Tag Archives: rights

Of Course They Can

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President Xi Jinping of the People’s Republic of China increased pressure on the Republic of China to surrender and be “unified” with the PRC.

Mr Xi said differences in political systems can’t be used as an excuse to resist unification.

Of course they can. Those differences are what makes the two nations separate from each other.  Never mind that the two have been independent of each other ever since the mainland under Mao Tse-tung won then-China’s civil war and drove the Kuomintang off the mainland onto the island of Taiwan, with Mao then creating the PRC.  The reason for the civil war was precisely those differences, differences over which the Communists were willing to kill those who opposed them.

Xi went on.

He promised Taiwanese people a peaceful and prosperous future with the mainland….

Right.  Just ask the folks on Hong Kong, who were the victims of the same promise and who now see their freedoms eroded and in many cases outright eliminated.  They’re not even allowed to elect their own political leaders; they must choose from a list the Communist Party of China provides them.

Xi’s word is worthless, and the citizens of the RoC, along with their government, know that full well.  RoC President Tsai Ing-wen: Xi’s

framework would place the island under China’s rule with limited autonomy, as has been done in Hong Kong.
…
“Taiwan will never accept ‘one country, two systems,'” Ms Tsai said. “The vast majority of Taiwanese public opinion also firmly opposes ‘one country, two systems.'”
…
“China must face the reality of the existence of the Republic of China, Taiwan,” she said…. She said [that] Beijing must “not reject the democratic system that the Taiwanese people have built.”

We need to stand loudly, overtly, and practically with the RoC.  We need to increase naval patrols of the Taiwan Strait, set up a naval basing right agreement for Kaohsiung City along with an Air Force basing agreement for Ching Chuan Kang and Tainan Air Bases.  We need to increase sales of modern air and naval weapons systems to the RoC.  We need to increase our trade ties with the nation, and we need to more actively support it diplomatically.

That’s just a start.

Facebook’s Secret Rule Book

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Facebook has written a massive, byzantine, and secret document of rules packed with spreadsheets and power point slides to help it censor the news posted tackle misinformation posted to its facility.

Even the New York Times gets it, at least to an extent.

The closely held rules are extensive, and they make the company a far more powerful arbiter of global speech than has been publicly recognized or acknowledged by the company itself[.]

It’s also internally inconsistent.

The [NYT] discovered a range of gaps, biases and outright errors—including instances where Facebook allowed extremism to spread in some counties while censoring mainstream speech in others.

Are these deliberate?  It’s hard to believe the smartest kids, Mark Zuckerberg, Sheryl Sandberg, their management team, wouldn’t be doing this deliberately.  But it’s also hard to discern the logic of their inconsistencies in their rulebook, too.

Inconsistencies like

outsource[ing …] content moderation to other companies that tend to hire unskilled workers…. The 7,500-plus moderators “have mere seconds to recall countless rules and apply them to the hundreds of posts that dash across their screens each day. When is a reference to ‘jihad,’ for example, forbidden? When is a ‘crying laughter’ emoji a warning sign?”

Sara Su, a senior engineer on Facebook’s News Feed:

It’s not our place to correct people’s speech, but we do want to enforce our community standards on our platform. When you’re in our community, we want to make sure that we’re balancing freedom of expression and safety.

Facebook’s definition of “balance.”  Facebook’s definition of “freedom of expression.”  Facebook’s definition of “safety.”  And so Facebook, appropriately, does not try to correct speech.  Instead, it openly bans speech of which it—Zuckerberg and Sandberg—personally disapprove.  And so it bars some individuals altogether, it blocks some Presidential tweets, it blocks administration immigration advertisements.

An this, from Monika Bickert, Facebook’s global policy management honcho:

We have billions of posts every day, we’re identifying more and more potential violations using our technical systems.  At that scale, even if you’re 99% accurate, you’re going to have a lot of mistakes.

This is utterly disingenuous; it shows that Facebook isn’t even trying.  Not in a world where car makers and other manufacturers have, for years, demanded and achieved six-sigma accuracy.  Can’t reach six-sigma accuracy in speech censorship?  Not yet, perhaps.  But a serious effort would achieve better than 99%.  Or–work with me on this; it’s a concept still under development–maybe Facebook should stop censoring altogether.

Or: Facebook already is achieving that greater accuracy—it does, after all, succeed in censoring speech from the right side of center.  It hides its evident bias, though, behind an internally inconsistent, multi-thousand-page rule book.  Maybe that’s the logic to the inconsistencies.

And maybe that’s why they wanted to keep their rulebook secret.

Child Molestation and Bankruptcy Escapes

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Ironically, it’s the Catholic Church that has invented this ruse.

The Archdiocese of Portland was the first to do it. Three months later the Roman Catholic Diocese in Tucson, AZ, followed suit and three months after that the diocese in Spokane, WA, did it, too.
They all filed for bankruptcy and since then more than 15 other Catholic dioceses and religious orders have filed for bankruptcy to seek protection from lawsuits by sexual-assault victims, resulting in about 4,000 claims seeking compensation for past wrongdoing. This year, three more Catholic dioceses announced intentions to file.

Escaping debt—escaping court ordered financial penalties for the Church’s abuse of children and women—through bankruptcy.

But, of course. The outcome of this ruse is

[T]he legal strategy uses the law that protects companies from creditors to help preserve its mission and shield assets from claims made by victims of sexual abuse. Filing for chapter 11 freezes lawsuits and provides breathing room to work out a plan to compensate abuse victims.

Never mind that there already are plans for compensating the children and women: the courts’ judgments and assigned penalties from those cynically frozen suits.  There’s nothing to work out.  Aside from that, I’m not sure that a mission that includes condoning officials’ abuse of the most helpless of their flock is a mission worth preserving.  Condoning? See the Pope’s response to attempts to punish priests who are found abusive. See his attempts to absolve higher officials—bishops and cardinals—of their responsibility for the abuses.

And the strategy is spreading.  USA Gymnastics and the Boy Scouts of America are both in or looking to bankruptcy as a way to escape judgment.  Condoning?  See USAG’s—and USOC’s, come to that—covering up of a doctor/trainer’s decades long abuse.

This stinks.

I’m not much enamored of Federal laws, but we need one here: bankruptcy must be legally barred as a means of avoiding financial responsibility for this sort of abuse.  We even have a precedent: college students can’t duck their student debt through bankruptcy, albeit that bar is newly in flux.

Churches (not just Catholic), and any other organizations whose leadership teams or individuals are found culpable of child abuse or sexual abuse of women, cannot be allowed to run away from their fiscal responsibility (criminal courts work the crimes here, already; although I’d certainly like to see the employing institution punished, also).  No debt “reorganization” through bankruptcy should be allowed.  Pay the judgment in full or cease to exist.  With one exception: the guilty ones must be permanently barred from taking any role other than parishioner or line employee in any religious institution, regardless of religion, or in any company in the originating industry.  If the bankruptcy court is empowered to require that, then any fiscal penalties could legitimately undergo some adjustment once publicly available proof has been provided that all the named individuals—and all of the individuals responsible must be named—have been so barred.

Sadly, this bar will have to be done civilly, since the Church, of which the Catholic Church and USAG have shown themselves the canonical examples for all institutions—have chosen not to.

Foolish Misunderstanding

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CNN‘s Fareed Zakaria is dismayed with our Constitution and the concept of a republican democracy.

[T]he Constitutional concept of equal representation in the U.S. Senate [is] a “structural problem.”

And

…”new dividing line in Western politics,” which [Zakaria] describes is the “less-educated rural populations” he calls “Outsiders” who “feel ignored or looked down upon” and “feel deep resentment towards metropolitan elites.”

And

…30% of America is now electing 70% of the Senate.  All those states with—you think of Wyoming. It has roughly a million people. It has two senators. California with 70 million people has two senators as well. So we have a kind of structural problem here where the land is being overrepresented. The people are being underrepresented. So both sides feel deeply wronged.

However.

That alleged imbalance is a designed-in feature, not a problem; it’s what makes us a republican democracy of some durability, not a popular democracy doomed to the failure of tyranny at the hands of a few—Zakaria’s metro elites, for instance.

The need to balance the large- and small-population States in one house of our Congress is just as important today as it was those 230 years ago.  For the same reason and for another: the political divide between the populous coastal States and less populous flyover country—illustrated by that very term of the Left’s and by Zakaria’s plain contempt for the less-educated (as we must be, because rural)—is even deeper than the political divide between the populous and rural States of those original thirteen.

Wyoming needs to be able to defend itself from an overweening California.

It’s sad that Zakaria slept through his 8th grade civics class.

Faith in the PRC

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The People’s Republic of China is broadening the reach of its religion.

Officials have threatened to close the Early Rain Covenant Church in the central city of Chengdu by the end of the year in keeping with new religious-management regulations, according to several congregants who said they had been waiting for the net to fall. In coordinated raids starting Sunday night, police detained Pastor Wang Yi and more than 100 of the church’s 500 members, said Li Yingqiang, a church leader.

Wang and his congregants have committed no felonies that anyone outside of the PRC would recognize.  He has, though, objected to the intrusiveness of President Xi Jinping and his Party and government, though, and he’s done so often from the pulpit.

That’s blasphemous: the One True Religion in the PRC is that of the Chinese Communist Party.

Just ask the Muslim Uighers, the Falun Gong, Yellow Hat Buddhists (and all other Buddhists), and the Christians.