Author: hr

OpenTwitter: A Wish List

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People who care about the free exchange of ideas — of any ideas, not merely the ideas that conform to the popular orthodoxies — are frustrated by a seeming paradox: though we are a free people living in an era of unparalleled connectivity in which the communication monopoly represented by old-fashioned media has effectively been destroyed, a small number of high-tech gatekeepers can, and sometimes do, impose their ideological restrictions on the rest of us.

Google, Facebook, Amazon, Twitter, and the various social media companies these giants own, collectively control the vast majority of public online content. They are all left-leaning technology companies that periodically suppress content they consider objectionable; that content is, more often than not, conservative. Though they each post a statement of content guidelines or community standards, the actual censorship strategies they use are opaque, and often seem arbitrary and subject to the whims of activists. In particular, conservative voices are routinely de-platformed — blocked, filtered, suspended — for seemingly trivial reasons, though high profile users are typically quickly re-instated, usually with a perfunctory apology for the “error.”

There is an obvious danger to the concentration of so much arbitrary editorial authority in the hands of a very few technology companies, particularly when they all broadly subscribe to the same left-leaning orthodoxy. Much was made of a bit of Russian “fake news” propaganda aimed at influencing the 2016 election. Any of the social media giants can, in an instant, have a greater impact on the information available leading up to an election than the Russians could ever dream of achieving.

I want a social media alternative that is effectively immune to institutional bias. It should have the following qualities.

  1. It should be free, open source, and easy for anyone to use. It should be available as web service, a PC-based application, and on mobile devices.
  2. It should be distributed, without any central data repository that would necessarily make it vulnerable to the owner of that repository. This means that it should be either a peer-to-peer system in which the information is stored in the individual computers of all of the users, or federated, meaning that an arbitrary number of servers together store the network’s contents, and anyone can add a server and become a repository.
  3. As a true platform, the system should impose no limitations on the content posted. All filtering/censoring/content restriction should be chosen by the user, and should be completely transparent to the user. Users may choose to “subscribe” to content filters created by others, but should always be able to determine what those filters restrict, and always be able to suspend or disable those filters.
  4. It should be possible to “white list” specific content providers, or collections of providers assembled by others, so that their content is never blocked. Further, it should be possible to receive notifications when content filters to which a user subscribes attempt to block that user’s white-listed providers; in general, it should be easy to discover when those you’ve trusted to filter your content are making choices with which you might not agree.
  5. Every implementation should adhere to these standards of openness, and an automated mechanism should exist to verify the compliance of any web site or application that claims to be a part of this social media system.

There are several open source social media platforms available, and a growing collection of interface standards. I don’t know how close any of them are to what I want, but I’m looking into them. Perhaps conservatives can get behind an alternative and begin to create a robust, truly open network that doesn’t suppress the discussion of ideas that challenge the left’s orthodoxy.

The Left’s Shabby Vision

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I think we conservatives sometimes feel inadequate, as if we lack the joy and enthusiasm that the left seems to bring to its various causes. It’s hard, after all, to wax rhapsodically about fiscal responsibility, deregulation, federalism, and other principles that distinguish conservative philosophy from the ever-expanding universe of leftist passions and causes. We don’t do sit-ins. We don’t chant. Conservatism is, well, conservative, and just not very exciting.

But if you scratch the surface, if you look beyond superficial enthusiasm and consider the worldviews that truly motivate left and right, you discover something interesting and, I think, counter-intuitive. You discover that it is conservatism that is optimistic, positive, enthusiastic, innovative, and forward-looking — in short, hopeful — and the left that is, overwhelmingly, motivated by a grim, desperate, fearful, and impoverished view of both humanity and our prospects.

Ever fretting about an environmental apocalypse, the left tells us how we must light and heat our homes, drive our cars, sort our trash, water our lawns. If the left had its way, every decision involving energy consumption would involve the Washington bureaucracy, and our lives would be smaller, slower, darker, colder. Conservation has it place, but that place must not be as the primary motivating principle of our lives: that is a call for stasis and an ever diminishing existence, and is the very antithesis of the progress, innovation, and increasing prosperity that has always defined our nation.

The left’s response to the expense of health care is to make health care less free, less innovative, less varied — to diminish choice and quality by imposing the same poor standard on everyone. Rather than allowing the market to drive health care in new directions, creating new treatments and new delivery systems, new price points and service levels, the left’s vision of health care is, like that in other countries with socialized medicine, of a commodity product that’s “good enough,” and needs only to be spread as cheaply as possible over as many as possible. We could guarantee care for the poorest among us while trusting the reduced regulation, the free market, and individual choice to take care of the rest. Instead, the left would prefer, once again, that an elephantine bureaucracy impose its sclerotic vision on the most innovative health care system in the world, and that everyone be forced to live with the consequences.

I don’t doubt that this approach to health care is motivated by a desire to provide health care to those who can’t afford it. The problem is that the left’s impoverished vision is of a country in which most people can’t afford health care, and in which most people never will be able to afford health care unless health care is diminished in quality and variety, reduced to the medical equivalent of a McDonald’s Dollar Menu selection.

On matters of race and identity, the left’s vision of comity and tolerance is dark: we are, by their reckoning, a nation perpetually at war with itself, dividing and sub-dividing into ever smaller and more passionately aggrieved micro-identities. No victories have been achieved, no improvements made, and every victim group remains as oppressed today as it ever was — this despite countless examples to the contrary. It is a worldview rooted in pessimism, promising nothing but anger and resentment and ever smaller factions fighting for the title of most downtrodden.

Again and again, the left’s assumption is one of failure: people will fail — fail to provide for themselves, fail to arrange their own affairs in a sensible way, fail to move ahead, fail to get along, fail to be responsible, fail to prosper. This is certainly true for some people, but it isn’t true for most people. The left’s answer is, almost without exception, to restrict: restrict choices, restrict markets, restrict freedom. Whether we’re talking about the environment, or guns, or health care, or free markets, or even free speech, the left’s perspective is one of fear, pessimism, lack of confidence in people and their ability to make choices — and, consequently, a desire to reduce those choices, and to herd the public into an ever narrower and less optimistic future.

America has always been an optimistic country. We still are, the shrill protests of the left’s angry pessimists notwithstanding. It’s time conservatives appreciated that we are the ones with the optimistic vision — that we are the true champions of progress, in that we embrace the principles and practices that have achieved the astounding real progress of the past two centuries. The left, with its tired ideas of central control and forced redistribution, with its vision of ever smaller, ever more pinched and restricted lives, is mired in a fearful past, unable to imagine the bright future most of us take for granted.

One Trigger One Finger One Man

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A recent article on the subject of Florida’s legislation authorizing teachers to carry guns in school (albeit with various restrictions and qualifications) prompted me to ponder, not for the first time, the left’s peculiar antipathy toward guns.

It’s often said that guns scare people. I suppose that must be true in some instances. Shoot, I grew up with a modest fear of spiders, something I only forced myself to overcome — through repeated and unpleasant exposure — when I had children and decided that I had to man up and deal with it. So I understand that phobias can be irrational and yet quite real and intense. But whereas I still find pictures of spiders unpleasant, I think few Americans are nonplussed by the appearance of a gun in a movie or television show. I don’t believe that there is a widespread fear of guns, in the sense we normally think of fear — not, at least, a fear sufficient to motivate the more strident anti-gun activists.

Guns don’t frighten liberals so much as they offend them.

One can argue whether it is the personal handgun or universal education that is “the great equalizer,” though chronological priority for the phrase probably goes to the latter (Horace Mann, 1848), but it is true that, purely in terms of physical security and autonomy, nothing levels the playing field like a gun in the hand of a competent user. In an era when endless lip service is paid to the idea of female empowerment, guns remain the only means by which most women can approach physical parity with most men. That would seem compelling, if women’s safety and independence were a high priority, and yet the left remains steadfastly opposed to empowering women in this critical regard.

The problem, I think, is that a gun is not merely the great equalizer, but the great individualizer. The left’s conception of equality is collective, the balancing of disparate identity groups each composed of essentially anonymous members sharing common interests and grievances. That is, after all, pretty much the definition of identitarian bigotry: the group to which you “belong” determines what you need, value, resent, and believe.

But guns are all about the individual. One individual holds the gun, aims the gun, decides whether or not to take on the awesome responsibility of actually using the gun — and, ultimately, pulls the trigger. The gun is the practical means by which one individual is given the power to make a life-or-death decision with neither the assistance nor the approval of anyone else. The gun is how a man or woman says, irrefutably, that he or she is equal and empowered without the collective — an identity group of one.

I think it is the individualism of gun ownership and use, more than anything, that keeps the left so passionately opposed to guns even in the face of compelling evidence that guns in the hands of law-abiding citizens are practical and beneficial.

(None of which explains the left’s affinity for abortion, which also grants a single individual the authority to determine the life or death of another human being without support or approval. I don’t know how to reconcile that with what I just wrote about guns: why is one kind of individualized ability-to-kill celebrated, and the other condemned?)

Happy Earth Day!

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Today is Earth Day and, as is my habit, I intend to celebrate it, as I have every year, by spending the entire day on Earth.

Other than that, it’s business as usual. I’ll continue consuming our abundant natural resources at my normal rate. My Yukon gets 16 miles per gallon on a good day, less in city driving. (I drove in town today.) I took #5 son out to lunch: we went to Five Guys and ate cow.

Locally and globally, the planet is doing well. The places that are really miserable, ecologically speaking, are generally places where collectivists (socialists and their ilk) hold sway. We’re fortunate here in America to have well-defined property rights and an economic system that produces enough surplus to allow us to do inherently dirty things in a clean, if somewhat more expensive, way. That could change: the Green New Deal, for example, would put an end to both property rights and surpluses, and give us the crippled economy of a third world country and the ecological deterioration to match. (If it’s any consolation, the GND would at least replace the Affordable Care Act as the most ironically misnamed bit of nanny-state overreach.)

Enjoy the day. Go outside and appreciate this beautiful environment that the wealth of our free-market economy affords us.

And eat a steak.

Collusion and Obstruction: Two Different Kinds of Crime

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If the President had been found guilty of Russian collusion — that is, of participating in a criminal conspiracy with the Russians to undermine our election — then it would have indicated that he is a particular kind of villain. It takes a particular kind of villain to knowingly work with our enemies to subvert the democratic process. That represents a treasonous betrayal of our country.

On the other hand, being oafish and ignorant of the nuances of executive authority in the context of a legal investigation, while it may arguably appear to meet the legal definition for a charge of obstruction of justice, need not suggest that the President is a villain. Rather, it may simply indicate that he is an amateur on matters of law and politics, and that he is accustomed to speaking his mind without considering the unique legal implications of doing so while the head of federal law enforcement.

I never thought the collusion charges made much sense, and Mueller’s finding that no collusion occurred surprises me not at all.

As to obstruction, I find it much more plausible that the President expressed his frustration at what he rightly considered a relentless and unjustified witch hunt that was undermining his administration, and that he explored various avenues for putting an end to it — but that, finally, he both allowed the investigation to continue and cooperated with it. We know that he resisted the temptation to invoke executive privilege, even when he might plausibly have done so.

I understand his frustration. I appreciate his transparency. I particularly appreciate the people who counseled him to let the investigation run its course.

I think it’s time his critics stepped back and considered the possibility that they’re trying to trap a normal person in a web of legal technicalities in an effort to undo, by hook or by crook, the result of a legitimate election that happens to have led to an outcome they find offensive.

Trump2020: A Response to One Objection

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One objection to re-electing President Trump in 2020 is that, because he exhibits so many of the personal traits which conservatives have traditionally condemned, his election by Republicans casts the latter as hypocrites and removes character as a dimension on which future Republicans can differentiate their candidates from those of the Democrats.

While I made this argument during the primaries leading up to the 2016 election, I think it is no longer relevant. Republicans have already elected Trump; failing to re-elect him will not in any way redeem Republicans. We live in a hostile, left-leaning media environment, and there is no voice on the left that will speak well of Republicans for rejecting President Trump in 2020. That would require a degree of charity the left is completely unwilling to extend.

Whatever damage to the moral standing of Republicans that the election of President Trump can do has been done, and nothing will reverse it or make it significantly worse. Those who think otherwise are crediting the left with more grace than there is any reason to believe it possesses.

I continue to believe that, on balance, the arguments in favor of re-electing President Trump remain compelling.

Why I Left Facebook

Posted on | by hr | 1 Comment on Why I Left Facebook

Four years ago a cartoon contest was held in Garland, Texas. Organizers encouraged contestants to draw political cartoons in response to a terrorist attack by Islamic supremacists on the offices of Charlie Hebdo, a Parisian newspaper, in January of 2015, in which a dozen people, including the newspaper’s publishing director Stéphane Charbonnier, were murdered.

This is the winning cartoon, drawn by a fellow named Bosch Fawstin.

On May 7, 2015, I posted the cartoon on Facebook, and added the following comment:

This was the winning drawing from the Garland, TX cartoon contest.

Bosch Fawstin, an ex-Muslim, drew the cartoon. As the cartoon suggests, and as Mr. Fawstin said, “I do it because we have been told we can’t.”

Having survived one Islamic supremacist attack, Mr. Fawstin has now gone into hiding.

* * * * *

I encourage everyone to quietly, and even politely, repost pictures of Mohammed. And I think they should do so with a note saying, in effect: “I really don’t care about Islam. I really don’t want to offend Muslims. But too many Muslims have asserted a right to tell me what I can and cannot say about Islam. That is unacceptable to me. It is part of our culture and heritage that we are free to say whatever we like about any faith, any ideology, any idea. And I am not willing to surrender that right, just to avoid offending Muslims. Or Buddhists. Or Hindus. Or Christians. Or even atheists. I am posting this picture to tell Islam that I do not consider it special, and to deny that it has any authority over me.”

Today I received a notification from Facebook. It read as follows:

An important message about your photo
Due to local legal restrictions, we limited access to your photo in Pakistan.

To which I replied, in what will be my last post on Facebook:

Facebook today has a market capitalization of just over half a trillion dollars. If they would rather censor Americans than risk offending the illiberal Islamist regime in Pakistan, then to hell with them. I’m glad I left.

The Absolute Right to Choose Your Own Pronouns

Posted on | by hr | 3 Comments on The Absolute Right to Choose Your Own Pronouns

I believe both in the right of individuals to express their personal pronoun preferences, and in the right of other individuals to ignore them. It’s the same right in each case, the right of freedom of expression. And it’s a right I hold dear.

I understand that some folks in the trans movement would like to tell other people which words they can and can’t use. I don’t approve of that, because I really do believe in freedom of expression: the same freedom that lets a guy put on a dress and say “I’m a woman” lets me chuckle and say, “yeah, no. But let’s agree to disagree.”

Live and let live. I know there are some men who like to dress up like women. There always have been. And I know there are people who are deeply confused about who and what they are. That’s too bad, but hardly new: troubled people have always been with us.

What is new, and what I can’t abide, is this insistence that I go along with their fantasy. Everywhere else we disagree in this wonderful country, we stop short of telling other people to use our words, to profess our beliefs. We let people think differently, and we tolerate their expression of their ideas, of their differences, even if we find them odd, off-putting, or offensive.

I believe that people are born either male or female and stay that way their whole lives, regardless of what they wear or what treatments they get. I think the trans movement is a silly, often destructive fad, and a way for people to avoid the stress of living up to their sex in a confused and sometimes challenging cultural climate.

But, as I said, I respect the right, if not necessarily the choices, of people to express themselves as they wish — while retaining my own right to choose the pronouns I’ll use when referring to them.

We don’t have to agree. We can just tolerate each other. I’m okay with that.

Beresheet: Condolences

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The Israeli spacecraft Beresheet ended its unsuccessful mission about three hours ago when, in the final moments of flight and barely five hundred feet from the lunar surface, it lost communication with earth and crashed on the moon. What would have been an enormous achievement for Israel and for private space exploration ended in disappointment, but nonetheless demonstrated that the era of private space travel is tantalizingly close.

Good effort, SpaceIL and Israel Aerospace Industries.

Joe Biden? String him up.

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I don’t think Joe Biden is a sexual predator. I think he’s just a guy who likes to touch people in innocent but too-familiar ways.

But old Joe has spent the last couple of weeks dragging me through the mud. He’s said that “white men” can’t be trusted to give a fair hearing to black women. He’s said that my culture is still the same sad ancient regime that countenanced the beating of women, and lamented that we — that I — haven’t done better.

Shame on me, and on all of my white, wife-beating brethren. Right, Joe?

So Joe can’t keep his hands off of little girls. Innocent or not, he’s a pandering creep who wants to throw me under the bus because of my sex and skin color. The old hypocrite deserves to be ejected, with prejudice, from the political landscape.