Category Archives: culture

The People Have Spoken

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The tally is nearly completely in for Hong Kong’s Sunday vote for local offices.

Local broadcaster RTHK reported that pro-democracy parties took 390 out of 452 seats in the district council, or nearly 90%.
The polls closed with 71.2% of eligible voters casting a ballot, the election commission said, easily surpassing the figure of 47% in the last such vote in 2015.

Hong Kong’s Chief Executive Carrie Lam suggests

The government will certainly listen humbly to citizens’ opinions and reflect on them seriously[.]

Yeah. She’ll think about it.  But will it act accordingly? Keep in mind, as you cogitate on that question, that the Lam government is nothing but a Beijing satrap.

Gordon Chang, who often writes for The Wall Street Journal and contributes to Fox News, is optimistic:

This is political annihilation for Beijing and it’s going to have consequences that are going to reverberate not just in Hong Kong itself, but perhaps in China as well….

He has a warning, though:

Carrie Lam, the Hong Kong chief executive, she reports directly to Xi Jinping. She no longer has any freedom of action. If he tells her not to give ground, which is what he’s been doing for the last several months, then you’re going to see Hong Kong erupt because, you know, people have expressed their will.
If the political establishment doesn’t make concessions, then we don’t know where this will go, but we know that will become probably much more violent and the protests will become even larger[.]

Are Xi and his Communist Party of China government listening?  Yes, most carefully.  But they’ll likely draw the wrong lessons.  I think we do know where this will go, and it won’t be pleasant, although it will be brief. Tanks rolling against a fundamentally unarmed civilian population will see to that, as was demonstrated in Tiananmen Square a little bit ago.

The US and our putative allies need to become more overt in supporting the good people of Hong Kong.  The PRC has already welched on its handover commitment and its pretense of a one country, two systems policy.

The Republic of China is watching the degree of our resolve, too.

Rule of Law and Roe

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There’s a Letter to the Editor in a recent Wall Street Journal that “explains” why his DAGA organization is against Pro-Life Attorneys General.  The man’s letter centers on the proposition that

Roe v Wade is settled law.

Wow. The hysteria is strong in this one. Of course, no law is “settled.” Not even our Constitution, in which Sean Rankin, the letter-writer, so piously cloaked himself, is settled; that’s clear in and from the existence of Article V and all those Amendments.

Regarding the relationship between AGs and the rule of law—absolutely, upholding the rule of law is the core of their role. Notice that, though: their role, their duty, is to uphold the rule of law, not blindly uphold any particular law—because no particular law is settled.  With respect to the present case, a subset of the rule of law is supporting the universal and inalienable law of the right to life of babies.

What Rankin also so carefully ignored is that Roe was a technologically oriented ruling, based entirely on the viability of the fetus outside the womb. Roe suggested, those decades ago, that the threshold for viability was the start of the third trimester. Medical technology advances have pushed that threshold sharply earlier in pregnancy. Defending additional restrictions on abortion, protecting babies’ lives, easily can be done from within Roe.

Beyond that, upholding the rule of law also includes challenging any particular law when facts come to light that alter, if not outright obviate, the conditions under which that law was written.  That includes challenging Roe.

Pro-Life AGs do far more for upholding rule of law than does any “settled law” AG; the latter obliviously puts laws above the rule of law.

A Court Error

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It seems the Hong Kong High Court messed up.  Recall that, last week, the court ruled Chief Executive Carrie Lam’s “emergency” rule barring Hong Kong citizens from wearing masks was illegal. Lam’s rule, the court ruled

infringed on fundamental rights more than was reasonably necessary.

Oops.

The court, having received its marching orders from Beijing, through Lam’s government corrected itself:

following an appeal from the government to freeze the ruling, the court agreed to grant a one-week suspension in view of the “highly exceptional circumstances that Hong Kong is currently facing,” local broadcaster RTHK reported.

Just in time for today’s nominally free local—district—elections (elections to the city’s legislature won’t be for another year).

Dishonesty of Journalism

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The guild’s latest lie began with a UN lie: Manfred Nowak’s (Independent Expert leading the United Nations Global Study on Children Deprived of Liberty) claim that

100,000 migrant children were detained by the Trump administration and indicated that it was the “world’s highest rate” of detained children.

Then Nowak was forced to confess that the number was cribbed from ex-President Barack Obama (D) administration statistics and that it was Obama who had detained those 100,000 children.

Guild dishonesty that flowed from that was broad.

Reuters:

A Nov 18 story headlined “US has world’s highest rate of children in detention—UN study” is withdrawn. The United Nations issued a statement on Nov 19 saying the number was not current but was for the year 2015. No replacement story will be issued[.]

National Public Radio:

We have temporarily withdrawn this story because the study’s author has acknowledged a significant error in the data. We will post a revised article with more complete information as soon as possible.

Apparently, “as soon as possible” means “if and when we feel like it.” As I write, three days after the lie, NPR doesn’t seem to have found it possible to correct its tale.

Agence France-Presse:

AFP is withdrawing this story.
The author of the report has clarified that his figures do not represent the number of children currently in migration-related US detention, but the total number of children in migration-related US detention in 2015.
We will delete the story.

Associated Press:

The Associated Press has withdrawn its story about a claim about the number of children being held in migration-related detention in the United States. The story quoted an independent expert working with the UN human rights office saying that over 100,000 children are currently being held. But that figure refers to the total number of US child detentions for the year 2015, according to the UN refugee agency.

And in an example of the danger of anyone relying on claims of the journalism guild, the Democratic National Committee got caught using the lie, unchecked, uncorroborated in any way, to make political hay:

This is a disgusting result of Trump’s family separation policies- pushed by Stephen Miller who has cited white nationalist propaganda in promoting his views. It’s also, apparently, a violation of a UN treaty, the Convention on the Rights of the Child[.]

But, apparently, a UN official lying about migration statistics doesn’t violate much of anything.

Notice the breadth of this journalistic dishonesty.  The guild broadly repeated the lie without even the barest effort to verify, or even corroborate, it.

Then on the lie having been caught out, the guild tried to cover up its own role in spreading the lie by simply announcing that they were deleting their stories [sic]. They made no move to correct them, only to hide them.

And they published not a single syllable of apology for their role in proselytizing the lie.

Cornell Law School professor William A. Jacobson has the right of this shameful episode:

Real journalism is reporting the truth, not covering it up. When the article originally portrayed Trump negatively, it was big news. When the truth came out that Obama was to blame, not Trump, the headline and text should have been corrected, not taken down[.]

But that’s not guild practice.

A Thought on Censorship

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Stanley Fish, Floersheimer Distinguished Visiting Professor of Law at Yeshiva University’s Benjamin N Cardozo School of Law, thinks that when Seton Hall “disinvited” him from speaking there he wasn’t being censored.

Fish’s headline, I Wasn’t Censored When I Was Disinvited, led off his claim. Then he contradicted himself with the opening sentence of his second paragraph:

My ideas were judged unworthy of being heard.

This is precisely what censorship is. Here is a legal definition of censorship:

The suppression or proscription of speech or writing that is deemed obscene, indecent, or unduly controversial.

Here’s a “civilian” definition of censor:

To examine and expurgate.

Near the end of his piece, Fish had this:

I have no right to speak at Seton Hall….

That’s a strawman argument. No one claiming he had a right to speak or that such a right was being blocked.  Moreover, there’s nothing in either of those definitions about blocking a right to speak; censorship in the Seton Hall case was the blocking of speech itself, and the censors were precisely those managers of the school and the school’s pupils.

This is an example of how far left the Left has pushed what is permissible speech and how meekly folks who should know better have acquiesced in that push.