Tag: freedom

Categories
First Amendment rights general freedom ideological culture

The King’s Airball

LeBron James, Hong Kong, China, freedom, free speech,

“The thing is, LeBron, we’ve come to expect more of you,” writes Dan Wolken in USA Today, taking the National Basketball Association star to task for his comments taking Houston Rockets executive Daryl Morey to task for having tweeted “Fight for freedom, stand with Hong Kong.”

Morey’s pro-protester statement had caused a backlash against the NBA from the totalitarian Chinese government, threatening the league’s — and LeBron’s — continued access to China’s large and lucrative market of basketball fans.

LeBron James told reporters that Morey was “misinformed, not really educated” about the Hong Kong situation, before adding, witlessly, “I have no idea but that’s just my belief.”

“Yes, we all do have freedom of speech,” acknowledged James, “but at times there are ramifications for the negative that can happen, when you’re not thinking of others and you’re only thinking about yourself.”

Ramifications for whom? The people of Hong Kong yearning for freedom and democracy? Or was Mr. James . . . only thinking about himself?

Criticism came fast and furious. “@KingJames — you’re parroting communist propaganda. China is running torture camps and you know it,” tweeted Nebraska Senator Ben Sasse. 

“Let me clear up the confusion,” responded the King of Basketball, if not public relations. “I do not believe there was any consideration for the consequences and ramifications of the tweet.  I’m not discussing the substance.”

And then LeBron further clarified, “My team and this league just went through a difficult week. I think people need to understand what a tweet or statement can do to others. . . . Could have waited a week to send it.”

Hong Kong protesters are now burning LeBron’s No. 23 jersey. 

Apparently, their freedom can’t wait a week.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

PDF for printing

LeBron James, Hong Kong, China, freedom, free speech,

See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)
See recent popular posts


Categories
general freedom international affairs

Blizzard Fallout

Ng, Activision, Blizzard, games

“I’ve already deleted my Blizzard account,” offered the young man while taking my Starbucks order. 

Blizzard Entertainment is a video game developer based in Irvine, California. Earlier this week, the company rescinded the Grandmasters tournament winnings of Hearthstone esports player Ng Wai Chung, whose professional name is “Blitzchung,” banning him from pro competition for one year. 

Why? In a post-match interview, the Hong Kong native, donning a gas mask, declared, “Liberate Hong Kong!”

The company claims Blitzchung violated tournament rules disallowing “any act that, in Blizzard’s sole discretion, brings you into public disrepute, offends a portion or group of the public, or otherwise damages Blizzard.” More likely, the censorship comes from Tencent Games, a large Chinese company, with a 5 percent ownership stake in Blizzard’s parent company.

“I can’t just sit there doing nothing,” Chung told reporters, “watching our freedom being destroyed bit by bit.”

Blitzchung’s courageous stand has, thankfully, received rewards, too, for he is receiving offers from other, more politically conscious gaming outfits. 

And Blizzard faces a serious customer backlash, along with employee walkouts and dissent.

On Wednesday, I bemoaned the fickle stand taken by Houston Rockets GM Daryl Morey, who tweeted, “Fight for freedom! Stand with Hong Kong!” but then deleted the tweet under pressure from the Chinese government. Then, yesterday, an NBA spokesperson apologized that a CNN reporter was blocked from asking Rocket players a question about the controversy.

The NBA may be scared of totalitarian China’s economic bullying, but fans are speaking out. At exhibition games between NBA and Chinese Basketball Association teams, in both Philadelphia and Washington, D.C., fans wore shirts and held signs saying, “Free Hong Kong.” 

Speaking truth to power across the globe.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

PDF for printing

Ng, Activision, Blizzard, games

See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)
See recent popular posts


Categories
general freedom ideological culture international affairs

Stand By Your Tweet

Fight for Freedom, Stand by Hong Kong,

Last Friday, Daryl Morey, the general manager of the National Basketball Association’s Houston Rockets, tweeted a graphic repeating the Hong Kong protesters’ chant, 

“Fight for freedom!

“Stand with Hong Kong!”

But before I could hit “like,” he deleted it amid the massive backlash from the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and the Chinese companies it rules. 

The owner of the Rockets, with billions in NBA business at stake, immediately distanced himself from his GM — and human rights — tweeting that, “@dmorey does NOT speak for the @HoustonRockets” and “we are NOT a political organization.”

Rockets star James Harden apologized on Chinese state television, adding, “We love China. We love playing there.”

Despite suggesting that it does not “Stand with Hong Kong,” the NBA did reiterate that “the values of the league support individuals’ educating themselves and sharing their views on matters important to them.”

“I did not intend my tweet to cause any offense to Rockets fans and friends of mine in China,” GM Morey penitently explained in yet another tweet. “I was merely voicing one thought, based on one interpretation, of one complicated event. I have had a lot of opportunity since that tweet to hear and consider other perspectives.”

On Facebook, Brooklyn Nets owner Joe Tsai posted a defense of China’s anti-democratic action in Hong Kong. “Supporting a separatist movement in a Chinese territory is one of those third-rail issues,” the Taiwan-born businessman wrote.

Let’s hope Hongkongers — for the last 18 weeks risking life and limb by demanding basic democracy, rather than totalitarian control by China — were not counting on a more steadfast commitment from Morey. 

Or the wealthy owners of the Rockets or Nets. 

Or the NBA. 

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

PDF for printing

Fight for Freedom, Stand by Hong Kong,

See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)
See recent popular posts


Categories
national politics & policies Popular too much government

E-Panic

vape, vaping, law, ban, prohibition,

One of the better arguments for government relies upon sobriety: we want rational, measured responses to threats, not panicky, hot-headed reactions. We have a rule of law to prevent revenge and vendetta, replacing them with justice and civil order.

But when we expand the concept of “threat” far beyond interpersonal violence and to dangers from our own foolish or merely misguided behavior, “sobriety” too often doesn’t even seem an option.

Take drugs. 

Specifically, take “vaping.” 

That is the innovative technology of “e-cigarettes” that can be used to replace the smoking of tobacco and other drugs with inhaling drug-laced water vapor.

Vaping is far less dangerous than tobacco, at least for emphysema and lung cancer, but it is not harmless. Several hundred people across several of these United States have become very ill and a few have died of a mysterious lung disease.

So of course the Surgeon General calls it an epidemic, and the White House and Congress take up the cause to regulate and even prohibit vaping. And India just “became the latest country to ban electronic cigarettes,” according to Bloomberg. 

Whoa, the subject has barely been studied, and what we know so far is that it was not major-brand nicotine e-liquid, but, instead, boutique product that has caused most of the casualties. 

The leap to legislation has been too quick for consumers to alter their own behavior with new information.

Besides, prohibition and regulation haven’t worked to prevent the current opiate overdose crisis.

The rush to “do something very, very strong,” as President Trump puts it, is the very opposite of why we say we want government.

Its lack of sobriety is . . . sobering.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

PDF for printing

vape, vaping, law, ban, prohibition,

See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)
See recent popular posts


Categories
general freedom ideological culture Popular

Slavery Is Not Free-Market Capitalism

John Locke

Tarring free-market capitalism and limited government with the brush of slavery is old hat. What is new is that prominent journals and major media figures now shamelessly slop that brush around.

Indeed, the argument is so often made that addressing it from several angles, as I have — twice in the last few outings of Common Sense — is important. Today I make an additional point.

The fact that human beings were treated as property, to be sold and mortgaged and disposed of at will, does not make slavery “free market.” If we legalized and institutionalized the market in stolen goods, that might make those markets legally above board — but not morally. 

It is this moral argument against stolen goods that undergirds the case against slavery. 

Always has.

For slavery is stealing the rightful property of the people enslaved — their property in their own bodies. 

Richard Overton called this “self-propriety” in 1646, and at about the same time John Locke, following Hugo Grotius, wrote of every man having “a property in his own Person.” This is the old liberal way to think about personal freedom when you are dealing with property: self-ownership. 

“Free market capitalism” rests on it just as slavery abridges it.

Unfortunately, there has been a successful campaign to muddy up this logic and its history. Teacher Lawrence Ludlow recently informed readers of American Thinker about the results of this indoctrination: today’s students have “somehow ‘learned’” that “slavery was isolated to the United States instead of practiced worldwide for ages” and that “Westerners were the most enthusiastic practitioners of slavery instead of being among the first to abandon it.”

Freedom is not slavery and the truth shall set us free.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)
See recent popular posts


Categories
ideological culture media and media people Popular

The Fifth Century Begins

slavery, 1619, freedom, chains,

When socialists and woke scolds talk about slavery, you can almost hear the chains and smell the leather of the slaver’s whip — and not always in a good way.

Project 1619 is the New York Times effort to acknowledge 400 years of Africans in America. Thankfully, the project’s page is more coherent and forthright than Matthew Desmond’s New York Times Magazine farrago of August 14, “In order to understand the brutality of American capitalism, you have to start on the plantation.”

Indeed, that piece (like others in the series) is such a tangle that there is no hope to unravel it in this limited space. Just note that Desmond does his darnedest to help the enemies of liberty tie slavery into the idea of free markets, private property, and free association.*

Project 1619, on the other hand, accepts the complexity of slavery in America without being idiotically tendentious. It recognizes that the captured Africans brought to Virginia shores in August 1619 were treated as indentured servants. Unfortunately, unlike the Englishmen arriving under indentured servitude, the first Africans in Virginia lacked explicit contracts. So negotiating their way out was . . . problematic. Still, one African, arriving two years later, was soon freed and became a landowner. And it was he who was awarded another African as a slave for life, in civil court in 1655, marking the real start of chattel slavery in America.

Which is to say, slavery in America was not exclusively a matter of race.**

Why is this important? Because slavery is wrong not because racism is wrong (as wrong as that is), but because people have a right to freedom.

Could it be that socialists emphasize racism regarding slavery because they fear that focusing on freedom might scuttle their socialism?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* See my discussion of slavery yesterday.

** This becomes clear once you read Mark Twain’s Pudd’nhead Wilson, or learn how Thomas Jefferson’s wife was related to Sally Hemings

PDF for printing

slavery, 1619, freedom, chains,

See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)
See recent popular posts

Categories
ideological culture Popular too much government

Slaves All?

slave, ancient, Roman, Rome, chains,

A bizarre argument is gaining popularity: the United States of America not merely allowed slavery in its first hundred years, it depended upon it, grew rich by it . . .  and, “therefore,” not only the federal government but also its constitutional principles and even capitalism are all tainted . . . and . . . “therefore” . . . we must have socialism!

Why long-dead chattel slavery requires political slavery now is hard to figure.

And no, you should not need to read George Fitzhugh’s Cannibals All! or Sociology for the South to see that socialism is slavery.*

But these days it is more common to link slavery with . . . freedom (this is hard even to type) in the form of free markets. 

Leftists who make this linkage are helped by some popular historians who argue that since the   antebellum South (1) grew faster, economically, than the North, (2) slavery was profitable for slaveholders, and (3) slaves became more productive in picking cotton, the “peculiar institution” was key to American success. Vincent Geloso, a visiting assistant professor of economics at Bates College, writing for the American Institute for Economic Research, ably shows that not one of these three theses hold up to scrutiny.

Most importantly, though, Geloso demonstrates that the slavery system was like all other interventionist systems, with some people (slavers) benefiting at the expense of others (slaves, of course, but also free people . . . through a variety of subsidies).

Geloso uses the term “deadweight loss” to make his case that slavery made America poorer.

He is certainly not wrong. But once you understand why freedom and prosperity are linked, not much economic jargon is necessary.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* This pro-slavery southerner did argue against the very idea of liberty and free labor on the grounds that freedom is bad and socialism is good. Indeed, “Fitzhugh disliked ‘political economy’ (as economics was then called), which he saw as ‘the science of free society,’” economist Pierre Lemeiux explains, “as opposed to socialism, which is ‘the science of slavery.’” That forthright appraisal is about all that’s good in Fitzhugh.

PDF for printing

slave, ancient, Roman, Rome, chains,

Photo by Jun on flickr

See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)
See recent popular posts


Categories
national politics & policies The Draft

No Exceptions

John Delaney, conscription, selective service, slavery, involuntary, freedom,

“It’s time to bring the country together,” says Rep. John Delaney (D-Maryland), aspiring to be our next commandeer-in-chief, “restore our sense of shared purpose and a common and inclusive national destiny.”

How? 

Forcibly: “John Delaney’s Plan for National Service” states that “Every American will complete a minimum of one year and a maximum of two years of mandatory national service when they graduate high school, or turn 18.”

Delaney joins other glassy-eyed statists in hallucinating that “mandating national service” will “build a future where young people begin their adult lives serving their country and working alongside people from different backgrounds.” 

That is, he explains, “Where people . . . who grew up in the suburbs, in farm towns, in coal country, in urban communities get to know each other, get to learn from each other, and get to see firsthand that we still have a lot in common.”

Except that young people won’t “get to,” they’ll “have to.” 

As a Delaney news release emphatically emphasizes about his forced national conscription: “No exceptions.”

If you’re a LeBron James type NBA prospect, forget that multi-million dollar contract for a year or two. You have streets to sweep. 

If you’re pregnant? Have a terminal disease? This time isn’t yours but the government’s.

And why is it always young people who “get to” be shanghaied? 

Never the politicians. 

No matter how many fifty-something politicians such as Delaney find their fellow middle-aged cohort to be disunited and non-cohesive, no one ever suggests that his own age group — that he himself — be enslaved into government service.

For their own good, of course.

And the nation’s destiny.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

PDF for printing

John Delaney, conscription, selective service, slavery, involuntary, freedom,

See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)
See recent popular posts


Categories
general freedom ideological culture Popular

America, the Debatable?

liberty, freedom, independence, debate, American,

“A divided America gathers for Fourth,” The Washington Post headlined its lead story about the Independence Day celebration on the National Mall.* 

Give me two minutes to unite us.

On the night of July 3rd, stuck in horrendous holiday traffic, I stumbled upon a National Public Radio broadcast discussing the punk rock song, “’Merican,” by Descendants. The operative lyrics being:

I’m proud and ashamed
Every fourth of July
You got to know the truth
Before you say that you got pride

“Truth,” now that’s heavy, man. What’s the truth about ’Merica — er, America?

It is certainly true that our government — in our name — has done some terrible things. And, accordingly, to suggest that criticism is unpatriotic is, well, to miss the point of why I feel very proud to be an American. 

On the 150th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, President Calvin Coolidge called July 4, 1776 “one of the greatest days in history” and “not because it was proposed to establish a new nation, but because it was proposed to establish a nation on new principles.” Those being “that all men are created equal, . . . endowed with certain inalienable rights, and that . . . the just powers of government must be derived from the consent of the governed.”

What this offers us is a standard to criticize America.

That is why it seems strange to witness folks criticizing current policy and behavior based on principles derived from the Declaration, yet, in the same breath, spurning America in the process. When America is wrong, let us right it — in true American style.

We may be divided on many issues, but on the ideals set forth in the Declaration of Independence we should all stand united.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* This was the headline in the print edition dropped on my driveway July 5th; the online version carried a different headline: “Trump’s Fourth of July celebration thrills supporters, angers opponents.”

** Love him or despise him, Rep. Justin Amash made a similar point in his op-ed about leaving the GOP to become an independent: “Our country’s founders established a constitutional republic . . . so ordered around liberty that, in succeeding generations, the Constitution itself would strike back against the biases and blind spots of its authors.

PDF for printing

liberty, freedom, independence, debate, American,

See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)
See recent popular posts

Categories
general freedom Popular Regulating Protest too much government

I Am Hong Kong

Hong Kong, protests, extradition, freedom, democracy,

“I love my students so much,” a protesting teacher in Hong Kong told a BBC reporter, wiping tears from her eyes. “I worry about they cannot have the freedom we have before. They cannot speak what they want to speak like us. So, I don’t want . . . this.”

Her English grammar notwithstanding, she speaks a language we should all understand: Liberty.

“If there must be trouble,” Tom Paine wrote in The American Crisis, “let it be in my day, that my child may have peace.” As usual, it is the young, whose idealism and courage has not been worn down and compromised — and who have their own future children to fight for — who lead the effort, facing tear gas and truncheons. That is precisely what they’ve encountered in Hong Kong . . . along with pepper spray and rubber bullets . . . for now. 

It can get worse.

Nonetheless, millions of Hong Kong residents have taken to the streets against Hong Kong’s legislature considering a bill to allow Mainland China the power to extradite criminal suspects. People well understand that, if the bill passes, their civil rights will be extinguished in China’s crooked, totalitarian justice system.

What to do? Hope and pray for Hong Kong. 

But let’s draw some lessons. Freedom requires not merely bravery, but also unity. An attack on the rights of anyone is an attack on us all. And attacks on precious democratic checks on political power are attacks on everyone’s freedom. 

Instead of the United Nations, we need an organization of united citizens across the globe. People everywhere want to be free and democratic. We should work together . . . bypassing our governments.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

PDF for printing

Hong Kong, protests, extradition, freedom, democracy,

See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)
See recent popular posts