“Did the seed of tyranny ever bear good fruit? And can you expect liberty to undo in a moment what oppression has been doing for ages?” (From anarchistquotes.com)
Voltairine de Cleyre
Tag: freedom
Net neutrality, a scheme to centrally plan the provision of broadband Internet access by private companies, is dead.
At least for now.
No harebrained scheme is ever definitely dead for sure and forever in politics. Not on this planet.
Net neutrality had been killed before. But last year, Democrats on the FCC in favor of micromanaging how broadband Internet access is priced and how broadband companies may invest their resources revived the misnamed doctrine, a confection of the Obama era.
Fortunately, the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals has put the kibosh on this recrudescence of out-of-control power-grabbing. The court explicitly noted a recent Supreme Court ruling that deference need no longer be accorded to regulators who make the law say whatever they want it to say.
The Sixth Circuit ruled 3-0 that the FCC had overstepped its authority under the law.
And it cited the Supreme Court’s 6-3 decision last year in Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo. This was the decision that overturned the Chevron doctrine (according to which judges must defer to bureaucratic misinterpretation and hijacking of law if such hijacking can be somehow construed as “reasonable”).
The Wall Street Journal points out that “ending Chevron will make it harder for regulators to exceed their authority. . . . This is a victory for self-government and the private economy over the willful administrative state.”
That, and the more basic truth that net neutrality is itself an incoherent, unworkable policy, is more than enough reason to celebrate this revenant notion’s reiterated demise.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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National socialism, as operated by the actual Nazis, did not seize all the major industries and run them as collectives or state-owned businesses. The Nazis applied party control directly to big business, as a political-regulatory matter.
How different is what woke Democrats have been doing to business today, here in America, using multiple agencies of the United States federal government’s regulatory apparatus?
Marc Andreessen, investor, innovator, business genius, and early Internet pioneer, explained how in a discussion on the Joe Rogan Experience, last month.
Start with debanking, which the regulators can tell banks to do to “politically exposed persons.” Mr. Andreessen told Joe about a friend who was debanked, apparently because his job title was involved in the business use of crypto-currency.
And debanking is exactly what you think it is: de-platformed from the financial system.
Don’t worry, statist: you are not “politically exposed.” This only applies to critics of our quasi-fascist system.
This commercial censorship is run pretty much like censorship on the social media companies after 2016, by soft pressure . . . the “raw power” of a “privatized sanctions regime.” Government functionaries notify a bank that a person or business is “politically exposed,” and the bank — fearing getting on the bad side of regulators — kicks the customer off the rolls.
Politicians can haughtily state that it was the bank that did it. Banks, after all, are not obliged to serve everyone! They can pick and choose their customers.
Besides, there is no First Amendment right to have a bank account.
This is how woke bureaucrats can rule like Nazis.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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After reports that British MPs wanted to summon Elon Musk to interrogate him about the role of his company, X (Twitter), “in disseminating ‘disinformation’ during the summer riots,” I didn’t suppose that he’d be eager to rush across the pond to be grilled by enemies of freedom of speech.
One of his would-be interrogators, Chi Onwurah, a Labour committee chairwoman, said she wanted to “cross-examine him to see . . . how he reconciles his promotion of freedom of expression with his promotion of pure disinformation.”
What a mystery. How can someone champion freedom of speech and letting people say things with which others disagree? Isn’t freedom of speech only for government-authorized speech, the kind King George III would have approved?
On X, a Malaysian commentator sought to warn Musk: “This is a trap,” tweeted Miles Cheong, “They’ll detain him at the border, demand to see the contents of his phone, and charge him under counterterrorism laws when he refuses.”
If we were concerned even a little that Mr. Musk might fall into this or a similar trap, we needn’t have been.
In reply to Cheong, Musk asserted that MPs will, rather, “be summoned to the United States of America to explain their censorship and threats to American citizens.”
In September, in response to being pointedly and publicly not invited to a British investment conference, Musk had said, “I don’t think anyone should go to the UK when they’re releasing convicted pedophiles in order to imprison people for social media posts!”
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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Don’t Kill Yourself
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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Flood and Fire
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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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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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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Remember June 4
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Remember June 4
Remember Tiananmen Square