February 26 marks the Dominican Republic’s Independence Day.
Categories
Dominican Independence
Paul Jacob didn’t do a podcast last weekend. Betrayal? Well, he was on the road. But this weekend he makes up for it, covering all the big stories of past two weeks, and a whole lot more.
Categories
Angelina Grimké
Human beings have rights, because they are moral beings: the rights of all men grow out of their moral nature; and as all men have the same moral nature, they have essentially the same rights.
Angelina Grimké, “Letter XII. Human Rights Not Founded On Sex” (October 2, 1837); reported in Isaac Knapp, Letters to Catherine Beecher (1838).
Categories
Grimke and Revels
February 25, 1805, saw the birth of Angelina Emily Grimké Weld, American abolitionist and feminist. She was the younger sister of the equally famed Sarah Moore Grimké.
On February 25, 1870, the first African-American entered Congress to serve in the U. S. Senate.
Hiram Rhodes Revels (Sep 27, 1827 – Jan 16, 1901) was a minister in the African Methodist Episcopal Church, a Republican politician, and college administrator. Born free in North Carolina, he later lived and worked in Ohio, where he voted before the Civil War. Revels was elected as the first African American to serve in the United States Senate, and was the first African American to serve in the U.S. Congress. He represented Mississippi in the Senate in 1870 and 1871 during the Reconstruction era.
In Law #46 of February 25, 1947, the Allied Control Council formally proclaimed the dissolution of Prussia.
After reading the Honorable Justice Paul Rouleau’s “Report of the Public Inquiry into the 2022 Public Order Emergency,” you may demand a palette cleanser.
Matt Taibbi wrote a full article, “The West’s Betrayal of Freedom.”
I’m going to quote an anarchist.
For both Taibbi and me, Justice Rouleau’s bizarre defense of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s leveraging of emergency powers to freeze truckers’ bank accounts during last year’s lockdown protests leaves a bad taste in the mouth.
If you have a taste for freedom.
Which people in the news media, as well as in government (but do I repeat myself?), decreasingly demonstrate. Mr. Taibbi, reacting to both Rouleau’s report and mainstream journalistic coverage, notes the general tenor of both, which he says read “like all the tsk-tsking editorials in the West you’ve read since Trump, which used every crisis to hype the idea that freedom = danger.”
Rouleau excuses the tyrannical (anti-protest, anti-free-speech, anti-due-process) Canadian government’s attack upon the truckers because it “met a threshold.” You see, “Freedom cannot exist without order.”
But that’s placing the matter downside up. Freedom provides its own order.
It just so often happens to be an order that tyrants don’t like.
Freedom creates order: when neither you nor I infringe upon the other’s sphere of life, that is an epitome of orderliness. Crime and government (but do I repeat myself?) upset that harmony.
“Liberty,” explained P. J. Proudhon, is “not the daughter but the mother of order.”*
When politicians forget that freedom provides the order we need, they make anarchists look good.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
* Proudhon, the first major writer to treat “anarchist” as a non-pejorative, was arguably not an Antifa-type anarchist — and the full quotation, presented here on Tuesday, talks about a Republic. Make of that what you will.
Illustration created with PicFinder.ai
See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)
See recent popular posts
Categories
Frederick Douglass
Let us render the tyrant no aid; let us not hold the light by which he can trace the footprints of our flying brother.
Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave (1845), Chapter 11.
Categories
A telegram
On February 24, 1917, United States ambassador to the United Kingdom, Walter Hines Page, was shown the intercepted Zimmermann Telegram, in which Germany offered to give the American Southwest back to Mexico were Mexico to declare war on the United States.
On February 24, 1803, the Supreme Court, in Marbury v. Madison, established the principle of judicial review.
If our government tried to march all dissenters to jail — or hang them all — it probably couldn’t get away with it. Too many Americans still have enough sense of fair play and concern for individual rights to make such ugly expedients untenable.
Also, the First Amendment hasn’t been repealed yet. Oh, no! So the non-crime of uttering “misinformation,” “disinformation,” “hate speech” — that is, uttering disagreement — can only be thwarted indirectly.
One way is for government officials to get chummy with compliant social media companies and point them to utterances (posted comments, videos) to censor.
Another is to fund organizations with missions of defunding wrongthinkers.
The Washington Examiner’s Gabe Kaminsky reports on the taxpayer-bankrolled conspiracy.
Congress funds the State Department and “two State Department-backed entities,” including National Endowment for Democracy; which has in turn been funding a British organization called the Global Disinformation; which has a group called the AN Foundation that is also called Disinformation Index Foundation; which is sending blacklists of websites that supposedly purvey disinformation to American ad companies like Microsoft-owned Xandr.
The State Department, not constitutionally authorized to censor our speech, gave over $300 million (three tenths of a billion) to the Endowment in 2021.
Websites to be deprived — and that probably have already been deprived — of advertising dollars as ad distributors seek to avoid “risks that arise from funding disinformation” include the New York Post, Reason, Newsmax, The Federalist, American Spectator.
No commie egalitarians; no woke websites.
All very roundabout and mostly under the radar. As intended.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
Illustration created with PicFinder.ai
See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)
See recent popular posts
Categories
The Federal Farmer
To preserve liberty, it is essential that the whole body of people always possess arms, and be taught alike, especially when young, how to use them. . . .
Additional Letters From The Federal Farmer, 53 (1788), authorship usually attributed to Richard Henry Lee (pictured), but this has been disputed.
Categories
Zola and Menger
On February 23, 1898, Émile Zola was imprisoned in France after writing J’accuse, a letter accusing the French government of anti-Semitism and wrongfully imprisoning Captain Alfred Dreyfus. Zola was a leading force in extending realism to the novel.
Fifty-eight years earlier, Austrian economist Carl Menger was born.
Menger [shown in sketch, above] would go on to contribute to the development of the theory of marginal utility, which supplanted cost-of-production theories of value in economics, in his first book, translated into English as Principles of Economics. Though expert in mathematics (he served as tutor in economics and statistics to Archduke Rudolf von Habsburg, the Crown Prince of Austria, starting not long after the publication of the Principles), his approach to marginal theory was the least mathematical of his famous “co-discovers” of the principle, William Stanley Jevons and Leon Walras. Rooted in a subjective theory of value, it was the most realistic and least model-based of the marginalist revolutionaries, and he was most interested in price formation, not “price determination,” which focused almost exclusively on equilibrium conditions. He developed an evolutionary theory of money, as well. In his second book, he expanded upon invisible hand processes in society — made most famous in Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations (1776) and contributed the opening salvo in what came to be known as the Methodenstreit, in which he attacked the misuse of historical method in economics by the technocratic “socialists of the chair” in the German-speaking world.
Zola died in 1902; Menger died in 1921.