Gu, the 18-year-old phenom who just became the youngest ever Olympic freestyle skiing champion. Born in San Francisco to an American father and a Chinese mother, Gu is an American citizen, but chose to ski on the Chinese national team at the Beijing Olympics, which means she is also a Chinese citizen. (Which is completely against Chinese law. But ssshhh.*)
Miss Gu’s now-you-see-it/now-you-don’t Instagram post of February 7th garnered a reply from a Chinese netizen, who inquired, “Why can you use Instagram and millions of Chinese people from mainland cannot, why you got such special treatment as a Chinese citizen?” The commenter added, “That’s not fair,” noting that “millions of
Gu quickly replied, “Anyone can download a vpn its literally free on the App Store.”
Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) are indeed easily available outside of China, but “it is illegal to use them to get around China’s Great Firewall,” Mashable explained.
“And, as the Weibo post featuring Gu’s Instagram comment started to gain traction on the social network, it was subsequently censored.”
“Let them have VPNs,” mocked a column in the Taiwan News, dubbing it Gu’s “‘Marie Antoinette’ moment.”
The reality of VPNs in China? Not so easy, and the laws against VPN usage are increasingly enforced.
Gu’s ignorance about the reality of living under Chinese rule may be caused by the wealth showering over her. “Eileen Gu’s China choice pays off for now,” says Yahoo News, noting she has made over $30 million since the beginning of 2021 and is poised to make far more.
This makes her a Communist Party asset, and thus a danger to herself and the rest us.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
* “China does not allow for dual citizenship,” Mashable informs, “and there is no record that Gu has given up her American citizenship.” It appears we can add “looking the other way” and “duplicitousness” to the Chinazis’ long rap sheet of crimes against humanity.
See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)
See recent popular posts
Categories
P.J. O’Rourke
Giving money and power to government is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys.
P.J. O’Rourke, Parliament of Whores (1991).
Categories
White Rose
On Feb. 18, 1943, Hans and Sophie Scholl, a brother and sister, were arrested at the University of Munich for secretly (or not so secretly) putting out leaflets calling on Germans to revolt against Adolf Hitler and the Nazi regime.
In the previous year Hans had founded a group of students, who called themselves “The White Rose.” The group wrote and distributed six leaflets aimed at educated Germans. The leaflets made their way across Germany and to several other occupied countries. The Allies later dropped them all over the Third Reich.
New Yorkers can breathe easier now — they’re finally rid of the repellent Mayor Bill de Blasio.
But — uh oh — the new mayor, Eric Adams, may be another worm to keep that bitter taste dominant in the Big Apple.
Mayor Adams dislikes guns and violence, so he wants social media to censor rap videos that display and glorify guns. It’s unclear whether he also wants social media to censor links to westerns and Matrix movies and lots of other movies and media in which guns to fight bad guys or bad algorithms are approvingly deployed.
“You have a civic and corporate responsibility,” Adams intones, enjoining social media firms to expand their list of banned things.
“We [we?] pulled Trump off Twitter because of what he was spewing. Yet we are allowing music displaying of guns, violence. We allow this to stay on the sites.”
“Stagecoach” and a rap video proposing that one “[expletive deleted] that [expletive deleted]” may have little in common in the categories of values and sensibilities. But if violence is “glorified” in both, well, that’s bad. Right?
Adams is a government official. A “public servant.” And a functionary in such a position cannot make solemn, well-publicized declarations about what companies should censor without thereby seeking to enlist them — deputize them, you might say — as agents of government censorship.
He is not sending police to the offices of Twitter and Facebook and ordering them to ban rap-video tweets or else. But he’s doing the next-worst thing.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)
See recent popular posts
Categories
P.J. O’Rourke
Hubris is one of the great renewable resources.
P.J. O’Rourke (November 14, 1947 – February 15, 2022).
Categories
President Jefferson
On Feb. 17, 1801, Thomas Jefferson was elected by the U.S. House of Representatives to be the third president of the United States, after an arduous election process that ended only 15 days prior to inauguration.
The fracas included a tie vote in the Electoral College followed by 35 indecisive ballots in the House. At that time, votes were cast for president, with the second place candidate becoming Vice-President. But in the Electoral College, Jefferson tied with his vice-presidential running mate, Aaron Burr. When that sent the balloting to the House of Representatives, the Federalists opposing Jefferson initially threw their support to Burr.
On Feb. 17, 1933, a constitutional amendment to repeal the Eighteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which had established the national prohibition of alcohol, was passed by the U.S. Senate. Known as the Blaine Act, the prime author was Wisconsin Senator John J. Blaine. By the end of 1933, the repeal of prohibition was adopted as the 21st Amendment to the Constitution.
Categories
Stay On Call
Backlash can be good. Against lousy ideas, for example. Sometimes, the response to the backlash is to relinquish the lousy idea, at least temporarily.
We must hope for more than a moment of reprieve from the Internal Revenue Service’s plan to require facial ID recognition of persons who use certain functions of its website.
Both Republican and Democratic congressmen, among many others, were outraged.
It’s good that many congressmen regard some forms of surveillance as beyond the pale. (Meanwhile, legislation to promote scanning of everybody’s online messages at will, Lindsey Graham’s EARN IT Act, is back in Congress. Bipartisan Backlash, can you take a look at this?)
The IRS said that it wanted to use facial recognition technology to help prevent scammers from posing as taxpayers.
But a database of such facial info would itself pose a huge security risk. For decades now, we have been inundated with stories about major databases being hacked.
Nor would legal access have been restricted to the less-than-trustworthy IRS. A third-party vendor would have been involved.
So the IRS has retreated, saying they grasp “the concerns that have been raised” and pledging to pursue “short-term options that do not involve facial recognition.”
The Biden administration has also proposed expanding IRS staff by 80,000+ personnel and permitting minute governmental monitoring of the bank accounts of millions of Americans — notions now in abeyance but undead. And who knows what other innovations in overseeing us are coming up?
Stay on call, Bipartisan Backlash.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)
See recent popular posts