Tag Archives: culture

Foolishness

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In response to a Wall Street Journal editorial on Scot Peterson, the cop who stood outside and listened to the butchery going on inside a Florida school, a Letter to the Editor writer had this to say:

Your editorial leaves out of the discussion how outgunned Scot Peterson and his fellow sheriff’s deputies were against shooter Nikolas Cruz with his AR-15 rifle at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School. I wonder how many Journal readers (and writers) would have confronted the shooter while bringing a metaphorical knife to a gunfight.

This is just foolish and ignorant along a couple of dimensions.  For one thing, Journal readers (and writers), in the main, are not trained for such dangers and associated risks, the way policemen are.  This is a foolish comparison to make.  The foolishness is illustrated by trained, but wholly unarmed, American men on a French train who defeated and subdued a semi-automatic rifle-armed terrorist.

For another thing, Peterson, and his fellows who arrived as soon as they could, were not seriously outgunned, for all that they had semi-automatic pistols against the butcher’s semi-automatic rifle.  The two types of weapons have similar rates of fire, although the rifle does have a slightly faster one.  Beyond that, the rifle’s primary advantage over pistols is its greater range. That range advantage was greatly reduced—virtually eliminated—in the confined fields of fire available inside a building.

In the end, these slight advantages would have been eliminated by a prompt, determined response and the surprise factor involved.  The advantages would have been reversed entirely by the numbers of police entering as promptly as they could, producing a variety of firing origins against the single point of the butcher.

And in the event, I would expect at least a fraction of (hypothetical) Journal readers (and writers) who might have been on scene to attack the butcher rather than try to duck away.  The folks on scene at the start of an event are, after all, the first responders.

Alphabet Censorship

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They’re at it again.  This time, it’s Alphabet’s YouTube, owned through Alphabet’s subsidiary Google that’s inflicting censorship.

YouTube has blocked some British history teachers from its service for uploading archive material related to Adolf Hitler, saying they are breaching new guidelines banning the promotion of hate speech.

Alphabet restored the censored data, but only after it had gotten caught in its censorship and the ensuing uproar got too uncomfortable.

Alphabet’s censorship was because the material consisted of

content that promotes hatred or violence against members of a protected group.

Yeah—the protected group here was Alphabet’s censors.

One of the victims of this censorship, though, seems to have missed the lesson.  Scott Alsop owns the MrAllsopHistory website saw Alphabet censor his efforts to upload archival Hitler imagery and video clips because Alphabet disapproved of them.

I fully support YouTube’s increased efforts to curb hate speech, but also feel that silencing the very people who seek to teach about its dangers could be counter-productive to YouTube’s intended goal[.]

“Counter-productive?”  Well, NSS.

Alphabet’s IT personnel are professional folks, fully versed in what they’re doing.  So are Alphabet’s folks responsible for testing IT’s…fixes.  This failure shows that Alphabet either did this deliberately and got caught—to stop people being radicalized, because these Precious Ones know better than their users—or it demonstrates the inevitable outcome of well-intentioned incompetence.

Either way, censorship itself is a failure that directly attacks free speech.  Some speech is inherently uncomfortable.  The discomfort, though, is in the perception of the hearer (who plainly is not a listener) and not at all in the speech of the speaker.  The hearer can listen better or stop paying attention to the speaker altogether.  The hatefulness of other speech is in the speaker, true enough, but those who receive the speech still have only two choices: stop attending to the speaker, or answer him with their own speech.

The Alphabets of the world—private enterprise, as in the present case, or government man—have no business dictating to us what they, in their precious awesomeness, will presume to permit us to say.  Or to hear.  And we have no business sending them our money in the form of buying their product, nor do we have any business electing them to office.

Rule By Law

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The House Progressive-Democrats insist that they, in the words of Rules Committee Chairman James McGovern (D, MA),

will not allow this president and his administration to turn a blind eye to the rule of law[.]

Current House rules regarding subpoenas issued to Executive Branch personnel that those personnel do not comply with must go to a full House floor vote in order for enforcement in Federal court to be sought.  That’s not fast enough or powerful enough to suit the Progressive-Democrat leadership.  It also exposes Progressive-Democrats from competitive districts to the risk of losing in the 2020 election.

Under their proposed new rule (scheduled for vote Tuesday), committee chairmen can seek court enforcement without even a committee vote, much less an ensuing floor vote.  They would only need to get the agreement of a small group of House leadership: the Speaker, the Majority and Minority Leaders, and Majority and Minority Whips.

Guess which way those votes will go.

Changing the rules solely for the purpose of achieving a narrow partisan end is not the rule of law that McGovern so piously claims to want.  It’s naked rule by law.  It’s what tyrannies do.

“Freedom” in Hong Kong

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Natasha Khan had a piece in Sunday’s Wall Street Journal concerning the implications of the People’s Republic of China’s 30 years ago Tiananmen Square bloody crackdown on today’s Hong Kong, especially in light of the PRC’s increasing and increasingly direct control over Hong Kong.  In the course of that piece, Khan asked about the implications of tightening freedoms on Hong Kong’s position as an international finance center.

To which I answer:

The implications of the PRC’s “tightening” of freedoms in Hong Kong are obvious and universal. The “tightening” is not that, it’s a direct attack on those freedoms with a view to converting them from actual freedoms to freedom to do as the PRC and its ruling Communist Party of China require.

Such an attack can only result in the destruction of freedom, and from that, the destruction of a people’s ability to prosper physically and morally.

The proximate impact will be the destruction of free market business in Hong Kong, followed by the departure of foreign businesses from Hong Kong, taking with them their economic activity and their jobs. That will lead to the impoverishment of the Hong Kong people.

There’s an upside, though. It’ll provide a clear, empirically done object lesson of the differences in outcomes between free markets and freedom on the one hand and a centrally controlled economy and freedom to do whatever the men running the Communist Party of China will allow from time to time on the other hand.

Gun Rights vs Gun Controls

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In a Sunday Wall Street Journal piece about red flag laws as a means of gun control, Zusha Elinson asked whether there are any (other) measures that could unify gun rights and gun control supporters.

I say there are none.  Full stop.

Gun rights supporters want the 2nd Amendment honored as it’s written. That’s it, and it’s that simple.

Gun control supporters, though, don’t care about the 2nd Amendment, except to the extent they’re willing to go to the trouble of repealing it rather than simply ignoring it. This is demonstrated by a couple of things central to their position.

One is their demand to dictate our purpose in having this or that weapon—”Why does anyone need an assault weapon” and “You don’t need that for defense” and “You don’t need that at all.”

The other is their flat refusal to identify their limiting principle on their controls. Where would they stop? What natural condition in our Constitution would set a limit? Gun control supporters refuse to say; they just natter on about “just this sensible control,” or “just that sensible control,” or “common sense controls” generally.

And, of course, it’s their common sense, not anyone else’s.

Concerning Elinson’s main thesis, red flag laws allow authorities to seize, ostensibly temporarily, firearms from people someone has accused of being threats.

The problem with red flag laws is that they have no protections against the flag being raised falsely because the complainer has an axe to grind; or a grudge to push; or someone is oversensitive or overreacting, vis. a grade school teacher who doesn’t want to hear little Sally talking about granddad’s pistol so the teacher denounces granddad; or….

Nor are there any mechanisms beyond pretty words for returning confiscated weapons to the owner once the false flag is identified or the legitimately raised flag’s concern satisfied.

And this: they leave no means of protection for anyone else in the household from which the weapons have been confiscated. Those members are left completely defenseless.

Those last two are consistent with (though by themselves not dispositive of) gun control advocates’ desire to disarm us.