Category: general freedom

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general freedom international affairs national politics & policies

It’s a Date

Taiwan, China, war, defense, freedom, technology

“Do not mess with Taiwan before 2028,” Vivek Ramaswamy instructed translators to tell Chinese ruler Xi Jinping, “before the end of my first term, okay?”

Responding to a question from Hugh Hewitt on his radio program, Ramaswamy — the entrepreneur, author, and GOP presidential candidate — urged a “move from strategic ambiguity to strategic clarity.”

The right idea, I guess, just not elaborated in the clear-thinking manner I have been hoping for.

You see, there was a “second part” to Ramaswamy’s foreign policy prescription. “That commitment is only as far as 2028,” he explained, “by which point I will have led the United States of America to achieve semiconductor independence, and we will not take the risk of war that risks Americans lives after that for some nationalistic dispute between China and Taiwan.”

“Some nationalistic dispute”?* Sure, between the democratic miracle of the last century and a genocidal totalitarian regime that claims it . . . along with claiming 90 percent of the South China Sea, the world’s busiest waterway.

A skeptical Hewitt heard Ramaswamy “saying ‘I will go to war, including attacking the Chinese mainland, if you attack before semiconductor independence. And afterwards, you can have Taiwan. So if you just wait until 2029, you may have Taiwan.’”

Let’s make the world safe for semiconductors! 

But . . . not for people? 

Ramaswamy’s transactional approach might make the Taiwanese feel less inclined to assist our efforts toward semiconductor independence. And what a terrible message to send other allies in the region!  

As the democratic countries of Asia and the world are stepping up and coming together to push back against Beijing’s belligerence, the U.S. ought not jeopardize this by suggesting more convenient dates for calendaring in future Chinazi invasions.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* From the interview, Ramaswamy appears ignorant of Taiwanese history; namely, the fact that the Nationalist Chinese forces that fled to the island in 1949, as well as their offspring, comprise a distinct minority of the island nation’s population. Meanwhile, the native Taiwanese had been under Japanese colonial rule for the previous fifty years and, prior to that, never completely under Chinese control.

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crime and punishment general freedom ideological culture

Violence on the Rise

political violence

In a fascinating if vexing article courtesy of Reuters, we learn that political violence has risen in recent years. 

Not shocking news, to those paying attention, but still worth thinking about.

The article focuses on a few stories of politically motivated violence by individuals against individuals since the fateful day of January 6, 2021. This conveniently stacks the deck of partisanship, ruling out of consideration 2020’s mass violence and multiple deaths during the riots following George Floyd’s death. With this limitation, the majority of violence is from “the right” against “the left.”

But the article’s most interesting passage regards a recent poll about the acceptability of violence. There the breakdown evens out: “In a Reuters/Ipsos poll of nearly 4,500 registered voters in May, roughly 20% of both Democratic and Republican respondents called violence ‘acceptable’ if committed ‘to achieve my idea of a better society.’” 

A similar poll last year shows that these acceptability-of-violence levels are on the rise.

Why?

One thing is perception of news media and thrust of the media. 

On the right, folks have noticed that the news regularly lies and spins in favor of the center-left establishment — demonstrated repeatedly in the article with what Reuters considers accepted facts. On the left, folks who trust their news sources and party follow the repeated narratives painting Trump and his supporters as wholly evil.

Of course you can fight evil with violence! — so a logic runs.

Also, the suppression of online social media stories and accounts that are perceived as “anti-left” has bred much distrust and disgust. Democracy only works in a context of free speech and open debate. 

Dysfunctional democracy makes violence more likely. 

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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education and schooling First Amendment rights general freedom

Students Strike Back

College Campus Commie Crybabies

In November 2021, at taxpayer-funded Clovis Community College, the group Young Americans for Freedom requested permission to post flyers. College officials assented.

The flyers attacked socialism. Uh oh. This was a grave violation of the alleged inalienable right of socialist students on the campus to never be exposed to disagreement with their views.

Some of the aggrieved students complained. We are offended, they told the school.

Administrators furrowed their brows and quickly determined that the school could not permit such offensive speech.

Suddenly censored, the YAF students who had posted the flyers went to court, represented by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE). They quickly won a district court victory that has now been affirmed in the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals.

According to the court’s ruling, “The district court did not abuse its discretion when it concluded that [the students] were likely to succeed on the merits of their claim that the ‘inappropriate or offens[ive] language or themes’ provision was facially overbroad.”

This means that the case can continue.

Clovis YAF Chair Juliette Colunga hopes that in response to the ruling, Clovis will finally decide “to explicitly protect the constitutional rights of its students to speak freely.”

The school has tried to forestall further litigation to require it to set forth an unambiguous policy protecting freedom of speech by conceding that the students may post the anti-socialist flyers.

That’s not enough for FIRE, though, which is proceeding with the litigation.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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general freedom ideological culture media and media people

“You in Your Whiteness”

struggle session, communism, race, racism

The “antiracist” training now often inflicted in the west resembles the efforts to shame and remake people during Mao’s Cultural Revolution in the 1960s and 1970s.

Today’s western cultural revolutionaries are not (yet) going nearly as far as China’s, when people were routinely humiliated, beaten to a pulp, imprisoned, and murdered for “wrong” ideas or background.

In the west of 2023, people with “wrong” politics and background (i.e., white) are merely humiliated, censored, perhaps forced out of a job. But we can now add another similarity to Mao’s era: the possibility that hounded victims will commit suicide, as Richard Bilkszto recently did.

Yes, Mr. Bilkszto killed himself.

In 2021, Kike Ojo-Thompson — hired to conduct “antiracist” struggle sessions that Bilkszto, a fill-in principal in Toronto, was required to attend — blasted him for disagreeing with her officially-approved contention that Canada is “more racist” than the United States.

While the issue could be subject to much debate, most of it would likely be pointless. Neither side stands on firm ground.

According to Bilkszto’s eventual lawsuit against the school district, Ojo-Thompson berated, “We are here to talk about anti-Black racism, but you in your whiteness think that you can tell me what’s really going on for Black people.” She also accused Bilkszto of being a white supremacist.

Repeatedly.

A workplace agency found that Ojo-Thompson had indeed engaged in “harassment and bullying.” And, perhaps because of his complaint with the agency, the school district declined to renew Bilkszto’s contract. His lawsuit contends that his reputation was “systematically demolished.”

Now that he’s safely dead, do those who punished Bilkszto for uttering the “wrong” view of racial claims now regret their conduct? 

No more, I bet, than they regard themselves as the bullies they are.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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BBC Apologizes, Bankers Squirm

Nigel Farage, gangsters, banksters, censorship

Banksters. It rhymes with “gangsters.”

The pejorative for bankers came to mind as I was reading about the British Broadcasting System’s public correction of a story it had published. In covering Coutts bank’s closure of Nigel Farage’s account, back on July 4, the BBC had said that it was not political.

But Mr. Farage, the former leader of the United Kingdom’s Independence Party, “later obtained a Coutts report which indicated his political views were also considered.”

Like we all guessed. 

The lengthy document seen by Farage and then the BBC “included minutes from a meeting in November last year reviewing his account” in which he was called “xenophobic and racist” and characterized as not the kind of customer compatible with Coutts’ “position as an inclusive organisation.”

Britain, like the United States, is in the throes of a very political “culture war.” Farage was the main proponent for Brexit in 2016. The unexpected success of Britain’s plebiscite to secede from the European Union became part of the global populist rebellion that led to the election of Donald Trump here. 

And, like here, in Britain it has gotten nasty.

Farage’s beef with the BBC was easily resolved, as Farage accepted the BBC’s apology and its reporter’s excuse that a “trusted and senior” confidential source within Coutts had fed the news organization misinformation.

The bank in question considers itself very upright and moral, apparently. Hardly a “gangster” — that’s not in its mission statement! But by taking sides in politics (apparently solidly in the Remainer rather than Brexiteer camp), the bank is following a trend we’ve seen here, where big business balks at doing business with people it doesn’t like — ideologically.

This is a recipe for the breakdown of open markets . . . and civil strife far beyond what we’ve seen so far.

That’s not good for business.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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First Amendment rights general freedom international affairs

Truth, Compassion & Forbearance

China, Falun Gong, genocide

The Chinese Communist Party’s genocidal ways did not begin with the mass Uyghur incarcerations. Twenty-four years ago the CCP kicked off “its brutal campaign to eradicate Falun Gong in China,” writes John A. Deller in The Epoch Times.

“Falun Gong (also called Falun Dafa) was introduced to the public in China by Mr. Li Hongzhi in May 1992,” explains Mr. Deller. “It is a spiritual practice in the Buddhist tradition based on the principles of truth, compassion, and forbearance. . . . By 1998, over 70 million people across China had found improved health and morality through Falun Gong.”

In the West, we may not immediately see how dangerous (to tyrants) a religio-philosophical movement like Falun Gong could be. 

Isn’t it innocuous? When D. T. Suzuki introduced Zen Buddhism to the U.S. in the last century, most Americans . . . yawned. 

But the Chinazis did not yawn. They banned Falun Gong on July 20, 1999. And began arresting and imprisoning and torturing and executing its practitioners.

While Deller insists that Falun Gong was not perceived by most of its practitioners to be intrinsically anti-communist, over the course of the antagonism it has dawned on the persecuted that “socialism with Chinese characteristics” is indeed at odds with “truth, compassion, and forbearance.”

What really bothers the CCP? Ideas. 

Of independence . . . forbearance. 

Of truth . . . not propaganda. 

Of compassion . . . the idea that maybe prisoners shouldn’t be killed to facilitate lucrative organ transplants.

The 24-year-old genocide is a memecide, the attempted final solution to these paramount ideas.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Big Biz-Big China Alliance

Cisco is in trouble, again, for a reason that many American technology firms should be: for aiding and abetting the tyranny of the Chinese government.

Cisco may have thought it was out of the woods after a lawsuit against it, originally filed in 2011, was wrongly dismissed in 2014. The litigation has just been revived by an appellate court.

The suit pertains to the company’s sale of software called Golden Shield to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Golden Shield is used to track down members of the popular and peaceful Falun Gong spiritual movement so that the CCP can persecute them as subversives (as proved by being part of Falun Gong). For the Chinese regime, all dissent and all activity it disapproves of are threats to national security.

Arrestees are tortured, imprisoned, even murdered, and the lawsuit contends that Cisco knew the ultimate goals that the software would serve. (The culpability of Cisco, Thermo Fisher, Microsoft, and other firms that abet CCP oppression is discussed with sarcastic brio by the YouTube channel China Uncensored.)

Ninth Circuit Judge Marsha Berzon states that the allegations are “sufficient to state a plausible claim that Cisco provided essential technical assistance to the [persecution] of Falun Gong with awareness that the international law violations of torture, arbitrary detention, disappearance, and extrajudicial killing were substantially likely to take place.”

The revival of this lawsuit and its ultimate resolution will deter, I hope, all U.S. firms from helping the Chinazis to systematically destroy innocent people.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Accountability folly general freedom international affairs

Austerity Theater

climate, elites, warming, ecology

Does Spain really need a Ministry of Ecological Transition and Demographic Challenge?

Well, the country’s reproduction rate has fallen dramatically, with the demographics heading into a tailspin. This is what decadence really means. So maybe, just maybe, the government should look into it.

But does Spain really need Teresa Ribera?

She’s the minister in charge of MITECO, the department in question. She hit international notoriety last week when video of her riding a bicycle to an EU “climate summit” proved to be something other than a valiant commitment to climate-crisis austerity.

While she intended her cycling to hit the news cycle, how it hit proved . . . hilarious. 

She had arrived at the summit via jet — and not a commercial airliner — and then was transported by limo to a spot a hundred meters from the event, stopping to get on her bicycle and pedaling the last bit.

For the show.

Why she thought she’d get away with what Pete Buttigieg had failed at in 2021, as The Daily Wire noted, I don’t know. Maybe our leaders think we’re that stupid. Or perhaps they haven’t completely transitioned to the Age of the iPhone and Internet Challenge.

We must wonder: Do our leaders really believe their own climate prophecies? 

They don’t seem to, any more than they believed, in the thick of the pandemic, that masking up and social distancing was something that they, too, should do.

That could be one take-away. But another is that they do, but they know that climate austerity, like the lockdowns, make sense only if most people comply. They are not “most people.” They are special. 

For them, the elites, austerity is just a show. 

To set us up to suffer — for real.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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general freedom

A Declaration

July 4, 2023

When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.

But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Two Days & 50 Years

American Independence, July 4, July 2, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson

Tomorrow is Independence Day in these United States.

But so was yesterday.

It was in the papers:

This day the Continental Congress declared the United Colonies Free and Independent States.

Pennsylvania Evening Post, July 2, 1776.

For it was two days before revising and accepting Thomas Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence that Congress officially declared its independence from King George III.

This Common Sense site has explained this quirk of history before. The Lee Resolution of July 2 declared that

  • the colonies should be “free and independent States”
  • they were “absolved from all allegiance to the British Crown” and that the connections should be “totally dissolved”
  • New “foreign Alliances” should be formed
  • And a “plan of confederation be prepared and transmitted to the respective Colonies for their consideration and approbation.”

Congress also commanded that a declaration be drawn up, and it was done quickly, accepted two days later.

The confederation document, on the other hand, took another year to work up, and four years beyond that to adopt.

John Adams, for all his faults as the Second President under the later U.S. Constitution, was a true friend of liberty and regarded the day as historic. “The second day of July, 1776,” he prophesied, writing to his wife on July 3, 1776,

will be the most memorable epoch in the history of America. I am apt to believe that it will be celebrated by succeeding generations as the great anniversary festival. It ought to be commemorated as the day of deliverance, by solemn acts of devotion to God Almighty. It ought to be solemnized with pomp and parade, with shows, games, sports, guns, bells, bonfires, and illuminations, from one end of this continent to the other, from this time forward forever more.

He was off by two days. It was the Fourth that would be celebrated.

Fifty years later he was off by much less: he died on July 4, 1826, uttering “Thomas — Jefferson — still surv —”

Jefferson had died a few hours earlier.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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