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Daily Archives: July 13, 2023
Dragging Business Leaders to Congress Is Not a Solution to … – Reason
Posted: July 13, 2023 at 4:53 am
American public figures and corporations are increasingly self-censoring to please the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). One conservative advocate wants Congress to fight back by dragging business leaders and others to Washington, D.C., for public hearings.
But China's government bullying can't be fixed by U.S. government bullying.
Fearing loss of access to the Chinese market, companies routinely avoid speech that may anger the CCP. For example, an investigative report from the free speech group PEN America revealed that Hollywood studios write and produce with CCP guidelines in mind in hopes of retaining access to its $2.46 billion box-office market.
From 2016 to 2021, the Swedish National China Centre compiled data on foreign businesses in China from English and Chinese language news sites, company statements, and social media posts and found that Chinese consumers routinely boycott companies that contradict CCP doctrine. More than 80 percent of the companies that consumers boycotted for violating Chinese territorial claims, such as sovereignty over Taiwan, Tibet, and Hong Kong, issued apologies in response.
Actors, sports officials, and other public figures also regularly apologize to China and self-censor when they offend the CCP. In 2019, Houston Rockets general manager Daryl Morey tweeted his support for Hong Kong protesters, costing the NBA hundreds of millions of dollars in deals and leading Chinese broadcasters to cancel broadcasts. The league described the comment as "regrettable" and LeBron James said Morey "wasn't educated on the situation," while Morey apologized for "offending or misunderstanding" Chinese fans. In 2021, actor John Cena apologized for calling Taiwan a country on social media while filming Fast & Furious 9. That same year, JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon apologized after joking that his company would outlast the CCP, stating that "it's never right to joke" about another country.
The consistent self-censorship U.S. companies and public figures engage in to appease an authoritarian regime led Oren Cass, founder and executive director of the conservative think tank American Compass, to argue that Congress should intervene. Cass sees China's economic influence as undermining the American tradition of free speech.
"The pursuit of profit often calls for kowtowing to the CCP. As a result, American movie studios and sports leagues self-censor in keeping with the CCP's preferencesand American business leaders fall over themselves apologizing for any possible slight," Cass writes in a recent policy paper, A Hard Break from China. "Americans are mostly oblivious to the reality that they are seeing only what the CCP will allow, except when the occasional misstep by a star or executive leads to groveling."
One solution to "re-normalize free speech," Cass argues, is to "raise the reputational stakes by creating a high-profile forum that embarrasses people who toe the CCP line." Enter the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party.
Cass' proposal seeks to transform the committee into a platform where those who are honest "earn widespread praise" and those who stay silent or lie would face "higher reputational costs." Business leaders would be asked or subpoenaed to testify under oath about their experiences with the CCP and what they really think about China.
"We're going to have a Hollywood hearing. We're going to have a sports hearing. We're going to have a finance hearing. And we're going to kind of move our way consistently through different sectors," Cass tells Reason,arguing that the prospect of public humiliation would encourage executives to stop self-censoring.
"The only peril you're in is if you have really dumb and indefensible ideas, which is exactly how a democracy is supposed to work," Cass says. "It's not like some kind of witch hunt project to try to embarrass people. It's, in a sense, quite the opposite. All you have to do to have a triumphant appearance is show up and say what you think."
Other critics of China's influence strongly disagree. Having a House committee question business leaders "is not a good step," Angeli Datt, PEN America's China research and advocacy lead, tells Reason. "We can't counter Chinese government censorship or restrictions on free expression by restricting free expression. We have to show that within a democracy and within the confines and principles that we believe indemocratic norms and free expressionthat there's ways to put pressure and expose and ultimately shame companies into not making censorship decisions."
Cass, who sees his proposal as a counterbalance to the CCP's censorship pressures, denies that the committee would have its own chilling effect on international business relations. "What's coercive about the subpoena?" Cass says. "The only thing you're being asked to do is, again, say what you actually think."
The House Select Committee on the CCP, formed in January and chaired by Rep. Mike Gallagher (RWis.), has not summoned any business leaders or celebrities to speak about Chinese censorship. However, when asked at a U.S. Chamber of Commerce conference in May if the committee would seek testimony from business executives, Gallagher said "Companies should be prepared to defend their investment strategy in China, their manufacturing presence in China," according to The Wall Street Journal. "My goal is not to have some sort of bomb-throwing viral moment," he added.
The committee follows several legislative efforts to curb CCP-induced censorship. In 2019 and again in 2021, a bipartisan group of senators introduced a bill that would have set up the China Censorship Monitor and Action Group, an interagency task force dedicated to reporting on CCP-related free expression concerns. In May 2020, Sen. Ted Cruz (RTexas) introduced the SCRIPT Act which would block federal agencies from assisting productions that alter content for CCP censors. In February 2022, Rep. Mark Green (RTenn.) introduced the SCREEN Act, which would have a similar effect.
Their proposals touch on an underlying irony of American concerns about Chinese soft power. As PEN America noted in its report, "The Hollywood-Pentagon relationship" affords Hollywood studios "conditional access to military facilities and experts" for films that the government "believes will reflect well on the country's armed forces." The report rightly notes, however, that "this governmental influence does not bring to bear a heavy-handed system of institutionalized censorship, as Beijing's does."
Cass and Gallagher aren't alone in wanting business leaders to testify about Chinese influence. In May, Yaqiu Wang, senior China researcher at Human Rights Watch, testified to the House Rules Committee, calling on behalf of her organization for Congress to "hold hearings requesting executives of companiesto testify in relation to their China operations, including whether they have conducted human rights due diligence and their responses to requests from Chinese authorities that would be contrary to their human rights responsibilities."
On the other hand, to combat censorship in Hollywood, PEN America endorses in its report Gallagher's proposal requiring studios to disclose whether their films were altered "to fit the demands of the Chinese Communist Party," similar to the "no animals were harmed in the making of this film" notice that many films contain. It also recommends studios commit to only altering their films for the version shown in China.
Datt maintains that congressional hearings would constitute government overreach. "I have no problem with blasting that person or having media scrutiny on a business decision because that should be subjected to scrutiny. Studios should not be making these decisions in their films based on the dictates of a single government," she says. But "government hearings, I think, cross a line into another governmentcoercively forcing studios into a very specific effort."
Datt points out correctly that the American tradition of free expression is built on the idea that the people, not the federal government, will hold institutions accountable for their speech. Allowing Congress to intimidate public figures over their speech, whether censored by China or not, risks unintentionally chilling China-related speech and business relations.
The press, everyday citizens, and other concerned stakeholders have always held companies and public figures accountable for their speech. The solution to China's infringement on free speech is not government bullyingit's more speech.
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Dragging Business Leaders to Congress Is Not a Solution to ... - Reason
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It’s Censorship and It’s Expensive – Royal Examiner
Posted: at 4:53 am
By Thomas Hinnant
Lord, I cant make any changes. All I can do is write em in a song. I can feel the concrete slowly creepin. Lord, take me and mine before that comes
Lynyrd Skynyrd, All I can do is write about it
Warren County has a rural character and beauty that is reflected in the folks who live here, the history of the area, and the touristic nature of the local economy.
Anyone who has spent any time here knows that Rockland is one of the most beautiful areas in Warren County. Consistent with its character, beauty, and history. Rockland happens to be designated a rural historic district by the Virginia Department of Historic Places.
Thats why as a community, we must stand together in order to Keep Rockland Rural.
Stand together to keep National Developers off of our agricultural land.
Stand together and say NO to this rezone.
In order to hold on to the beauty and authenticity of our county. Folks must speak out against the attempt at suburbanization that threatens to strip away the historic nature and rural character of this community.
There are those who will tell you that in order to raise revenue for the county and to keep up with the times, we must develop our farmland into high-density housing. They will likely speak of how great it is to have National builders interested in developing our area.
Dont fall for these predatory talking points. Dont buy the lie.
Firstly, these housing developments rarely, if ever, contribute as much tax revenue as they end up costing the county in infrastructure development. Large high-density housing developments overburden our infrastructure and drive taxes up for longtime county residents. On top of that, they rarely use local labor when building their developments. The cost-value analysis simply doesnt add up. The local economy is burdened, not boosted. This is something every resident of Warren County should be concerned about.
Secondly, this proposed development in Rockland violates the vision for this charming area. The very vision found in our own comprehensive plan.
The comprehensive plan seeks to direct future development into an efficient and serviceable form that will preserve the Countys predominately rural character.
This proposed development is a clear and direct violation of the ethos espoused within the comprehensive plan and its vision for Rockland.
Lastly, if we start rezoning land, especially land that is zoned agricultural. A domino effect of development will undoubtedly begin. That domino of development will turn this county into just another rootless suburban outpost of metropolitan Northern Virginia.
The distinct culture, history, and character of the community will be overshadowed by cookie-cutter high-density housing.
I was at the community meeting on May 4th. It was a beautiful demonstration of democracy. The Alliance for the Shenandoah Valley should be commended for the facilitation of such a successful event. Over 100 residents attended of all stripes, backgrounds, and worldviews.
Partisan political proclivities were put aside, and a community came together with one voice in defense of their areas history, character, and beauty.
I hope the planning Commissioners and Supervisors take heed of the clear and undeniable will of the people.
I recommend everyone check out the documents and information that the Alliance for the Shenandoah Valley has made publicly available regarding Rockland.
In conclusion, I implore you. Dont be fooled by the shallow promises of suburbanization, it will destroy the soul of this county that we all cherish. Our aquifer, our river, our agricultural land, and our way of life are under threat.
As a community, we should be focused on preserving our agricultural land.
We should be focused on cleaning up and rehabilitating our rivers. And we should be focused on holding on to a rural way of life that builds true character. We should not allow Warren County to be steamrolled by National Developers who have no ties to this community.
If this land is rezoned, thats exactly what will happen.
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It's Censorship and It's Expensive - Royal Examiner
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Censorship is never the answer | Columns | themountaineer.com – The Mountaineer
Posted: at 4:53 am
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Censorship is never the answer | Columns | themountaineer.com - The Mountaineer
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What’s Lost When Censors Tamper With Classic Films – The New York Times
Posted: at 4:53 am
This particular change to The French Connection came unexplained and unannounced, so we can only guess at the precise reasoning behind it. But we can imagine why the language was there in the first place. The French Connection was adapted from a nonfiction book about two real detectives, both of whom appear in the film, and the scene clearly wants to situate the viewer within a certain gritty milieu: a space of casual violence, offhand bigotry, sophomoric humor. We see a bit of banter between two policemen working in what was then called the inner city, dialogue underlining their good cop, bad cop dynamic; in certain ways, its not so different from the set pieces you would find in Blaxploitation films of the era. Doyles eagerness to get to the bar hints at the long-running alcoholic cop trope, and his homoerotic jokes are offset by his womanizing another ongoing genre clich. His racist barbs give a sense of his misdirected frustration. Doyle is presented as flawed, reckless, obsessive, vulgar, rough around the edges but, of course, were ultimately meant to find him charming and heroic. He is one in a long line of characters that would stretch forward into shows like The Shield and The Wire: figures built on the idea that good cop, bad cop can describe not just an interrogation style or a buddy-film formula but also a single officer.
Attempting to edit out just one of a characters flaws inevitably produces a sense of inconsistent standards. We get that true heroes shouldnt be using racial epithets. But theyre probably supposed to avoid a lot of the other things Popeye Doyle does too like racing (and crashing) a car through a residential neighborhood or shooting a suspect in the back. This selective editing feels like a project for risk-averse stakeholders, so anxious about a films legacy and lasting economic value that they end up diminishing the work itself. The point of the edit isnt to turn Doyle into a noble guy, just one whose movie modern viewers can watch without any jolts of discomfort or offense. If Gene Hackman is American cinemas great avatar of paranoia a star in three of this countrys most prophetic and indelible surveillance thrillers, The French Connection, The Conversation and Enemy of the State then his turn here might anticipate the intensity with which entities from police departments to megacorporations will try to mitigate risks like that.
Artful jump cuts can illuminate all kinds of interesting associations between images. Bad ones just create bumps in logic; theyre disorienting in a way that suggests external, self-interested forces at play. The one newly smuggled into The French Connection reveals, to use a period term, the hand of the Man, even if its unclear from which direction its reaching. (Is it Disney, treating adult audiences like the children its used to serving? Did Friedkin, who once modified the color of the film, approve the change?) Censors, like overzealous cops, can be too aggressive, or too simplistic, in their attempts to neutralize perceived threats. Whoever made the cut in the precinct scene, sparing the hero from saying unpleasant things, did nothing to remove other ethnic insults, from references to Italian Americans to the cops code names for their French targets: Frog One and Frog Two. It also becomes hilarious, in this sanitized context, to watch the films frequent nonlinguistic violence: A guy is shot in the face; a train conductor is blasted in the chest; a sniper misses Doyle and clips a woman pushing a stroller.
Surveillance, as the movie teaches us, is a game of dogged attention; focus too much on one thing and you miss a world of detail encircling it. Nit-picking old artworks for breaking todays rules inevitably makes it harder to see the complete picture, the full context; we become, instead, obsessed with obscure metrics, legalistic violations of current sensibilities. And actively changing those works continually remolding them into a shape that suits todays market eventually compromises the entire archival record of our culture; were left only with evidence of the present, not a document of the past. This is, in a way, the same spirit that leads obdurate politicians to try and purge reams of uncomfortable American history from textbooks, leaving students learning and living in a state of confusion, with something always out of order, always unexplained.
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What's Lost When Censors Tamper With Classic Films - The New York Times
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The Legal Fight Over Government and Social-Media Censorship … – The Wall Street Journal
Posted: at 4:53 am
This transcript was prepared by a transcription service. This version may not be in its final form and may be updated.
Speaker 1: From the Opinion pages of The Wall Street Journal, this is Potomac Watch.
Paul Gigot: A federal judge rules that the Biden administration illegally pressured social media platforms to censor certain views it didn't like, especially on Covid-19, and the judge bars administration officials from meeting with the social media platforms. How significant is this case for the future of free speech and the government use of private actors to do what the First Amendment bars government from doing? Welcome, I'm Paul Gigot with the Opinion pages of The Wall Street Journal, and I'm here with my colleagues Allysia Finley and Kyle Peterson talking about this case, which is Missouri v. Biden, right now in federal district court. Allysia, tell us about the background of this case. Who sued the government and what are they claiming?
Allysia Finley: So Louisiana and Missouri, the states, they sued, actually various government officials. There are over a couple dozen and various government agencies, and these include CDC, Census Bureau, FBI, the HHS, and some of the officials that were named were Anthony Fauci, as well as Rob Flaherty, who we can get to in a little bit, who worked at these agencies and with the states. And also, some scientists or leading plaintiffs were authors of the Great Barrington Declaration in 2020, which was censored by many of these platforms.
Paul Gigot: Which took an alternative view of how to handle the pandemic.
Allysia Finley: Right. One of the other plaintiffs was the owner of Gateway Pundit whose post, and had been censored by some of these platforms. And they alleged that the platforms, again, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter being the primary ones, were censoring or removing, in some cases, de-platforming individuals at the behest of the government, and that the government and these government agencies and officials were coercing or encouraging the platforms to boot them or suppress their speech.
Paul Gigot: It's fascinating because of course the private companies themselves are not subject to the First Amendment per se. First Amendment constrains government actors. The private companies also have liability protection under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. So, why are the private actors acting on behalf of government here? Why did Judge Terry Doughty find that there was this pressure on them to do the censoring?
Allysia Finley: So he looked at, actually, this was a very facts and evidence specific case, and he examined the evidence, and a lot of these communications between the government agencies or government officials and the platforms, so the Twitter and Facebook employees, and he found that they were "significantly encouraging or coercing the private platforms to do their bidding." This actually gets to, in 1982, precedent Blum, which related to actually nursing homes and whether the government could be liable for essentially coercing nursing homes to violate law.
Paul Gigot: I see. So this is basically, he went through a lot of discovery. It's the first time these emails and other communications have actually been coughed up in a case like this, and he looked at that evidence. And what did he rule? What did he decide?
Allysia Finley: Well, he ruled that they had violated the free speech rights of the plaintiffs, and actually said that they'd probably violated this speech rights of the millions of Americans across the country. And by the way, they decided to restrict certain content that the government disliked, disfavored, and that this speech was predominantly conservative views.
Paul Gigot: And on Covid, it was dissenting views from the orthodoxy of the government on lockdowns, on vaccines in particular, and other things, right?
Allysia Finley: Masks, right.
Paul Gigot: Masks.
Allysia Finley: And those were the three big ones. I think the strongest evidence in the case actually really concerned the vaccines, and that's where you really saw the Biden White House officials put a lot of pressure on Facebook and Twitter and YouTube to take down content that had flied in the face of their official guidelines.
Paul Gigot: Kyle, what's the coercion that is supposedly exercised here by the government? Obviously, the government has its own right to talk to private actors. It can say, "We don't like this policy." That's not coercion per se. What is the coercive element here?
Kyle Peterson: It's communications between members of the government and staff for these social networks. So, here's a couple of examples.
Paul Gigot: But what makes it coercive? Because if they just say, "Call up Kyle Peterson," and say, "Kyle, I don't like that editorial you wrote." You're going to say, "Well, thank you very much for your comment, but I don't care."
Kyle Peterson: Yeah, I mean, so here's a couple of examples. "Cannot stress the degree to which this needs to be resolved immediately. Please remove this account immediately." Here's another one. "Internally, we have been considering our options on what to do about it." And there was some talk at that point of revising the Section 230 immunity that social media platforms enjoy in the law.
Paul Gigot: This is the government threat against the companies. We're tugging our chin and saying, "Hmm, we're thinking about revising 230, which protects you from liability."
Kyle Peterson: Right, and so the judge's view is that it's a little bit like, "Nice social network you have there, shame if something would happen to it." Here's what the judge says is the standard, "The state can be held responsible for a private decision only when it has exercised coercive power, or has provided such significant encouragement that the choice must be deemed to be that of the state." So basically saying that Facebook, Twitter, these social companies had no choice but to comply with these requests. I would push back a little bit though, because maybe that is true in particular with regard to some of these communications between the social networks and the White House. But if you go through and look at the exhibits, the discovery that was found in this case, a lot of this looks like places where people at the social sites that were concerned about misinformation, and people in the government who were concerned about that, were working together. So there's a White House email, for example, that flags an Instagram user, Anthony Fauci Official, and says, "Any way we can get this pulled down? It's not actually one of ours." The answer from Facebook is, "Yep, on it." So there's a case where Facebook has an incentive, I think, not to have people masquerading as public officials on their platform. The White House obviously doesn't want that either, and so they're kind of working together. And the same is true for some of the Covid stuff, at least, you have emails between the CDC and these social sites where the social sites are saying, "We're seeing all sorts of claims that Covid vaccines might cause ALS or magnetism, or that they can alter blood color. Can you verify whether this is true or not?" And the CDC says, "There's nothing to this," or in the examples of myocarditis, "Yes, there is something to this," and trying to respond. And I have a hard time seeing how there's coercion in some of these emails, at least.
Paul Gigot: Okay, fair enough. I mean, conversations like that are not coercive, but if you start to say, as a government official, "That Section 230 thing, we may want to revise that. Please excise this content." And I gather, Allysia, there's also some antitrust threats here that were part of it, correct?
Allysia Finley: Right. Then the privacy regulation, which the giants have also been trying to ward off, and the antitrust point, Facebook has already been sued. The FTC is already is trying to break up Facebook, and actually it's continued to go after Facebook with a number of lawsuits. And actually for that matter, the Justice Department has also sued Google, a numerous antitrust claims.
Paul Gigot: Which owns YouTube.
Allysia Finley: Right, so this threat was legitimate. And I think going back to the point on Section 230, what's interesting is the Biden administration tries to claim in its defense is, "Well, there was bipartisan support from Congress, and so that threat, it's not legitimate, or it doesn't really mean anything because Republicans support modifying or revising Section 230 too."
Paul Gigot: Did the government actually say that in that case?
Allysia Finley: Yes, they actually made that in their defense.
Paul Gigot: Of course, that if-
Allysia Finley: That makes it even more likely.
Paul Gigot: ... Yeah, it makes it more likely that they'd be able to follow through on the threat. So Kyle, what is your response to that? These are government actors, the White House being a very powerful government actor with control over Justice Department, with heavy influence over the federal agencies. Why would it not be coercive in that case?
Kyle Peterson: Well, it could be, and that's the question. I mean, it will be fascinating to watch this as it works its way up the appeals courts and maybe to the Supreme Court. I'm certainly open to the idea that particularly these White House statements that I quoted, that sounds a little coercive to me. One question in the case would be how far that goes down the chain of government? I mean, if somebody in the White House advisory team is saying coercive sounding things to Twitter, does that affect these good faith interactions between the CDC? Does that coercion go all the way down the government chain of command as it were? But that's part of why I think this case is so interesting, worth watching, is we have a new form of media, social media, and we don't have a great case law, nothing. It really, analogous to these situations to rely on. And so, we're going to answer some of these questions, and I would point to another piece of the judge's ruling. So he says, he barred certain communications, interactions between government officials and these social sites, but he says, "The following actions are not prohibited by this preliminary injunction." One of them is exercising permissible public and government speech promoting government policies, or views on matters of public concerns. So is it the secrecy that was the problem here? If these White House officials said publicly, "We think X is misinformation and we're disappointed that Facebook is not taking greater action." Is that coercive in the same way that private conversations to the same effect are? And then two, the judge also says that, not covered by his injunction, "Is informing social media companies of postings intending to mislead voters about voting requirements and procedures?" And I'm a little bit flummoxed by that because if these interactions are coercive with regard to Covid information, I have a hard time seeing how they're not coercive with regard to what people are saying on voting procedures.
Paul Gigot: All right. We're going to take a break, and when we come back, we're going to talk more about this fascinating case. A federal judge ruling that private censorship under pressure from the government violates the First Amendment, when we come back. Don't forget, you can reach the latest episode of Potomac Watch anytime. Just ask your smart speaker, "Play the Opinion Potomac Watch Podcast." That is, "Play the Opinion Potomac Watch Podcast."
Speaker 1: From the Opinion pages of The Wall Street Journal, this is Potomac Watch.
Paul Gigot: Welcome back. I'm Paul Gigot with The Wall Street Journal, with Allysia Finley and Kyle Peterson, talking about the ruling by Judge Terry Doughty that found the government had illegally pressured private social media companies to censor speech and violated the First Amendment, particularly on Covid. Allysia, there's no doubt here in the factual case, the discovery that the judge undertook, that these companies did censor speech. They did censor content considerably, correct?
Allysia Finley: Right. In many cases, it was, they suppressed some of the content that they deemed "borderline". By that, it means that they prevented it essentially from going viral. People couldn't share it, so it had a very limited audience.
Paul Gigot: Okay, and this was the Great Barrington Declaration, we know was particularly contentious with Tony Fauci and government public health officials at the time. This is the declaration signed by many, many scientists, but Jay Bhattacharya and Martin Kulldorff were two of the promoters of this. And their argument was that you should take care of the most vulnerable people first, first and foremost under Covid. Make sure that older people, people who had underlying conditions were protected, but let the rest of the economy stay open. That was not where Tony Fauci was. And they ran a campaign internally, which has been exposed later with emails against the Great Barrington proposal.
Allysia Finley: Right. So in part of the ruling, they actually weren't able to find any instances in which the Tony Fauci and Collins actually pressured the social media companies.
Paul Gigot: Okay.
Allysia Finley: And so, it was a lot of internal communications between the two saying that we need to basically push back against this in the media, like doing articles, Washington Post, providing quotes in those cases.
Paul Gigot: Which is not illegal.
Allysia Finley: This is not illegal. So I think that's actually one weak point in the judge's ruling that just because they publicly denounced and tried to discredit the Great Barrington Declaration in the wider media, and then the social media companies kind of took the hint that, "Well, maybe we should also try to suppress this." I don't think that that passes as or meets the criteria as being coercive or significantly even in encouraging, because there really weren't any direct communications at least that they were able to uncover during legal discovery.
Paul Gigot: Okay. So it seems here, Kyle, that what we're talking about when it comes down to a legal matter is what qualifies as, how should we say, discussion between the government and these companies of the kind that we would have as journalists? Certainly, I would have as an editor and have had with government officials who call and gripe about something, or say, "We sure would like you to write an editorial about this or that." They don't say, "Paul, we're going to pull your license." Well, there's no license to practice journalism, but we're not going to try to take away your job or something like that. They can't do that, or we're going to sue you for something or other. But the social media platforms are vulnerable as we said. But does it come down to, do you think, a fact-based question of just how coercive this pressure was?
Kyle Peterson: How coercive it was, and also what the legal standard, the legal test for that coercion is, and whether it's different in the social media space than it is in other spaces? I mean, the difficulty of the analogies I think you hit, as a journalist, you can get calls from government officials that you maybe would describe as a frank exchange of views. And if you're a reporter doing something on the national security beat, I imagine officials, White House officials may call you and say that, "This is very important national security information. If you publish this, you're going to expose sources."
Paul Gigot: Right, and also say that you may end up being vulnerable yourself to some kind of investigation.
Kyle Peterson: Well, or you may end up killing people because there are sources that are described in this that would be revealed. And to me, I mean that sounds maybe persuasive or maybe not, but the question is whether the decision to publish still rests with the journalists and their editors. And I think that's the question here with social media as well. Whether the decision to moderate that content or not moderate that content was still reasonably in the hands of Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, what have you, or whether there was so much pressure on them that they basically had no choice but to comply.
Paul Gigot: What do you think about that? Is that the line that you would draw here, whether this is actually a proper ruling or not?
Allysia Finley: Well, I think that the coercion is, and whether it's implicit or explicit, I think that that's the key to the case. Now, I just want to use one other illustration is, we've been seeing what's happened to Twitter since Elon Musk took it over and how Lina Khan has basically been harassing the company.
Paul Gigot: She's the head of the Federal Trade.
Allysia Finley: Federal Trade, and basically, because of his hands-off content moderation policies and has been subject to all kinds of document requests, and FTC is also threatening to rewrite a privacy settlement with the company, and that just shows how vindictive the government can be, and the government really does have a lot of power over these companies. It can't really pull licenses per se, but it could seek to put a company out of business, break it up, so to speak. Maybe the Biden administration would be doing these antitrust cases anyways, but some of it could also be out of sheer vindictiveness.
Paul Gigot: Does the judge cite any precedence for the linkage between government and private censorship?
Allysia Finley: Not actually censorship. He cites a lot of different case precedents to, as I mentioned before, the 1982, the Blum precedent which involved the nursing home, and actually the basis in terms of whether or what qualifies as coercion and significant encouragement, which is the standard to hold the government liable or responsible for violation, whether it be a First Amendment or other civil rights or other individual rights violation. But really, in this realm of First Amendment rights, especially with regards to the media or social media, it really is an untested case.
Paul Gigot: There are not a lot of precedents here that have gone up to the Supreme Court. There is a case from some decades ago where the Supreme Court did rule on a, it was in West Virginia I believe, where the government stood guilty of compelling speech because it amounted to a company town. It was just a small town where everybody more or less worked for the same company, and therefore was deemed to be acting on behest of the government. But there's not a lot of case law on this, so this could set some new ground, Kyle. And I'm just reading between the lines of the Peterson coercion here, or the discussion, and I think you're skeptical.
Kyle Peterson: Well, at least I think that there is possibly a mixed ruling here where maybe some of the White House private statements to these social networks crossed the line, and maybe the CDC apparatchiks coordination with Twitter on them asking, is there any truth to this claim, this health claim about a Covid vaccine, doesn't cross the line. But I think this is certainly one to watch just because it is, I think, setting some new ground, and does raise questions for other areas of life. I mean, we were talking about a comparison to journalists earlier. What if you had a newspaper that ran an op-ed, and the President says, "There is information in here that is libelist about me and my administration, and that's why I'm going to appoint judges that will overturn New York Times v. Sullivan, pass a constitutional amendment to change the libel standard under US law." Is that a First Amendment breach? Is that a retaliation?
Paul Gigot: No, no, not at all.
Kyle Peterson: I think there's a lot of cans of worms that are being opened here, and it's hard for me sitting here right now to see around all the corners about how they're going to be settled. But it is certainly going to be an interesting case. And maybe one, or maybe we have to wait for another one to get up to the Supreme Court. There's another one that could be coming on Ron DeSantis and Disney, his removal of government benefits from Disney after Disney spoke out against the law concerning teaching of sexual orientation and gender identity in elementary schools. That is being litigated as a retaliation case, and maybe that will have some bearing on this as well.
Paul Gigot: Well, it strikes me as a very important area to be investigated and litigated because of the power of social media platforms to control speech. I mean, during Covid, we essentially had one part of the debate about Covid, which we carried on in our pages, but that debate could not extend to social media because of the censorship of a lot of those views that the platforms undertook. You saw another illustration with the 2020 campaign with the censoring of the Hunter Biden story that the New York Post have published about his laptop, which turned out to be entirely true. But because of the 51 former spies who said that at the time, that that was possibly Russian misinformation, the platforms used that as an excuse to censor. So, there's a broad concern there for what this says about democratic debate. And it's bad enough if the platforms themselves, from all kicking in the same direction with the same point of view, censor alternative points of view, but it's much worse when the government is able to use them as agents of their official policy to censor dissenting or alternative points of view.
Kyle Peterson: I think that's right. On the point about democratic debate, I would say two things, which is the person who is upset that Facebook keeps taking down their posts about how vaccines cause magnetism or alter their blood color is in the same position as the person whose op-eds on that subject keep getting refused by op-ed editors at newspapers around the country. And I think that it's easy to overestimate the influence of social media on democratic debate. Most Americans are not on Twitter. There is still an awful lot of speech that takes place off Twitter, and way more magnitudes, more speech than there was in the Democratic debate even 10 or 20 or 30 years ago. And so, there's a lot of speech out there, a lot of avenues for speech, and there are many companies that want to be the next Twitter. There is competition out there. One problem is the network effects. I mean, Twitter is powerful because everybody else is on Twitter. But also part of it is, I think, those moderation policies. There are unmoderated social media sites, and they tend not to be very pleasant places to spend a few minutes.
Paul Gigot: Allysia, you're going to get the last word here. What do you think about this issue and where it goes from here?
Allysia Finley: Well, I think as Kyle pointed out, there are a number of free speech cases headed up to the Supreme Court. Texas and Florida have tried to tackle this issue in passing laws that would restrict social media companies from censoring speech and speech of public officials and media companies. And the Supreme Court is now considering whether to grant cert to both of those cases, and has asked for the Solicitor General's opinion. But I think those are probably the two more important cases to watch going up to the Supreme Court, and may decide also the extent of free speech rights for the platforms themselves.
Paul Gigot: Right, because those cases are about the governments of those states saying the tech platforms cannot censor, right?
Allysia Finley: Right, and the platforms in those cases are claiming that this is an abridgement of their First Amendment rights.
Paul Gigot: Right, to be able to decide what they want to say or not publishes content. All right. Kyle Peterson and Allysia Finley, thank you for this fascinating discussion. Thank you all for listening. We're here every day with Potomac Watch, and we will back tomorrow with another edition. So, hope you'll join us then.
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The Pentagon Will No Longer Offer Support to Moviemakers Who … – Military.com
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"What does it say to the world when Maverick is scared of the Chinese communists?" U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) said in a floor speech while discussing the fiscal 2023 defense policy bill.
Cruz was referring to what some eagle-eyed viewer saw in the trailer for the long-awaited "Top Gun" sequel, "Top Gun: Maverick." It turns out the filmmakers had removed the flags of Taiwan and Japan from Maverick's flight jacket. The reason, reported by Politico, was because the studio tried to "appease" Tencent, a China-based backer of the film.
Politico said it obtained a recent Pentagon document that says the U.S. military will no longer offer technical assistance to filmmakers unless they offer a pledge that the final product won't be altered for approval from the Chinese government.
Read: How Hollywood Films Get the US Military as a Co-Star
According to the document, the Department of Defense "will not provide production assistance when there is demonstrable evidence that the production has complied or is likely to comply with a demand from the Government of the People's Republic of China... to censor the content of the project in a material manner to advance the national interest of the People's Republic of China."
The policy has been a long time coming. In May 2023, Cruz, as a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, introduced the "The Stopping Censorship, Restoring Integrity, Protecting Talkies Act" or SCRIPT Act, an amendment to the fiscal 2023 defense policy bill, which would limit or end Defense Department technical assistance to Hollywood productions if those productions censor their films for viewing in China.
"For too long, Hollywood has been complicit in China's censorship and propaganda in the name of bigger profits," Cruz said in a statement. "The SCRIPT Act will serve as a wakeup call by forcing Hollywood studios to choose between the assistance they need from the American government and the dollars they want from China."
This new Pentagon guidance contains most of the provisions of Cruz's intended legislation, without the legislation. It requires the production company working with the DoD to inform its liaison officer of any changes demanded by a Chinese official, and whether or not the company intends to comply with that demand.
The SCRIPT Act would also require an annual report of films that were submitted to Chinese officials and submitted to the Department of Commerce. Films produced in whole or in part in China will also not be allowed to censor their contents for the Chinese government.
Tencent eventually ended its investment in "Top Gun: Maverick" and the flags reappeared in the final version of the film, but this is just one moment in a long line of censorship requests from Beijing, many of which Hollywood is often only too happy to accommodate. China surpassed North America as the world's biggest market for Hollywood movies in 2020, and moviemakers often depend on its market to break even.
Changes are made despite the fact that Chinese censorship isn't limited to content that makes China look bad. It's known that any content involving Uyghurs, Taiwan or Hong Kong demonstrations won't pass, but the Chinese have also been known to censor same-sex kissing ("Bohemian Rhapsody") and even the Statue of Liberty (noticeably absent from "Spider-Man: No Way Home").
Studios have been editing films for China as far back as the late 1990s with "Titanic," where actress Kate Winslet's nude body was edited out of the final version. "Iron Man 3" featured Chinese product placement. Films such as "Fight Club" and "Lord of War" had their endings cut off and replaced with text that told audiences the criminals were apprehended.
"This new guidance -- implementing the legislation I authored in the SCRIPT Act -- will force studios to choose one or the other, and I'm cautiously optimistic that they'll make the right choice and reject China's blackmailing," Cruz told Politico.
-- Blake Stilwell can be reached at blake.stilwell@military.com. He can also be found on Facebook, Twitter, or on LinkedIn.
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Britains Holocaust island – Index on Censorship
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In a West London art gallery, a pock-marked relief sculpture provides a devastating visual representation of a wartime Nazi atrocity. The piece is both a work of art and evidence from a crime scene: a cast of a wall riddled with bullet holes. The cast could have been taken from any number of sites across Nazi-occupied Europe. But this wall is on Alderney one of the Channel Islands and part of the British Isles which surrendered to the German army in 1940.
The artist Piers Secunda, who created the work, has been told by forensics experts that it was used by a German firing squad. Secunda is part of a growing group of campaigners, journalists, researchers and politicians who believe the full story of the occupation of Alderney has never been told. In particular, he believes the fate of Jewish prisoners on the island has been conveniently minimised to protect the idea of British exceptionalism. If he is right, we will have to reassess our understanding of the history of the geographical boundaries of Hitlers Final Solution. Hence the exhibitions title: The Holocaust on British Soil.
Just eight Jews are officially recorded as dying on Alderney. Secunda, who describes himself as a researcher as well as an artist, is sceptical. Another of his works includes reproductions of lists of deportees compiled by the French Nazi-hunter Serge Klarsfeld. Secunda is now writing to the families of 400 French Jews who are known to havebeen transported to the island from the notorious transit camp at Drancy in the suburbs of Paris.
If many hundreds of Jews were sent to Alderney and we know the death rate of prisoners was high-between 30% and 40% how is it possible that only eight people died on the island? There is a disconnect, and my interest is to join the dots, he told Index.
While Alderney is technically a Crown Dependency and not a part of the United Kingdom, the British government was responsible for the surrender of the Channel Islands. The occupation of these islands has always been an inconvenient truth. By the summer of 1940, Prime Minister Winston Churchills War Cabinet concluded the islands could not be defended, and at the beginning of July, Jersey, Guernsey, Sark and Alderney were all occupied.
However, unlike on the other islands, all but a handful of people on Alderney were evacuated. This paved the way for the island to be turned into a vast prison for slave workers constructing Hitlers sea defences. In January 1942, therefore, four camps Helgoland, Norderney, Sylt and Borkum were set up for workers from so-called Operation Todt. Conventional wisdom is that the majority of those transported to the island were Russian prisoners of war. But the records show a significant proportion of those in the camps were Spanish Republicans, north African Arabs and French Jews.
The conditions on Alderney were appalling and, in common with other Nazi work camps, prisoners were beaten and starved. Many succumbed to disease. Those who could no longer work were sent to camps in mainland Europe where they were murdered. The overall numbers of those who died on the island is also the subject of academic controversy: the minimum estimate is between 700 and 1,000 people, but experts believe the actual figure could be much higher.
Immediately after the liberation of Alderney, two senior British soldiers, Major Cotton and Major Haddock, were sent to investigate war crimes. As a result, the Judge Advocate Generals (JAG) office, the body responsible for bringing Nazis to justice, concluded the conditions were akin to those in other concentration camps in German-occupied territory: The position here is somewhat similar to Belsen, stronger perhaps because the offences were committed on British territory. A young captain, Theodore Pantcheff, was brought in to carry out a full investigation. In September 1945 he wrote: Wicked and merciless crimes were carried out on British soil in the last three years.
And yet Britain did not bring a single German officer to justice for what happened on Alderney. Instead, the authorities chose to focus on the Russian victims of the regime in the islands camps and shift the responsibility for any investigation to the Soviet authorities. In October 1945, Pantcheffs report was sent to Moscow, where it lay in the archives until 1993. The British copy was destroyed.
When the report finally came to light, it revealed that 15 suspected war criminals had been in British custody at the end of the war. In his memoirs, Pantcheff claimed that three of the most notorious of these, Maximilian List, Kurt Klebeck and Carl Hoffman, had not survived the war. This was untrue. Hauptsturmfhrer List was in charge of Sylt, the only SS camp on British territory. After the war, he was traced to a British prisoner-of-war camp and was said to have been handed over to the Russians. In fact, he was living in Germany well into the 1970s. Obersturmfhrer Klebeck, Lists deputy, lived out his days in Hamburg, despite being convicted of other war crimes in 1947 and being the subject of German investigations in the 1960s and the 1990s.
Most shocking is the story of Major Hoffman, the Kommandant of Alderney and its four camps, who Pantcheff said had been handed over to the Russians and executed in Kyiv in 1945. The British government was forced to admit the truth in 1983: that Hoffman was taken from Alderney and held in the London Cage for prisoners of war until 1948, when he was released and allowed to return to Germany. He died peacefully in his bed in Hamelin, West Germany, in March 1974.
The story of Alderney is one of silence, state censorship and missed opportunities. Hoffman and the other war criminals should have faced justice immediately after the end of hostilities. The British government has never explained why it allowed them to go free nor why it pursued a policy of Russification of the atrocities committed on the island. But there is no doubt this was a conscious policy. The details are contained in Madeleine Buntings 1995 book, The Model Occupation. In it she said that Brigadier Shapcott from JAG wrote in 1945 that all the inmates on Alderney were Russian, and Britains Foreign Office concluded that for practical purposes Russians may be considered to be the only occupants of these camps. JAG also told the Foreign Office: No were committed against the French Jews. On balance they were treated better than the others working for the Germans.
There have been a number of attempts to correct the historical record by drawing attention to the camps on Alderney and the presence of Jewish prisoners. Most notable is the work of Jewish South African archaeologist Solomon H Steckoll, whose book The Alderney Death Camp was published in 1982 and serialised in The Observer newspaper. His direct, impassioned approach is captured in the cover blurb: In 1943 the SS built a concentration camp on the British island of Alderney. Prisoners were worked as slaves, beaten, starved, hanged, garrotted, hurled from cliff-tops, even buried alive in setting concrete. Why have these horrific acts been kept from the public for so long?
The Alderney Death Camp is a remarkable piece of investigative journalism driven by the authors own burning sense of injustice. Many on Alderney dismissed it as a tabloid hatchet job. But it is nothing of the kind, not least because Steckoll made it his personal mission to find Hoffman and reveal the full scale of the British governments cover-up. This will be his legacy.
Steckolls revelations prompted a grudging recognition from the British government that it had not told the truth about Hoffman. It did not, though, lead to full disclosure. Those files on the Channel Islands that had not been destroyed remained closed for at least another decade, when Labour MP David Winnick, who is Jewish, began campaigning for their release.
From May 1992, Winnick also pushed for an investigation into the war crimes on Alderney committed by Klebeck, who was by then known to be at large in Hamburg. By the end of the year, he had succeeded on both fronts (although no files released made any reference to Alderney). Winnicks campaign was followed two years later by the publication of Buntings book. Nearly 30 years on it still bears scrutiny as a major piece of journalism; Buntings tone as she grapples with the British governments decision-making is a mixture of shock and justified anger.
Her conclusion is stark: Trials on British soil would have been an acutely embarrassing reminder to the British public of several painful facts about the war which the government wanted quickly forgotten: that British territory had been occupied for five years; that British subjects had collaborated and worked for the Germans on Alderney; and that Nazi atrocities, including the establishment of an SS concentration camp, had occurred on British soil.
One block on transparency has been the attitudes on Alderney itself. Academics and journalists have faced hostility on the island. Caroline Sturdy Colls, professor of conflict archaeology at Staffordshire University, was the first to apply modern forensic techniques to sites on Alderney. Her book, Adolf Island: The Nazi Occupation of Alderney, was published last year. Nearly 80 years after the end of the war, the subject of what really happened on Alderney remains highly sensitive among some residents who dont want their island paradise to become part of what they see as the Holocaust industry.
There are certainly some islanders who want to help memorialise the victims and tell their stories, so not everyone wants to forget, Sturdy Colls told Index. Those that do often provide reasons like not wanting the island to be tarnished by this dark history or not wanting tourism based on Nazi sites.
The archaeologist said there were a host of other reasons why the subject of the camps on Alderney has proved controversial. There are many people who still dont recognise the crimes that were perpetrated as being part of the Nazi programme of persecution and/or the Holocaust. After the war, there was a conscious effort by the government to play down the atrocities that were carried out, and so a sanitised narrative emerged that a good proportion of the British public believed or chose to believe. Some of the islanders who went back to Alderney found it too painful to discuss what had happened there, whilst some residentsafter the war didnt (and still dont) want the island to be known for the occupation-era sites that exist there.
There have been several key moments when a full and accurate narrative should have been told. Immediately after the war, the Pantcheff report could have led to a war crimes trial, but the British government chose to draw a veil over the atrocities.
The extraordinary work of Steckoll in 1982 could have prompted an inquiry, but instead it was dismissed as sensationalist. The combined efforts of Winnick in parliament and Bunting in the press could have opened the door in the mid-1990s, but again the government chose obfuscation rather than openness.
We have another such opportunity now. The mantle of Steckoll has been taken up by another Jewish investigator, Marcus Roberts, who is determined to pursue the truth about the Holocaust on British soil. He believes it is possible that between 15,000 and 30,000 people died on the island, with at least 1,000 being Jewish.
Roberts is the founder of the Jewish heritage charity JTrails. He began researching the Nazi camps of northern France in 2007. Two years later he turned his attention to the Channel Islands. He has been pushing for official recognition of Alderney as a Holocaust site, the establishment of an appropriate memorial and protection of Jewish graves. Roberts has established it was not just French Jews who were sent to Alderney; there were Jews from many from other parts of Europe and north Africa.
His research demonstrates that a considerable number of Jews are likely to have died on the island from dysentery and disease. His view is that the push for a Soviet inquiry was a smokescreen. Roberts told The Observer: The way I read it is that the investigation regarding the Russians was undertaken first as a diversion from war crimes against other nationalities, but also there was definitely discussion in the papers we can read that they wanted to guarantee access to Allied war graves on Russian territory. It was also about plausible deniability.
Although she has challenged the numbers cited by Roberts, Sturdy Colls also believes the scale of the Jewish atrocities has been downplayed. It is evident from the wide range of testimonies available and from the surveys we did of the camps in which Jews were housed that they were treated appallingly, and more Jews likely died than we know of, she said. The conditions in which Jews were housed were an extension of those that they were kept in elsewhere in Europe. The camps on Alderney were part of a network of sites that housed Jews and harsh punishments, terrible working and living conditions, and torture characterised their lives on Alderney.
She added that it was important to recognise the atrocities committed against other groups on Alderney eastern Europeans and Jehovahs Witnesses, for example. Overall, the suffering of most of the people who were sent to Alderney and were under the control of Organisation Todt and the SS has been underplayed.
The momentum towards full disclosure may now be irresistible. In recent years, investigative journalists around the world have turned their attention to Alderney, and the story has been covered by The Sunday Timesand ITV in the UK, Channel 9 in Australia, Der Spiegel in Germany and The Times of India. One of the most comprehensive investigations was carried out last year by Isobel Cockerell for the international online publication Coda Story.
Her article on Alderney has been nominated for the 2023 Orwell Prize for Journalism. In it she asks the key questions: Why did the British government let evidence of German war crimes on its soil remain in obscurity? Why was no one prosecuted? She says the islanders have a range of answers: collective shame at surrendering the islands and subsequent collaboration; the post-war focus on rebuilding the country; a view that the scale of the atrocities didnt merit war crimes trials; and also that no government wanted talk of Jewish murders on its soil.
Events in the next few years may force the governments hand and prompt ministers to correct the historical record. In 2024, the UK will take its turn as chair of the International Holocaust Remembrance Association. The body is responsible for Holocaust education,remembrance and research around the world. Lord Pickles is the UKs special envoy for Post-Holocaust Issues and the head of the UKs IHRA delegation. On visits to Alderney, Pickles has told islanders they need to come to terms with the troubled history of the camps and find a way of marking what happened with a respectful memorial.
Later this year, Pickles will announce an expert review of the numbers who died on Alderney and invite submissions from academics, researchers and members of the public. The IHRA is seeking to adopt a charter to safeguard all sites of the Holocaust in Europe. Gilly Carr, associate professor in archaeology at Cambridge University and chair of the IHRA Safeguarding Sites project, told Index: Such sites play a crucial role in educating current and future generations about the Holocaust and help us reflect on its consequences. In this charter we take a broad approach to what we consider to be a site of the Holocaust. Jews were held in camps in Alderney and we consider these to be Holocaust sites.
Carr, like Sturdy Colls, believes the full story of Nazi atrocities has been downplayed in the past. Certainly, the subject of victims of Nazism in the Channel Islands as a whole, a category within which I would include Jews, political prisoners and forced labourers, has come late to the table, she said. Because there were no war crimes trials resulting from the occupation of the Channel Islands, it became a non-subject for many people.
Carr has helped develop the concept of taboo heritage, where the legacy of war is so sensitive that people become resistant to the idea of full remembrance.
Taboo heritage can become heritage in the end if it receives political support, but this usually takes a lot of time and investment by stakeholders, she said.
Pickles is also co-chair of the UK Holocaust Memorial Foundation, the body responsible for planning a Holocaust Memorial and Learning Centre, which will be built in sight of the Houses of Parliament. British exceptionalism will be at the heart of the new memorial.
It will celebrate the Kindertransport, the scheme to rescue 10,000 children from Nazi Germany in the nine months before the outbreak of war. It will also celebrate British heroes of the Holocaust, such as Sir Nicholas Winton, who helped rescue 669 children from Czechoslovakia on the eve of war.
There is now a commitment to putting the occupation of the Channel Islands at the heart of the memorial. But what happened here does not sit easily with this narrative of exceptionalism. The horrors of Alderney are a blot on Britains reputation, which is perhaps why the full story has been suppressed for so long. The slogan chosen for the memorial is Confronting Evil, Assuming Responsibility. Will we now confront the evil of the camps on Alderney and assume responsibility for covering up what happened there?
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Britains Holocaust island - Index on Censorship
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Building the World’s First Private Libertarian City – Reason
Posted: at 4:52 am
"Prspera is the first time in human history that a group of people has said there's a way to deliver governing services, privatized for profit in a completely free market way," says Joel Bomgar, a Mississippi state representative and president of Prspera Inc., the company that's building a privately run charter city on the Honduran island of Roatn called Prspera Village.
In Honduras, about half of the population lives in extreme poverty, and gross domestic product per capita is 25 times higher than in the United States. And yet the country has abundant natural resources and is close to major shipping lanes.
The problem is governance: Nobody wants to invest in Honduras because the country has a long history of political instability, expropriating private land, and legal agreements that aren't particularly binding. Honduras is ranked 154th out of 190 countries in contract enforcement on the World Bank's Ease of Doing Business Index and 133rd overall in ease of doing business.
Narco gangs once made Honduras the murder capital of the world, and though crime has dropped in the last 12 years, life there is still extremely dangerous in comparison to the U.S., which is one reason so many Hondurans make the risky journey to immigrate. U.S. Customs and Border Protection has reported more than 73,000 encounters with Hondurans at the U.S.-Mexico border so far this year.
Recently, the country's politics have been especially turbulent: A president was ousted by the military in 2009, and another was extradited to the U.S. for drug trafficking.
The nation recently elected its first democratic socialist president, Xiomara Castro, who has called for a "refounding." She wants to rewrite the constitution to recognize that "the capitalist system doesn't work for the majority" of people. She's calling for electricity to become a "public goodand a human right" and is laying the groundwork for the outright nationalization of the entire energy sector. And she's spending billions on cash transfers.
"Every millimeter of the [Honduran] homeland that [capitalists] took over on behalf of the sacrosanct free marketwas watered with the blood of the native people," said Castro, who ran on abolishing the very law that authorized Prspera and similar zones in Honduras, in a September 2022 speech to the United Nations. "My government has embarked upon a process of national rebirth and is bringing profound change."
Meanwhile, a group of foreign investors has embarked on its own "refounding" of sorts. They've started a radical experiment in private governance, which they hope will become a model for how to create prosperity in poor countries all over the world.
"The concept of free private cities and charter cities, specifically what Prspera is trying to do, is the most transformative project in the world," says Bomgar. "There's not a big financial hub in Central America. There's not a sort of Singapore of Central America right now. And so that's what we're trying to create."
On the island of Roatn, a tourist hub with a land mass similar to Hong Kong, a group of libertarian entrepreneurs, including Bomgar, are trying to build a country within a country that's free of the dysfunction that hobbles the national government. And they're starting with a clean slate.
Prspera is based on the principle of true voluntarism, they say: All who live and work there have opted into the rules that govern the land, and they can change their minds and opt out at any time.
The first location being developed as part of this privately run charter city is called Prspera Village, but the project's co-founder and CEO, Erick Brimen, says that the particular plot of land doesn't matter as much as the rules governing it.
"Prspera is not a location. Prspera is a platform that delivers governance as a service in partnership with host governments that create a legal framework that allows that public-private partnership to emerge," says Brimen.
In 2017, the company began acquiring its first 58 acres, which at the time was mostly an undeveloped jungle. Today, Prspera Village is occupied by an office building, a schoolhouse, a factory for prefabricated building materials that's under construction, and a shared workspace for remote office workers. A 14-story luxury condo tower is also nearly complete. Development is happening here at a pace unheard of in a country where it can take years and several well-placed bribes to obtain a permit to put up a building of that size.
Prspera has so much autonomy thanks to a 2013 law authorizing Zones for Economic Development and Employment, or ZEDEs.
ZEDEs don't merely have favorable business and labor regulations, like China's Shenzhen. They make their own laws and regulations. Prspera created its own zoning code and levies its own taxes. Only the country's criminal laws still apply.
To become a full-time resident of Prspera, you just fill out an online application and pay a $1,300 fee, though Honduran nationals get an 80 percent discount. In lieu of a court system, they have access to the PrsperaArbitration Center to resolve any civil disputes, or they can opt for a different arbiter.
Companies can select their own regulation from a menu of options. Like Japan's biotech regulation? Use that. Singapore's banking laws? Use those. Or mix and match.
Depending on what industry they're in, some companies can opt out of regulation altogether, though at a cost.
"Then you're under common law legal liabilities, which can be very harsh. So you do have an incentive to be under regulation, and you need to have liability insurance that covers you," says Niklas Anzinger, who runs Infinita VC, a venture capital fund based in Prspera.
"So this way you have insurance [companies] looking at what you're doing in your regulation and like, 'Yeah, this [regulatory scheme] has been done multiple times before [in] multiple jurisdictions, it's cheap. And this one, ah, that's quite new, right? It's not been really tested. So there's gonna be a higher premium because we have to pay experts to assess the risk of what you're doing.' So, this way you have an open process to improve and develop and find the right kind of regulations for different businesses."
When Reason visited, Anzinger was hosting a seminar for companies that operate or are interested in operating here, including a biotech firm, which found it easier to run gene therapy trials at Prspera than in the U.S.
But President Castro has vowed to repeal the ZEDE law, calling it "criminal" legislation and an attempt to "steal our sovereignty."
Brimen says that even if a repeal vote is ratified by the Honduran congress, Prspera is protected by international treaties, and the government will risk paying damages of over $10 billion if it violates them. Brimen says he expects the Honduran government to back down.
"It's not just the cash cost to us [that will stop them]. It's the message that the Honduran government is appropriating a U.S. investment," says Brimen."So, on the one hand, you have this very bad outcome, and on the other, which I think they're starting to realize, begrudgingly to some extent, you have not [only] $10 billion [in damages] but a multiple of that in upside benefits in not just direct investment but of jobs, positive externalitieswhat would you do?"
Fernando Garcia, a former economic Minister whom Castro appointed as presidential commissioner against the ZEDEs, says what Brimen and his company are trying to pull off in Honduras is outrageous.
"It is as if I came to the United States with $500 million or $1 billion and asked for a constitutional amendment to buy Central Park in New York, to create a state within a state," says Garcia, speaking in Spanish.
He says that President Castro is defending the Honduran constitution and its national sovereignty by dismantling the ZEDE law because zones like Prspera "will later become free states, independent of her [political] process" if she doesn't act now. Brimen says ZEDEs are far from a threat to political sovereignty.
"It's the opposite. It's an exercise of sovereignty" says Brimen. "One has to more fully understand what sovereignty is to begin with. Sovereignty is about self-determination. And the power to be self-determined properly rests upon the people, not upon some institution that rules them."
Jorge Colindres is the technical secretary of Prspera ZEDE,* roughly the equivalent of its mayor. He says that his experience running a law firm in Honduras has made him acutely aware of the ways in which corruption and weak rule of law have crippled the country, which is why he became involved with the project early on.
"I've seen corruption at almost every government or institution. I've seen it at the municipalities, I've seen it with the prosecutor and the judges, at the environmental agency, at the health care agencies, essentially all over," says Colindres. "And on top of that, you have people demanding bribes and payments. It's horrible."
Colindres says that because Prspera must work to attract and keep investors and citizens, it's incentivized to eliminate corruption from its governance. Bomgar says this competitive structure will make all the difference.
"Unlike other governments, we don't have a monopoly of the use of force and coercion," says Bomgar. "So we live by the principles of nonaggression, self-ownership, and the rule of law and property rights. And unique to Prspera is the right to join but also the right to exit."
Voice matters here at Prsperaresidents will be allowed to elect five of the nine members of the city council once the population surpasses 10,000but political power mostly derives from exit, or voting with your feet. Colindres says that, for example, in a 10-story building, floor seven could be in Prspera, floor six in the general free zone regime of Honduras, and the remaining floors governed by the national regime.
"The basis of the legitimacy of government is consent of the people," says Colindres. "We do have consent of 100 percent of our residents, and that's where our powers stem from."
This opt-in arrangement has allowed Prspera to expand from five acres to 58, and then, during the height of the pandemic, the project expanded to more than 1,000 acres of a nearby resort and villa called Pristine Bay. The hotel at the center of that development remains outside Prspera's jurisdiction, and individual homeowners in the villas will be able to opt in or out.
Another major problem that many South and Central American countries have faced is runaway inflation. In the '90s, Honduras' inflation peaked at around 34 percent; it currently stands at about 9 percent. Prspera will have its own financial overseer who will make sure businesses have selected an applicable regulation standard for themselves, and Prspera is home to a bitcoin cafe and education center devoted to promoting the use of the cryptocurrency on Roatn.
"We provide educational support, technical support setting up [point-of-sale bitcoin infrastructure]," says Dusan Matuska, who runs the Roatn Bitcoin Center and says more than 50 merchants currently accept bitcoin on the island. "I think Prspera's main payment infrastructure will be bitcoin over time."
Prspera is primarily a governance model, so its territory doesn't have to be contiguous. We took a ferry ride to the mainland city of La Ceiba to visit another large territory that's participating in the project.
Though everything about Prspera has been voluntary to date, it's no wonder that Hondurans are worried about foreign businessmen violating their national sovereignty. La Ceiba happens to also be a key battlefield in a successful 1911 coup backed by the American business magnate Sam Zemurray, who would later become the president of the United Fruit Company. Concerned that the president was hostile to his expansion plans, Zemurray used his wealth and influence to bring about regime change in a foreign country.
We drove along an unpaved road once partly occupied by railroad tracks that used to carry banana harvests to the port.The land was eventually abandoned and now is part of Prspera, which hopes to develop it into a major manufacturing hub.
Eric Paz manages the site, which is currently occupied by a tiny office building, a rundown schoolhouse, and several single-room homes lacking electricity and running water.
"Historically, this has been a community that has had a great lack of opportunities to develop, to be able to study, to be able to have access to health care, to be able to have access to decent work or to decent housing," says Paz.
Paz says Prspera has letters of interest from three companies eyeing the sitea medical supplies manufacturer, a maker of prefabricated housing materials, and an aeroponic farmer.
"Prspera is an opportunity for the region, and I could dare to say that it is an opportunity for the country, because we are trying to do something different," says Paz.
The ZEDE law made it through Congress on the grounds that it would attract investment and bring new opportunities. Garcia says that it hasn't made good on that promise because Prspera said it would generate 10,000 jobs by December 2021 but has only reported 1,000 to the government.
But Colindres says that it's absurd for the Castro regime, which has hamstrung special economic zones and imposed economically destructive policies after several years of COVID pandemic stagnation, to criticize the rate of job growth within the ZEDEs.
"Frankly, the Honduran population, they're not happy with this new socialist government," says Colindres. "In their first year, they butchered over 100,00 jobs and left tens of thousands of people without a formal job. While we are seeing an economic and democratic deterioration at the national level, here in Prspera, we're still creating jobs."
Back on the island of Roatn, some of those jobs have gone to locals from the island, like a carpenter who repurposes excess construction material to make furniture. Or Virginia Cecilia-Mann, Prspera's head cook, who lives in the neighboring village of Crawfish Rock.
"Until Prspera came here, there are moms that never had a job in their life," says Cecilia-Mann. "They don't have the educational level. Or maybe they don't speak the language that they need or just maybe other things, like they have kids at home and there's no one to watch them so they can't get a job that offers mother hours. All of those things, Prspera is offering to them."
Cecilia-Mann also spearheaded the creation of Prspera's on-site school, which teaches local kids using Khan Academy virtual learning. Victor Andino, who lives with his family in a house on the beach that directly abuts Prspera, sends his kids to the school.
"Nobody [else] is going to give you a teacher, who teaches English for free," says Andino. "I don't know much English. I can learn from my boy."
Andino is an electrician, and his wife works maintaining Prspera's many plants.
The company fills many of the location's administrative, security, and construction jobs with workers from the mainland. A mason from the mainland told us that work dried up during the pandemic and that outside of Prspera new construction projects tend to get held up by red tape.
"The permitting process is really slow," he said, speaking in Spanish. "You have to make bribes."
At a fork in the road at the top of a hill leading down into Prspera Village is a small convenience store where construction workers congregate at the end of the work day.
The owner, Lorena Webster, has lived here for 36 years. She's suspicious of her new neighbors.
"[Prspera's leadership] used to come and eat with us and talk with us and talk about the development that they [would] bring in [a] project to benefit the community in the future," says Webster. "So then we [were] always, well, happy because, at last, the place is going to grow, you know?"
Webster says members of the community changed their minds when they found out that the ZEDE law allows companies like Prspera to partner with the government to expropriate their land.
"Never again will the stereotype of a banana republic wear heavy upon us," said Castro in her U.N. speech. She regularly compares ZEDEs like Prspera to the United Fruit Company, which took advantage of politically weak Central American countries to boost its profits in banana cultivation.
Forty-three years after financing a coup in Honduras, United Fruit CEO Sam Zemurray helped orchestrate covert CIA operations in neighboring Guatemala, which led to the removal of another president he considered hostile to his company's business interests.
This legacy of corrupt governments colluding with powerful private landowners has left many locals wary of the ZEDEs.
"Maybe [at] the beginning it will benefit us because they may give us jobs. But in the future, the laws give them the privilege to take our land," she says, though she told Reasonthat nobody from Prspera has ever threatened to take her home or even offered to buy it.
"They say 'No, we won't [take your land.]' But does that guarantee that they won't? No," she says.
In the adjacent fishing village of Crawfish Rock, a store owner expressed the same fears.
"We live here. We [were] born here, we [were raised] here, and this is what we have," she says. She believes Prspera plans to take all of Crawfish Rock but toldReasonthey haven't done anything yet to make life worse in her village.
"They haven't bothered us, not at all," she says.
Though Prospera prohibits expropriation in its charter, the ZEDE law does permit the zones to partner with the government to take private lands for public infrastructure development.
Brimen says that Prspera's charter prohibits expropriation and that anyone who attempted to do so on behalf of the organization could be held personally liable. He says he's long supported a reform to the ZEDE law that would make the practice illegal.
"Prspera specifically cannot receive expropriated land into its jurisdiction, period. End of story. It's in our charter, it's in our bylaws, and, if we did, the people involved are personally liable," says Brimen. "I'm against expropriation as a matter of principle."
Brimen is originally from Venezuela, where socialist President Hugo Chvez became notorious for expropriating land and businesses, which eviscerated the economy.
"I think [seeing Venezuela's collapse under socialism] was a very visceral experience of what otherwise would've been read in a book and not understood firsthand," says Brimen.
Brimen says that when he enrolled in college, he wanted to study economic development and poverty to figure out why some countries get rich while others, like Venezuela, stay poor despite having abundant natural resources.
"I thought that what I wanted to do in my life was somehow eradicate poverty," says Brimen. "Yet I realized that I was asking the wrong question. It's not about how you end poverty but rather how you catalyze prosperity."
He says that when he studied the problem from this new perspective that the answer became obvious.
"I was unavoidably led to the empirical evidence that shows that in order for there to be maximized human prosperity, you need freedom. You need economic freedom," says Brimen. "And so the invention of Prspera is mostly around the business model, the public-private partnership approach to deploying an economic system with rule of law that is proven throughout history to unleash human potential."
Will this ambitious experiment catalyze prosperity in Honduras? Can a properly designed private government thrive and avoid the corrupt and violent fates of the 20th-century banana republics?
A lot is riding on Prspera's success or failure: the future of ZEDEs in Honduras, the promise or folly of separating governance and state. It's a bold test of the limits of the proposition that the private sector does everything better and that the profit motive is less corrupting than political processes for obtaining state power.
Brimen and his team say they'll deliver on the promise of creating a bastion of freedom and prosperity, just as long as the national government holds up its end of the deal.
"My vision for the next one to five years is you come back and see as big a leap it was to go from nothing to 1,000 acres," says Bomgar. "Perhaps not in just sort of geographic size but in vertical developmentbuilding the city toward the sky."
Brimen says that growth and investment are accelerating and that their biggest obstacle in the near term isn't economic or physical but political.
"The main wild card is how the Honduran government chooses to proceed," says Brimen.
*CORRECTION: The video version of this story originally identified Jorge Colindres as the "technical secretary of Prospera Inc." He is the technical secretary of Prospera ZEDE, which is a different legal entity.
Photos: TEDxJackson/Flickr/Creative Commons; TEDxJackson/Flickr/Creative Commons; Everett Collection/Newscom; Everett Collection/Newscom; Inti Oncon/dpa/picture-alliance/Newscom; Camilo Freedman/SOPA Images/Si/Newscom; Inti Oncon/dpa/picture-alliance/Newscom; Simon Liu/Flickr/Creative Commons; Seth Sidney Berry/SOPA Images//Newscom; Seth Sidney Berry/ZUMAPRESS/Newscom; Milo Espinoza/ZUMAPRESS/Newscom; Milo Espinoza/ZUMAPRESS/Newscom; Gustavo Amador/EFE/Newscom; Milo Espinoza/ZUMAPRESS/Newscom; Humberto Espinoza/EFE/Newscom; Seth Sidney Berry/ZUMAPRESS/Newscom; Seth Sidney Berry / SOPA Images//Newscom; Album/Oronoz/Newscom; Gustavo Amador/EFE/Newscom; /Flickr/Creative Commons; /Flickr/Creative Commons; Seth Sidney Berry/ZUMAPRESS/Newscom
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Building the World's First Private Libertarian City - Reason
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Libertarian candidates say they were not asked for money to run – Buenos Aires Herald
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Over 100 candidates of La Libertad Avanza (LLA) filed a presentation assuring they werent asked for money to run, after presidential hopeful and LLA coalition leader Javier Milei was accused of selling candidacies for his party.
A document signed by 120 candidates was presented before the National Electoral prosecutors office on Tuesday. Ramiro Gonzlez, the prosecutor in charge, started an investigation against LLA last week following the claims.
We were never asked for any money in hopes of being proposed for a candidacy, the document reads. The candidates also rejected the false accusations Milei and his party are facing, saying everything is being orchestrated by spurious interests.
Last week, the prosecutor cited the seriousness of these claims as a reason to open a preliminary investigation and determine whether electoral law had been broken. The first step of the investigation was to call in those making the accusations, including businessman and politician Juan Carlos Blumberg, liberal political leader and former LLA member Carlos Maslatn, and former LLA activist Mila Zurbriggen, among others.
Blumberg accused the coalitions political organizers Carlos Kikuchi, Sebastin Pareja, and Javiers sister, Karina Milei, of selling places on the ballots. There are people who paid US$50,000 for a counselor position, Blumberg said in an interview with La Red radio station.
Pareja was the first one on the list of people who signed the document dismissing the accusations.
Former LLA ally Maslatn testified on Friday. Blumberg sent a letter to the prosecutor expressing his total willingness to assist with the investigation. Meanwhile, Zurbriggen and former Milei ally Rebeca Fleitas, who is currently a Buenos Aires city LLA law-maker, testified this Tuesday.
Zurbriggen said that she learned about the candidacies being for sale through third parties and that she fears for her safety, according to sources from the investigation cited by Tlam.
Around six months ago, Zurbriggen had told Tlam that candidacies were being sold for sexual favors.
Fleitas, on the other hand, said her issues were not with LLA, but another party. According to Fleitas, they wanted to choose her legislative advisors after she won a seat at the BA city Legislature following the 2021 elections, the same sources said.
In response to the backlash he is facing, Milei sent a letter to Attorney General Eduardo Casal saying Gonzalez investigation is an illegitimate intrusion in the electoral process.
Milei said that the only purpose of the prosecutors preliminary investigation is to undermine the public image of the party and himself, and asked Casal to investigate if Gonzlez started the inquiry following a request by other parties or candidates.
He also asked Casal to determine whether the investigation was launched with the only purpose of confusing voters, undermining the democratic process and harming his image towards the elections. Last week, Milei had said that Blumbergs allegations are the product of spite, since he was rejected as a candidate for Buenos Aires province governor and that all candidates for La Libertad Avanza have to self-finance their campaigns.
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David Schmidtz and My Dad on Asking the Right Questions – Econlib
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I recently posted how a passage from David Schmidtzs Living Together: Inventing Moral Science reminded me of a line from a decades old essay written by Theodore Dalrymple. But that was far from the only time a passage in his book triggered a long dormant memory. In another case, David Schmidtz outlines an idea for evaluating politics I learned many years ago from my father.
My dad held a wide spectrum of views over his life. He described himself in his younger years as a ponytailed hippie definitely not a persona that made one popular in those days in Texas. By the time I was becoming aware of and interested in politics, he had shifted towards being largely Republican in his political orientations, with some libertarian leanings thrown in for good measure. Those leanings led him to cast his vote for the Libertarian candidate in the 2016 and 2020 elections he couldnt accept the idea of voting for Trump, whom he saw as antithetical to everything conservatives and Republicans should support. But the lesson Im referring to came up in a discussion we had in the early 2000s.
In those days, the PATRIOT Act was being hotly debated. Like so many issues, supporting or opposing it seemed to sort very neatly into party lines. One day, I asked my dad what he thought about the PATRIOT Act. The standard response from most Republicans in those days was to offer their support for it after all, it was passed under a Republican administration, and in response to a massive terrorist attack. It also seemed to line up with standard Republican points about the importance of a strong defense against foreign threats. But that was not the response I got. Instead, he told me that he opposed the PATRIOT Act and when I asked why, he told me because it failed what he called the Hillary test.
What was this test? Simple. He just asked himself if he would be okay with the federal government wielding the kind of powers granted to it by the PATRIOT Act if that government had Hillary Clinton as its chief executive. And he didnt like the idea of that so he didnt support the PATRIOT Act. After all, there is no guarantee that the government will always be headed by trustworthy people with good values. Government shouldnt have the level of power that would best enable good work to be done by wise and trustworthy public servants government should only have as much power as you would be comfortable being held by someone who is your worst political nightmare. Because, one day, someone that nightmarish will actually get elected, and they will gladly pick up any of the tools made available to them.
Republicans should ask themselves whats the most power they would want the government to wield, if that government was headed by people like Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. And Democrats should ask themselves how much power they would want the government to wield if that government was headed by people like Ted Cruz, Ron DeSantis, or Donald Trump. (Insert your own personal political boogeyman as needed.) Odds are, you wouldnt want the government in those hands to wield too much power and if your response to this conundrum is to say the government should wield greater powers anyway and just make sure only good people get elected to wield it, youre playing a very dangerous game that history shows you cannot win.
David Schmidtz makes this same point in his book, charging much of what passes as ideal theory in political science as asking fundamentally the wrong question. As Schmidtz put it:
Officials not only enforce rules, but also interpret, amend, and so forth. Smith saw this and perceived a further chronically tragic reality: this power to oversee markets is what crony capitalists are buying and selling.
Smiths observation changes everything. Imagine concentrated power in the hands of the worst ruler you can remember. Now, assume what you know to be true: concentrated power has a history of falling into hands like that. As a preliminary, then, when theorizing about what is politically ideal, we can ask two questions. (1) Ideally, how much power would be wielded by people like that? or (2) Ideally, how much power would be wielded by ideal rulers?
Which of these two versions of ideal theory is a real question? Can political philosophy answer the one that truly needs answering?
Why isnt it trying?
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David Schmidtz and My Dad on Asking the Right Questions - Econlib
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