Category Archives: culture

First, They Came for our Guns

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Then they came for our freedom of speech.  Now they’re after our freedom of religion.  Progressive-Democratic Party Presidential candidate Robert Francis O’Rourke has made the attack on the core of our Bill of Rights open and explicit.  After having promised to take our guns (and his Bestie, Eric Swalwell (D, CA) presaged him by threatening to nuke us if we didn’t give up our guns), and after Party has pressured social media to censor speech of which Party disapproves, we get this from O’Rourke at the CNN town hall meeting which it held with a number of Party Presidential candidates last Thursday:

…religious institutions should lose their tax-exempt status if they oppose same-sex marriage.
“There can be no reward, no benefit, no tax break for anyone or any institution, any organization in America that denies the full human rights or the full civil rights of every single one of us,” the former Texas congressman said at CNN‘s Equality Town Hall in Los Angeles.
He added: “And so as president, we are going to make that a priority, and we are going to stop those who are infringing upon the human rights of our fellow Americans.”

Never mind the human rights of believers.  Religious institutions will be punished by the state if they don’t destroy their religions by violating their religions’ fundamental tenets in favor of state diktats.  Our religious institutions must surrender themselves into instruments of the state.

The 1st Amendment, along with the 2nd, have no place in the lives of modern Americans.

The Constitution, having been written more than 100 years ago isn’t, as that sage philosopher Ezra Klein has said, binding on anything.

After all, no less a light than Woodrow Wilson, one of the founders of the modern Progressive movement and the first Progressive-Democrat President, said this of our Constitution:

This is where the living and breathing constitution comes from. It is modified by its environment, necessitated by its tasks, shaped to its functions by the sheer pressure of life.

We the People—us ignorant voter-citizens—have no role in the life of our Constitution; Article V is just a bunch of pretty words.  No, our Constitution, the very fabric of our nation, is to be modified at will according to whatever our Progressive-Democrat Betters determine to be the relevant pressures of life.

Keep this in mind in the summer and fall of 2020.

First-Name Interactions

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The familiarity of business’ personnel charged with interacting with members of the public conducting those interactions on a first-name basis is unwarranted and unwanted.  Those business personnel don’t know me (for instance) well enough for the uninvited closeness.

Tunku Varadarajan touched on that in his recent Wall Street Journal Weekend Interview, which centered on a different subject. In response to that peripheral matter, a letter writer to a subsequent WSJ Letters column described an incident involving his and a judge’s interaction with a hospital clerk wherein the clerk addressed each of these, in their separate interactions, by their first name, strangers to the clerk though they were:

“Puzzled by the first name?” I asked [the judge]. “Now that you mention it, yes I am.” “HIPAA” I explained, which we both knew as the acronym for the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act.
So you see, Mr Theroux, what you observed wasn’t youth obsession at all. It was your government protecting your privacy.

Really? HIPAA applies to my interactions with my cable provider? My cell phone company? My interactions with the grocer’s checkout clerk? My calls to tech support? The teller at the bank (which already keeps the line separate from the teller-customer interaction)?

Wow. What an amusing thought.

Attack on Free Speech

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[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.

In Which Zuckerberg is Right

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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”

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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.