Category: international affairs

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international affairs social media

China Cord Not Quite Cut

LinkedIn, China, Microsoft, censorship

Is it good news?

LinkedIn recently announced that it’s ending the current form of its service in China, citing the “challenging” environment.

“While we’ve found success in helping Chinese members find jobs . . . we have not found [the same] success in the more social aspects of sharing and staying informed. We’re also facing a significantly more challenging operating environment . . .”

Part of the problem has been China’s unremitting censorship. Which was not openly discussed in the LinkedIn post, of course.

Another part has been the Microsoft-​owned firm’s willingness, as the price of doing business in China, to do the Chinazi government’s bidding in censoring dictatorship-​disfavored posts. Also not openly discussed.

So now LinkedIn will replace the full LinkedIn experience with an app for China-​based users that is a “standalone jobs application.”

Whether this means that LinkedIn will no longer censor Chinese LinkedIn users remains to be seen. For example, China is likely to demand censorship of a user if it sees a disapproved organization mentioned in a job posting.

At that point, will LinkedIn leave China entirely? 

Given the Chinese government’s history, why wait?

Meanwhile, Microsoft’s Bing search engine continues to operate in China and to censor results at the behest of the Chinese government.

That public opinion has swayed Microsoft and LinkedIn to the extent that they will no longer abet China’s censorship of social media is good. But still doing business with CCP-​controlled China is fraught with danger. Why? Because China is fraught with tyranny.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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international affairs

Strait Democracy

Xi, China, Taiwan

“China vows ‘peaceful reunification’ with Taiwan,” was The New York Post’s takeaway from Chinese ruler Xi Jinping’s speech at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing over the weekend.

What fantabulous news! Peace for our time … in Asia. 

That same message was echoed by The Washington Post, which also noted that Xi’s statement comes “days after sending a surge of warplanes near the island.”

With China’s massive military build-​up, ongoing threats to attack, invasion drills around Taiwan, not to mention flying squadrons of warplanes across the Taiwan Strait and into the island nation’s air defense identification zone — 150 such incursions last week — tensions have escalated to a fever pitch. 

“We are very concerned,” warned Taiwan’s Foreign Minister Joseph Wu, “that China is going to launch a war against Taiwan at some point.” 

Thank goodness, then, that at this scary moment, our Fourth Estate can herald Xi’s promise of peace!

The only problem? 

The Chinese dictator gave no such assurance. 

Xi merely stated a preference for Taiwan’s peaceful surrender to his one-​country, one-​system totalitarianism — over having to snuff out Taiwan’s freedom by missile attack and invasion, murdering millions. Which the genocidal autocrat is still threatening to do whenever the opportunity presents.

Cancel the parade. 

Still, if Xi’s rhetoric constitutes “a more conciliatory approach” from Beijing, chock it up to free countries finally waking up and pushing back against the Chinazis. 

Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-​wen, noting her nation’s position “on the front lines of democracy and freedom,” focused on the fight against Chinese “coercion.” As she eloquently wrote in Foreign Affairs: “[T]he future of Taiwan is to be decided by the Taiwanese through democratic means.” 

Provided there is the military might to deter Chinese aggression.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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international affairs responsibility

The War Presidents’ Debacle

Afghanistan, president, Bush, Obama, Trump, Biden

President Biden yesterday called the now somewhat* completed withdrawal of U.S., Afghan and coalition soldiers and civilians an “extraordinary success,” arguing that “no nation has ever done anything like it in all of history.”

There were a reported 120,000 people airlifted out, but with 13 U.S. soldiers killed in last week’s suicide attack at the Kabul airport, along with three British nationals and more than 160 Afghans — let’s cancel any victory lap.

Still, I’m more with Mr. Biden than with Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, who made the case on Fox News Sunday with Chris Wallace that the occupation of Afghanistan was a complete success, making the pull-​out (now over) a horrendous policy mistake. 

McConnell’s case for a never-​ending “Mission Accomplished” understates the costs in blood and treasure — by trillions of dollars, in part. Just like you would expect of a deficit-​and-​debt plotter.

“America’s longest war has been by any measure a costly failure,” argues David Rothkopf in The Atlantic, adding that “Joe Biden doesn’t ‘own’ the mayhem on the ground right now.” Instead, Rothkopf blames “20 years of bad decisions by U.S. political and military leaders.”

Rothkopf errs in letting Joe “The Buck Stops Here” Biden and the generals off the hook for the withdrawal. And gifting the enemy with a vast and sophisticated arsenal.

All four Afghanistan War presidents deserve blame, along with the war establishment, in government and out.

Remember: wars that cannot be won even with military victory on the battlefield should not be fought.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* The Biden Administration continues to pledge they’ll work to get Americans left in Afghanistan out. However, in an ABC News interview a little more than a week ago, Biden had committed that, “If there’s American citizens left, we’re going to stay until we get them all out.” 

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folly international affairs

Done to the Dogs

shelter dog

It shouldn’t have happened.

Shire councils should not be killing dogs “to prevent volunteers at a Cobar-​based animal shelter from travelling to pick up the animals.”

But that’s what happened. The Bourke Shire Council in the New South Wales region of Australia shot and killed several dogs, including a new mother, that were about to be picked up and taken to an animal shelter.

An Office of Local Government reported that the council did this “to protect its employees and community, including vulnerable Aboriginal populations, from the risk of COVID-​19 transmission.”

We all know that shelters sometimes put down animals when the shelter cannot find a home for them.

This wasn’t that. The council’s action wasn’t a reluctant last resort. It was a first resort.

It was, the argument runs, about preventing volunteers from going from here to there in the ordinary course of their work, work that has not been discontinued for the duration of the pandemic.

The council’s action is an example of what happens when fear displaces common sense. The thwarted shelter volunteers, who love animals and volunteer precisely to prevent needless killing, are distressed. The Sydney Morning Herald reports that they had safety measures in place to deal with the pandemic while getting the dogs.

This isn’t the worst kind of thing going on in this world, obviously.

But you don’t have to be an animal rights activist to be appalled by the viciousness of the conduct. 

And it does serve as a marker for the callousness and crazed panic of politicians in the current crisis. What else might they do?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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international affairs privacy too much government

Privacy with Chinese Characteristics

China, internet

Governments must appear, at least some of the time, to be riding a silver stallion to rescue The People. All government rests on a kind of consent: not legal; not democratic; instead, the accommodation of the many to the few — to accept being ruled. This has been known since David Hume.

So when governments pretend to be more democratic, more contractual, than they actually are, it’s to maintain and increase power.

Take China.

In a fascinating report by Liz Wolfe, we learn that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is establishing new rules regulating corporations’ use of their customers’ data: “the Personal Information Protection Law (PIPL), necessarily weakens big tech companies, forcing onerous regulations that they will now have to comply with.”

This may sound all very consumer- and citizen-​oriented. But Ms. Wolfe not only notes that the regulations are burdensome, she observes that while China’s corporations will soon be prevented from doing things big tech companies routinely do in the West, the Chinese will pointedly not be protected from data collection by the government. 

Which is vast. 

Intrusive.

Often malign.

“Protection of consumer data, while fine and good, means nothing,” she writes, “if there’s no true rule of law binding governments to privacy-​protecting standards as well.”

Almost certainly China is trying to prevent in China what happened in America: the creation of powerful countervailing organizations competing with the government in one of the oldest activities of government: suppression of opinion to leverage power and revolutionize the State, changing policy from outside formal power centers.

Our social media — and other major tech corporations — have plied their incredible access to information to mold popular opinion for political and ideological purposes.

The CCP will not put up with that. 

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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crime and punishment incumbents international affairs

The Lurid Latest

Ilhan Omar, traitor, step brother

Offensive.

Absurd.

Absolutely false.

Those are the words Representative Ilhan Omar used to describe the startling accusation against her — that she married her second husband to bring him into the country, and that he was actually her biological brother.

Most people would find such a scheme “offensive,” sure.

And it is “absurd” in the sense it would be a good plot point in a Christopher Buckley or Tom Sharpe farce-​cum-​satire, yes. 

It is not absurd, however, as in impossible or completely out-​of-​character for the far-​left Islamist Democrat from Minnesota’s 5th Congressional District.

But is it “absolutely false”?

Not according to Anton Lazarro, a GOP Minnesota operative who spent thousands upon thousands of dollars on private investigators to obtain DNA evidence of both alleged brother and ostensible sister and then published the results. 

Omar’s incest/​immigration scandal has criminal complexities.

“His website, IlhanOmarDNA​.com,” writes Miranda Devine for The New York Post, “containing the DNA test results, was online briefly before it was taken down Wednesday.” I just checked moments ago, and the website is back up and running. Peruse at your leisure. The main contention is that “test results stated there is a 99.999998 percent chance that Omar and her second husband, Ahmed Elmi, now her ex-​husband, are siblings, according to an analysis by British company Endeavor DNA Laboratories.”

No sooner had Mr. Lazarro posted it than the FBI arrested him on charges of “underage sex-​trafficking.” And those charges have put the kibosh on a major publicity campaign against Rep. Omar — though the Post journalist appeared on Tucker Carlson Tonight.

Lazarro, for his part, “is denying the charges,” writes Terresa Monroe-​Hamilton for BizPac Review. “It remains to be seen if he is guilty or not, but the timing seems very, very convenient.”

A lurid story all around. 

Offensive, though? Absurd? Absolutely untrue?

I’d like to know more.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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