Monthly Archives: November 2020

Mutual Trust

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…requires mutuality. Progressive-Democratic Party Presidential candidate Joe Biden is preaching unity, bipartisanship, and trust. However, The Wall Street Journal, in its Tuesday edition, noted that

Biden will be under intense scrutiny from his left flank, which is already calling on him to shun incremental change in favor of an ambitious agenda and to populate his administration with progressives.

However.

Biden has shown himself since to be utterly untrustworthy.

His positions are unreliable; he’s flip-flopped on far too many principles, from the Hyde Amendment, to fracking bans, to the Green New Deal, and more.

forge deals in which each side wins something

He no longer adheres to that–it’s the Progressive-Democrat way or nothing all. That’s House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s (D, CA) and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer’s (D, NY) position, and Biden has not once disputed with them over that. Not with a single syllable.

Operate in confidentiality

But only Progressive-Democrat confidentiality. Congressmen Adam Schiff (D, CA) and Jerry Nadler (D, NY), among many others, leak freely and selectively from confidential meetings. Here, too, Biden is carefully silent. He offers not a syllable of objection to such breaches, not a syllable of objection to leaks by others of confidential Presidential phone calls between President Donald Trump and other heads of state.

Attack ideas and not personalities

Biden has had nothing but ad hominem smears against Trump throughout his campaign, from his primary contests to his  general election campaign.

His fellow Progressive-Democrats and his extra-Party supporters on the Left are busily compiling enemies lists of all worked for Trump or supported him—all 72 million of us, since they include voters. Biden actively supports these tools of hatred and political tyranny with his considered decision to not denounce the lists and his list makers.

It’s not possible to arrive at bipartisan proposals with so untrustworthy a negotiating “partner.”

There can be no trust of Biden since he has no trust of us.

Foreign Takeovers of Domestic Companies

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Great Britain is concerned with

strik[ing] a middle ground between welcoming foreign investment and protecting strategic industries from takeover, particularly amid concerns around acquisitions by Chinese state-backed companies.

Thus,

Under…proposed rules, investors would have to notify the government about transactions involving 17 sectors including nuclear, artificial intelligence, transport, energy, and defense.

That would seem to make a foreign investment law unnecessarily byzantine, and require revisiting at some aperiodic intervals.  After all, what’s not strategic today might turn out strategic tomorrow. This is illustrated by the timing of this proposal.

The rules update a takeover regime dating back 20 years that the government says is no longer adequate.

Well, NSS.

I have a better idea (also because I don’t lack for hubris). Don’t worry about strategic sectors. Bar all foreign takeover transactions unless and until they’re approved by a CFIUS-like facility. It would work for us, too.

Two Misleadings in One

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Progressive-Democratic Party Presidential candidate Joe Biden now is pushing the General Services Administration to approve an official transition of power from President Donald Trump to him.

That’s the first mislead. There’s no power to transition because no winner of this Presidential election has been identified yet.

Reuters then says, in its article at the link,

Biden was declared the winner of the November 3 election by US television networks on Saturday….

That’s the second mislead. Reuters‘ own press oblivious self-importance notwithstanding, it’s remarkably unimportant what the US television network press thinks. The winner of the November will be identified by the aggregated certifications of State vote counts by State Secretaries of State and the associated allocation of Electors in the Electoral College (technically, not until the Electors actually vote in December, but the incidence of faithless Electors is quite rare).

What He Said

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A Massachusetts letter writer published in The Wall Street Journal‘s Monday Letters had this on identity politics:

I was born and raised in working-class Chicopee, MA, by second-generation Polish-American factory workers. I’m not a Boston Brahmin. I didn’t graduate from an Ivy League school or do a Wall Street internship, but I’m no longer blue-collar, either. Regardless, I’m proud to belong to an identity group that includes a wide variety of people of different races, ethnic backgrounds and religious beliefs. I identify as an American.

I hope he’s not simply being naively optimistic. In any event, what he said. Indeed.

Factchecking

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One example of factchecking, by Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook censors factcheckers, is provided by Power Line.  It seems that Jon Hinderaker was impertinent enough to link to his Power Line post from his Facebook account, and that post rudely suggested that there might be voter fraud in the Wisconsin establishment.

Zuckerberg’s minions didn’t like that, so they had USA Today “fact check” the post, and based on that “news” outlet’s review, they added this to Hinderaker’s Facebook link.

Here’s Hinderaker’s rebuttal—on Power Line, since Zuckerberg brooks no argument with his priests—in pertinent part (RTWT):

The explanation given for Facebook’s “fact check” is that “Wisconsin turnout [is] in line with past elections, didn’t jump 22%.” But my Facebook post said nothing about Wisconsin turnout jumping by 22%. Neither did my Power Line post, which I doubt anyone from USA Today or Facebook actually read. According to Wisconsin officials, that state had a record turnout in 2020, not one that was “in line with past elections,” so Facebook’s “fact check” is blatantly false. Also, obviously, it doesn’t even attempt to deal with anything I wrote in my Power Line post, which, among other things, explained why some observers have made exaggerated claims relating to Wisconsin’s 2020 turnout numbers. Nor does it try to explain why there is something wrong with what I wrote on Facebook, which was that “the numbers suggest” that there was major voter fraud in Wisconsin–a claim that, as far as I know, stands unrebutted.

Hinderaker is polite and says Zuckerberg’s (Hinderaker also says “Facebook,” but Zuckerberg is the MFWIC, not only in name, but with controlling share ownership) fact check is false. I have no such compunction: Zuckerberg, through his censors, is straight up lying.

Zuckerberg no longer runs a pipeline and so that operation no longer falls within the protections of the 1996 Communications Decency Act‘s Section 230. Here’s what Section 230 does in this context:

…protects social media platforms from liability for “any action voluntarily taken in good faith to restrict access to or availability of material that the provider or user considers to be obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessively violent, harassing, or otherwise objectionable, whether or not such material is constitutionally protected.”

It’s that “otherwise objectionable” bit that’s the problem (and so is “harassing” in this context). That’s where political speech is getting censored by Zuckerberg. From that, he’s made his operation a publisher (of opinion and, in too many cases, lies; although the latter is neither here nor there regarding Section 230), and so either his Facebook needs to be reclassified and removed from within Section 230, or Section 230 needs to be corrected to remove “otherwise objectionable” or anything like it from the liability protection clauses and the definition of “harassing” tightened a very great deal. Afterall, newspapers don’t get those protections; neither should Zuckerberg’s publisher.

Full stop.