Tag: freedom

Don’t Kill Yourself

democracy, peace, freedom, elections, voting, propaganda, hysteria

As Donald Trump appeared to be winning last night, the number of Twitterers who proclaimed a hankering or a design to kill themselves rose dramatically. Michael Malice and others found humor in it, but it’s a super-saddening development, if you ask me.

These Kamala Harris voters are not really going to kill themselves. It is just something to say on Twitter.

I really hope I’m not wrong about this.

I’ll leave to others the counsel of life. That is the job of friends and family and emergency hotline dispatchers. My counsel is different: talking about suicide because your candidate lost is undemocratic. If the authoritarian pronouncements of both major candidates alarmed you about the danger of anti-democratic trend, this fad should raise the alarm several decibels.

The whole point of democracy is to allow a transition of power sans bloodshed. And that requires both contenders and supporters not to shed each other’s blood … or their own. When they fail.

It’s a requirement. Not to over-react.

The losers have to accept the loss, and the winners have to refrain from using the state to punish the losers further.

It’s sort of that simple.

Resignation is key, as scientist Lawrence M. Krauss (@LKrauss1) indicated: “Going to bed, reasonably resigned to Trump win at this point as it seemed to me from a distance for some time. He may be a nut, a liar, and a crook, but the bright side is a likely boost free speech and due process at unis and bump in tech sector, if we survive the rest.”

We will survive. If Trump wins the Electoral Vote (I’m going to bed, too, before a final determination), or if Harris does.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Tags democracy, elections, freedom, hysteria, peace, propaganda, voting

regulation subsidy too much government

Flood and Fire

electric vehicle, electric car, hybrid, engineering, freedom

Tesla, the maker of some of the most popular, eye-catching, and prestige electric vehicles of our time, offers advice to folks who may experience “submersion events” with their automobiles. The company “recommends moving EVs to higher ground ahead of potential” unholy baptisms and warns owners to keep a safe distance as well as notify “first responders if one notices ‘fire, smoke, audible popping/hissing or heating coming from your vehicle,’” summarizes The Epoch Times.

This is sparked, I’m sorry to say (and pun) by hurricane victims in Florida, at least six of whom had their houses catch fire after their electric vehicles caught fire after their vehicles were submerged in water. Florida’s chief financial officer and fire marshal Jimmy Patronis put the number higher, at 16, of burning “EVs in the Tampa Bay area alone, including Pinellas County.”

“So far.”

When it floods, it burns.

“The governor had warned EV owners in Florida to get their vehicles to higher ground ahead of Helene’s arrival,” explains Jacob Burg, in the above-mentioned Epoch Times piece, “as contact with saltwater can short-circuit the batteries, causing a catastrophic chain reaction known as thermal runaway in which heat energy is released from the battery to cause a fire.”

I’ve been seeing quite a few reports that EVs don’t do well in extreme conditions. The cold, for one, where the batteries don’t work properly, and the heat, for another, when they can too easily catch fire. And now this “submersion” menace.

Electric vehicles sure do appear to demonstrate a technology still in its infancy.

One the government shouldn’t be pushing on us.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Tags electric car, electric vehicle, engineering, freedom, hybrid

defense & war general freedom ideological culture

Up from Demoktesis

Last week was Independence Day, but I was still celebrating Juneteenth.

The June 19th date hasn’t quite kicked in as a holiday for many Americans, despite a bipartisan House and unanimous Senate effort — along with President Biden’s signature — making it the “Juneteenth National Independence Day” and giving federal workers the day off.

It marks the day in 1865 when federal troops landed in Galveston, Texas, a rebel state, to announce that slavery had ended and the enslaved must be freed.

The day is about freedom. Other days could have been chosen, but for years it has served as an apt enough marker for the end of chattel slavery in America.

And slavery’s cessation is worth celebrating!

Americans are used to big July 4th celebrations, having reveled for nearly 250 years in our wonderful Declaration, announcing our separationfrom the British Empire on that day!

Actually, it was two days earlier that the Continental Congress voted to secede — and August 2, 1776, that the Declaration was finally signed. There was no sure separateness until Cornwallis surrendered on October 19, 1781, and it took nearly two years for the official peace treaty to be signed.

There are many dates we could have chosen to honor. We settled on July 4.

We liked the words of the document.

Similarly with Juneteenth. We need a holiday commemorating the end of slavery and I like the play on words in the very name.

Arguably, the 15 days from the 19th of June to the Fourth of July should be a celebratory period for liberty more generally, starting with slavery’s abolition and ending with the creation of an independent America dedicated to equal liberty. (Backwards, of course.)

Maybe somewhere in the middle we can find a date to push the necessary third step, the cessation of “demoktesis,” the institutional philosophy of our time where “everyone owns everyone else.”*

Until personal freedom is generally respected — where nobody, not even the government, owns pieces of others — the American experiment in independence is incomplete.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* The term was coined by Robert Nozick (1974, p. 290), who defined it as “ownership of the people, by the people, and for the people.”

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Tags demoktesis, freedom, Juneteenth, slavery

crime and punishment First Amendment rights general freedom

Doxxing Dissent

free speech, First Amendment, anonymous, anonymity, freedom

California lawmaker Steve Padilla is apparently indifferent to the speech-enabling virtues of anonymity. The state senator (18th District) has no problem violating the First Amendment rights of persons who conceal their identity the better to speak out.

Padilla is proposing legislation, SB1228, to compel social media companies to compel social media “influencers” who’d rather remain anonymous to identify themselves. A company that fails to comply would risk being penalized.

And I hear it often: why anonymity? Folks should own up to their speech!

But many people have good reasons for remaining anonymous when they publish their views. One is to protect themselves from harassment by private parties. Another is to protect themselves from harassment, or worse, by governments.

Tiffany Donnelly of the Institute for Free Speech observes that the United States has a long history of anonymous political speech.

Investigative journalism “often relies on anonymous sources. Americans use social media to express political opinions that might cause them to lose their jobs. Political dissidents who fled to the U.S. to escape tyrannical governments use social media to speak out against those repressive regimes.”

Once social media companies collect the ID data, then what?

Perhaps the information is supposed to just sit in the companies’ computers. But once it becomes known that certain anonymous but controversial writers are being forced to supply personal information, this information becomes a target — for hackers, state governments hiring hackers, disgruntled moderators who may decide to “out” the commentators they dislike.

The bill won’t stop “misinformation,” but it will discourage discourse.

Specifically, dissent.

It’s this bill that should be stopped.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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