Tag Archives: rights

Xi, Lam, and Hong Kong

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Hong Kong Chief Executive Carrie Lam met in Beijing with People’s Republic of China President Xi Jinping and Premier Li Keqiang earlier this week.  Li said, in a press conference afterward,

The city’s government must continue to make efforts in stopping violence and ending chaos in accordance with the law, and restore order.

On this, I agree.  Lam must have her police stand down from provoking violence in the protests by Hong Kong’s citizens and then using that violence as pretext for shooting tear gas at the protesters, beating them, and shooting them with live ammunition.

Lam must also have her government address in a serious manner—accepting the bulk of them, if not all—the five demands of the protestors:

  • withdrawal the extradition bill [lately done; although nothing has been done to prevent its being reintroduced]
  • Lam to step down
  • inquiry into police brutality
  • release of those arrested
  • greater democratic freedom

To which I add a sixth, a responsibility of the PRC press as well as of Lam’s Hong Kong government and of Xi’s PRC government:

  • To stop characterizing the protesters’ movement as an independence movement

It’s nothing of the sort. The protestors have been at pains to emphasize that they explicitly do not desire independence from the PRC; they want only their rights restored under the one nation, two systems framework promised by the PRC government at the time of handover from Great Britain.

When Lam has her government act responsibly, there can be a just peace and prosperous economic activity in Hong Kong.

The initiative is entirely hers. And Xi’s.

Meetings and Talk

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Hong Kong Chief Executive Carrie Lam is in Beijing this week, her first meeting with her boss, People’s Republic of China President Xi Jinping, since pro-democracy parties rebuked and rejected Xi’s politicians in last month’s local Hong Kong elections.  It’s likely a Come to Jesus meeting, and Lam’s job may be on the line.

What’s truly cynical, though, is Lam’s Facebook postings.  (Use Bing Translator; it does a much better job than Facebook’s translation facility.) Deutsche Welle, at the first link above, has a sound summary of Lam’s words.

Lam stressed the importance of an open dialogue between community and officials in a post on social media platform Facebook on Saturday morning.
She said her governing team would continue to pursue “different formats of dialogue to listen to citizens sincerely” and that “our sincerity to have dialogue with citizens has not changed.”

Right.  She’ll talk and talk and talk.  She’ll listen the sincere Hell out of what Hong Kongers might say to her.

She’s already given her game away, though.

Just this week [the week of 9 Dec], Lam said a cabinet reshuffle was not an “immediate task” after the election defeat and she would focus her efforts on restoring law and order in Hong Kong.

She’s also clear that public meetings are meaningless.  This is from her weekend post:

The first “community dialogue” was enthusiastic, but as the event was held in an open format, it was important to consider whether the public who spoke would be “bottomed down” as they were last time….

Only private, secretive meetings are to be trusted by her.  Of course, it’s only in those secretive meetings that she can employ her metaphorical cudgels and lay down the…law…to those impudent citizens.

No, yap, yap, yap isn’t concrete action; it’s just Lam’s mouth talking. She has no intention of acting on Hong Kong citizen’s concerns. And neither does her boss.  They do, though, have every intention of extending mainland despotism to the city.

Foolishness

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It seems a bunch of Army and Navy cadets flashed the “OK” sign—thumb and index finger touching in a circle with the remaining fingers extended—at last weekend’s Army-Navy football game. Now

West Point and Annapolis officials are trying to determine the motives

of those cadets.

Nonsense, and it’s…sad…to see otherwise intelligent Academy officials falling for the Left’s artificial hue and cry and wasting time looking into this. They’re just throwing their cadets under the bus by taking this idiocy seriously.

Only lately has the gesture been given

a different significance for some people around 2017, according to the Anti-Defamation League, when it began to be used to signify white power.

This is nothing but a cynical effort to change the meaning of an innocent, well-meaning, gesture for deliberately divisive meaning. The OK sign has no history of any other meaning, and it has no connection to any other meaning. The distortion is dishonestly created.

No. The gesture means “OK,” and nothing else. That it might also be used in a bar room prankish game is neither here nor there.

It’s important that all of us not surrender any part of the lexicon to the manipulations and bastardizations of the Left.

It’s important to not surrender this gesture to a motley collection of snowflakes, virtue-signalers, and segregationist identity politickers.

Flash the OK sign whenever and wherever you wish to indicate approval.

Voting Rights

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On the whole, convicted felons lose their right to cast votes in our elections for the rest of their lives. Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear (D) wants to restore this right to nonviolent felons.

It’s been a truism in our American jurisprudence and our American society that when a miscreant—a felon in the present case—has paid his debt to society (nominally including a measure of “make whole” his immediate victim), he should be allowed to start over, reenter society, and try to live honorably and on his own efforts rather than continuing to be dependent on society, a dependence begun with his dependence on our prison system for his existence as well as for his punishment.

Now, some crimes want a lifetime punishment, and a few demand the criminal’s life in compensation to society and to the victim.  Most crimes, though, have punishments that society has determined to be sufficient at a smaller price than the criminal’s life or life span.  These crimes are identifiable by their finite jail terms with parole following after release or by their having been suspended on the criminal’s good behavior during the period of suspension.

Many of those short-of-life crimes are violent crimes; Beshear wants to limit his action to non-violent crimes.

In principle, I agree with that.  When a man’s debt has been paid, his bill should be so marked, including with additional detriments, like a fundamental right of citizenship—voting—also lifted.  But we need to be careful with the definition of “non-violent.”  I suggest that a con job is non-violent, or a burglary of an unoccupied building.  I suggest, though, that dealing drugs is not at all non-violent, even if no guns are used: it destroys lives.  Drug dealing has no merely temporary effects.  I suggest, further, that identity theft, for all that no guns may have been involved, is far from non-violent.  Identity theft can destroy a life as thoroughly as drugs: it takes financial resources necessary for the victim’s present life and his future life.

Again, I agree, in principle, with the concept of restoring a citizen’s right to vote to a felon whose crime was non-violent and who has completed his sentence in every respect, including restitution.  But we need to know the details of Beshear’s specific proposal before we can agree that he’s on the right track.

Gimme, Gimme, Gimme

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That’s what French unions are demanding with their strikes against French President Emmanuel Macron’s and French Prime Minister Édouard Philippe’s plans to streamline, standardize, and otherwise reduce the cost to French taxpayers of France’s byzantine pension system.

Never mind that the pension system consists of 42 different pension plans or that French civil servants insist that they are, somehow, special and so should have special perquisites unavailable to petty private sector workers.

Trains, subways, and buses were still severely curtailed on Friday, and hundreds of domestic and regional flights were canceled. There were no demonstrations on Friday, but unions have warned the strike could last days and become one of the biggest in France in over two decades.

And

Civil servants, in particular, fear they may lose advantages they have over private-sector employees.

To hell with their fellow citizens attempting to get to and from their own work, to and from their own necessary errands, to and from their own entertainments.  The unions want theirs, and no one else matters.

All the government wants to do is to

extend the number of years needed to collect a full pension and create a universal plan that would do away with the so-called special regimes enjoyed by French civil servants, including rail workers.

Currently, full retirement occurs after 43 years of work or age 62; the latter being the youngest full-retirement age in the OECD.

“Screw you,” say the unions, exemplified by Catherine Perret, Confederal Secretary of the CGT trade union:

We won’t let go[.]

This is the naked, if strictly legal, extortion of union strikes made national.  The US has Taft-Hartley, in which the government can order the end to a strike for a significant period during which serious negotiations could occur.  France, not so much; its unions are amok.