Tag Archives: freedom

“Rioting”

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Recall the teenage protestor in the Hong Kong protests earlier this week, the one who was shot in the chest at point blank range by a Hong Kong cop who thought he was being threatened by the boy.

A Hong Kong court charged 18-year-old student, Tsang (Tony) Chi-Kin, with rioting, a charge carrying a sentence of up to 10 years in prison. Tsang was among seven people charged with rioting on Thursday.
The secondary school student also faces two additional counts of attacking two police officers, punishable by up to six months in prison.

Riotous bastard dared to interfere with the cop’s bullet.  Nor were the cops in any great hurry to get the boy treatment or to let any protestors help him.  Despite that, he’s in stable condition in a Hong Kong hospital.

This is the kind of despotic tyranny that People’s Republic of China President Xi Jinping intends to impose on Hong Kong.  And on the Republic of China later.

Strength of Consent

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The people of Hong Kong are in their 15th straight week of protest against the People’s Republic of China’s moves to intervene in Hong Kong’s internal affairs, to impose yet more PRC controls over a nominally free, “two systems” city.

People of all ages, many unmasked and some carrying children, walked more than 2 miles from a shopping district, where usually busy stores were shuttered, to downtown Hong Kong. Many chanted, “Five demands! Not one less!,” “Fight for freedom!” and “Revolution of our times!”

Those five demands, which do not add up to freedom, but are a necessary early step on the path to freedom, are these:

  • independent inquiry into allegations of police brutality
  • amnesty for arrested protesters
  • electoral reforms to allow Hong Kongers to vote for their own leaders
  • formal withdrawal of the extradition bill that would have allowed Hong Kong citizens (and anyone else arrested) to be sent to the PRC for trial and jail
  • Hong Kong Executive Carrie Lam’s resignation

Lam has “promised” to formally withdraw the extradition bill, but she has not honored her promise, and she has categorically rejected the others. Lam’s “promise” was a cynical effort to divide and weaken the protest movement.

However, as The Wall Street Journal put it in the article at the link,

The scale of the crowds Sunday evoked mass marches earlier this summer, suggesting efforts by Hong Kong Chief Executive Carrie Lam to weaken and divide the opposition movement are having little effect, and the crisis remains a challenge for the Chinese leadership in Beijing.

This protestor illustrates the matter.

The PRC’s President Xi Jinping has a golden opportunity, here, to demonstrate the strength of consenting to the citizens’ demands, but he’s overtly eschewing it. He, and his Chinese Communist Party cronies, are simply too insecure to take the step.  And not just politically: they’re personally and emotionally too insecure.

Brexit and Sovereignty

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This is amazing.  And an utter betrayal.

Senior MPs opposing a no-deal Brexit sought assurances from the EU that their bid for a three-month delay would be granted, it has emerged.
European leaders were sounded out before MPs, including the “rebel alliance,” passed a bill…forcing Boris Johnson to ask for an extension.

For the EU to participate in such scruffy deal would seem to be a naked interference in sovereign British domestic politics.

Except that….

On the one hand, this is those MPs selling out British sovereignty.

On the other, this is the European Union, by its ready participation in the sordid affair, telling the British citizens that their nation is not sovereign; it is subordinate to the European Union: Great Britain has no domestic politics that are beyond the reach of Brussels—which is to say Great Britain has no domestic politics of its own.

As Conservative MP and former minister David Jones has it:

Senior EU figures gave private assurances to British MPs…. This confirms the level of EU interference in our internal affairs and makes the need for Brexit all the more pressing.

This collaboration [sic] arguably invalidates the bill just passed. Or would in an honest government and court system, even one like the Brits’ where the courts can be overruled at the whim of a Parliament like today’s mendacious one.

Facebook Agonizes

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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

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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.