Tag Archives: freedom

A Party of Bigots?

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This article is “triggered” by a segment last Thursday on Fox News Overtime. A panel including otherwise respected Democratic (note: not Progressive-Democratic) pollster Doug Schoen, the show’s host Harris Faulkner and another lady (sorry, her name escapes me). The panel was discussing Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’ (D, NY) despicable, and repeated, equation of the detention centers along our border wherein we house illegal aliens pending their disposition with the World War II concentration camps used explicitly for rounding up Jews, Romani, and others—seizing them from their own homes for the purpose—and exterminating them (with a view to carrying out genocide of the Jews in particular).  Mind another distinction: the folks housed in those detention centers are free, given some associated paperwork, to leave at any time, provided they leave to go home. The folks “housed” in the Holocaust concentration camps were not free to go anywhere except to die.

Schoen had the grace to be embarrassed by the behavior of what he still refers to as his party.

Here’s the thing, though.  The Progressive-Democratic Party has refused to condemn either Ocasio-Cortez for her bigoted remarks or those remarks.  Jerry Nadler (D, NY), House Judiciary Committee Chairman, openly supports Ocasio-Cortez’ remarks:

One of the lessons from the Holocaust is “Never Again”—not only to mass murder, but also to the dehumanization of people, violations of basic rights, and assaults on our common morality. We fail to learn that lesson when we don’t callout such inhumanity right in front of us.

Nadler’s refusal to condemn Ocasio-Cortez or her remarks speaks loudly and clearly, but there’s more to his tweet.  His naked distortion of what’s going on in those detention centers and Nadler’s equation of that with what went on in those Holocaust concentration camps is a clear demonstration of Nadler’s personal bigotry.

Senator and Progressive-Democratic Party Presidential candidate Bernie Sanders (I, VT) gave a CNN interview in which he insisted (as cited by Haaretz)

“I didn’t use that terminology,” noted Sanders, subsequently repeating twice in the interview that he had “not used that word.”

He went on to equate the detention centers with the Holocaust’s concentration camps.  Notice that: Sanders quibbled with Ocasio-Cortez’ terminology, but he wholly agrees with her claims, thereby exposing his own bigotry.

The rest of the Progressive-Democratic Party’s Presidential candidates—every single one of them—have stayed carefully silent on Ocasio-Cortez’ bigoted remarks.  Those two dozen candidates for the highest office in our nation therewith actively demonstrate their agreement with Ocasio-Cortez and thereby demonstrate their own overt bigotry.

This comes on the heels of the Progressive-Democratic Party’s refusal to censure Congresswoman Ilhan Omar (D, MN) over her bigoted, anti-Semitic remarks.  Party refused even to call her out or condemn her words. In the end, Party passed a carefully saccharine resolution that said, “We don’t like mean words.”

This is of a piece with the Progressive-Democratic Party’s effort, not just to divide us, but to partition us with their racist and sexist identity politics.

I have to wonder what it will take for Schoen to leave the Progressive-Democratic Party.

No—the Progressive-Democratic Party is not a party of bigots, it is an institution of bigotry, and we have to take care next year lest our nation fall under its sway.

“Radical-Right” and the Left

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The Washington Post ran a panic-mongering op-ed about the Supreme Court last week.

Last month, the new conservative majority—being driven by Justices Neil M Gorsuch and Brett M Kavanaugh—signaled that this change is coming. In overruling a 40-year-old precedent governing how state governments can be sued, the new court majority, all of whom pledged reverence for precedent during their Senate confirmation hearings—sang a different song: “stare decisis is ‘not an inexorable command,’ … and is ‘at its weakest’ when interpreting the Constitution.” This was the second time in less than a year that the conservative majority has tossed aside decades-old precedent.

Thus screamed the WaPo in its terror.  Never mind that reverence for precedent is not blind adherence to it, no matter how wrong the precedent.  The Brown example the paper so piously cited elsewhere in its op-ed was itself an overturning of an 80-year-old precedent, that of Plessy.  Never mind, more importantly, that as Justice Clarence Thomas has said on many occasions, the primary precedent in all of American jurisprudence is the text of our Constitution.

And this “fear:”

….race-conscious programs in employment and admissions that are now pervasive could be forbidden.

The op-ed’s author wrote that with no trace of irony.

“Race-conscious” programs are by definition racist; that they’re pervasive just means that the evil is far too ubiquitous.  They should be forbidden, and the sooner and louder the better.

And this:

The past decade has seen a conservative court slow further social progress….

That’s entirely appropriate, it’s regrettable that this was even necessary, and it’s further regrettable that court-imposed “social progress” was only slowed and not halted altogether.  Social progress—whatever that is—is a political matter, to be furthered or opposed only by the political arms of our government.  Courts have no legitimate role in political matters; this is made clear in that primary precedent’s Article I, Section 1.

The paper headlined its op-ed thusly:

We need to prepare for a complete reversal of the role the Supreme Court plays in our lives

I certainly hope the Court reverses course; I certainly hope the Court goes back to applying the Constitution and the laws as they’re written, instead of in accordance with the “philosophies” of the likes of Thurgood Marshall—”I make my ruling and expect the law to catch up”—and Ruth Bader Ginsburg of living Constitution, amend it from the bench according to a judge’s personal view of society, ideology.  I certainly hope the Court reverses its role in our political lives and absents itself from it.

It’s illustrative of how dangerously far left the Left has gone when simple adherence to the Constitution is radical-right.

Socialism

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It seems Amazon has teamed with another company to create and issue a credit card that would be issuable to Amazon’s Prime members. It doesn’t matter what the purpose and parameters of the card are—they’re legal under existing law.

But none of that matters.  Senator and Progressive-Democratic Party Presidential candidate Bernie Sanders (I, VT) and his trophy BFF, Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D, NY), object to the card because it doesn’t suit their requirements.  And since they object, they’ve vowed to destroy the card, should Sanders be elected President.

It doesn’t matter what their objections are; Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez intend to use Government power to destroy a private enterprise’s product because that product wouldn’t fit their government’s purpose for private enterprise products.

Sanders pretends his ideology, his policy, is democratic socialism.  No, this example of his is straight up socialism.  In particular, it’s the fascism subset of socialism, since Sanders would presume to have government impose its production policy on a private enterprise.

The sad—and dangerous—thing is, Sanders knows this distinction full well, even if Ocasio-Cortez might not.

The PRC and Facial Recognition

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The People’s Republic of China is moving “beyond” the use of smart phones for making on-the-spot retail payments, starting to supplant that with facial recognition—with personal images tied to personal financial accounts.

Ant Financial Services Group and Tencent Holdings Ltd, rivals that operate, respectively, Alipay and WeChat Pay, China’s two largest mobile-payments networks, are competing for dominance in the next stage of China’s cashless society. Each is racing to install its own branded facial-recognition screens at retail points-of-sale all over the country, marketing the screens as a way to speed up sales and improve efficiency.

Marketing the screens as a way to speed up sales and improve efficiency.  A way to speed up and broaden PRC government knowledge of what its citizens are doing, where they are going, what they’re spending their money on, where they have their money, also.  In fine, a way to extend the PRC’s ability to control, not just the population over which it reigns, or subgroups of it, but down to the individual level.  George Orwell knew about this, and about the debilitation it inflicts on liberty, even on moral and on morale.

This is not an advance over smart phone payments.  Not at all.

Another Reason

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…to not have these things in our homes.

According to internal documents seen Wednesday by local media, German interior ministers are considering a proposal that would allow data from speech assistants to be legally permissible as evidence for the prosecution of crimes.

“Speech assistants”—is that what the kids are calling these things?  The speech assistants to which those German interior ministers refer are “smart” home devices like Alexa, Siri, smart TVs, presumably Cortana, and on and on—any device we allow in our naivete into our homes—that listen to our every word, every sound we sigh, and records the most current of them.

Those interior ministers say those “digital data saved on devices” are there to be “collected and evaluated by authorities.”  Those data, those interior ministers piously claim, are “‘increasingly important’ for investigating capital crimes and preventing terrorist threats.”

All very high-minded and pure of intent.  There’s no need of any natural limiting principle to constrain this surveillance.  Because no government would ever grow…curious…of the doings inside a private home.  No government would ever get so protective of its own prerequisites that it would look preemptively for untoward, or rude, criticisms.  No government’s bureaucrat would ever eavesdrop on the sounds of pleasure flowing through a home for his own jollies.

No.

This is the People’s Republic of China’s overt, face-by-face surveillance of citizens in the public square brought into the privacy of a home. And, like the PRC’s surveillance, this one would be done solely with speculative intent.

So far, this effort is overt only in Germany, but we need to be vigilant against its spread and to ensure our own government doesn’t try to embrace such an invasion of our castles, our homes—our privacy.