Category: ideological culture

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general freedom ideological culture

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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ideological culture international affairs

Triumph & Failure

Shen Yun, China, CCP, freedom

“Shen Yun Performing Arts completed its 18th global tour earlier this month,” a May 24th press release informs, “a historic run of 799 shows in 199 cities in 26 countries in front of over a million people.”

This notice, entitled “Triumphant 2025 Shen Yun Season Concludes,” may look like the usual glowing corporate self-congratulatory exercise in unwarranted hype. But it isn’t. “Shen Yun’s eight touring groups and hundreds of performers overcame tornadoes and fires as well as sabotage attempts from the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and its allies. And yet, not a single performance was missed.”

That is an accomplishment, indeed, for the theater troupe did face back-room political pressure from that great foe of freedom, the CCP.

I had seen several news reports of their troubles. It took a court order, for example, to enforce a venue contract with South Korea’s Kangwon National University. University officials had “greenlit the New York classical Chinese dance company’s application to perform at its Baekryeong Art Center on April 1,” explains The Epoch Times, “only to walk back on the agreement after the Chinese embassy voiced a complaint.” 

The university “stated that its decision to cancel the show had to do with the public interests of the school,” of course. But while“escalating the matter into a ‘diplomatic issue’” obviously loomed large, the center also mentioned the danger from “the roughly 500 Chinese-national students studying at the center who it claimed could stage protests, potentially leading to clashes, should the performance go on as scheduled.”

The Shen Yun Performing Arts organization is made up of many artists who have fled communist China. The communists in China do not like defectors, and their reach is alarming.

Thankfully, in this case, the CCP failed.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Fifth Amendment rights ideological culture national politics & policies

Whose Principles?

immigration, illegal immigration, border, citizenship, due process

Partisan contest! You may start with principles, but — if you are careless — end up fighting, instead, for the things your opponent only thinks you stand for. You become the strawman your enemies put up as the dumbed-down version of your position.

This happens a lot: Democrats have long denied being socialists, but have accepted leadership from socialists; Republicans have long denied being authoritarian, but routinely act like authoritarians.

Case in point: the deportation of “criminal illegal aliens.”

This is not an authoritarian position as such; right or wrong, it can be done in a legally sane way.

But Donald Trump and Republicans have embraced an extremely authoritarian manner of deportation.

How? By denying the principle I defended in April: due process. Writing about the Abrego Garcia case, I made this simple point: “whether a dangerous criminal or an innocent, hard-working family man, Garcia’s status is hardly the issue. This is about whether our government must follow its written Constitution.”

Now we are learning a lot more about who has been sent to El Salvadoran dungeons: the innocent. 

According to an informative Cato article, “of the 90 cases where the method of crossing is known, 50 men report that they came legally to the United States, with advanced US government permission, at an official border crossing point.”

This is important: “Dozens of legal immigrants were stripped of their status and imprisoned in El Salvador.”

We are, today, shocked to read of how the ancient Athenian democracy would expel citizens from the polis. But Trump’s deportations are much worse: they’re being done without constitutionally required due process . . . without any chance for the accused to defend themselves.

And the innocents are being sent to a hell-hole prison, not merely banished.

Trump and his willing government functionaries are conforming not to their principles, but the ones imputed to them by Democrats.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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First Amendment rights ideological culture

Antidemocracy in Maine

Maine, legislature, censorship, freedom of speech, representation,

Laurel Libby, a Republican state legislator in Maine, has been censured by Democrats in the Maine House of Representatives for a February 17 social media post in which she expressed disapproval of allowing “trans” girls (boys) to compete in high school sports for girls.

The alleged reason for the censure? Her post mentioned the winner of a girls’ track championship who is publicly known to be the winner and publicly known to be male.

Censuring Libby for stating her views would be bad enough. But the legislature went beyond putting its disapproval (or the Democratic majority’s disapproval) on record.

Representative Libby isn’t being allowed to speak as a representative during session. And she’s not being allowed to vote until she apologizes. 

For stating her views on a public question. 

Nor was she even allowed to defend herself when the House voted along party lines 75-70 to censure her.

This qualifies as tyranny, another mile down the slippery slope of eroding — or dynamiting — democratic norms and practices. The tyranny is not that of an autocrat but of the majority. In this case, the tyranny of a majority of partisans in a legislature.

It is also an attack on free speech. As the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression observes, people elect representatives to “vote according to their conscience and express themselves freely on controversial topics.”

Rightly, Laurel Libby has refused to remove the Facebook post criticizing the policy of the Maine Principals’ Association. Wrongly, her constituents continue to be deprived of her voice and vote in the legislature.

She is asking the U.S. Supreme Court to redress this injustice. Let it act, and fast.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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ideological culture international affairs

The Great Implosion

population, humanism

Is watching North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un shed earnest tears of sadness a cause for, well, if not jubilation, at least some schadenfreude?

Maybe not in this case: he was listening to a lecture on his country’s population collapse. He was pleading with young women to have more children. North Korea is experiencing negative population growth: well below the “replacement rate.”

An inevitable result of horrific North Korean tyranny?

Well, population decline is almost a universal phenomenon. North Korea’s population rate is alarming, but so is South Korea’s — which is much, much freer. 

And Japan’s, for that matter; and Europe’s.

So what do we make of the population growth alarmists from the 1960s and ’70s? I refer to folks like Paul Erlich, who wrote The Population Bomb, and the “experts” who made up The Club of Rome, with its infamous 1972 report, The Limits of Growth. 

Magnificently bad prophets.

But they had a huge impact — at least on Communist China, which instituted the One Child policy in 1979. Now, that country’s population trend has reversed, with an increasing rate of decline. 

Moreover, there may be a lot less people in China than was boasted of — official government stats admit a 2.08 million person drop from 2022 to 2023, following the previous (and first official) drop of 850,000. We can only guess the actual population, because communists lie. Yi Fuxian, a demographer at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, estimates that China’s population was less than 1.28 billion in 2022, not 1.41 billion, with the decline starting in 2018, not 2022.

Ask yourself: how many civilizations have survived a population implosion? 

And for peoples with ponzi-like pension systems, this is even more devastating.

The Chinese are cursed, but so are we — for we all live in interesting times.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Population Trends

  • Canada: 1.33 births per woman (2023).
  • China: 1.0–1.16 births per woman (2023).
  • France: 1.68 births per woman (2024).
  • Germany: 1.46 births per woman (2024).
  • Great Britain: 1.45 births per woman (2023).
  • Japan: 1.26 births per woman (2024).
  • Mexico: 1.80 births per woman (2023).
  • North Korea: Estimates suggest a fertility rate of around 1.8–2.0 (2021), below replacement.
  • South Korea: 0.72 births per woman (2023), the lowest globally.
  • Taiwan: 0.87 births per woman (2023).
  • United States: 1.64 births per woman (2023).

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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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crime and punishment ideological culture

Propaganda by the Deed

TESLA, Elon Musk, donkey, Democrats, terrorism

“Five Tesla vehicles were damaged when a fire was started at a Tesla Collision Center in Las Vegas on Tuesday morning,” reports Megan Forrester for ABC News, “the latest in a wave of incidents aimed at the electric vehicle company, according to the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department.”

Described as a “targeted attack” by the police, these acts of outrageous property destruction are not confined to the Silver State. Occurring all over the country, these are obvious political attacks on Elon Musk, who turned against Democrats by supporting Donald Trump’s 2024 presidential run, and who has since led the DOGE effort to confront federal government “waste, fraud and abuse.”

“Violence against Tesla dealerships will be labeled domestic terrorism,” Reuters quotes President Trump, “and perpetrators will ‘go through hell.’”

As of last week, Tesla stock had plunged 50 percent since December, but “[s]hares of the automaker closed nearly 4% higher on Tuesday,” continues the Reuters report, “rebounding from the biggest one-day fall in four-and-a half years the previous day, after the president appeared with Musk at the White House to select a new Tesla for his staff to use.”

“House DOGE Subcommittee Chairwoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga.,” USA Today told us last week, “announced that she and her committee colleagues had sent a letter to U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi and FBI Director Kash Patel asking for an investigation into the ‘organized’ attacks against Musk, Tesla and the DOGE effort.”

These spectacular destructions of private property are indeed terroristic. Anarchists used to use a similar approach over a century ago, calling the technique “propaganda by the deed.”

But the tide of public opinion turned against the anarchists, and I suspect it will turn strongly against today’s saboteurs as well. 

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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ideological culture

Royal Society in Disrepute?

Elon Musk, Mars, Royal Society

Elon Musk’s membership in the Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge has been imperiled. 

“Thousands of scientists are now calling for Musk’s name to be blotted out from that charter’s fine vellum pages,” explains The Atlantic. “The effort kicked off last summer, when 74 fellows (out of roughly 1,600) sent a letter to the Royal Society’s leadership, reportedly out of concern that Musk’s X posts were fomenting racial violence in the United Kingdom and could therefore bring the institution into disrepute.” 

But it’s not just the racial issue. “In November, one of the signatories, the neuropsychologist Dorothy Bishop, resigned from the Royal Society in protest of what she saw as inaction; her statement cited Musk’s derogatory posts about Anthony Fauci and the billionaire’s promotion of misinformation about vaccines.”

Of course the “scientists” are lockstep “for vaccines,” rather than express the least bit of caution about a new therapeutic (Pfizer’s and Moderna’s mRNA injections) that was pushed out to the world with subsidy, legal immunity, and government threats — to treat a disease funded by Fauci himself.

Then another letter made the rounds, signed by more than 3,400 scientists. Elon must go!

But to what extent is it really about money? At the latest Royal Society meeting, worry was expressed that Elon’s DOGE efforts may be cutting off science funding in the United States.

Thankfully, at a recent meeting of the Society, fellows decided not to do anything too precipitous.

So the Royal Society’s members will have to eat their anger, continuing to be associated — for a while, at least — with the dread Elon Musk.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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education and schooling ideological culture

Diversity versus Merit

quota, race, racism, sexism, hiring

Northwestern University is being sued for “consciously discriminating” in favor of women and racial minorities at the expense of obviously better qualified candidates.

The suit is brought by a group of white male professors that does not include Eugene Volokh, one of its examples of applicants summarily ignored under the alleged hiring practices.

“Northwestern University School of Law refuses,” the plaintiff’s complaint reads, “to even consider hiring white male faculty candidates with stellar credentials, while it eagerly hires candidates with mediocre and undistinguished records. . . .

“Professor Volokh’s candidacy was never even presented to the Northwestern faculty for a vote, while candidates with mediocre and undistinguished records were interviewed and received offers because of their preferred demographic characteristics.”

One of those with the requisite demographic characteristics is Destiny Peery, a black woman who graduated near the bottom of her class at Northwestern Law School.

The suit alleges that Dan Rodriguez, the dean in 2014, the year she was hired, threatened to penalize faculty members who voted against her. She would “never even have been considered” for the appointment but for her sex and race.

Rodriguez also ordered the faculty to abstain from discussing candidates on the faculty listserv and mentioned the risk of litigation as his reason for the ban. In other words, this administrator knew that his policy was illegal and sought to cover it up.

Now the feared lawsuit has arrived, brought against Northwestern by Faculty, Alumni, and Students Opposed to Racial Preferences (FASORP).

Wobbly acronym, sure, but Federal law is clear in outlawing hiring discrimination based on race or sex.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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ideological culture Voting

Blood in the Streets?

voting, legislature, panic, hysteria

“When you think about how dangerous it is to raise an issue like this,” Davis Hammet, president of Loud Light Civic Action, explained to a Kansas State House committee, “whenever something doesn’t need to be addressed — because you’re going to create a lot of public attention, a lot of debate on this, and very likely — not to say that anyone here, this is their intention — but there’s [sic] almost three million people in the state, some folks will have very xenophobic and potentially violent outlooks on immigration.”

Hammet then asked legislators to “consider the Garden City bombing plot,” a 2016 case in which three Kansas men were arrested and convicted of conspiring to bomb a housing complex with many Somali immigrants.

Wait . . . what issue — “like this” — is he talking about? 

Mr. Hammet testified against House Concurrent Resolution 5004, a constitutional amendment introduced by Rep. Pat Procter, clarifying that only U.S. citizens are eligible voters in all Kansas elections, state and local.

“This legally and practically won’t do anything,” asserted Hammet.

Far from the truth, legally. 

Kansas has the same language in its constitution’s suffrage provision as California and Vermont, where courts have upheld the constitutionality of noncitizen voting at the local level. Plus, by placing citizen-only voting in the state constitution, Kansans can guarantee their power to vote yes or no before any future state legislature or city council could legalize non-citizen voting.

Twenty-one cities across the U.S. now give the vote to noncitizens, most also allow those here illegally to vote. Meanwhile,in recent years nearly 30 million Americans in 14 states have voted by whopping margins to enact Citizen Only Voting Amendments like HCR 5004, eight of those states last November. 

“But it could create fuel on the fire for some radical groups,” speculates Hammet, “to feel like they’re motivated to take improper actions.”

Yet so far without a single fatality! No fisticuffs or riots or bombings attributed to the debate or the public vote. Not one incident. 

Hammet may sound high-minded, throwing around words like “xenophobic,” but note his paranoia about his fellow citizens handling political issues. Moreover, he fails to recognize that the policy he sees as “anti-immigrant” is, in actual fact, overwhelmingly supported by immigrants.

So, who’s the xenophobe?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Note: HCR 5004 passed that committee and then passed the House on a vote of 98 to 20. The amendment now awaits action in the Kansas State Senate in order to be referred to the voters.

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