Hilary Clinton: A little improvement over making America break again

HIllary Clinton Many of us have experienced loss in our lives, and we get hit with the cruel irony that we don’t know what we’ve got until it’s gone. We Americans like complaining. To be sure there is plenty to complain about. You have your own list; I won’t write one for you. But things can get a lot worse for Americans than they are.

Donald Trump looks up to President Putin and envies China, because he sees an uncontested leader and hunger to win, regardless of rules, respectively. But that doesn’t mean we want to live in those countries, where people are subject to arrest without cause, where one cannot say what wants to say. These are countries that operate by the rule of man (and I do mean “man”) and not the rule of law, where might makes right, and where the ends justify the means. Putin took the Crimea because he could. He imprisoned and poisoned his opposition because he could. He has interfered with an American election because he could. China violates intellectual property rules and builds islands in the Pacific because they can. These are the ones Trump looks up to.

The American ideal is different. We don’t believe in kings, and we surely do not believe in thugs. We like our freedom, where government acts on the will of the People and not the will of an individual, and where it is constrained not only by the People, but by those who we elect through their oaths to uphold the Constitution, a document that guarantees freedom and fairness, that a person won’t be treated different because of sex, race, or religion. Our ideal extends the Constitution to cover other innate characteristics, such as sexual orientation. Fairness is something we hold dear.

I do not believe that Donald Trump understands any of this. He has spent his life cheating people out of money. To him, the ends will always justify the means. To him, the art of the deal is a matter of deceit, and knowing when to violate its terms. And he does so as long as he can get away with it. An agreement to him only binds him until he finds it inconvenient. Donald Trump will never deliver on his promises, and we know this because of all the broken promises of his past. He is vindictive, and spews hatred towards others. He does not know how to delegate responsibility, and he does not know how to accept responsibility for his mistakes. According to Trump, he’s never made a mistake.

Hillary Clinton lacks the charisma of her husband. She is not a visionary like Bernie Sanders. She is an incrementalist. She is a policy wonk, and she’s a bit nerdish. She will be challenged by a vociferous and resentful opposition. Under a President Hillary Clinton we will not see a Democratic House of Representatives. That will never be her mission. What we will see is steady leadership. Mostly status quo. Status quo means that we get mostly what we have.

And we have quite a lot. We have freedom. We have a functioning, if imperfect, support infrastructure. We have an innovative society. We have democracy. We have checks and balances. We have the right to practice whatever religion we want, so long as we don’t hurt others. Under a President Clinton we would have humility in leadership, and someone who is serious about trying to take a great America and make it better; not by a lot, but at least in the right direction. She is the type that will work to fix the potholes and leaks in the roofs. And she won’t promise more.

She will also deal honestly and ably with what crises hit her. No president is defined by his or her campaign platform, but rather how they react to the problems that are thrown at them. Hillary Clinton will do that will a cool head. We cannot say the same about Trump.

Image Courtesy: Gage Skidmore from Peoria, AZ, USA – Hillary Clinton, CC BY-SA 2.0

Access to WCIT available to ALL

As I wrote earlier, WCIT is now taking place in Dubai. This conference could impact your ability to use the Internet, either by stifling growth due to encoded business models, or by mandating specific standards, rather than allowing creativity to flow. We have the opportunity to listen to parts of this conference, specifically plenary and whole committee meetings. After a tremendous amount of pressure, the participants of that conference have allowed open access to the streaming. You can access the streams at the ITU web site. To be sure, it’s a fairly technical conference. If you listen in and have questions, you can join an XMPP chatroom. If I’m around I will answer your questions. You can also post them here, although in either case I may not have the answer.

Freedom of Speech means something

I don’t blog often these days, in part because of my role. However, I am taking a moment to do so to pay tribute to U.S. Ambassador Chris Stephens and Career Foreign Service Officer Sean Smith, who were killed this week at their posts in Libya, alongside two other Americans. All four served their country for the purpose of furthering not only the interests of the United States, but also those of Libya.

Members of the U.S. foreign service do not get paid well, in comparison to those of us in industry. They do the job out of a sense of duty and service to humankind, with the idea that dialog between peoples is the best way to avoid conflict, that all of our interests are served when differences are resolved peacefully. These people prevent wars, saving not only American lives, but the lives of those who would be lost or irrevocably harmed through conflicts.

Many people in the Middle East are upset over an “anti-Muslim” film. I have not seem this film. While words matter (whatever they are), they are no excuse for violence, especially violence against people who have probably not even seen or heard of the movie! But many outside the U.S., and perhaps even many inside the U.S., don’t understand the meaning of the freedom. It’s is easy listen when one isn’t saying something controversial. Nobody cares about a freedom when we’re all saying nice things.

Freedom of speech is needed by those who speak that which everyone else might find repugnant, outrageous, or simply rude. It’s the only way to insure in a free society that nobody has the right to judge, in an effort to control a political outcome, what should be spoken and what shouldn’t.

This freedom is not universally agreed to nor is it absolute. In the United States, you cannot yell “Fire!” in a movie theater, and in Germany you can’t go around espousing the views of Hitler. But even when people do espouse such views, you have the right to tell them where to go – but peacefully. You also have the right to ignore kooks and wingnuts, and sometimes that is the best response.