Tag Archives: rights

A Misunderstanding

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…and why a Labour Party government would be a disaster for Great Britain (and not just because of Jeremy Corbyn’s blatant socialism bent).  In a Deutsche Welle piece about Boris Johnson’s move to replace Theresa May as party head (and presumably as Prime Minister, at least until the next general election), the news outlet quoted Labour Brexit Secretary Keir Starmer:

The debate on Brexit in the Tory leadership contest…[n]one of the likely candidates for the top job has a credible plan for how to break the deadlock before the end of October.

Therein lies Labour’s lack of understanding of the situation. The deadlock is Brussels’ manufacture, not Great Britain’s, and certainly not that of their combined effort. It’s on Brussels to offer solutions to its deadlock.

The clearer understanding is illustrated by Johnson.  He’s

not aiming for a no-deal outcome but it is only responsible to prepare vigorously and seriously for no-deal. Indeed, it is astonishing that anyone could suggest dispensing with that vital tool in the negotiation.

Great Britain needs to leave the EU with no further delay.  Delay only increases uncertainty, and uncertainty damages the British economy and harms the British people and their enterprises who must operate within it.  A smoothly done departure would be optimal, but given what the EU has on offer, a no-deal departure is better.

Keep in mind: for all the argument over border control and immigration and the force of European Union regulations within Great Britain, what’s at the core is that the Brits voted for their own economy and their sovereignty, not the continent’s.

Flip Flops

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The Wall Street Journal concerned itself with Progressive-Democratic Party Presidential candidate Joe Biden’s flip flop surrender on the question of abortion rights and the Hyde Amendment.  I have some thoughts on that.

Joe Biden’s best claim to the Democratic presidential nomination is that he’s a moderate liberal who can pull centrist votes from Donald Trump.

?? Biden himself has never made this claim during the present campaign. He led off his campaign by saying he was the most Progressive of all his fellow candidates.

That’s a non sequitur [the premise abortion rights are dependent on zip code]. The existence of a right doesn’t assume the government’s obligation to pay for it.

The second is WSJ‘s own non sequitur. Government doesn’t pay for anything; us taxpayers do. Government only brokers the deal. However, the WSJ‘s sentiment is on track, sort of: we taxpayers aren’t obligated to pay for anyone’s abortion, either.

Biden’s about-face…underscores how far left the Democratic Party’s activist base has moved.

This raises the more important and more general question. As the Progressive-Democrat candidates race each other to the far left to pander to the Progressive-Democratic Party’s base, what will the winner do in the general election?

Will that candidate betray the Party’s base in an effort to appeal to the center and to Independents, or will he betray the center and those Independents in order to stay with Party base?  In either event, how can he be believed by any voter?

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.

“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.