Tag Archives: rights

PRC Censorship

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…is reaching into other nations to deprecate their free speech.

Clive Hamilton, Professor of Public Ethics at Australia’s Charles Sturt University has written a book, Silent Invasion, that details the breadth of influence the People’s Republic of China has achieved within Australia.  His publisher, Allen & Unwin, has decided to “delay” release of the book because the PRC is threatening “defamation action” against the publisher.

What defamation, exactly (and how does a private citizen defame a foreign government, anyway)?  Hamilton says his book is

“very factual, very deeply researched,”…the “first comprehensive national study of Beijing’s program of exerting influence on another nation.”

He said he had documented the influence of the Chinese Communist Party on Australian political parties, universities and cultural organizations, as well as on Chinese living in Australia.

Apparently, on private enterprises, as well.

As Hamilton put it, Allen & Unwin’s decision to acquiesce to the PRC’s threats is

a watershed moment in Australia, when Beijing can suppress free speech.

Hamilton has said he’ll get another publisher, and it would seem he has another instance of PRC “influence” within Australia to describe.  Along the way, I have to wonder why, in future, any author would want to do business with so unreliable a publisher.

Frightening the Snowflakes

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It seems a Cambridge University professor had the effrontery to warn new students of a class of his—Physical Sciences—that life is hard and that it’s harder when you’re stupid.  For instance, this in an email that he sent to his incoming students:

Remember that you are NOT at any other uni, where students do drink a lot and do have what they regard as a ‘good time’—and you are NOT on a course, as some Cambridge courses sadly are, where such a behaviour pattern is possible or acceptable.

Oh, the wailing and bodice rending that resulted.

Student Minds Cambridge, a “mental health” activist group:

We are very concerned that this could be extremely damaging to the mental well-being of the students concerned, and potentially others as well.

And a Vice-Chancellor of nearby Buckingham University, Anthony Seldon (late of Cambridge):

Frightening impressionable undergraduates into believing that work alone is all-important is irresponsible, unkind and wrong-headed[.]

Wow.

On the contrary, what’s damaging to incoming university students, what stunts their mental development, what’s frightening regarding “impressionable undergraduates” is coddling them, rewarding them for their precious snowflake-ness, and thereby trapping them in a sense of victimhood, instead of confronting them with the difficulties of serious learning, the sterner difficulties of life in the real world, and teaching them how to cope—and especially that they can actually cope.

Free Speech, Left-Style. Again

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The UC Berkeley student newspaper, The Daily Californian, accused Alan Dershowitz, in black and white, of having “blood on his hands” and of being “culpable for…Israeli atrocities”—of blood libel.  The Harvard law professor emeritus wanted to respond, but

The Daily Californian “absolutely, categorically” refused to print his reply to the op-ed.

As Dershowitz put it in a Fox & Friends segment,

The Daily Cal, as many college newspapers today, are totally one-sided.  You can say whatever you want about people like me if I’m pro-Israel. I don’t get to respond.

Free speech, indeed.

A Slip of the Mask

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When President Donald Trump’s Twitter account was deleted for a few minutes last week, it looked like an isolated mistake by a customer service employee “on his last day at work,” as Twitter, Inc, representatives had it.

Maybe not.  Now, more information is coming to light about that incident.  Seconds thoughts are occurring about the likelihood of a single employee in such a position having the authority to delete an entire account.  There’s more, too.

Inside Twitter, the brief deactivation elicited celebration or amusement even in the upper ranks. Twitter Chief Executive Jack Dorsey Liked a tweet with an image of his face superimposed on celebrity painter Bob Ross standing before a canvas depicting Mr Trump’s deactivated account. “There are no mistakes, only happy little accidents!” the caption said.

And

One former employee said that deleting Mr Trump’s account was a “running joke” among employees about things they wanted to do on their last day.

And

Lara Cohen, Twitter’s former head of entertainment and talent partnerships, retweeted a post about the rogue employee that said, “Not all heroes wear capes.”

“Doing good on the way out the door,” is how another former employee described the episode.

And

A former employee involved with Twitter Moments, a product that highlights tweets curated by the platform or users, said on a number of occasions during the campaign that senior executives expressed displeasure with Moments that portrayed Mr Trump in a good light.

It’s also instructive that so many of these Twitter, Inc, responses are exposed by ex-Twitter employees, and not by current ones.

The mask has slid away momentarily, quickly reset, and the slip has exposed what free speech would be under a Left-leaning government.  And it looks a lot like the “free” speech of our colleges and universities.

YGTBSM

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Another in the annals of.

The Louisiana court system, all the way up to the State’s Supreme Court, has upheld police denial of a (black) defendant’s demand for a lawyer during a police interrogation.  At one point during the interrogation, the suspect said, quite clearly IMNSHO,

If y’all, this is how I feel, if y’all think I did it, I know that I didn’t do it so why don’t you just give me a lawyer dog ’cause this is not what’s up.

The Supreme Court said the suspect’s statement was too ambiguous to constitute a demand for a lawyer.  Justice Scott Chrichton, in concurring, actually wrote in all seriousness,

In my view, the defendant’s ambiguous and equivocal reference to a “lawyer dog” does not constitute an invocation of counsel that warrants termination of the interview….

Elie Mystal, in his article at the link, generously attributed the ruling to an inaccurate transcript—”lawyer dog” vice the defendant’s clearly stated “lawyer, dawg,” even as he, rightly, decried the blatant racism in denying the suspect his lawyer.  Over that “ambiguity.”

I’m not so inclined.  Even without the comma, “lawyer dog” is a pretty clear slang phrase identifying the object of the suspect’s call.

Dawg.