Anyone with any degree of mental toughness ought to be able to exist without the things they like most for a few months at least.
Georgia O’Keeffe, letter to Anita Pollitzer (December 1915)
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Georgia O’Keeffe
Edward Snowden turns 35 today and begins another year as a fugitive stuck in Russia.
Five years ago, he fled the country to Hong Kong, meeting with The Guardian’s Glenn Greenwald and documentary filmmaker Laura Poitras to discuss documents he had released showing illegal National Security Agency collection of our phone records, social media posts and mega other metadata.
It is not merely Snowden who calls the NSA’s programs unconstitutional, or me, but how a federal judge ruled.
Remember when James Clapper, President Obama’s Director of National Intelligence, wittingly misled Congress by claiming our private information was not being swept up, except “unwittingly.” We only know that Clapper fibbed because of what Snowden divulged.
“[T]he breaking point was seeing the Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper, directly lie under oath to Congress,” Snowden has explained. “There’s no saving an intelligence community that believes it can lie to the public and the legislators who need to be able to trust it and regulate its actions.”
Clapper is free, collecting his pension. Snowden has been indicted under the Espionage Act, which unconstitutionally limits his defense.
Snowden sure has paid for his courage. He was making very good money, and living with his girlfriend in Hawaii, when he decided he had a duty to alert us to our government’s lawlessness — at the cost of his livelihood, his future, his very life, perhaps.
While our leaders call him a traitor, I call him “friend.”*
Edward Snowden is a friend of every American who cherishes our Fourth Amendment right “to be secure in [our] persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures.”
Freedoms the government was secretly stomping upon.
It is time to bring him home.**
Ed Snowden, thank you for your service. Happy Birthday!
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
* I feel a connection to Mr. Snowden, and have an inkling of what it’s like to do what you believe is right and to find yourself wanted by the government, on the run, far from home.
** Snowden deserves a presidential pardon. But he has said he would even return to face prosecution, provided the charges did not preclude him from defending his actions in open court.
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Walter Bagehot
“The great difficulty which history records is not that of the first step, but that of the second step. What is most evident is not the difficulty of getting a fixed law, but getting out of a fixed law; not of cementing (as upon a former occasion phrased it) a cake of custom, but of breaking the cake of custom; not of making the first preservative habit, but of breaking through it, and reaching something better.”
Walter Bagehot, Physics and Politics (1872).
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Grandfather clauses
On June 21, 1915, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down an Oklahoma law denying the right to vote to some citizens. In Guinn v. United States, the Supreme Court found “grandfather clauses” in effect in several formerly slave states to be little more than sneaky ways of allowing illiterate white folks to vote while disallowing illiterate black folks.
Have Americans forgotten that freedom makes getting along easier?
We do not all have to like each other. We do not even all have to be nice to each other. We just don’t have license to hit or hornswoggle our fellows. Hate speech may be bad, but it is hate assaults — not talk — that should be punished by law.
Yes, free people are at liberty to insult each other, call each other nasty names, even demean each other. And those insulted, besmirched, and dissed may return in kind or shrug the negatives off.
But we needn’t let it go at that.
Bill Ottman, founder and CEO of Minds.com, reminds us that there is more than one way to skin a hate. When coming across vile nonsense and worse, “the most important question is how we deal with these situations,” he writes.
We may be able to find the answer in the work of Daryl Davis, a famous blues musician with a hobby of befriending members of the Ku Klux Klan. According to him: “Once the friendship blossoms, the klansmen realize that their hate may be misguided.” By having dinner with Klansmen, he has inspired over 200 members to give up their robes.
Ottman goes on to call for a concerted effort to reclaim a future for “internet freedom and human rights.” That’s a good idea.
Don’t accept the premise that, to get along, we must squelch speech. Instead, ignore disagreeable people trying to make us feel bad.
And look for ways to persuade those who hate us.
We can be adults about this. And keep freedom of speech.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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A Federation
On the 20th of June in 1787, at the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia, Oliver Ellsworth moved to confine legislative powers to two distinct branches, and to strike the word “national” from the document. Edmund Randolph of Virginia had previously moved successfully to call the government the National Government of United States. Ellsworth moved that the government should continue to be called the United States of America.
The final wording eventually became “All legislative powers herein granted shall be vested in a Congress of the United States, which shall consist of a Senate and House of Representatives.”
And, yes, the word “national” does not occur anywhere in the Constitution.
“Alas, if man is blind, shall his misfortune be also his crime? I may have mistaken the voice of reason; but never, knowingly, have I rejected its authority.”
C. F. Volney, The Ruins, or, Meditation on the Revolutions of Empires (1793; first English-language edition, 1802)
I’m glad to be able to say this: Brownells has, present tense, a YouTube channel. Especially glad because, on June 9, Google had shut that channel down without warning or explanation.
Brownells is a family-owned supplier of firearms, firearm parts and accessories, gunsmithing tools, and emergency gear. Well-known and well-regarded by shooters, hobbyists and gunsmiths, the company has a website and a YouTube channel that serves as a “portal to everything shooting and hunting,” as Pete Brownell explains.
Brownells’ YouTube channel is substantial, with almost 1,800 instructional videos and some 71,000 subscribers. Patrons stress that there’s nothing outré, radical, or offensive about the offerings — unless you’re reflexively anti-Second Amendment, I guess.
We’ve got no smoking gun in the form of an explicit admission from Google. But we may plausibly suspect that the firm terminated this YouTube channel for ideological reasons. Perhaps Google shot from the hip here in reaction to the recent spate of school shootings, without pausing to properly distinguish between promoting responsible gun ownership and promoting murder.
We may also never know whether Google expected Brownells to meekly accept the arbitrary snuffing of a resource it had spent so much time and energy developing. In any case, Brownells used Twitter and other forums to urge supporters to call Google and object.
The self-defense paid off. On June 11, Google undeleted the channel. The protests against injustice must have been too many to ignore.
YouTube is no longer a mere platform for video sharing. It has taken political controversy and complaints as excuses to editorialize.
Were it a government, I’d say “censor.”
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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Scott Adams
If you are engineering, or you’re in science, or even if you are building a product, yeah, yeah: you totally want to get the facts right. You want to use the best reasoning, the best thinking, etc. But in the realm of politics facts don’t matter. Now, let me clarify that. Facts do matter to the outcome. Of course. If you walk in front of a truck, the truck is a fact, the truck kills you — that matters. But the way people make decisions is so divorced from facts, and always has been, that Trump doesn’t actually add anything that wasn’t already there. All he does is he does it better. Let me say that again: the world of politics was always a hundred percent bullshit. Always. It was just different bullshit. The thing that Trump has added is that he just does more of it and he does it better.
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Happy Birthday, Václav
In 1941, Czech economist and politician Václav Klaus was born; other June 19 births include Salman Rushdie in 1947, Kathleen Turner in 1954, and Laura Ingraham in 1964.