Tag: freedom

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education and schooling First Amendment rights general freedom international affairs

Cold Climate in Hong Kong

Hong Kong, China, censorship, freedom, mind control

“There is no ‘red line,’” says an anonymous thirty-something Hong Kong humanities professor. “If they want to come after you, everything can be used as an excuse.”

Grace Tsoi, writing for the BBC, shows what happens when political correctness returns to its roots in totalitarianism. As it has in Hong Kong, in the “People’s [sic] Republic [sic] of China [sick].” The young academic Ms. Tsoi is quoting elaborated the situation: “He says his nightmare is being named and attacked by Beijing-backed media, which could cost him his job, or worse, his freedom.”

Political correctness can cause academics in America their jobs, of course. But as relentless as our woke media and online mobs may be to “de-platform” people they disagree with, it’s harder to go all the way.

Under a totalitarian state, it’s easier to be more thorough.

That’s why totalitarianism is the modish form of tyranny that tyrants aspire towards.

More power.

“In the academic year 2021/22, more than 360 scholars left Hong Kong’s eight public universities,” Ms. Tsoi explains. “The turnover rate — 7.4% — is the highest since 1997, when Hong Kong returned to Chinese rule, according to official data. Foreign student enrolments have dropped by 13% since 2019.”

The chilling effect is arctic. Self-censorship has become the rule, in advance of expected censure, censorship, or worse. Hong Kong academics blame all this on 2020’s National Security Law, which “targets any behaviour deemed secessionist or subversive, allowing authorities to target activists and ordinary citizens alike.”

It’s worth remembering that while “secession” is a dirty word for the powerful, and subversion the enemy of all, it does depend on context: secession from a tyrannical state is liberation; subversion of an unjust system is justice.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Memester to the Pokey

vote, garbage can, dumpster

It was a joke. For which he’s been sent to prison.

A political joke online.

Admittedly, it wasn’t very funny. It certainly wasn’t new. That is, the general idea has been floating around for as long as there have been ballot boxes. 

The ur-form of the joke is “Hey, [political opponent], why don’t you deposit that ballot right here in this handy receptacle [trash can]?”

The specific joke that got Douglass Mackey into big trouble sported an image of a smiling black woman in front of a white-on-blue “African Americans for Hillary/President” sign, along with the message: “Avoid the line. Vote from home. ¶ Text ‘Hillary’ to 59925 ¶ Vote for Hillary and be a part of history.”

It arguably flirted with dirty tricks of the sort honest people don’t engage in. But a lot of partisans do that sort of thing, not just Mr. Mackey, who posted the joke to his now-defunct “Ricky Vaughn” Twitter account. A better version of the joke about the same time was not only never prosecuted, the link to it’s still on Twitter (X). It just so happens, however, to have been made by a Democrat . . . against Trump voters.

Trolls flirting with Dirty Trick status are not criminals; there is the First Amendment. But what Mackey was successfully prosecuted for (he was sentenced last week to seven months) was “Election Interference.”

Tellingly, ZERO is the number of voters stepping up to testify that they were tricked into texting 59925 and then not voting by his lame meme. If there were any, they might understandably be too humiliated to bear witness.

Curiously, the law he violated does not mention misinforming a person as a criterion for criminality.

A country that selectively prosecutes this sort of thing — can it be said to be free?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Don’t Tread on Jaiden

Gadsden Flag, freedom, slavery, snake, snek

The Gadsden Flag: “Don’t Tread on Me” — it is many an American’s favorite flag, for it expresses a sentiment, the most American of political sentiments: resistance to tyranny.

Other flags, including the Stars and Stripes, are symbolic without being explicit.

What American could be against it? To oppose the Gadsden Flag is to oppose liberty!

But, these days, there are a lot of people who try to impugn the flag and the concept as being, I kid you not, “white supremacist” and “pro-slavery.”

It’s absurd, of course. Slaves were tread upon. Those who demand not to be tread upon object to their own slavery. And, by extension, others’.

Tell that to the woke mob. 

And to public school administrators.

On Monday, a likely lad named Jaiden was removed from his class at Vanguard Elementary in Colorado Springs. He triggered his teacher with a patch on his backpack featuring the Gadsden. When his mother confronted the charter school’s administrator, recording the chat, the administrator defended the action on the usual woke grounds: its alleged “origins with slavery.” 

Oddly, not even the school rules gave grounds to remove him for it — even if it were “about slavery.” (To repeat: it’s about slavery’s opposite.)

I smell the stink of partisanship. Many teachers and administrators so object to some people who like the flag that they distort facts to enforce ideological conformity on students.

The story has a happy ending, though. Jaiden was exonerated, walking into school with the patch still visible.

To make the story better, however, the teachers and administrators who thought they could tread upon Jaiden should be severely reprimanded, if not fired outright. For violating his rights.

And for not knowing history.

Flunk ’em!

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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general freedom international affairs national politics & policies

It’s a Date

Taiwan, China, war, defense, freedom, technology

“Do not mess with Taiwan before 2028,” Vivek Ramaswamy instructed translators to tell Chinese ruler Xi Jinping, “before the end of my first term, okay?”

Responding to a question from Hugh Hewitt on his radio program, Ramaswamy — the entrepreneur, author, and GOP presidential candidate — urged a “move from strategic ambiguity to strategic clarity.”

The right idea, I guess, just not elaborated in the clear-thinking manner I have been hoping for.

You see, there was a “second part” to Ramaswamy’s foreign policy prescription. “That commitment is only as far as 2028,” he explained, “by which point I will have led the United States of America to achieve semiconductor independence, and we will not take the risk of war that risks Americans lives after that for some nationalistic dispute between China and Taiwan.”

“Some nationalistic dispute”?* Sure, between the democratic miracle of the last century and a genocidal totalitarian regime that claims it . . . along with claiming 90 percent of the South China Sea, the world’s busiest waterway.

A skeptical Hewitt heard Ramaswamy “saying ‘I will go to war, including attacking the Chinese mainland, if you attack before semiconductor independence. And afterwards, you can have Taiwan. So if you just wait until 2029, you may have Taiwan.’”

Let’s make the world safe for semiconductors! 

But . . . not for people? 

Ramaswamy’s transactional approach might make the Taiwanese feel less inclined to assist our efforts toward semiconductor independence. And what a terrible message to send other allies in the region!  

As the democratic countries of Asia and the world are stepping up and coming together to push back against Beijing’s belligerence, the U.S. ought not jeopardize this by suggesting more convenient dates for calendaring in future Chinazi invasions.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* From the interview, Ramaswamy appears ignorant of Taiwanese history; namely, the fact that the Nationalist Chinese forces that fled to the island in 1949, as well as their offspring, comprise a distinct minority of the island nation’s population. Meanwhile, the native Taiwanese had been under Japanese colonial rule for the previous fifty years and, prior to that, never completely under Chinese control.

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local leaders political challengers

Outlawed But Unmoved 

trucker, freedom, license, permit. law

He plied his trade without shame. Through the years, he was again and again officially rebuked for his conduct. He went ahead full throttle anyway, laughing in the face of danger.

Once, enforcers even tossed him in jail for a night to deter him from his dastardly deeds, deeds that were so galling and offensive to . . . well, to competitors in the same business who had decades of regulatory tyranny on their side.

On the Liberty website, Bruce Ramsey recalls the story. Born Michael Patrick Shanks, Mike officially changed his name to Mike the Mover. 

Why? For the advertising value.

Maybe also the annoyance value.

His job was helping people move. Illegal, because the state of Washington doled out a strictly limited number of professional licenses. And for half a century it was virtually impossible to get one.

“Mike had started in 1981 with one truck,” says Ramsey. “When he painted his name on his trucks his competitors noticed him and complained. In 1987 the state cited him. In 1992 it hit him with a cease-and-desist order. In 1993 it slapped him with a court injunction. . . . He ignored them all. [State] enforcers wrote 89 tickets, each a gross misdemeanor, for operating without a license.”

Where Mike the Mover led, others followed. Finally, the regulators eased up and began licensing many more people to move for a living.

Not Mike the Mover. When he was finally offered a license, “I told them to shove it.”

Thanks, Mike.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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First Amendment: Irrelevant?

censorship, social media, cat

For at least three years, we have all suspected — well, known — that the federal government has been pressuring social-media companies to censor speech that government officials dislike regarding the pandemic and other matters.

One clue: officials like Jennifer Psaki, White House press secretary from 2021 to 2022, forbiddingly and publicly demanded that social-media firms do more to suppress disapproved speech.

Even so, many left-wingers stressed that once allegedly open public forums like YouTube, Facebook, pre-Musk Twitter et al. were private entities with every darn right to set standards for posting. 

Just market decisions, that’s all that was happening here!

Now that litigation has delivered so much evidence that government agencies have been colluding to censor, directly and chronically “working with” social-media firms to suppress dissent, many on the left are not even pretending to favor protection of First Amendment rights to express speech they disagree with.

Jonathan Turley notes that according to The New York Times, a recent ruling temporarily enjoining the Biden Administration from colluding to censor would, by fostering open discourse, lamentably “curtail efforts to combat disinformation.”

Washington Post editors and others on the left “no longer deny censoring,” agrees Jeffrey Tucker. “Now they defend censorship as a policy in the national interest. . . . They don’t even pretend to have respect for the First Amendment that gave rise to the national media in the first place. They now seek a monopoly of opinion and interpretation.”

Yes. Cat’s out of the bag.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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