Category: general freedom

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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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general freedom initiative, referendum, and recall

A Sporting Chance

Riley Gaines, Paul Jacob, Protect Women's Sports, Maine Girl Dads

Maine may become the first state to place a Protect Girls Sports measure on the statewide ballot. 

A group appropriately enough called Maine Girl Dads has been standing up on this issue and constitutes the core of a newly formed ballot question committee, Protect Girls Sports in Maine. On Election Day weeks ago, the committee launched an initiative petition that needs 68,000 registered voter signatures in order to give voters the choice to designate public school sports as male, female or co-ed. 

Let every person participate. But stop allowing males to enter and dominate sports set aside for women. Or to lurk in their locker rooms.

It’s no wonder why the issue of permitting 6’4’ men transitioning to identify as women to compete against females has caused a stir — they’ve won competitions by wide margins, setting new records.

And, in several cases, the dangerous physical mismatches created have also resulted in injuries to women.

That’s not sportsmanlike, for there are very real biological differences between men and women and, in virtually every athletic activity, men have significant physical advantages: speed, quickness, strength. 

Which is why there has been no issue with women transitioning to identify as men competing in men’s sports. Because they are at a distinct disadvantage and, therefore, not a factor. 

Over the weekend, I traveled to Portland to hear NCAA champion swimmer Riley Gaines speak and learned that the Protect Girls Sports effort has surpassed 68,000 signatures and is now working on extra signatures to thwart any possible challenge.

“It’s time we made Maine Girl Sports safe for girls again,” says Alisha Lawson of Moms for Maine Girls, adding that the measure will be: “Common Sense. Voter Enacted.”

I’m all for it.* I’m Paul Jacob.

* To be clear, I’m actively helping this Maine campaign.

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La Libertad Avanza

Javier Milei, Argentina, freedom, bail out

“It’s a landslide victory compared to expectations,” Lizzy Burden announced for Bloomberg Television, going on to report that U.S. President Donald Trump has taken some of the credit for the successes, Sunday, of President Milei’s party, La Libertad Avanza (Liberty Advances).

On Truth Social, Trump wrote “BIG WIN in Argentina for Javier Milei . . . He’s making us all look good.”

But how does this redound to Trump’s, er, biglyness? 

Well, Trump provided a bailout. 

That’s the term used in the news for a $20 billion currency swap plus $20 billion private loan facility — that is, private funds directed by the negotiating agents at U.S. Treasury. This stabilized Argentina’s peso after a September crisis triggered by Milei’s party’s losses at Buenos Aires polls a month earlier.

Regardless, Liberty Advance’s current win defies recent polls showing a dip to around 40 percent, in part because of hardship from Milei’s “austerity” drive — slashed subsidies, fired public workers, deregulated industries.

It also defied North American expectations. Leading up to October 26, we heard little good news from the land named for the element silver: major U.S. outlets such as the New York Times and NPR, and British media including The Guardian, emphasized Argentina’s dire straits reveling in the “irony” or “failure” of Milei’s “libertarian experiment,” often with a strong whiff of schadenfreude toward “Trump-lite” policies.*

But Milei’s biggest successes should not be ignored: inflation has dropped from 211 percent to under 5 percent monthly. Another factor in his victory is how rural voters, lives improved by freer trade, outweighed disgruntled government workers, newly disemployed.

Mostly, though, I bet Argentines were fearful of a return to Peronism.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

 * Of course, Milei’s “shock therapy” and “austerity” (and other leftist bugaboos) were unmatched by anything Trump has done — if anything, Trump’s “Milei Lite.” 

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First Amendment rights general freedom ideological culture

Two Ways of Walking Away

free speech, censorship, tolerance, mob, 1st Amendment, government

“The First Amendment prohibits the government from restricting free speech,” explained Michael J. Reitz in The Detroit News. But what about individuals and non-government groups? 

“Free speech doesn’t compel you to listen. You can walk away,” Mr. Reitz goes on to say.

In the piece, reprinted by the Mackinac Center for Public Policy, Reitz wonders, however, whether this “agree to disagree” attitude is enough to keep free speech alive. He believes that “as a society, we show our commitment to free speech through our willingness to listen, discuss and debate. It’s not consistent to say I value another person’s right to speak if I refuse to engage.”

A liberal attitude — in a social, perhaps non-political sense — is what Reitz advises: tolerant of differences; not prone to anger at hearing an opposing view; engaging logically and fairly with differing opinions; but free to take it or leave it without fearing recrimination, retribution or retaliation.

This right to walk away may define free speech, but Reitz argues that we mustn’t all walk to our bubbles in anger.

An old saw, recently popularized, insists that “we have freedom of speech, but we don’t have freedom from the consequences of speech.” In a free society, you may say what you like on your property, on your dime, but some people may shun you. Or fire you. And that’s OK.

What’s not an acceptable “consequence” of freedom of speech? Being silenced by the government, or the mob, either with petty violence or maximum force. Too many people use the “no freedom from consequences” cliché as an excuse to harass people at their work. Or bank. This is where it gets difficult. 

Since one neither has a right to a specific job nor to force a bank to accept one’s money on account, purely social pressure to de-bank, de-platform, or get someone fired, fits in a free society. But is Reitz correct that, legality aside, when such social pressure is common, and one-sided, free speech is doomed?

Perhaps society is doomed, in multi-lateral wars of us vs. them. 

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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defense & war general freedom international affairs

China’s Long Reach

China, war, invasion, land, internet

“Is China preparing for war?” CBS’s Scott Pelley asked General Tim Haugh last Sunday on 60 Minutes. 

“There was no other reason to target those systems. There’s no advantage to be gained economically. There was no foreign intelligence-collection value,” replied the general. “The only value would be for use in a crisis or a conflict.”

Systems? The segment featured Chinese infiltration into the computer system controlling electricity and the water supply for Littleton, a town of 10,000 residents in Massachusetts.

Littleton’s manager, Nick Lawler, pointed to how disastrous losing control of the computer system could become, noting that with that control an evil force — in this case, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) — “can poison the water.”

Literally as well as figuratively.

Once head of the National Security Agency and the U.S. Cyber Command, Haugh explained that the CCP is “certainly attempting every single day to be able to target telecommunications, to be able to target critical infrastructure.”

Even in little bitty Littleton. Talk about “unrestricted warfare”!

We have known for years that China’s Communists were tyrants; responsible for arguably a hundred million deaths due to murder, torture and starvation; subjugating Tibet; harvesting organs from political prisoners; placing more than a million Uyghurs in concentration camps; canceling all political rights in Hong Kong. These totalitarians also threaten to invade Taiwan and lay claim, ridiculously, to 90 percent of the South China Sea . . . which they are policing. 

Then we discovered the Chinese had opened police stations in the United States and other countries to harass and silence Chinese dissidents who had managed to escape to our shores. 

Now, it is hardly a surprise that the CCP has intruded into our electrical grids and water systems, while buying up farmland near American military bases.

Xi Jinping and the Chicoms are far worse than our rivals. While a far starker problem for those living in Asia, we are not safe from the Chinese State. 

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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First Amendment rights general freedom international affairs

UK as China’s Thumb Puppet

Xi Jinping, China, UK, surveillance, censorship

British police do some good things. In 2023, officers were credited with reducing the number of phone snatchings by punks on mopeds. Great.

Let’s have more of that, less of telling victims of totalitarian dictatorship to shut up for their own good.

The UK police wanted expatriate Hongkonger Carmen Lau, a pro-democracy activist and former Hong Kong politician who has been living in Britain since 2021, to stay out of trouble with China. So in March, London bobbies asked her to sign a “memorandum of understanding” obliging her to avoid public gatherings and “cease any activity likely to put you at risk.”

What activity? 

Not hang gliding.

The sickening effort to muzzle Lau came after neighbors got letters “offering a £100,000 bounty (US$131,947) for information on her movements” leading to her arrest by Hong Kong’s Chinese Communist Party authorities.

Hong Kong denies sending the letters. But in 2024, it placed bounties on the heads of six pro-democracy activists, including Lau, who had fled overseas in the wake of China’s repressive national security law of 2020, which targeted Hong Kong liberties.

Lau felt constrained to submit to the police request when they came to her door but has continued to speak out. “A truly democratic response should center on protecting the rights of those targeted, not advising them to retreat from public life,” she says.

Responding to the revelations, Thames Valley police say that they’d never “confirm or deny safeguarding tactics that we may or may not use. . . .”

Is this the free world? Not if under China’s thumb. 

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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crime and punishment general freedom

Precedented Prosecution?

Canada, Covid, truckers, punishment, tyranny

“The Crown says it’s seeking an extraordinary sentence for an unprecedented crime,” wrote Arthur White-Crummey for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation last week, “as court began hearing sentencing submissions Wednesday in the mischief case of Ottawa truck convoy leaders Tamara Lich and Chris Barber.”

The “Ottawa truck convoy” is what they are calling the big anti-totalitarian protests made by truckers in Canada during the late pandemic scare. 

“Crown prosecutor Siobhain Wetscher asked Justice Heather Perkins-McVey to impose a prison sentence of seven years for Lich and eight years for Barber,” we learn, and if you raise your eyebrows over such stiff sentences — for “mischief” cases! — you’re not alone. Chris Barber’s lawyer called the prosecutor’s demanded punishment, “cruel and unusual.” 

The exact charges against the two convoy leaders are “mischief and counselling others to disobey a court order” (Barber) and “mischief alone” (Lich). The prosecutor argued that these people did a lot of damage.

But it wasn’t property damage, or burning buildings, or even littering. The convoys stalled traffic around government buildings and made a lot of noise — and Barber is acknowledged by the prosecutor to have worked with police to move trucks out of residential areas. 

Barber and Lich wanted a clean and pointed protest. 

Barber’s lawyer noted that the organizers and hooligans of the “Black Bloc” protesters at Toronto’s 2010 G20 summit “caused extensive property damage, including upending police cars and smashing storefronts, but received comparatively light sentences of under two years.”

And remember, even the CBC article used the word “unprecedented.”

Traditionally, however, a specific kind of government does indeed prosecute its opponents in this manner, no matter how peaceful.

Tyrannical governments.

So we now know how to categorize the Canadian government.

Very precedented.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Common Sense general freedom obituary

Waiting for the Day

freedom, Independence Forever! Liberty

Towards the end of their lives, former President John Adams asked former President Thomas Jefferson whether he would live his life over again. 

The third president answered in the affirmative: “I think with you, that it is a good world on the whole; that it has been framed on a principle of benevolence, and more pleasure than pain dealt out to us.”

Not everyone agrees, of course. Jefferson called these people “gloomy and hypochondriac minds,” who “always count that the worst will happen because it may happen.”

Jefferson has a challenge to those whom we today call “the black-pilled”: “How much pain have cost us the evils that have never happened!” Jefferson confessed to lacking hope sometimes, but not as often as the perpetually gloomy.

Those of us who follow the news often have occasion for gloom — or alarm. But on July Fourth it is appropriate to remember the council of these two leaders of Independence. 

In 1826, as Jefferson and Adams approached their inevitable demises, both struggled — and succeeded — in their final goals: to make it to Independence Day. 

On the Third, Jefferson inquired, more than once, about whether it was the Fourth yet, wrote Albert Jay Nock at the end of his Jefferson (1926), “and when told at last that it was, he appeared satisfied. He died painlessly at one o’clock in the afternoon, about five hours before his old friend and fellow, John Adams; it was the only time he took precedence of him, having been all his life ‘secondary to him in every situation,’ except this one.”

According to Adams family lore, when Adams died a few hours later, he said, “Jefferson survives.” 

Wrong, as a point of fact. But in spirit?

On Independence Day, we should ask ourselves what of the founding survives.

Unlike the actual lives of those who made our Independence, and, to paraphrase Tom Paine, we can start Independence anew. And as John Adams definitely said on his last day, “Independence forever!”

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Chinese Individualism

individualism, collectivism

“You’re not the center of the story — at least not everywhere.”

That’s the tagline of a video featuring the late President Lee Kuan Yew, described as the “founding father of Singapore,” elsewhere affectionately referred to as LKY.

The social media account responsible runs under the moniker Office of the Director of Intelligence & Strategy, which sounds like a propaganda bureau. It’s an excerpt from a 25-year-old hour-long interview with Charlie Rose.

Entitled “Not Every Culture Believes Success Starts with One Person,” the clip goes on to say that LKY “shares his understanding of a key divide between the West and many Asian societies: Where the West centers the individual and leading your own path, many Asian systems prioritize the group — family, obligation, cohesion, survival together.”

The familial and communal aspects of traditional Chinese society are not in doubt. But LKY makes two crucial errors. 

“You believe in the individual as the creator of all things,” he says of Americans. 

That is not even close to how American individualism views the world. For starters, most Americans continue to believe in a capitalized Creator “of all things,” and it’s not the individual. Furthermore, even the most rugged individualist understands the role of families in raising children and communities in helping humans flourish.

American liberty, as imperfect and diluted as it is, can accommodate family-values traditions and communitarian folkways as well as free radicals. The point of individualism is not that The Individual creates success ex nihilo, but that government must make no exceptions for some individuals over others based on group membership.

Which is why Chinese-Americans do so well: they are helped by their family orientation as well as freedom. They do much better here than in China, but Chinese do even better in Singapore, which sports a lower tax burden. 

The kind of tax burden individualists prefer.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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general freedom ideological culture national politics & policies

Excellence in Success

space, freedom, NASA, SpaceX, DEI, quota

The NASA Jet Propulsion Lab has “parted ways with” — I’m guessing fired, despite the glowing words that attended the parting — DEI officer Neela Rajendra.

The Free Beacon reports that NASA seems to have been nudged in this direction by a Beacon report that despite the anti-DEI policies of the new U.S. administration, the Jet Propulsion lab had tried to retain Rajendra by changing her title. She still had many of the same responsibilities, including managing “affinity groups” like the Black Excellence Strategic Team.

The propulsion lab is now replacing its DEI department with a new one called “Office of Team Excellence and Employee Success.” 

Even assuming that race and gender consciousness are now no more — probably not a safe assumption — we may wonder why such a department, solely devoted to “excellence and success,” is necessary.

If it is, how did the NASA of the 1960s, including Apollo 11 astronauts Neil Armstrong, Michael Collins, and Buzz Aldrin, ever manage to reach and land on the moon? Surely this kind of accomplishment must have required pervasive excellence. Maybe, back then, commitment to excellence was one of the requirements for getting and keeping NASA jobs to begin with?

Among Rajendra’s own excellences: hostility to deadlines and criticism of SpaceX for being “fast-paced” and failing to promote DEI, as she complained in 2022. 

A few years later, it was a SpaceX capsule that enabled the rescue of NASA astronauts stranded on the International Space Station. 

Now that’s “team excellence”!

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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