The wife of a Chinese dissident is suing Yahoo, Inc. for providing identifiable evidence to the communist government that imprisoned her husband for writing anonymous editorials critical of China’s communist rule.

From Wired News:

Early one Sunday morning in 2002, a phone rings in Yu Ling’s Beijing duplex. She’s cleaning upstairs; her son is asleep, while downstairs, her husband, Wang Xiaoning, is on the computer. Wang writes about politics, anonymously e-mailing his online e-journals to a group of Yahoo users. He’s been having problems with his Yahoo service recently. He thinks it’s a technical issue. This is the day he learns he’s wrong.

Wang picks up the phone: “Yes?”

“Are you home?” asks the unfamiliar voice on the other end.

“Yes.”

The line goes dead.

Moments later, government agents swarm through the front door – 10 of them, some in uniform, some not. They take Wang away. They take his computers and disks. They shove an official notice into Yu’s hands, tell her to keep quiet, and leave. This is how it’s done in China. This is how the internet police grab you.

Yahoo! isn’t the only search engine company guilty of conforming to the rules of communist countries in exchange for access to their marketplace. According to the article, Google also censors certain phrases on its Google China search engine that relate to subjects such as freedom and democracy that the Chinese government prefers its citizens not learn about.

It’s an interesting notion that, ostensibly, the rights our government recognizes for its citizens are God-given and do not dissolve when an American travels to another country, and yet there is no system in place to ensure that big American companies follow the same rules where civil rights are concerned when offering their products to other countries as they would have to follow here. The implication is that either our government believes the people of other countries are innately less than Americans or that our government no longer believes such rights are innate at all. It could be argued that while the US government may recognize those rights it has no jurisdiction for protecting the rights of foreigners, but even so, it does have an obligation to ensure that American businesses do not engage in practices that violate those rights anywhere.

Legal experts are doubtful of Yu’s chances in court. But her presence in the United States puts an inescapable human face on the pain caused by the uneasy alliances American technology companies have forged in the last five years with China’s repressive regime. These partnerships are the price of admission to China’s booming market, but they are not without their casualties.

Cathy Young’s article in the March issue of Reason, Enforcing Virtue, is an excellent clarification for anyone who is under the mistaken impression that libertarians not only want government to stop enforcing morality, but also want society to stop enforcing it as well. For most libertarians, this isn’t the case at all.

But the merits of specific conservative pleadings aside, is there anything illiberal about an argument for the cultural stigmatization of, say, casual sex? Does supporting the free speech right to chronicle your sex life or explore your sexual fantasies online mean that you cannot regard such porno-blogging as tacky and narcissistic? Must you oppose not just state censorship but the social conventions that generally compel such bloggers to conceal their activities from relatives and employers?

Few libertarians, I think, would argue that stigmatization as such is abhorrent. While no libertarian worth the name would support legal prohibitions on hate speech, the overwhelming majority would agree that racist, anti-Semitic, or homophobic slurs should be socially unacceptable, penalized through severe disapproval if not outright ostracism.

Thank you, Cathy Young! There may be some sociological anarchists who subscribe to the libertarian philosophy, but, by and large, libertarians have very specific morals– they’re just not all the same. Society, and, yes, even you alone can inspire change in people. You do not need the government’s help.

What really gets me about the Republican Party (And here I speak of the machine that makes laws, not individual Republicans, many of whom I know and love.) is that they still think that government can change people’s minds on moral issues, even though the contrary morals the Democratic Party often pushes annoys the hell out of them. People of all stripes resent government interference in their lives, and even when they’re prevented (or, as is more often the case, only hindered) from living the way they want, their mind never changes.

Just because we don’t outlaw something, doesn’t mean we condone it. We might hate it. And we’re free to, thank God.

I just saw this great video from the ACLU on YouTube. How to Avoid Being Arrested by the Cops shows three scenarios in which the cops search a car, a person, and a house, and then the former ACLU director explains how the implicated person could have handled the situation differently if they’d known their rights. Watch this video. Know your rights. It’s aimed at teenagers, but it’s useful information for everyone when it comes to dealing with cops.

For the past five years or so I’ve been aware of Noam Chomsky’s political activism, and I’ve always enjoyed reading (if not entirely agreeing with) his essays. He’s a self-described “libertarian socialist", which is a philosophy that basically proposes a free society in which ownership of the means of production is entirely in the hands of labor unions. He’s more or less obsessed by the idea that private ownership of business necessarily puts power over laborers in the hands of an elite group and that said power is always used oppressively. (I’m generalizing here, though not, I think, unfairly. Nevertheless, I welcome the input of any libertarian socialists or Chomsky scholars who feel so inclined.)

My most prominent objections to that are these: America has a dominant middle class (that Marx never considered when he started all the hooplah about class) which, as a group, more or less rules the country– the members being both workers and property owners. And, presumably the nature of the oppression which private business exerts is that it keeps laborers from ever getting ahead, which would seem to have to be measured by material prosperity and which would not be possible if private business was outlawed anyway. For, how would they ever have the means to rise above their station?

Ownership seems to me to be a somewhat fundamental aspect of humanity. For the purpose of this blog, I define ownership as rightful possession of property. Removing that seems to me to be quite in contrast to Freedom as an individualist value. What is Chomsky’s version of liberty to someone who wants to make a better mousetrap than the one the mousetrap union is producing? Too, what motivation is there in such a society for change, innovation, or diversity?