Tag Archives: rights

Occupation by Remote Control

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Details of the People’s Republic of China’s overt takeover of Hong Kong via its new “security” law have been released by the government organ Xinhua News Agency. The high points, summarized by OANN, are these:

  • Hong Kong must establish a “local” national security council to enforce legislation, headed by the city’s Chief Executive, Carrie Lam
    • to be supervised and guided by a new PRC commission specially created for the purpose
    • a PRC “adviser” will be a member of the council
  • New local police and prosecution units to be set up to investigate, enforce the new law
    • backed by PRC security and intelligence officers deployed to the new commission
  • Lam will have power to appoint judges to hear cases related to national security
    • bypasses existing judicial appointment procedures

Notice the supremacy of the PRC law over Hong Kong domestic law.

Notice, too, that those entities each have a Communist Party of China apparatchik embedded.

Misapprehensions

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Here is one. In an editorial in Friday’s Wall Street Journal concerning the ripened crop of charges brought by Fulton County District Attorney Paul Howard Jr against a cop in the Rayshard Brooks shooting, the Editorial Board hazarded this bit:

Yet amid protests and riots over police brutality—arsonists burned down the Wendy’s where the Brooks shooting took place—prosecutors are under pressure to pursue maximum charges against officers.

No. Prosecutors aren’t under any pressure at all beyond what they inflict on themselves in their fetid timidity. The howling mob cannot threaten their jobs. Only their bosses can and then only through specified procedure—which in the Georgia county prosecutor’s case is the next election—and his bosses haven’t spoken yet.

Even at that, though, if this prosecutor feels pressure now from his bosses, it’s only because he favors his job over his honor.

Howard’s surrender to any (self-inflicted) “pressure” simply amplifies the…foolishness…of his stampede to virtue signal; it simply increases the risk to confidence in the legal system should Rolfe be acquitted on the overcharged, hastily done batch.

In the event, Rolfe’s legal team should push hard for his Constitutional right to a speedy and public trial, since of course Howard is ready to go to trial, else he would not have filed the charges.

Manipulated Media

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It seems that Carpe Donktum, a President Donald Trump supporter, put together a satirical video.

The video…begins with dramatic music showing a black toddler running away from a white toddler with a “breaking news” graphic that reads “Terrified toddler runs away from racist baby” with the CNN logo next to it. That headline then changed to “Racist baby probably a Trump supporter.”
Then, a graphic that shows “what actually happened” shows the two toddlers running towards each other and hugging with excitement to the tune the “Close to You” cover by Harry Connick Jr.
“America is not the problem… fake news is,” the video tells viewers. “If you see something, say something. Only you can prevent fake news dumpster fires.”

Never mind that

The footage came from a viral Facebook video shared in 2019 featuring real-life New York pals Maxwell and Finnegan, who were 26 and 27 months old respectively at the time.

Never mind that Jack Dorsey and his censoring Twitter twitterers know this full well.

Never mind that anyone with two neurons to bump together into a ganglion could recognize the video as satire. However, @Jack and his Twitter censors insist on insulting tens of millions of Americans by slapping their “Manipulated Media” flag on it after Trump pinned it in his Twitter feed.

Satire isn’t manipulated media. @jack, with his decision to censor a satirical posting, is manipulating media.

Some Speech Rights are More Equal than Others

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A college newspaper, following in the footsteps of the tabloid New York Times, has fired a columnist for not complying with the paper’s, or its University’s, thoughtcrime avoidance requirements.

Syracuse University student Adrianna San Marco was fired from her gig as a columnist at a local paper, The Daily Orange, when she dismissed the notion of “institutional racism” in an opinion piece for a separate, conservative website.

And she wasn’t even writing for the ex-employing paper; her piece was published by LifeZette. Here’s Daily Orange Editor-in-Chief Casey Darnell:

We aren’t afraid of controversial views, but we have a responsibility to avoid promoting harmful ones. We don’t censor conservative columnists[.]

Not afraid? Yet he and his organization censored speech. If he doesn’t understand that, his journalism professors have failed him badly. If he doesn’t understand that suppressing speech is precisely the promotion of harm then Syracuse has failed him badly. His parents should demand their money back.

Syracuse University did not respond to a request for comment.

Of course not.

Free Speech for Me

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…but not for thee.

‘Course, we’re all perfectly free to speak approved messages. This is demonstrated by Facebook’s overt, deliberate censorship of a political ad. Days after Mark Zuckerberg so piously said his company would not censor political ads (even though he considered all other speech of which he disapproved freely censorable), he had his Facebook pull a Trump campaign ad because he didn’t like what it said.

The ad in alleged question was a call-out of the dangers of far-left radical organizations, including antifa. The ad used one of antifa’s several symbols as part of the call-out, but Zuckerberg decided that even using the symbol to symbolize hate groups was too “triggering.”

Not only is Zuckerberg committing censorship—and illustrating one of the points of the campaign ad—he’s insulting ordinary Americans, insisting we’re all too stupid to evaluate speech on our own: we have to be instructed by our Leftist betters.

A carefully anonymous Facebook spokesman had this:

We removed these posts and ads for violating our policy against organized hate…. Our policy prohibits using a banned hate group’s symbol to identify political prisoners without the context that condemns or discusses the symbol.

The only hate in this incident is Zuckerberg’s and his Facebook’s organized contempt for Americans, claiming as this Anonymous One does, that ordinary Americans are too stupid to understand the plain context of a political ad taken in its entirety.