Category: international affairs

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international affairs social media

Good-​bye, Google

China, Google, censorship

Is Google working for the Chinese government?

The group Atajurt Kazakh Human Rights believes that pro-​Chinazi partisans have been targeting its YouTube videos, triggering sanctions against Atajurt’s channel. Many of its thousands of videos provide testimony about how family members have been hauled off to internment camps in China’s Xinjiang region.

Alphabet/Google’s YouTube has penalized the Atajurt YouTube channel for alleged “harassment” because some of the videos provide proof of identity. Channel owner Serikzhan Bilash, an Atajurt cofounder, says this is important to establishing the credibility of the testimony.

On June 15, after a dozen of the channel’s videos were flagged for harassment, YouTube terminated the channel. After Reuters asked why, the channel was restored.

On June 22, YouTube locked another dozen videos and accused the channel of praising “criminal groups or terrorist organizations.” YouTube blames automated messages for such accusations. But it hasn’t stopped threatening the channel.

“There is another excuse every day. I never trusted YouTube,” Bilash says. “But we’re not afraid anymore, because we are backing ourselves up with LBRY. The most important thing is our material’s safety.”

LBRY is a blockchain protocol used by YouTube competitor Odysee, to which Atajurt has so far ported almost a thousand of its videos.

The large audiences of Google’s YouTube and other Big Tech social-​media forums make them appealing as a means of getting out a message. But as Atajurt Kazakh Human Rights and many others are discovering lately, you better have backup.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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general freedom international affairs

The 400 Million

“More than 50 million total deaths,” writes Washington Post columnist David Von Drehle, summing up the cost of Communist Mao Zedong’s decades of re-​making Chinese society from the “Great Leap Forward” to the “Cultural Revolution.” 

“… entirely self-​inflicted,” Von Drehle adds.

“A free market of ideas would never have settled on such terrible policies,” he declares, “and a limited government could not have enforced them.”

Exactly! Is it finally morning in Washington?

The columnist articulates two principles: (1) “a free society is a great solver of problems and finder of answers because more brainpower is better than less,” and (2) “while a big government can certainly give a great boost to a good idea, it can also put enormous force behind a bad idea — and when it does, the effects can be catastrophic.”*

He highlights China’s brutally enforced One Child policy, instituted in 1979, whereby the government, according to One Child Nation documentarian Nanfu Wang, bragged it had “successfully prevented 400 million babies from being born.” Through forced abortions and infanticide! 

“This draconian, ill-​considered measure,” Von Drehle charges, “has brought China to the brink of population decline at a time when the rising nation is still too poor, on a per capita basis, to support swelling ranks of elderly pensioners on the backs of a dwindling number of young workers.”

So, in 2016, “the all-​powerful government permitted couples to have two children,” he explains. “Birthrates have continued to drop, moving the Central Committee to raise the cap last month to three children.” 

Regardless of the number, what could be more totalitarian than the government deciding how many children you may have?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* Like covering up a virus outbreak that turns into a pandemic killing almost 4 million people worldwide — and over 600,000 Americans?

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international affairs

How About That?

Joe Biden

The G7 summit provided much-​needed comic relief. 

Biden’s mumbling and stumbling elicited titters and gasps. (His slip in constantly referring to Libya when he meant Syria was, if not funny, at least revealing.) But maybe the greatest moment of pandering silliness came from Britain’s Boris Johnson.

“We’re building back better together,” Johnson said. “And building back greener and building back fairer and building back more equal and how shall I — and in a more gender-​neutral and perhaps I — a more feminine way! How about that?”

A naked appeal to feminists. Which the “conservative” politician does not seem to understand isn’t the same thing as appealing to women in general.

His answer got play mainly because he mouthed a slogan with aesthetic stickiness: “build back better.”

But the opportunity to “build back” at all is the result of governments first destroying so much of commercial and civil life. Maybe politicians are the last people we should trust to do that.

The big news out of the summit was the idea of a “universal 15 percent corporate tax,” to establish a “level playing field.”* And prevent what Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen calls “a race to the bottom” — by which she means the escape of international corporations to lower-​tax areas overseas.

MSNBC puts this notion in context: “the average corporate tax rate across 177 different jurisdictions in 2020 was just under 24%.”

Instead of trying to maximize revenue by raising taxes, high-​tax governments could simply reduce taxes. That would keep corporations within territory, and over time keep revenue flowing.

That would be a “race to a level playing field” without all the political hoopla.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* And somehow this new this new “universal” tax is said to exclude China!

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First Amendment rights international affairs

The Biden-​Boris Censorship Alliance

The Group of Seven (G7) is an annual meeting at which leaders of seven major countries hobnob about international matters and how they might coordinate policies.

This year, the pandemic was high on the agenda. Also on the agenda, if lower and less conspicuous, was muzzling dissidents.

Dissidents being defined, in current style, as people who spread “disinformation.”

At the meeting, Joe Biden and Boris Johnson endorsed a revised version of the 1941 Atlantic Charter that includes a seemingly minor provision: “We oppose interference through disinformation or other malign influences, including in elections . . . .”

That’s it — just an ominous hint. 

But the Biden administration has been more open in other contexts. White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki says that according to Biden, more should be done by “major platforms” to prevent “misinformation, disinformation, damaging, sometimes life-​threatening information” from going out to the public.

Throughout history, people have disagreed about facts and their interpretation. It’s nothing new. And pretending it is new provides no justification for preventing the exercise of freedoms that are the only means of reaching and communicating truths — and of correcting the honest or dishonest errors that government officials are as capable of committing as the rest of us.

The UK is considering an Online Safety Bill to block social media sites that fail to remove “legal but harmful content” — which opens up wide vistas of … illegal legal content? 

Even if our government doesn’t follow Her Majesty’s (yet), our current administration is pressuring social media firms to impose censorship on its behalf.

That’s violation-​by-​proxy of the First Amendment.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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international affairs media and media people

The Man the Media Missed

Wuhan, Covid

Searching for the world’s most compromised scientist? Look past über-​bureaucrat Anthony Fauci. Get a load of Peter Daszak of EcoHealth Alliance. He’s in the thick of it.

The “it” being the lies peddled by China’s totalitarian state, the World Health Organization (WHO), important parts of the government-​funded American science establishment and — last but not least! — the vast majority of U.S. media. 

The Lancet printed and the media reported the infamous open letter from scientists declaring a lab-​leak origin of the virus to be unlikely, either without saying or without knowing that the scientist leading the effort to gather the 27 scientists’ signatures was the bag-​man taking U.S. taxpayer money and re-​gifting it to the actual Wuhan lab in question. 

Yes, Dr. Peter Daszak.

The good doctor also managed to secure a spot on the WHO’s much-​ballyhooed on-​site China probe — as the sole American investigator — to look (fecklessly) for COVID’s origin. Still, Daszak and company enthusiastically declared a lab-​leak “unlikely,” which the media mindlessly echoed … until even the WHO’s director-​general backed away from it.

The problem is not confined merely to one or two rogue papers or cable channels: it’s also endemic to social media. Facebook, which blocked coverage and silenced those of us trying to speak and learn about the origin of COVID-​19, turns out to have actually used — you guessed it! — Daszak as its go-​to expert to advise them on what info to block.

How did our news hounds miss this trifecta?

Even now — after Dr. Fauci and others agree we need an investigation into the origins of the CCP virus, and as several major articles present additional evidence that the virus may have come from Wuhan gain-​of-​function “research” — the news-​media response to its own obvious failures is to continue to blame … Trump.

The idea seems to be that the Sheer Awfulness of Trump somehow provides valid excuse to ignore China’s horrible behavior around the origin of COVID — silencing doctors, destroying important evidence and lying to the world — enabling its subsequent spread to pandemic level. 

Is this really all the result of mere incompetence?

If you believe that, I’ve a wet market to sell you.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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general freedom international affairs

June 4: Tiananmen 32

China, protests, freedom, democracy

Will truth ever be bought-​off or beaten-​down enough to satisfy Chinese President Xi Jinping and the Butchers of Beijing?

The ‘Butchers’ nickname came 32 years ago today — from the clearing of Tiananmen Square by soldiers and tanks in the early morning hours of June 4th, and in opening fire on and murdering thousands of Chinese citizens outside the square. 

Someone may object that Xi, the General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) since 2012, can’t be blamed. He wasn’t in charge back in 1989.

Xi didn’t give the order for troops to kill the unarmed students and workers who filled Tiananmen Square for weeks with as many as a million people protesting for freedom and democracy. Nor did he have thousands more arrested and imprisoned after the massacre. In fact, Xi’s father “condemned the use of force against protesters during the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests,” informs U.S. News. 

But Xi cannot escape the taint of Tiananmen. Not only does Human Rights Watch charge that government repression under his unlimited rule is “at its worst level since the Tiananmen Square massacre,” Xi and today’s CCP are on a mission to memory-​hole Tiananmen. 

How? 

By massacring any public memorial of the massacre.

While the truth about Tiananmen has always been verboten in China, freer folks in Hong Kong held massive memorials each year. “Last year’s vigil was banned for the first time because of the coronavirus,” Yahoo News explains, “but thousands defied police and rallied anyway.”

This year, however, the new national security law threatens five years in prison for attending an unauthorized rally. Chanting “Democracy for China!” could land a Hongkonger in prison for life.*

Thankfully, in America today we have the freedom to condemn the Chinazis. 

And remember June 4. 

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* And it has already begun: “Hong Kong cracks down on Tiananmen commemorations, arrests vigil organiser.”

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