Trust

Our individual liberty—and liberties—depend on a number of things: sovereignty of us citizens over our government; understanding that our rights and duties are inherent in us as gifts from our Creator and not grants from that government; the tools with which to enforce those rights and duties—free speech and religion, keeping and bearing arms, among others.  And an ability to trust one another.

Laura Ingraham addressed this peripherally.

The Second Amendment be damned. You see liberals don’t really trust regular people. They prefer a system where a small set of elites in Washington make decisions for everybody else. Including on issues of self-defense.

And

Law abiding gun owners are invariably seen as suspicious. Their motives untrustworthy.

This is yet another example of the Left’s contempt for ordinary Americans.

This is yet another example of their projection: the people of the Left don’t trust themselves. Or each other.

This lack of trust is as much a threat to our nation’s commitment to individual liberty, personal responsibility, self-reliance as is the Left’s overt attacks on our right to keep and bear Arms and the rest of our Bill of Rights.

Facebook Agonizes

Facebook says in a public white paper that it’s confronting its commitment to protect user privacy while dealing with “giving” users the right to take their data where they choose—to a competitor social medium platform, for instance. Facebook is treating these two goals as though they conflict with each other, though.

Of course, they do not.

Facebook’s white paper on the matter has this, for instance:

We’ve heard calls—sometimes from the same stakeholder—both to enable greater data portability and to limit people’s ability to share their data with third parties….

No, Facebook has heard no such thing.  What the platform has heardis that Facebook’s ability to share people’s personal data with third parties must be strictly limited. Indeed, Facebook is increasingly enjoined from such sharing by both the US and the EU.  That, of course, has nothing to do with users sharing, or not, their personal data.

And:

For example, the paper says it is clear that people should be able to transfer data such as the photos they upload to a social network, a capability Facebook has given users since 2010. Whether friends’ contact information or their comments on posts should also be portable are separate matters—and ones that Facebook hasn’t yet taken positions on.

This isn’t that unclear.  Take emails sent by a writer to a user, for instance.  The email in the originator’s emailer is the property of the originator.  The copy of that email in the recipient’s emailer, however, is the property of the recipient.  So it is with comments and other such transmittals from non-user to user.

And this:

Whether an outside entity is a worthy recipient of user data and who should be responsible for potential misuse of Facebook data after it is in that entity’s hands aren’t clear, the paper argues.

This isn’t Facebook’s concern.  In the first place, they’re not Facebook’s data; they’re the users’ data. Users haven’t voluntarily given those data to Facebook; Facebook has forced the transfer as a condition of doing business with Facebook (sound familiar in an international trade environment?).  From that, it becomes clear that assessment of worthiness of a transfer recipient and responsibility for potential misuse of those data after transfer are strictly those of the user. They’re his data, and he’s the one moving them about.  Facebook has no legitimate role in this assessment.

Finally, this bit of disingenuosity, although this bit isn’t only Facebook’s; it’s also that of regulators:

The paper’s underlying premise is that who should own what data on a social network remains a murky matter.

Facebook’s agonizing and bodice-rending needs to stop. The virtue signaling has grown boring, and Facebook is using it only to obfuscate the fact that it is doing nothing to curb its abuse of user data.

Carrie Lam and Hong Kong

Hong Kong Chief Executive Carrie Lam has said she’ll fully and formally withdraw her/People’s Republic of China President Xi Jinping’s extradition bill completely.  She even issued a formal statement claiming that, among other things.  Many are touting this, and the other things, as major concessions to the demonstrators that have been in the streets of Hong Kong in their hundreds of thousands, even millions, for the last several months.

Those protestors have been demanding the bill’s formal and irrevocable withdrawal, Lam’s resignation, and an independent investigation into police misbehaviors during those protest demonstrations, among others things.

Lam, of course, has made no concession at all.

She has said she will not resign.  Indeed, she has said in a carefully orchestrated leak of a “private” conversation that she has no choice but to not resign.

There’s nothing in Lam’s statement about when she will withdraw the extradition bill, only her claim that she’ll do so. Sometime. Aside from that, there is not even a syllable of enforceable commitment that she, or her successor, won’t simply introduce an identical bill at some later time.

In response to the demand for an independent investigation, Lam

claimed that a probe of police enforcement actions is “best handled by the existing and well-established Independent Police Complaints Council.”

This is especially disingenuous.  Lam ignored the plain fact that

[t]he council has authority merely to “observe, monitor, and review” internal police investigations and make recommendations, without the independent power even to summon witnesses. Council members are appointed by Ms Lam, who answers to Beijing.

The rest of Lam’s disingenuous statement is just further commitment that “her” government will investigate itself.

Lam and her fellows must resign (I’m expanding; the good people of Hong Kong have only asked for her resignation).  That’s necessary for the symbolism of the deed, even as it would be only symbolic: the citizens of Hong Kong are allowed to “elect” a government only from candidates approved by the PRC. Lam’s and her fellows’ replacements would only be more of her and her ilk.

Countrymen

Claudia Rosett, of the Independent Women’s Forum, had an excellent op-ed in Monday’s Wall Street Journal.  In essence, Rosett compared the PRC of 1989’s Tiananmen Square (she was there) with Hong Kong’s situation today (she was in Hong Kong over the summer), and her essential conclusion is

that for all China’s economic advances, it remains a brutal, dehumanizing tyranny in which the ruling Communist Party would rather destroy people than give them a genuine say in their government.

After all, we’re getting the same thing, so far, in Hong Kong:

Rather than give in to their legitimate demands, the Communist Party is readying its guns.

I agree with Rosett on 99+% of what she wrote.

I do have one point of disagreement, though.

soldiers of the People’s Liberation Army open fire on their countrymen [in Tiananmen Square].

No. The soldiers of the PLA do, certainly, share citizenship with the people of the PRC and of Hong Kong. However, PLA soldiers are not countrymen; the PLA is nothing but a mercenary army in the pay of the despots running the PRC government and the CPC.

Surrender, Or Else

That’s Teheran’s latest demand regarding the nuclear weapons deal that the European signatories have shown themselves so desperate to preserve.

Iran will “take a strong step” away from its 2015 nuclear deal with world powers if Europe cannot offer the country new terms by a deadline at the end of this week, a government spokesman said Monday as top Iranian diplomats traveled to France and Russia for last-minute talks.

Never mind that those European nations hold all the cards that we don’t hold, and that Iran is in no position to make demands on anyone.  Iran has Europe thoroughly cowed.

It’s a shameful abdication.

Some few pundits, like Amy Kellogg on Fox News last Monday, claim that talks with Europe are Iran’s preparation of themselves for talks with the US.  This is a misreading of the situation.  Iran has already said it will not talk to the US.  Iran’s President Hassan Rouhani:

Maybe there has been a misunderstanding. We’ve said it several times and we repeat it there has been no decision to hold bilateral talks with the US[.] In principle, we don’t want bilateral talks with the United States[.]

The larger misread, though, is this: Iran has no need to talk to us; it’s not laying groundwork for talking to us, because they’re on the verge of getting Europe to surrender outright. That surrender will bypass our sanctions.