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Not Being Norway
Aren’t Norwegians the good guys?
Yet, somehow, this bastion of human rights (and “best democracy in the world”) has, since 2010, “forcibly registered the nationality of Taiwanese residing in Norway as ‘Chinese’”?
“The action is considered an act of appeasement,” The News Lens paraphrases Joseph Liu, a Taiwanese lawyer based in Norway, “after the Norwegian Nobel Committee angered Beijing by awarding the peace prize to the late human rights activist Liu Xiaobo the same year.”
Norway’s promotion of human rights upset the genocidal Chinese government, which had imprisoned Liu Xiaobo, and which then moved to “suspend trade talks with Norway and restrict exports of important commodities.” It took six years of placating the Chinazis before normal diplomatic and economic relations were restored.
Meanwhile, Taiwanese students living in The Land of the Midnight Sun are demanding their right simply to be Taiwanese. Joseph Liu formed a group, “Taiwan: My Name, My Right,” to lobby Norway’s government and is now legally challenging the policy. After Norway’s supreme court rejected their lawsuit last year, they have appealed to the European Court of Human Rights.
“The Applicants are Taiwanese,” argues Professor Jill Marshall of the University of London, “failing to state this on their official documentation and instead ascribing them with an incorrect nationality misidentifies them and violates their right to personal identity.”
Even as Norway denies Taiwanese identity, its own identity takes the biggest hit. Prime Minister Erna Solberg explained her 2014 snubbing of the Dalai Lama as “a necessary sacrifice in order to show China that it’s important for us to have a dialogue with them.”
Sacrificing what’s right and just for trade deals with totalitarians is no way to be Norway.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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“The core of the dispute is this,” declares The Washington Post’s “Fact Checker” column: “Did the virus emerge from nature — ‘zoonotically’ from animals — or was it the result of a lab experiment gone awry?”
Ah, modern journalism: even when dealing with some actual facts, is the real point to maneuver the reader not to consider possibilities?
In “Fact-checking the Paul-Fauci flap over Wuhan lab funding,” the Post’s fact-checkers seem most concerned to tell readers that while it is now OK to question the origin of SARS-CoV‑2, still, only within limits: as between normal viral evolution and an accident regarding gain-of-function research into viruses.
Outside this Overton Window, though, readers are still being instructed not to think about sabotage, conspiracy and biochemical warfare.
The upshot of the Post piece?
Senator Rand Paul (R‑Ky.) gets “two Pinocchios” for his alleged overstatements about NIH funding of Wuhan gain-of-function research.
After the Post’s listicle treatment of relevant facts, though, if you came to a different distribution of wooden noses — say, giving a few to Dr. Anthony Fauci, instead — you could make a plausible case.
After all, when Fauci himself says that he’s not convinced that the pandemic was not human-created — despite telling Rand Paul that the senator’s facts were “entirely and completely incorrect” — we should take that not merely as a cue to accept the Post’s latest Overton Window placement.
I say, open up that window all the way.
On Medium, science writer Nicholas Wade treated the actual evidence seriously, discovering that “the science” we were fed early on — the “science” that insisted that the gain-of-function story was highly unlikely — was actually orchestrated by the NIH’s subcontractor at Wuhan.
If you smell a rat — or a bat — at this point?
Your schnozz is in working order.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
Note: While trying to put this story to bed, The Wall Street Journal broke news that “Three researchers from China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology became sick enough in November 2019 that they sought hospital care, according to a previously undisclosed U.S. intelligence report that could add weight to growing calls for a fuller probe of whether the Covid-19 virus may have escaped from the laboratory.”
Previous coverage: here.
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The speech-repressing Chinese government and the speech-repressing tech firm Google are apparently taking cues from each other.
Busy Google unit YouTube has been working overtime to cripple the YouTube channel China Uncensored, which is too brutal in its criticism of the Chinazi government.
YouTube has demonetized the channel’s latest video, “YouTube Helps Cover Up China’s Atrocities.” According to channel publisher America Uncovered LLC, the videos that tend to get penalized are those with footage “that makes the Communist Party look bad.”
Google often does much more to repress speech than flag and demonetize. But Google doesn’t want to always be super-blatant. So China Uncensored is still a YouTube channel. For now.
In contrast, the Chinese government usually goes full Chinazi. Its latest project is a snitch app to help neighbors turn in neighbors for voicing “wrong” opinions.
It’s about correcting misinformation. China’s Cyberspace Administration says the app will help counter online statements that are “maliciously distorting, slandering and denying Party, national and military history in an attempt to confuse people’s thinking,”
Ah, disagreement, a.k.a. “misinformation,” the too-steep cost of freedom! And who alone is qualified to determine which information is correct?
“Whatever the Party holds to be the truth, is truth,” says Orwell’s O’Brien. “It is impossible to see reality except by looking through the eyes of the Party.”
Deviate from the party line about the party, the pandemic, an election, lack of elections, or anything else, and supposedly it’s right and just to muzzle you.
Wrong.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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Afghan Angst
Declaring a coming end to “the forever war,” President Joe Biden announced last week that U.S. military forces will be leaving Afghanistan by September 11th* — a four-month-and-ten-day delay from the May 1 deadline that was set for troop withdrawal by the Trump Administration last year.
“Apparently, we’re to help our adversaries ring in the anniversary of the 9 – 11 attacks, by gift-wrapping the country and handing it right back to them,” chided Minority Leader Mitch McConnell from the Senate floor.
But wait a second … McConnell knows that negotiating for the enemy Taliban, the horrific human rights violator and sponsor of terrorism, to put down arms and join the government to share power has been the U.S. policy objective from the Obama Administration’s embrace in 2013 to the Trump Administration actually inking the agreement.
Dealing the Taliban back into the political mix, after having gone to war to dislodge them, never made sense. But neither does an ad infinitum military occupation seem rational … chewing up generations of soldiers until Afghanistan miraculously metamorphoses into a sustainable democracy. Two decades of U.S. nation-building offer no serious promise that the mission could be accomplished in another decade.
Or two.
Or ever.
Plus, plugging the problem in Afghanistan has not worked more broadly. “The terrorist threat has changed dramatically since we went to war in Afghanistan 20 years ago,” National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan explained. “Al-Qaeda is in Yemen and Syria and Somalia. ISIS is across that border region in Iraq and Syria and in multiple countries in Africa.”
Policy futility is a bad thing. Recognizing it is good.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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Major League Baseball has renewed its contract with a Chinese telecommunications company with ties to the Chinese Communist Party.
Professional baseball thus avoids the fate of the National Basketball Association, ejected from Chinese airwaves for a year after Houston Rockets general manager Daryl Morey voiced support for pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong.
This doesn’t mean that the folks running MLB lack a moral compass.
It could be just a skewed one.
One day after Chinese state media confirmed that American baseball games would continue to be shown on Tencent’s streaming platform, MLB yanked its All-Star game from Atlanta, Georgia. The idea? To protest the state’s new election reform.
Baseball Commissioner Robert Manfred would have us believe that demonstrating “our values as a sport” requires
- cutting deals with the tyrannical and murderous government of China while simultaneously
- noisily punishing Georgia because friends of slack voting rules dislike the voter ID requirements and other provisions of Georgia’s new election law designed to limit the potential for fraud.
MLB’s press release does not bother to explain what is wrong with the law except to say that the league “opposes restrictions to the ballot box.”
All restrictions?
MLB officials ignored the Epoch Times’s inquiry about “how continuing business with China demonstrates its values considering the recent U.S. recognition of a genocide being carried out by the CCP against the Uyghur Muslims.”
Hmm. Chinazi dictatorship or Georgia election reform: Which is worse?
I guess for those with a skewed moral compass, that’s a tough one.
But for the rest of us the question answers itself.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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