Monthly Archives: October 2019

Attack on Free Speech

Posted on by
Reply

[Heads up: long post]

By American enterprises, no less.  And, no, this time I’m not talking about American social media like Facebook or Twitter.  Keep in mind the NBA’s ongoing assault on free speech in the form of openly rejecting one team General Manager’s tweet supporting freedom in Hong Kong. The NBA’s response—from individual players on up, through team coaching staff and front office personnel, to the NBA’s head office and its commissioner, Adam Silver—was to reject the GM’s tweet in sum and substance and to apologize to the People’s Republic of China’s government and sports authorities so meekly as to be, metaphorically, in deep bows while doing so. And that GM abjectly deleted his own tweet—he didn’t even have the courage of his conviction.

Now we get an American game-making company kneeling and kowtowing to the PRC.  Activision Blizzard, maker of Hearthstone E-sports, an on-line multi-player card game, has banned one of its Hong-Kong players for his heinous crime of speaking out against the PRC’s abuse of Hong Kong during the present ongoing crisis in that city. Activision Blizzard

banned Ng Wai Chung, who plays remotely from Hong Kong, from competing in the company’s online multiplayer card game Hearthstone E-sports for one year. The 21-year-old known online as “Blitzchung” had just won $10,000 in the Hearthstone Asia-Pacific Grandmasters tournament when he declared in a livestream video interview in Mandarin: “Liberate Hong Kong, revolution of our times.” He was wearing a gas mask and goggles, the same equipment worn by Hong Kong’s pro-democracy demonstrators, when he made the statement[.]

This company also forced the man to forfeit those $10,000 (HK$78,444.80).

These are American companies that are saying the approval of the PRC government and the flow of the PRC’s money into their coffers are more important than upholding American values.  Senator Marco Rubio (R, FL) is on the right track in his tweet, although he has the order of emphasis reversed:

Recognize what’s happening here. People who don’t live in #China must either self censor or face dismissal & suspensions. China using access to market as leverage to crush free speech globally. Implications of this will be felt long after everyone in U.S. politics today is gone.

The PRC isn’t so much using its market power to crush free speech as American companies are voluntarily surrendering free speech and kowtowing from their knees to PRC pressure, favoring PRC money over liberty, preferring personal and company wealth over American values.

Senator Ron Wyden (D, OR) is more direct in his tweet:

Blizzard shows it is willing to humiliate itself to please the Chinese Communist Party. No American company should censor calls for freedom to make a quick buck.

Activision Blizzard issued a statement that said this, in rationalization of its ban on Chung:

we have found [Chung’s] action has violated the 2019 Hearthstone Grandmasters Official Competition Rules…”Engaging in 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 image.”
…
While we stand by one’s right to express individual thoughts and opinions, players and other participants that elect to participate in our esports competitions must abide by the official competition rules.

Think about that statement for a moment.  Standing for a people’s right to their own liberty, acting on one’s own right to speak freely, are acts that bring[] you into public disrepute, offend[] a portion or group of the public, or otherwise damage[] Blizzard image.  It’s disreputable to defend others or to speak freely. What Blizzard considers damaging to its own image is offending the men of despotic governments.

 

It’s not just Blizzard, though.  That NBA thing also censors calls for freedom in order to fill its bank boxes with PRC money.  In the league’s ongoing assault on free speech and PRC favor-currying, this happened during a Washington Wizards home game against the PRC’s Guangzhou Long-Lions:

[P]rotesters, who said they were from Freedom House, held up signs that read: “Shame the NBA,” “South Park was right,” and “Memo to the NBA: Principles over profit! No censorship! USA loves Hong Kong.”

Arena security confiscated those signs and others in the same vein addressing Tibet and the Uighurs.  Because free speech is only that speech that doesn’t offend the PRC.

In addition, Apple, after coming in for PRC opprobrium for having an app, HKmap.live, in its store that could allow Hong Kong protestors to track police movements, has meekly removed that app. Apple also has obeyed the PRC’s demand that its news app, Quartz, be deleted from the Apple PRC app store.

More: Alphabet’s Google subsidiary has removed from its Google Play store The Revolution of Our Times,

 a mobile game that allowed players to role-play as a Hong Kong protester.

Alphabet did this on the demand of the PRC’s Hong Kong police.

As an aside, this also happened at the Wizards-Long-Lions game:

After the Chinese national anthem was played, one person shouted: “Freedom of expression! Freedom of speech! Free Hong Kong!”

Notice that: after their national anthem, not during it.  Would that American athletes had that much respect for our own national anthem.

This comes alongside Alphabet’s long-standing refusal to support our defense establishment, for instance on artificial intelligence projects, while enthusiastically working on AI projects in the People’s Republic of China.

Ben Franklin wrote that our Constitution was written for a virtuous people, as that’s what it would take for effective self-governance.  The people who run our businesses are losing that virtue.

Lies of a Progressive-Democrat

Posted on by
Reply

Progressive-Democratic Party Presidential candidate and Senator Elizabeth Warren (D, MA) now is claiming that when she became pregnant at a teaching job early in her career, she was let go from that teaching job.

I loved it, and I would probably still be doing it today but back in the day, before unions, the principal, by the time we got to the end of the first year, I was visibly pregnant. And the principal did what principals did in those days: they wished you luck, showed you the door, and hired someone else for the job. And there went my dream.

We’ve seen that her lie has been contradicted by her own earlier words: “As I became pregnant, I realized this just wasn’t working for me.”

…my first year post-graduation I worked in a public school system with the children with disabilities. I did that for a year, and then that summer I didn’t have the education courses, so I was on an “emergency certificate,” it was called. I went back to graduate school and took a couple of courses in education and said, “I don’t think this is going to work out for me.” I was pregnant with my first baby, so I had a baby and stayed home for a couple of years….

Now we learn that her lie also is contradicted by the public record of that school district.

The Riverdale Board of Education approved a second-year teaching contract [as a substitute teacher] for a young Elizabeth Warren, documents show, contradicting the Democratic presidential candidate’s repeated claims that she was asked not to return to teaching after a single year because she was “visibly pregnant.”

The minutes of that Riverdale school district meeting can be seen here.

And this bit. A couple months after that contract offer, the Board had this:

“The resignation of Mrs. Elizabeth Warren, speech correctionist effective June 30, 1971 was accepted with regret,” the June 16, 1971, minutes say.

Those minutes can be reviewed here (scroll to near the bottom).

This is the level of integrity we can expect from this Progressive-Democrat, were she to get elected President. Indeed, given Warren’s constant flow of lies, from her claim of being part Native American, through this sequence, her lie about being the first nursing mother to take a bar exam in the state of New Jersey, I have to wonder whether she can discriminate reality from fantasy at all.

 

h/t Dana Loesch via Eliana Johnson

In Which Zuckerberg is Right

Posted on by
Reply

Attorney General William Barr has taken up ex-FBI Director James Comey’s battle for government backdoors into private citizens’ encrypted private messages.  Apple MFWIC Tim Cook won a similar fight regarding iPhone passwords and a demand that government should be allowed backdoors into those, and Comey’s FBI was shown to have been dissembling about that difficulty by the speed with which a contractor the FBI hired successfully broke into an iPhone the FBI had confiscated.

Now Barr has broadened the fight, demanding Facebook give Government backdoors into Facebook’s planned rollout of encryption for its messaging services.  He wants Facebook, too, to hold off on its rollout until Government is satisfied it has such backdoors.  Barr’s cynically misleading plaint includes this tearjerker:

Companies cannot operate with impunity where lives and the safety of our children is at stake, and if Mr Zuckerberg really has a credible plan to protect Facebook’s more than two billion users it’s time he let us know what it is[.]

Zuckerberg has been quite clear on what it is.  It’s facilitating private citizens’ ability to encrypt their private messages on Facebook’s platform.  Many of whom live in outright tryannies, others of whom live in so-far free nations, but whose government officials want to be able to pierce the protections of enforceable privacy at will.

The concern that bad guys, terrorists as well as common criminals, will take advantage of such encryption to evade government law enforcement facilities is entirely valid.  Two things about that, though. First is Ben Franklin’s remark about the relationship between safety and security.

The other is for law enforcement to do better with their own IT skills and with their own human policing skills.  Just as the FBI did in cracking that iPhone after Apple refused to give break-in assistance to Government.

“Stand for Something”

Posted on by
Reply

Howard Silver, commissioner of the National Basketball Association, in the aftermath of a tweet by Houston Rockets General Manager Daryl Morey,said in a CNN interview cited by The Wall Street Journal‘s Notable & Quotable,

I think in this day and age, you really do have to stand for something[.]

This is after Rockets players apologized to the PRC for their GM’s tweet, Rockets owner Tilman Fertitta ran away from his GM’s tweet,

Listen….@dmorey does NOT speak for the @HoustonRockets.

and the NBA as a whole affirmed their preference for PRC money over honor.

The NBA really does have to stand for something.

Absolutely.  Except when the NBA comes in for opprobrium from the PRC over a tweet supporting the citizens of Hong Kong. Then the league and its players and team management cower down.

Stand for freedom for the citizens of Hong Kong? They can’t: there’s no headroom under the bed.

An Elizabeth Warren Demand

Posted on by
Reply

Progressive-Democratic Party Presidential candidate and Senator Elizabeth Warren (D, MA) has begun issuing her orders to our private business executives.  And she’s not even the Progressive-Democratic Party nominee for the office, much less the President [bold face emphasis added].

I write in regard to the Business Roundtable’s (BRT) new Statement on the Purpose of a Corporation issued on August 19, 2019. … I write for information about the tangible actions you intend to take to implement the principles, including whether, to make good on your commitment, you will implement the steps laid out in the Accountable Capitalism Act I plan to reintroduce in the coming weeks.

And

If you, and the other 181 corporate executives who signed the BRT’s new Statement on the Purpose of a Corporation, plan to live up to the promises you made, I expect that you will endorse and wholeheartedly support the reforms laid out in the Accountable Capitalism Act to meet the principles you endorse.

And so on.

A key part (among several key parts) of Warren’s Accountable Capitalism Act is her requirement that all businesses above a minimum size must get Federal—not State—charters to continue to operate.

Do what I tell you to do with the corporations you run in my Government’s name, if you know what’s good for you.

This is the core aspect of socialism: Government ownership of an economy’s means of production—the businesses operating in that economy—or Government direction of what nominally privately owned businesses will be permitted to do.

Warren’s letter to those executives can be read here.