Author: Redactor
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Anne Hutchinson
If any come to my house to be instructed in the ways of God what rule have I to put them away? Do you think it not lawful for me to teach women and why do you call me to teach the court?
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Congress Adjourns
On September 29, 1789, the first Congress of the United States under the new Constitution adjourned.
On the same date in 1881, economist Ludwig von Mises was born in Lemberg, Galicia, of the Austria-Hungary Empire (now Lviv, Ukraine).
On September 28, 2008, SpaceX launched the Falcon 1, the first private spacecraft to go into orbit around planet Earth.
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Denis Diderot
There are three principal means of acquiring knowledge… observation of nature, reflection, and experimentation. Observation collects facts; reflection combines them; experimentation verifies the result of that combination.
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Two-thousand Somethings
Alex Ko is “exactly the kind of person China is worried about,” informs the BBC.
Described as “soft-spoken” and “bespectacled,” the 23-year-old Ko lives in Taiwan, hundreds of ocean miles away from Hong Kong, where for months the streets have been consumed in protests demanding simple but difficult things: freedom, democracy, government accountability.
What can one person do — especially living far away and in a different country?
You might think: not much.
But Mr. Ko managed to do something. Two-thousand-plus somethings. With help.
Ko launched “a donation drive for gas masks, air filters and helmets at his church,” and has been able to send Hong Kong protesters “more than 2,000 sets of such gear . . . to protect them against tear gas regularly fired by the police.”
It’s sad such gear is needed but . . . “[a] new Amnesty International field investigation has documented an alarming pattern of the Hong Kong Police Force deploying reckless and indiscriminate tactics, including while arresting people at protests, as well as exclusive evidence of torture and other ill-treatment in detention.”
“As a Christian,” Ko told the BBC, “when we see people hurt and attacked, I feel we have to help them.” And then he added, “As a Taiwanese, I’m worried we may be next.”
Today I’m flying to Hong Kong in route to Taiwan to address the 2019 Global Forum on Modern Direct Democracy. Because freedom and democracy must be protected and expanded the world over . . . so no one is “next.”
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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While we are postponing, life speeds by. Nothing is ours except time.
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Congress on the Run
Lancaster, Pennsylvania — home to James Buchanan, Jr., the 15th president of the United States, and to congressman, abolitionist and “Radical Republican” Thaddeus Stevens — served, during the American Revolution, as the capital of the United States for one day, on September 27, 1777.
This occurred after the Continental Congress fled Philadelphia, which had been captured by the British. The revolutionary government then moved still further away, to York.
Cancel culture, writes Christian Britschgi of Reason, may have just “jumped the shark.”
Britschgi tells the tale of “Carson King, a 24-year-old security guard who achieved viral fame after he was spotted on ESPN’s College Gameday waving a sign that asked people to use the mobile payment app Venmo to send him beer money.” Mr. King got a huge number of responses, then decided to give it all to charity. This spurred on both Anheuser-Busch and Venmo to match the donations, and a hero was born.
Enter the shark.
I mean, legacy media.
The Des Moines Register chose to profile King, on Tuesday, with that special postmodern twist: dig up some ugly tweets by the man from back when he was a 16-year-old edgelord, saying the de rigueur racist things.
Next: apologies, backlash.
“Treating a person’s most intemperate tweets as worthy of public shame is an exercise in hypocrisy,” Britschgi not unreasonably asserts. “What’s worse is that we have graduated from using social media history as a way of divining a person’s true nature to deploying that history cynically and maliciously.”
The hypocrisy part was provided by the Register’s registered hitman, a recent hire who was himself caught on Twitter, having used the n-word and warning others never to talk to “strange gay men,” as Keith Mann regales us with on Heavy.
This is not the way civilized people behave.
Sure, don’t tweet ugly, vicious stuff in the first place. That’s a good takeaway.
But cancel culture shouldn’t cancel out cultural goodness.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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