Tag Archives: free speech

More on Free Speech

Posted on by
Reply

Here’s another example of Progressive-Democrats and Party’s Presidential candidates objecting to free speech.

Senator [and Progressive-Democratic Party Presidential candidate] Kamala Harris said on Monday night that President Trump should have his Twitter account suspended over his tweets about the whistleblower whose complaint has helped launch an official House inquiry into his potential impeachment.

Trump’s terrible crime here? He expressed his desire to meet his accuser, a right all Americans have when accused of wrong-doing.

She went on, paraphrased by Fox News:

Harris said Trump’s latest tweets, in which he called the whistleblower “close to a spy,” is evidence that he is “irresponsible with his words in a way that could result in harm to other people.”
“The privilege of using those words in that way should probably be taken from him,” she added.

Of course, no harm can result “to other people” from such remarks.  Except in the fetid imaginations of the Left.

A President talking directly to ordinary Americans, bypassing the NLMSM Gateway and Party-approved mechanisms—how terrible.

Free Speech

Posted on by
Reply

We’re beginning to see more of the value system that the most progressive candidate of them all, Progressive-Democratic Party Presidential candidate and ex-Vice President Joe Biden, wants to impose on all of us.  His campaign team, led by Anita Dunn (one of ex-President Barack Obama’s early White House Communications Directors) and Kate Bedingfield (Biden’s 2015 Communications Director) of Biden for President, have written to

executives and top political anchors at ABC, CBS, CNN, Fox News, and NBC, including star interviewers like Jake Tapper, Chuck Todd, and Chris Wallace

to demand all of them cut Rudy Giuliani out of his ability to speak to us ordinary Americans via those widely disseminated and watched programs.

We are writing today with grave concern that you continue to book Rudy Giuliani on your air to spread false, debunked conspiracy theories on behalf of Donald Trump.
Giving Rudy Giuliani valuable time on your air to push these lies in the first place is a disservice to your audience and a disservice to journalism

This is as clear an expression of the contempt in which members of the Progressive-Democratic Party hold us ordinary Americans.  Plainly, they think us just too grindingly stupid to decide for ourselves what we’ll listen to or how to think about what we hear, including whether Giuliani’s comments really are false, debunked conspiracy theories.  Or whether it might be Biden, et al., who are distorting the facts.  Biden, with this letter that The New York Times go hold of, has made that contempt explicit.  Again.

Much worse, though, is that this is a demonstration of the overall nature of free speech that the Biden the Presidential candidate is pushing.  Think about the breadth and depth of his assault on our freedom of speech that a Biden administration would inflict on our nation.

NYT provided these images of the Biden team’s letter.

In Which Alphabet may be Getting One Thing Right

Posted on by
1

Alphabet’s Google subsidiary is developing a new Internet protocol, and competitors are worried that the protocol would mak[e] it harder for others to access consumer data. Some thoughts on that below.  Congress is concerned, too, and its “antitrust investigators” are looking into the matter.

The new standard modernizes a fundamental building block of the internet known as the domain name system, or DNS. This software takes a user’s electronic request for a website name such as wsj.com and, much like a telephone book, provides the series of internet protocol address numbers used by computers [to provide user access the website].
Google and another browser maker, Mozilla Corp, want to encrypt DNS. Doing so could help prevent hackers from spoofing or snooping on the websites that users visit, for example. Such a move could complicate government agencies’ efforts to spy on Internet traffic. But it could prevent service providers who don’t support the new standard from observing user behavior in gathering data.

Alphabet, via Google, also runs its own DNS service, Google Public DNS, which lends credence to monopoly abuse concerns.  Alphabet also pointed out, in its proposal, that the new standard would

improve users’ security and privacy and that its browser changes will leave consumers in charge of who shares their Internet surfing data.

My thoughts are these:

  • There’s nothing wrong with Alphabet developing any new Internet nav protocol, including this one. I’d expect them to be required to license it, though, much like chip makers are required to license their tech.
  • There’s nothing wrong with alter[ing] the internet’s competitive landscape as the article put some of the concerns. Product and tech development and innovation always alter the existing competitive landscape. That’s to the good.
  • They [cable and wireless providers] fear being shut out from much of user data.… That’s a bit of too bad. They’re not the providers’ data; they belong to the user. It’s exclusively (or should be) the user’s call whether to share his data with any provider or other vendor.

And this:

Mozilla…will move most consumers—but not corporate users who use providers such as Akamai—to the new standard automatically, even if the change involves switching their DNS service providers.

Users better be able to override that switch. Otherwise, this may resume the browser wars between Mozilla/Netscape and Microsoft.  To Alphabet’s credit, if they can be believed, its Google subordinate has no plans to ape Mozilla and compel a change in DNS providers.

Given licensing, the only real concern is this:

[T]he new system could harm security by bypassing parental controls and filters that have been developed under the current, unencrypted system.

That’s fairly straightforward to restore, though.

Alphabet Censorship

Posted on by
Reply

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.

“Freedom” in Hong Kong

Posted on by
Reply

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.