Category Archives: culture

Trust

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Our individual liberty—and liberties—depend on a number of things: sovereignty of us citizens over our government; understanding that our rights and duties are inherent in us as gifts from our Creator and not grants from that government; the tools with which to enforce those rights and duties—free speech and religion, keeping and bearing arms, among others.  And an ability to trust one another.

Laura Ingraham addressed this peripherally.

The Second Amendment be damned. You see liberals don’t really trust regular people. They prefer a system where a small set of elites in Washington make decisions for everybody else. Including on issues of self-defense.

And

Law abiding gun owners are invariably seen as suspicious. Their motives untrustworthy.

This is yet another example of the Left’s contempt for ordinary Americans.

This is yet another example of their projection: the people of the Left don’t trust themselves. Or each other.

This lack of trust is as much a threat to our nation’s commitment to individual liberty, personal responsibility, self-reliance as is the Left’s overt attacks on our right to keep and bear Arms and the rest of our Bill of Rights.

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.

Countrymen

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Claudia Rosett, of the Independent Women’s Forum, had an excellent op-ed in Monday’s Wall Street Journal.  In essence, Rosett compared the PRC of 1989’s Tiananmen Square (she was there) with Hong Kong’s situation today (she was in Hong Kong over the summer), and her essential conclusion is

that for all China’s economic advances, it remains a brutal, dehumanizing tyranny in which the ruling Communist Party would rather destroy people than give them a genuine say in their government.

After all, we’re getting the same thing, so far, in Hong Kong:

Rather than give in to their legitimate demands, the Communist Party is readying its guns.

I agree with Rosett on 99+% of what she wrote.

I do have one point of disagreement, though.

soldiers of the People’s Liberation Army open fire on their countrymen [in Tiananmen Square].

No. The soldiers of the PLA do, certainly, share citizenship with the people of the PRC and of Hong Kong. However, PLA soldiers are not countrymen; the PLA is nothing but a mercenary army in the pay of the despots running the PRC government and the CPC.

“Journalists,” Redux

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Recall the kerfuffle over an idle tweet in which a George Washington University Associate Professor, in a mildly snarky tweet, likened New York Times Precious Columnist Bret Stephens to a bedbug.  The Prof was riffing off a headline announcing that the NYT building was infested with bedbugs.

Stephens chose to take offense, and not only did he email the Prof about it, he CCed the Prof’s Provost in a clear attempt to intimidate the professor into silence.  Or into something.  In the meantime, Stephens has earned for himself a new nickname: #BedbugBret.

But there’s something far more important here, and it goes back to the (lack of) integrity in the journalistic industry.

The Prof makes a closely related best in his op-ed in Esquire:

Bret Stephens seems to think that his social status should render him immune from criticism from people like me. …
Stephens…reached out believing my university would chastise me for provoking the ire of a writer at The New York Times. That’s an abuse of his social station.

But it’s much more than an abuse of station—a station that does not exist, properly, in the United States of America, where all and each of us are equal under law and before God.

This is an abuse of the industry of what used to be journalism.  This is a naked claim that journalism and journalists are too high and mighty for the petty rules of ordinary Americans, and we commoners have no business—no right—to tease, much less criticize, any member of the aristocracy of the press, our Betters.

The professor’s university also responded, directly to Stephens:

Stephens, though, as far as I can determine, has not reached out to the Provost or otherwise responded to his invitation to face the objects of his contempt on their turf. He seems willing only to face a single man in the comfort and safety of his own.

Stephens exemplifies the fundamental dishonesty of the press, and of the NYT in particular.  And, apparently, the cowardice of the bullying industry.

In Which the City of New York Might Get One Right

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The city’s Department of Social Services, through a subordinate agency, is proposing a rule that would require those homeless residing free of charge in a city facility to save against a future in which they live in their own home.

The rule would mandate that residents deposit 30% of their earned income into a savings account that the city’s Department of Social Services would manage. Shelters residents would have access to the funds when they move into permanent housing.
“Our goal is to assist New Yorkers with saving in order to more effectively help them plan for the future and get back on their feet,” said a spokesman for the Department of Homeless Services….

It’s possible to quibble over who it is that will manage those saving accounts, but the principle is eminently sound.  Beneficiaries of government welfare should earn their “benefits” and learn to stand on their own.

Of course, this is of a piece with requiring other welfare recipients to get a job, get training for a job, or provide a measure of community service, though, so expect the Left to raise a hue and cry over the unfairness of this proposal, too.

Oh, wait….

Councilman Steven T Levin, a Democrat who chairs of the council’s Committee on General Welfare, questioned the efficacy of the rule.
“It’s really looking at the wrong issue,” he said. “The idea of people having a savings account, that’s not one of the things that needs to happen in order to end the homelessness crisis in New York City.”

He added:

What’s really needed is for us to be very aggressive on our subsidized-housing options upon leaving shelter[.]

He wants more “rental assistance vouchers,” more subsidies—more entrapping handouts, instead of liberating help to escape from welfare.  He does natter on about helping residents consolidate or reduce their existing debts, which would be useful also, but he presents these as alternatives; he doesn’t want them done in addition to the savings accounts.