Defense of the Republic of China

Paul Wolfowitz had a thought on that last Tuesday. His opening paragraph laid out his thesis.

Beijing has been making a show of hostility toward Taiwan. Last week China released footage of “real combat” it conducted last month in Taiwanese airspace. A Chinese invasion would present the greatest threat to global peace in a generation. The US would confront an agonizing dilemma: risk an armed clash between two nuclear superpowers or abandon a free people to communist tyranny. But there’s an alternative—deter the threat by committing to oppose it, by force if necessary.

I’d be a bit more blunt.

It would be good to remind the PRC of who has vastly more nuclear warheads than the other, who has the better cyberwar capability, and how little the US depends on river dams—or a single dam—for its food supply.

It also would be good to stage our own demonstrations, real rather than virtual, throughout the East and South China Seas and in the Taiwan strait and to increase and accelerate arms sales to the Republic of China.

Joe Biden, however, is the epitome of an Asian nation being of little strategic value, of a commitment to use military force in [RoC] would be ill-advised and impracticable, and whose prevailing mood… [is] not to interfere—after all, the PRC, Biden insists, is not a serious competitor; the nation isn’t a “patch on our jeans.”

Censorship

Here are a couple of New York Post items that Facebook and Twitter are so nakedly censoring. These are in their second article:

And

And

These items are in the NYP‘s second article, published 15 October, the day after the Post published its first article—which Twitter and Facebook began censoring. These two social media enterprises went so far as to lock White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany out of her personal Twitter account unless and until she deletes her own Twitter post that carried that original Post article, which broke the fact of the laptop and emails thereon.

Twitter has extended its censorship to the point that it is blocking a United States Senator—Ted Cruz (R, TX)—from tweeting about this second article.

True, false, or misunderstood, the laptop and these emails and the others on that newly exposed laptop need to be openly discussed and their provenances clearly identified.

With this censorship, Facebook and Twitter have ceased to be pipelines and created themselves publishers controlling what information they will choose to publish.

That makes it imperative to withdraw their immunity from the regulation to which any publisher of information is subject, including in particular the requirement to provide equal time under equal conditions to all sides of any discussion of information.

With their censorship, Facebook and Twitter have drastically abused their monopoly power. With that, it’s necessary, also, to break them up into smaller, independently operating enterprises with management teams and employee suites that are entirely separate each enterprise from the others.

Read both articles. The first one can be seen both here and via the Senate Judiciary Committee’s Web page.