RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/09/china-uses-disinformation-pretext-ban-more-online-joseph-klein/

The Communist Chinese regime is moving aggressively to solidify what it calls a “civilized” Internet for its citizens. The regime’s definition of a “civilized” Internet is one that adheres to “the guiding status of Marxism in the ideological cyberspace sphere, foster a common ideology among the whole Party and the Chinese people, and interiorize core socialist values.”

China’s rulers want the Internet to serve as their tool to disseminate their propaganda about “the great achievements of [China’s Communist] party in each historical period of revolution, construction, and reform.” The regime intends to crack down on what it characterizes as “misinformation” and to refute so-called online “rumors” with the government’s official party line.

The official Xinhua News Agency reported on an online summary posted by China’s State Council of upcoming proposed regulations. “The country plans to better regulate the production, publication and distribution of online content, classify the management of online accounts and build a national mechanism to stop and prevent disinformation,” according to the Xinhua News Agency.

President Joe Biden has frequently sought to contrast “autocratic governments” like China’s with “democracies.” But at least in the area of freedom of expression on the Internet, Biden’s declared line of demarcation is rapidly disappearing.

Harvard Law Professor Jack Goldsmith co-authored an article with Andrew Keane Woods, a law professor at the University of Arizona College of Law, entitled “Internet Speech Will Never Go Back to Normal.” The article claimed that “China was largely right and the United States was largely wrong” during the last two decades when it came to the debate over whether Internet freedom or control of the network deserved greater priority.

“Significant monitoring and speech control are inevitable components of a mature and flourishing internet, and governments must play a large role in these practices to ensure that the internet is compatible with a society’s norms and values,” the law professors wrote.

The giant social media companies in the United States are already doing much the same thing as the Chinese regime in terms of censoring online speech they don’t like. The difference is that China’s government is imposing censorship directly on what is posted on social media platforms in China. In the United States, left-wing Silicon Valley plutocrats are doing the dirty work themselves, under pressure by the Biden administration and progressives in Congress to clamp down even further on what they consider to be undesirable speech.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/afghanistan-withdrawal-lost-harvard-rotc-military-training-ivy-league-elites-patriotism-11632152914?mod=opinion_lead_pos6

Postmortems on Afghanistan are still focused on failures of the U.S. military and government, but before moving on, we should explore the more fundamental causes of this debacle.

Maybe because I have spent my life in education, I have always valued the observation, attributed to the Duke of Wellington, that “the battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton.” The qualities developed in those British schoolboys produced the soldiering that defeated Napoleon’s forces. Since armies are typically made up of young people who go straight from school to the battlefield, the traits and habits necessary for winning wars must be already ingrained in those we expect to fight them. Afghanistan was lost in the halls of Harvard.

Harvard was the first college to bring the Reserve Officers’ Training Corps, or ROTC, to campus in 1916. ROTC was established by the U.S. National Defense Act, signed by President Woodrow Wilson. Its purpose, then as now, was to encourage college students to undergo military training as potential officers. Many campus plaques honor Harvard students who fought for their country, but ROTC came under attack in 1968 as part of opposition to the Vietnam War, the draft and the “military-industrial complex.” As the war became unpopular, antagonism toward the military on campus grew.

Both the draft and American involvement in Vietnam ended in 1973. One might have expected the voluntary ROTC to flourish, given that the U.S. still had plenty of enemies, some with dangerous weaponry and aims. Instead, rather than encourage outstanding students to undertake military training as part of their civic responsibility, faculty at Harvard and elsewhere took the lead in banishing ROTC from campus.

By the time I arrived at Harvard to teach in 1993, the ostensible justification for keeping ROTC off campus had shifted from objections to its educational function to rejection of the Clinton-era policy toward gay soldiers. Rather than legitimately opposing “don’t ask, don’t tell” through the political process, faculty used it as moral camouflage for their continuing war on military service.

The finer students saw through it. I fondly recall a student forum in 1999 where a self-described “gay libertarian” mocked the university’s policy, saying that the next pretext would be that recruits were not allowed freedom of speech.

But student conscience and conscientiousness were no match for opposition from the small number of faculty ideologues in the humanities and social sciences—the ones who determine a university’s political agenda because the rest of us are too indifferent or weak to stop them.

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/society/2021/09/the-left-and-the-decline-of-the-moral-community/

With the emergence of permissive liberalism in the West during the 1960s – much encouraged by the Left – immoral and then amoral conduct became more and more socially acceptable. The abandonment of moral norms in favour of more licentious behaviour is a consequence of widespread public acceptance of the degeneration of society into amorality. This could not happen without the failure of influence of the idea of a moral community of like-minded people, people who see it as their role to perpetuate standards of good conduct that are in danger of being undermined or abandoned altogether. But now, fifty years after the Swinging Sixties, we can see where this has all led. The sexual revolution contributed to the weakening of family ties, as the norm of the extended family gave way to the nuclear family, which then gave way to the single-parent family.3

And now we have the transgender movement seeking to remove from parents any right to object to their child’s manipulation by political activists advocating irreversible life-changing interventions in the name of transgender ‘rights’, promoted and carried out by physicians and counsellors whose role as therapists is deliberately put to serving political ends.4 These activists have abrogated their professional obligation to do no harm, and their ethics have been distorted and eroded such that they now accommodate the doing of irreversible harm to vulnerable children, even against the objections of the parent(s). This is a new form of amorality and barbarism, and it betrays how corrupted the public discourse on moral probity has become.

At root this all comes down to an issue of fundamental moral values, principles, conscience, and character. These are not words you hear or read much in the mainstream media these days, at least not in any meaningful sense. The same applies in education, and in public life. The rhetoric is still occasionally used, but often it rings hollow, lacking meaningful content if the words are used carelessly, as if everyone should know what they mean and so further discussion is unnecessary. 

https://dianebederman.com/medically-assisted-suicide-and-abortion-and-the-sanctity-of-life/

My friend of 50 years died on Tuesday, August 17 at 8:15 AM. It wasn’t a surprise. We were told that she had requested that her life end. Medically assisted suicide. Death with dignity.

I am not against MAID, medically assisted suicide, or abortion, but I fear the slippery slope that we saw with abortion will come to assisted suicide. Almost 7,600 Canadians received medical assistance to end their lives last year, continuing a trend of steady annual increases in cases since the procedure was legalized in 2016.

If we lived in a world where we honoured the sanctity and dignity of all life, perhaps I would not be so fearful. But we don’t live there. Too many have attacked the Judeo/Christian ethic that underpins our way of life. We live in a world that separates essential people from the non-essential in order to permit the destruction of some lives over others. That not only allowed, but commanded, that some people do not have the right to earn a living, to be with loved ones who are dying (talk about death with dignity), to celebrate life. We allowed others to dictate whose businesses will survive and whose could not. We set such restrictions that we allowed opioid overdose to reach all-time highs because too many people lost hope and faith in living. No dignity in those deaths.

We, as a society have shown how easily we will give up the rights of others to protect our own. That is not honouring the sanctity of life.