Tag Archives: rights

International Censorship

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France wants to enforce a “right to be forgotten” law (recently enacted by the EU that allows persons to demand publicly available information about them to be erased from links in search engine results) inside other nations than the EU membership—inside the United States, for instance.  Google, et al., is demurring, and France has taken the matter to the EU’s highest administrative court, the Court of Justice.

The case will help determine how far EU regulators can go in enforcing the bloc’s strict new privacy law….

It has wider implications than that. It will set a legal precedent, explicitly for the EU to reach inside the United States and censor our Internet, and that won’t be limited to EU privacy sensibilities, or EU views on censorship.

It’s broader, still. It will set a precedent for the PRC, which can intercept messaging images and erase them from the message before the intended recipient gets the message, to be exercised inside the US.

The Court of Justice ruling—likely to be in favor of France—will need to be explicitly rejected by us, with strong cyber consequences taken against the EU on its every attempt to enforce this first step at rank censorship against us.

Free Elections

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The Progressive-Democratic Party version is playing out in California.  The good citizens of the state senatorial district straddling Orange, San Bernardino, and Los Angeles counties want to recall state Senator Josh Newman (D), who voted for a 12/gal gasoline tax increase.  A successful recall also would jeopardize the Progressive-Democrats’ supermajority in each house of California’s legislature, and so the one-party rule that’s currently devastating the state but accruing political power to those Progressive-Democrat incumbents.

Can’t have that.

This is where free elections, Progressive-Democrat style, comes in.

Turnout in special elections typically drops more for Democrats than Republicans. So Democrats last month passed legislation adding procedural hurdles that would delay the recall election from this fall to next June’s midterm primary, when liberal turnout is expected to be higher.

And

Democrats are also imploring the state’s Fair Political Practices Commission to upend a campaign-finance law that voters approved in 2000.
…
Yet Democrats now say legislators should be allowed to donate unlimited sums to their colleagues.

That would allow Progressive-Democrats in the state’s “safe” districts to pour money into Newsom’s defense.  Can you hear the screams from the Left that decried so piteously the Supreme Court’s Citizens United ruling?  I’m having trouble making them out.

Yeah, this will be a fair and free recall election, all right.

Charlie Gard and the British Government

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Or, Charlie Gard and sovereignty.

Charlie Gard is the baby with a rare genetic disease that has damaged his brain, probably fatally and soon.  The baby’s parents want to be able to try alternative treatments, or in the alternative, be allowed to bring him home to die there with his parents who love him rather than encumbered by the state’s bureaucrats and representatives, his parents also by-the-way present, in an emptily sterile hospital room.

The British government has chosen to not allow any of this: the baby must die in the hospital.  The EU’s Court of Human Rights, in a breathtaking repudiation of its mission, has sided with the British government.  Understand: that the Brit government and the EU in their ruling have sided with the hospital in which Charlie is being held is neither here nor there.  Both the Brit government and the EU Court could have sided with the baby’s parents, and each chose not to.

Which, as The Wall Street Journal put it in their op-ed at the link, raises a question:

Whose baby is Charlie, anyway—his parents’ or the state’s? In this delicate case, Britain’s national care system has elevated technical expertise over parental love.

In this, the WSJ has misunderstood.  It’s the Brit government that has decided, not the bureaucrats of the NHS.  It is the government of the home of 1984 that has claimed this baby, poor Charlie Gard, as its ward.

With the British government’s ruling, it has made parents irrelevant and claimed all children to be wards of the state.  By extension, the British government has made all citizens of Great Britain, raised from early childhood as wards of the state, themselves wards of the state.

The citizens of Great Britain are not sovereign in their own nation.  Only Government is sovereign.

“Pre-Crime”

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Another word for Government’s prior restraint of private citizens, a word used by Holman Jenkins in his Friday op-ed to disguise this assault on our freedoms.

Let’s face it, with big data, with impersonal algorithms that could track every earthly resident’s web activity, travels, purchases and electronic interactions with the world, it might be quite possible to know whose life and personality are disintegrating, who might seek to resolve the impasse by going on murder binge.

Jenkins saw this favorably as the basis of a “pre-crime” era of law enforcement, however pessimistically he also saw it as coming to pass anytime soon.  I see that unlikelihood less sanguinely, but to the extent it’s slow to come or doesn’t come at all, that’s a good thing.

Then Jenkins closed his piece with this:

The more the average citizen can understand and recognize the pattern, the more such incidents likely will be avoided without us even knowing it.

Indeed, and yet Jenkins completely ignored the implication of this. We don’t need Big Brother looking over our shoulder everywhere we are, in the real world or the virtual world of social interactions, nor do we need a Hoover-esque FBI peering in through our windows, real or virtual, nor can we support any other excuse for Government extend its regulation of our lives through this new version of prior restraint.

What we need is a return to a sense of community, where private citizens look out for each other at the local level. Local problems dealt with locally are much less likely to become national problems. And even those don’t require the assault on liberty that is prior restraint, which can only be done from politicians’ definitions of alleged need for the prior.

The Supreme Court is Considering the Limits of Partisan Gerrymandering

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The case stems from a Wisconsin state districting case

where a three-judge lower court last year invalidated a redistricting plan enacted by the Republican-controlled Wisconsin legislature in 2011.

That court insisted that, following the 2010 census, the Republican State legislature redrew its legislative districts to favor Republicans and disfavor Democrats.

Election results since then have shown the redistricting had its intended effect, with the GOP winning a larger majority in the state assembly, even as the statewide tally of votes was nearly even between Republicans and Democrats, the lower court said.

This smacks entirely too much of disparate impact sewage.  The ruling would be legitimately reversed on that ground alone.  That one party won a collection of close-run elections proves nothing.  Close-run means no more than that the two parties were evenly matched.  Apparently, an even election is too partisan, not favoring Democrats sufficiently, to suit the court.

The Supremes and lower courts have long held, though, that

gerrymandering that discriminates against minority voters [is] unconstitutional….

There aren’t any minority voters, only American citizen voters, though. Not any more.  As a Chief Justice John Roberts said only a few years ago in Parents Involved in Community Schools v Seattle School District No.1, the way to end discrimination is to stop discriminating.  Mandating districts explicitly to benefit minorities is exactly that cynical discrimination.

Woodrow Wilson once said about segregation that blacks should be grateful for the protection it affords them.  Is that really what today’s Progressive-Liberals, including the Liberal Justices on the Supreme Court, want?  We should return to that despicable era of racial racist discrimination?

Regardless of any of the foregoing, the question is easily enough settled, if there’s enough collective courage to do so.  I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: draw equal-sized district squares, regardless of demographics, deviating from the square shape only at State borders and only along the side that is the border.