Free Speech – Page 30 – artdiamondblog.com

Americans Should Not Be Required to Join a Private Organization Against Their Will

(p. A15) I am one of 10 California teachers suing to end compulsory union dues in Friedrichs v. California Teachers Association, which will be heard by the Supreme Court Jan. 11. Our request is simple: Strike down laws in 23 states that require workers who decline to join a union to pay fees anyway. In our view, paying fees to a union should not be a prerequisite for teaching in a public school. No one in the U.S. should be forced to give money to a private organization he or she disagrees with fundamentally. Teachers deserve a choice.
. . .
I was a member of the union for years and even served as a union representative. But the union never played an important role in my school. When most teachers sought guidance, they wanted help in the classroom and on how to excel at teaching. The union never offered this pedagogic aid.
Instead, the union focused on politics. I remember a phone call I received before a major election from someone in the union. It was a “survey,” asking teachers whether they would vote for so-and-so if the election were held tomorrow. I disagreed with every issue and candidate the union was promoting. After that conversation, I thought about what the union represents. Eventually, I realized that my dues–about $1,000 a year–went toward ideas and issues that ran counter to my beliefs.
. . .
A Gallup poll last year found that 82% of the public agrees that “no American should be required to join any private organization, like a labor union, against his will.” That’s all we’re asking.

For the full commentary, see:
HARLAN ELRICH. “Why I’m Fighting My Teachers Union; I don’t want to be forced to pay for a political agenda I don’t support. Now the Supreme Court will rule.” The Wall Street Journal (Mon., Jan. 4, 2016): A15.
(Note: ellipses added, italics in original.)
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date Jan. 3, 2016.)

“America Represents Wilderness and Freedom, and Also a Big House”

(p. A1) JACKSON HOLE, China — Yearning to breathe untainted air, the band of harried urbanites flocked to this parched, wild land, bringing along their dreams of a free and uncomplicated life.
But unlike the bedraggled pioneers who settled the American West, the first inhabitants of Jackson Hole, a resort community on the outskirts of the Chinese capital, arrived by Audi and Land Rover, their trunks filled with French wine and their bank accounts flush with cash.
Over the past decade, more than a thousand families have settled into timber-frame houses with generous backyards, on streets with names like Aspen, Moose and Route 66. On Sundays, some worship at a clapboard church that anchors the genteel town square, outfitted with bronze cowboys and a giant Victrola that sprays water.
“America represents wilderness and freedom, and also a big house,” said Qin You, 42, who works in private equity and owns a six-bedroom home that features a koi pond, a year-round (p. A8) Christmas tree and what he proudly described as “American-style” electric baseboard heating. His parents live in the house and he goes there on weekends. “The United States is cool,” he says.
. . .
. . . , Communist Party edicts and conservative commentators have sought to demonize so-called Western values like human rights and democracy as existential threats. Even if the menace is seldom identified by name, the purveyor of such threats is widely understood to be the United States.
. . .
Gao Zi, 60, a retired military employee who organizes an oil painting club for Jackson Hole residents, said that “we accepted the propaganda” back in the 1950s, when China was a closed society. “But now people have the opportunity to travel abroad and see the truth for ourselves.”
Like Ms. Gao, Mr. Qin, the investment executive, has never been to the United States but he has long admired American ideals like personal liberty and blind justice. Five years ago, after his wife gave birth to their second child, Mr. Qin says the government fined him nearly $30,000 for violating the country’s population-control policies. “This is not freedom,” he said, before continuing a tour of his expansive back patio.

For the full story, see:
ANDREW JACOBS. “JACKSON HOLE JOURNAL; Living a Frontier Dream on Beijing’s Outskirts.” The New York Times (Fri., DEC. 11, 2015): A1 & A8.
(Note: the online version of the story has the date DEC. 8, 2015, and has the title “JACKSON HOLE JOURNAL; Living a Frontier Dream on the Outskirts of China’s Capital.”)

Comedians Censored on College Campuses

(p. A3) Stars such as Chris Rock and Jerry Seinfeld have said they don’t play college shows anymore because the audiences are too easily offended. Schools now often have contracts that forbid performers from using certain words or even broaching entire subjects.
. . .
Alvin Williams, who is from Chicago, said he did some college shows this year, after largely swearing off them for cruise ships about three years ago. He had been doing a lot of what he regarded as G-rated material, but was shocked to find even that could be offensive on campus.
“I’d never thought I’d see the day when family-friendly material is not appropriate for college kids,” said Mr. Williams.
. . .
Mr. Williams said he no longer mimics Indian or Chinese accents or tells jokes about camels. He believes the only reason Apu, the Indian convenience-store owner on the television show “The Simpsons,” still exists is because he has been grandfathered in and audiences are used to him.
The increasing sensitivity is being driven by peer pressure, Mr. Williams said. “They think, if I’m not offended by this then I’m not a good friend,” he said. “If I tell a joke about black people, whites are more likely to get more offended.”
Mr. Williams, who is black, refuses to jettison all his racial material, but is more apt to focus the joke on himself. One of his favorites: “I hate stereotypes with a passion,” he deadpans. “The problem is I love fried chicken.”

For the full story, see:
DOUGLAS BELKIN. “Comedy at College Is Often No Laughing Matter.” The Wall Street Journal (Fri., Nov. 13, 2015): A3.
(Note: ellipses added. The online version of the article is much longer than the print version. A couple of the paragraphs quoted above, appear only in the online version.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date Nov. 12, 2015, and has the title “For Stand-Up Comedians, Shows on Campus Are Often No Joke.”)

Professors Oppose Diversity by Discriminating Against Conservatives

(p. A23) One of the great intellectual and moral epiphanies of our time is the realization that human diversity is a blessing. It has become conventional wisdom that being around those unlike ourselves makes us better people — and more productive to boot.
Scholarly studies have piled up showing that race and gender diversity in the workplace can increase creative thinking and improve performance. Meanwhile, excessive homogeneity can lead to stagnation and poor problem-solving.
Unfortunately, new research also shows that academia has itself stopped short in both the understanding and practice of true diversity — the diversity of ideas — and that the problem is taking a toll on the quality and accuracy of scholarly work. This year, a team of scholars from six universities studying ideological diversity in the behavioral sciences published a paper in the journal Behavioral and Brain Sciences that details a shocking level of political groupthink in academia. The authors show that for every politically conservative social psychologist in academia there are about 14 liberal social psychologists.
Why the imbalance? The researchers found evidence of discrimination and hostility within academia toward conservative researchers and their viewpoints. In one survey cited, 79 percent of social psychologists admitted they would be less likely to support hiring a conservative colleague than a liberal scholar with equivalent qualifications.

For the full commentary, see:
Arthur C. Brooks. “Academia’s Rejection of Diversity.” The New York Times (Sat., OCT. 31, 2015): A23.
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date OCT. 30, 2015.)

The Behavioral and Brain Sciences article mentioned above, is:
Duarte, José L., Jarret T. Crawford, Charlotta Stern, Jonathan Haidt, Lee Jussim, and Philip E. Tetlock. “Political Diversity Will Improve Social Psychological Science.” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 38 (Jan. 2015) DOI: http://dx.doi.org.leo.lib.unomaha.edu/10.1017/S0140525X14000041

Chinese Communists Fear the Magna Carta

(p. A5) HONG KONG — China’s leaders have long behaved as if nothing could daunt them. But an 800-year-old document written in Latin on sheepskin may have them running scared.
. . .
It is not clear why the public showing was moved off the Renmin University campus. But Magna Carta is widely considered a cornerstone for constitutional government in Britain and the United States, and such a system is inimical to China’s leaders, who view “constitutionalism” as a threat to Communist Party rule.
In 2013, the party issued its “seven unmentionables” — taboo topics for its members. The first unmentionable is promoting Western-style constitutional democracy. The Chinese characters for “Magna Carta” are censored in web searches on Sina Weibo, the country’s Twitter-like social media site.
Hu Jia, a prominent Chinese dissident, said he was not surprised that the exhibit had been moved off the campus. He said that Renmin University had close ties to the Communist Party’s training academy and that the principles the document stood for were contrary to the party’s. More important, he said, Chinese leaders may have been concerned that the exhibit would be popular and that “many students would flock there.”
“They fear that such ideology and historical material will penetrate deep into the students’ hearts,” Mr. Hu said.
. . .
Magna Carta has been the subject of several academic conferences and lectures in China this year, including two at Renmin University. One doctoral student in history who knows people at the museum said that the school had canceled the exhibit on orders of the Ministry of Education.
“To get kind of wound up about an old document like the Magna Carta? They’re a little bit brittle and fragile, aren’t they, Chinese leaders?” said Kerry Brown, a former British diplomat who was stationed in Beijing and now serves as director of the China Studies Center at the University of Sydney in Australia. “Poor dears.”

For the full story, see:
MICHAEL FORSYTHE. “Magna Carta Visits China, but Venue Abruptly Shifts.” The New York Times (Thurs., OCT. 15, 2015): A5.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the article was dated OCT. 14, 2015, and had the title “Magna Carta Exhibition in China Is Abruptly Moved From University.”)

Political Freedom Depends on Economic Freedom–Hayek Was Right

(p. A12) The Commercial Press bookstore does not carry the banned political books. Instead, the collected speeches of China’s president, Xi Jinping, are prominently displayed, as are at least four biographies of Lee Kuan Yew, the late Singaporean leader who was widely admired by Chinese officials.
It is the same pattern in 13 other Hong Kong stores owned by the parent company of Commercial Press, Sino United Publishing, the biggest bookseller and publisher in the city. Despite the interest from mainland tourists, books that paint Chinese politicians in a bad light are either not available or tucked out of sight on shelves far from heavily trafficked areas.
. . .
According to Hong Kong corporate records and one of the company’s top executives, Sino United is owned, through a series of holding companies, by the Chinese government.
The company’s dominant position in the city’s publishing and bookselling industry is a major breach in the wall between the communist mainland and Hong Kong, a former British colony whose civil liberties — including freedom of the press — were guaranteed by treaty for half a century after it returned to Chinese sovereignty in 1997. It also illustrates how the central government in Beijing wields influence here not through force, but through its financial clout.
That influence has become even more apparent in the nearly three years since Mr. Xi became the top leader in China.

For the full story, see:
MICHAEL FORSYTHE and CRYSTAL TSE. “Hong Kong Bookstores Display Beijing’s Clout.” The New York Times (Tues., OCT. 20, 2015): A12.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date OCT. 19, 2015,)

“A Collective Thumbing of the Nose at” Burma’s Dictatorship

(p. A9) For a young man born in a premodern dictatorship, Nway appeared to have it all. The son of a physician, he grew up in the town of Twantay, Burma, with the comforts typically reserved for the country’s military elite. He dreamed of becoming a doctor and raising a family of his own.
That all changed one night after the abortive elections of 1990, when Nway’s father, a supporter of the democracy movement, was arrested on unnamed charges and sentenced to 20 years in prison. There, he was kept in solitary confinement and endured routine beatings, interrogations and mock suffocations until he died of “complications of the liver” in October 1996.
Nway’s father was gone but not forgotten: His awza, or influence, lives on. Inspired by his father’s legacy, Nway dropped out of medical school and devoted his life to bringing liberal democracy to Burma.
. . .
At one point in the book, Nway is pursued by the “dogs” of Burma’s security forces and happens upon some old acquaintances at a beer den. The friends swallow their fear and summon passersby to help protect him. They sit down, building “a fort around Nway” in “a collective thumbing of the nose at the Special Branch police” until he is able to slip away on a motorbike.
For Ms. Schrank, this anecdote embodies the philosophy that ultimately makes the dissidents’ appeal to the people of Burma successful. In her final chapter she notes that it has now become “cool” to tie across your forehead a strip of cloth with the sign of the NLD and support the party “that only months before had belonged to the underground students and come most often with a one-way ticket to prison.”

For the full review, see:
NICHOLAS DESATNICK. “BOOKSHELF; Freedom Fighters; To understand how Burma’s military junta began coming apart at the seams, you need to meet this band of ‘oddballs and dreamers.'” The Wall Street Journal (Fri., July 31, 2015): A9.
(Note: ellipsis added, italics in original.)
(Note: the online version of the review has the date July 30, 2015.)

The book under review, is:
Schrank, Delphine. The Rebel of Rangoon: A Tale of Defiance and Deliverance in Burma. New York: Nation Books, 2015.

Smugly Believing Those Who Disagree with Us Are Stupid

(p. 3) Many liberals, but not conservatives, believe there is an important asymmetry in American politics. These liberals believe that people on opposite sides of the ideological spectrum are fundamentally different. Specifically, they believe that liberals are much more open to change than conservatives, more tolerant of differences, more motivated by the public good and, maybe most of all, smarter and better informed.
The evidence for these beliefs is not good. Liberals turn out to be just as prone to their own forms of intolerance, ignorance and bias. But the beliefs are comforting to many. They give their bearers a sense of intellectual and even moral superiority. And they affect behavior. They inform the condescension and self-righteousness with which liberals often treat conservatives.
. . .
. . . my strongest memory of Mr. Stewart, like that of many other conservatives, is probably going to be his 2010 interview with the Berkeley law professor John Yoo. Mr. Yoo had served in Mr. Bush’s Justice Department and had drafted memos laying out what techniques could and couldn’t be used to interrogate Al Qaeda detainees. Mr. Stewart seemed to go into the interview expecting a menacing Clint Eastwood type, who was fully prepared to zap the genitals of some terrorist if that’s what it took to protect America’s women and children.
Mr. Stewart was caught unaware by the quiet, reasonable Mr. Yoo, who explained that he had been asked to determine what legally constituted torture so the government could safely stay on this side of the line. The issue, in other words, wasn’t whether torture was justified but what constituted it and what didn’t. Ask yourself how intellectually curious Mr. Stewart really could be, not to know that this is what Bush administration officials had been saying all along?

For the full commentary, see:
GERARD ALEXANDER. “Jon Stewart, Patron Saint of Liberal Smugness.” The New York Times, SundayReview Section (Sun., AUG. 9, 2015): 3.
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date AUG. 7, 2015.)
(Note: ellipses added, italics in original.)

“Fight the Decay Called Silence”

Chenjerai Hove speaking in 2001. Source of photo: online version of the NYT obituary quoted and cited below.

(p. B7) Chenjerai Hove, one of Zimbabwe’s leading writers, whose poems and novels powerfully evoked the struggles of ordinary village folk before and after independence, died on July 12 [2015] in Stavanger, in southwestern Norway.
. . .
Writing primarily in English, but also in his native Shona, Mr. Hove vividly depicted the lives of the humblest of his countrymen caught up in the guerrilla war waged against British colonial rule and, after independence in 1980, dealing with the hopes and disappointments of living under Robert Mugabe’s rule.
. . .
In newspaper columns and essays, Mr. Hove painted a bleak picture of post-independence Zimbabwe and sharply criticized the Mugabe regime. The government retaliated with a campaign of intimidation that drove him into exile in 2001 — first to France, then to the United States and finally to Norway, where the International Cities of Refuge Network, an organization that helps persecuted writers, placed him as a guest writer in Stavanger.
“Chenjerai was a national treasure,” Wilf Mbanga, the editor of the British-based weekly The Zimbabwean, told The Independent of London. “It is such a tragedy that one of Zimbabwe’s best-known writers was hounded out of his country and forced to live — and die — in exile. He was never afraid to speak the truth, no matter however painful that might be.”
. . .
“I try to write in order to fight the decay called silence, to communicate with myself so as to search for the ‘other’ in me,” he wrote in 2007 in an essay for the collection “Writers Under Siege: Voices of Freedom From Around the World.”
He continued: “What keeps me going is that every new word and metaphor I create is a little muscle in the act of pushing the dictatorship away from our real and imaginative existence.”

For the full obituary, see:
WILLIAM GRIMES. “Chenjerai Hove, Zimbabwean Author, Is Dead at 59.” The New York Times (Sat., JULY 25, 2015): B7.
(Note: ellipses, and bracketed year, added.)
(Note: the online version of the obituary has the date JULY 23, 2015, and has the title “Chenjerai Hove, Chronicler of Zimbabwean Struggles, Dies at 59.”)

Science Is a Process, Not a Set of Settled Conclusions

(p. A11) Are there any phrases in today’s political lexicon more obnoxious than “the science is settled” and “climate-change deniers”?
The first is an oxymoron. By definition, science is never settled. It is always subject to change in the light of new evidence. The second phrase is nothing but an ad hominem attack, meant to evoke “Holocaust deniers,” those people who maintain that the Nazi Holocaust is a fiction, ignoring the overwhelming, incontestable evidence that it is a historical fact.
. . .
. . . , the release of thousands of emails from the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit in 2009 showed climate scientists concerned with the lack of recent warming and how to “hide the decline.” The communications showed that whatever the emailers were engaged in, it was not the disinterested pursuit of science.
Another batch of 5,000 emails written by top climate scientists came out in 2011, discussing, among other public-relations matters, how to deal with skeptical editors and how to suppress unfavorable data. It is a measure of the intellectual corruption of the mainstream media that this wasn’t the scandal of the century. But then again I forget, “the science is settled.”

For the full commentary, see:
JOHN STEELE GORDON. “The Unsettling, Anti-Science Certitude on Global Warming; Climate-change ‘deniers’ are accused of heresy by true believers; That doesn’t sound like science to me.” The Wall Street Journal (Fri., July 31, 2015): A11.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the article has the date July 30, 2015.)

Communist Party Destroying Dissenting Civic Groups in China

“Yang Zili of the Transition Institute of Social and Economic Research went into hiding.” Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

(p. A4) BEIJING — First, the police took away the think tank’s former graphic designer, then the young man who organized seminars, and eventually its founder. Another employee fled China’s capital, fearing he would be forced to testify against his colleagues in rigged trials.

“The anxiety is overwhelming, not knowing if they are coming for you,” said the employee, Yang Zili, a researcher at the Transition Institute of Social and Economic Research in Beijing, who has been in hiding since November. “It’s frightening because as they disappear, one friend after another, the police are not following any law. They just do as they please.”
These are perilous days for independent civic groups in China, especially those that take on politically contentious causes like workers’ rights, legal advocacy and discrimination against people with AIDS. Such groups have long struggled to survive inside China’s ill-defined, shifting margins of official tolerance, but they have served as havens for socially committed citizens.
Under President Xi Jinping, however, the Communist Party has forcefully narrowed the bounds of accepted activity, setting off fears that these pockets of greater openness in China’s generally restrictive political landscape may soon disappear.
. . .
The campaign has focused on groups deemed sanctuaries for dissent. From its cramped offices in the university district of northwest Beijing, the Transition Institute championed a mix of free market economics and support for the downtrodden, conducting research on the exploitation of taxi drivers, school policies that shortchange rural children and the environmental costs of the massive Three Gorges Dam on the Yangtze River. But the institute also attracted advocates of democratic reform, some of whom had prior run-ins with the authorities.
“We always hoped to eke out survival in tough circumstances,” said Mr. Yang, 43, the researcher now in hiding, who spent eight years in prison for holding informal discussions with a group of friends about multiparty elections and a free press. “But the more independent NGOs,” he added, referring to nongovernmental organizations, “especially the ones that criticize government policies or don’t help the government’s image, have encountered a policy of containment, even destruction.”
. . .
(p. A6) With his colleagues disappearing one by one, Mr. Yang decided to go underground. He was in the institute office one morning in late November when a police officer called and told him to go to a station for questioning. Instead, Mr. Yang left an Internet message for his wife, shut off his cellphone, and slipped away, taking only the clothes on his back. “It was a spur-of-the-moment decision,” he said in an interview.
Meeting with a reporter at a location several hours’ drive from Beijing, he said he missed his wife and 4-year-old son, and visibly nervous, he talked about his fear of being returned to prison.
Mr. Yang said he would turn himself in should a warrant be issued for his arrest, but he was not interested in cooperating with what he described as an extralegal persecution of his colleagues.
“I still don’t understand what we did wrong,” he said. “We were just trying to help improve China.”

For the full story, see:
ANDREW JACOBS and CHRIS BUCKLEY. “In China, Civic Groups’ Freedom, and Followers, Are Vanishing.” The New York Times (Fri., FEB. 27, 2015): A4 & A6.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date FEB. 26, 2015.)