Tick-Tock, Freedom's on the Clock
Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia. Since the beginning of your life, since the beginning of the Party, since the beginning of history, the war has continued without a break, always the same war. Do you remember that?
— O'Brien (1984)
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My first thought about the concession of the Department of Energy, and shortly thereafter, of the FBI, that SARS-CoV-2 “leaked” from a lab in China was that it was strange that it was the Department of Energy making the concession. Even though it turned out that the Department of Energy has partial oversight of biological labs, because of the risk that they can be, and are, used to manufacture weapons of mass destruction, this information probably should have come from a less obscure source, such as, Joe Biden or some other prominent executive branch official.
My second thought was “What is the government not saying?”
On the one hand, we know as a historical fact that the government lies about everything. On the other hand, we know that the best propaganda hews closely to the truth. It is simply a matter of (i) what truths are told, (ii) how much of the truth is told, and (iii) what coloring is given to the truth presented.
For example, what the government failed to concede, among many other related things, is that:
1. It financed the lab in Wuhan from which SARS-CoV-2 “leaked;”
2. The research being conducted at the Wuhan lab began in the United States;
3. The research being conducted at the Wuhan lab involves the biological and genetic modification of naturally occurring viruses to make them more infectious and more toxic to human beings, which is commonly known as “gain of function” research;
4. The reason the research is being conducted at the Wuhan lab is that President Obama ordered, at least on the record, that the gain of function research in the United States be halted due to its high risks, and that Anthony Fauci disobeyed this (apparent) order and moved the research over to China; and
5. The development of viruses which are extremely infectious and toxic to human beings is generally a serious violation of both U.S. and international laws which prohibit the manufacturing biological weapons in the clearest language possible.
The point being that at most, the government advised the public of only a fraction of the truth about the origins of SARS-CoV-2. As we know from the CIA’s manual on psychological warfare, we should be suspicious about any such partial disclosure. Further, we must presume that the government’s presentation was intentional, and that the government carefully selected the “truth” which it chose to disclose because it has an ulterior purpose.
My takeaway is that the government intends to provoke in the public antipathy towards China.
The issue becomes “Why?”
Certainly, a worldview which conceives of all global affairs as an economic competition would be concerned about recent geopolitical developments, including:
1. China is partnering with Russia on arms manufacturing and on energy delivery as a result of military miscalculations in Ukraine;
2. The international energy markets appear to be transitioning from transacting in the dollar to transacting in the yuan and other currencies;
3. China is consolidating investment and economic hegemony in resource rich Africa;
4. China is threatening Taiwan and asserting sovereign rights to the South China Sea; and
5. Perhaps most significantly, American global power appears to be in an accelerating decline, the poorly managed pull-out from Afghanistan following a failed two-decade military campaign being emblematic.
Much, if not all, of this realignment is the result of “neo-conservative” influence on American public policy. We could argue all week about whether these conditions were actually intended, in that if we had tried to screw things up, we couldn’t have done a better job of it, but it is probably not disputable that these conditions are the predictable results of the political decisions of the past several decades. Nothing good for the people was to come of the decisions to destroy America’s manufacturing base and to expend our Treasury on wars of aggression with no defined material objectives.
Unfortunately, there is no short-term solution. Moreover, even with a firm commitment to rebuild America and with a dedicated allegiance to this commitment, we are years behind the curve. It is unlikely that we will ever recapture whatever international power we once had, or believed that we had.
We are, in the present, at least fortunate that even the nuttiest lunatics in the national security apparatus are unlikely to agitate for war with China, and Russia, and Iran, etc. — John Bolton excluded. It is obvious that we simply don’t have the necessary resources. We are worse than broke, and our industrial base is at best, dormant, and at worst, paralyzed by an addiction to illegal Chinese Fentanyl.
Nevertheless, just as suddenly as the government announced that it had “low confidence” that SARS-CoV-2 had “leaked” from the Wuhan lab, TikTok, of all things in the world, was designated as a grave and immediate threat to American national security.
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TikTok is a Chinese video-sharing internet program which allows users to create and share short-form videos from three seconds to ten minutes in length. It is open to videos on any topic. It is primarily a cell-phone app, but it is possible to upload and watch TikTok videos in a web browser.
TikTok makes creation and sharing of videos very easy. In addition, due to the short-form format, watching takes almost no effort, and can become addicting. Indeed, some people can keep watching videos for hours, and the TikTok algorithm will load videos for the viewer. Like all such algorithms, it can be tweaked for different users, different groups, and different countries.
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The politicians would have us believe that TikTok is a grave national security threat, because TikTok gives China the power to corrupt our youth and to collect data on the users.
I won’t dispute that these are risks. However, I do dispute that these risks are grave or risks with which the people who run the government are actually concerned. If the government cared about our youth, the schools would be a lot better. If the government cared about user data, we’d see this concern applied to the entirety of the international economy.
What the people who run the government actually care about is the control of the public. One of the most powerful, and necessary, tools for this job is the control of information. One critical component of controlling information is the control of dissent.
As we know from the CIA manual on psychological warfare, when the government intends to persuade the public of some notion, to influence public opinion, in other words, it will seek to induce a form of mass hypnosis. The government will pound away relentlessly on some a message across all media. Vital to this method of persuasion is the elimination of any “corrective,” i.e., the whole truth in the face of half-truths, and the truth in the face of the lies.
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Just as suddenly as TikTok was identified as a grave threat to American national security, the politicians had a “solution:” A new set of laws, which were obviously years in the drafting, called, the “RESTRICT Act,” short for “Restricting the Emergence of Security Threats that Risk Information and Communications Technology Act.”
This Act is an abomination. More horrifying is that like all of the worst laws, it has broad “bipartisan” support, meaning this is something the people who pay the politicians very much want enacted.
While the Act would ostensibly apply only to Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Venezuela, Russia, and China, our so-called “foreign adversaries,” it would apply broadly to the “use of any information and communications technology product or service,” in which an entity subject to a foreign adversary’s jurisdiction has an interest. Because nearly every tech company is at least partially subject to Chinese jurisdiction, this means that the RESTRICT Act would, in the end, apply to all information and communications technology.
The RESTRICT Act would grant the Secretary of Commerce sweeping administrative authority to take “any mitigation measure to address any risk” arising from the use of communications products and services. The secretary’s power to invoke these mitigation measures would arise upon a unilateral determination that there is an “undue or unacceptable risk to the national security of the United States or the safety of United States persons.” These mitigation measures include censorship of information and imposition of administrative fines of up to $250,000.00. Further, any judicial review must be sought by an aggrieved party within 60 days of the secretary’s actions.
The way I read the RESTRICT Act is that it codifies the censorship regime which the government has implemented in secret alliances (or more accurately, conspiracies) with the social media companies over the past decade, while at the same time, making meaningful relief essentially unavailable to the public.
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Freedom of speech is generally celebrated as the first of the civil liberties. It is both an instrumental and an intrinsic good. It is an instrumental good in the sense that it is a necessary condition of inquiry and of progress. It is an intrinsic good in the sense that it is an element in individual well-being and self-fulfillment.
This right of free people is preserved in the First Amendment:
Congress shall make no law . . . abridging the freedom of speech.
Similarly, this right is included in the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, to which the United States is a signatory. Article 19 provides that:
1. Everyone shall have the right to hold opinions without interference.
2. Everyone shall have the right to freedom of expression; this right shall include freedom to seek, receive and impart information and ideas of all kinds, regardless of frontiers, either orally, in writing or in print, in the form of art, or through any other media of his choice
We have to be careful here. The government does not exist to help the people, at least in its present iteration. If we have learned anything from the Covid-19 exercise, it is both that the government will seize tyrannical power and also that most of the public will accede to even the most malicious oppressions without the slightest resistance, or even any skepticism. Part and parcel of this tyranny included, and still includes, censorship of dissenting opinions regarding the un-democratic and scientifically unsound measures imposed by the government. These dissenting opinions not only have been proven in the passage of time, to have been right, but also, if they had been heard, would probably have saved lives.
There’s profit for the few in autocracy, and this is a powerful motive for the imposition of authoritarian controls by a captured political process, but autocracy is not a healthy form of government for a people with the resources to govern themselves.