Category Archives: ethics

“Common Sense”

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The Progressive-Democratic Party is attempting to use its Newspeak Dictionary to redefine “Nonsense” as “Common sense.” The latest example of this is President Joe Biden’s (D) latest call for “common sense” gun reforms. He made his latest demand in response to a series of murders with guns in Mississippi. In that series, the murderer used a shotgun and two handguns to murder six people across three locations in his single rampage. Biden’s demand:

That includes requiring background checks on all gun sales, banning assault weapons and high-capacity magazines, fully closing the boyfriend loophole to keep guns out of the hands of domestic abusers, requiring safe storage of guns, and eliminating immunity for gun manufacturers who knowingly put weapons of war on our streets.

Because any of that, like banning mythical devices—assault weapons and weapons of war on our streets—would have kept shotguns or handguns away from this murderer, or any other. And surely “high capacity magazines,” of whatever definition that becomes convenient from time to time to an overreaching government, would have kept shotguns and handguns away from criminals.

Holding gun manufacturers liable for the abuses of their products by criminals will only limit the availability of firearms to us honest ­average Americans. Oh, wait: that’s the goal of Party. Party members know full well that laws are ignored by criminals; that’s at the core of what makes them criminals.

Nonsense is common sense to Party. And Party expects us meekly to accept that. Or else.

Liability

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The Supreme Court is taking up a case centered on Internet platform liability, or lack of it, for things posted on those platforms by users. Wall Street Journal editors asked a couple of questions on the matter.

But are internet sites liable for the algorithms they use to sort and present content?

Liable for the algorithms in the legal sense? That’s an open question, and the Supremes are likely to answer it Gonzalez v Google, albeit unusefully narrowly.

However, the Internet sites most assuredly are responsible for the algorithms and what the algorithms sort and present. Those algorithms, after all, were written by the Internet sites’ human employees.

On the other hand,

Do social-media sites have immunity for fact-checks they append to disputed posts? What if search engines use language models to directly answer user queries, with text synthesized from the web?

Absolutely, they do not have immunity. This is the social-media site doing after-the-fact commenting on the legitimacy of what a user has posted, and so the site is creating its own liability with that after-the-fact legitimacy-checking. Keep in mind, too, those search engines, language models, and text synthesizing algorithms all are written by human employees of those social-media sites. Since that software does only what the human programmers code it to do, and those human programmers code what the site employs them to do, the use of that after-the-fact software deepens the social-media sites’ lack of immunity.

Don’t Waste Any More Time

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The House Committee on Oversight and Accountability asked for Hunter Biden’s bank and communications records. Biden’s lawyer, Abbe Lowell, said “No” with the rationalization that the Oversight Committee’s request lacked oversight basis. This excuse is so risible as to be contemptible.

Enough.

Stop wasting time handling these persons with kid gloves. Subpoena the documents, and then go get them under threat of arrest—and actual arrest and lockup—using the Senate’s Jurney v MacCracken precedent. Find Hunter Biden in contempt, have the House Sergeant at Arms arrest him and bring him before the House, there to try him on the contempt charge, and if convicted jail him until he clears the contempt failure by producing the untampered with (vis., unredacted) documents for the Committee’s satisfaction.

The Supreme Court’s ruling on MacCracken, which makes clear that this power extends to each house of Congress and is not limited to the Senate, can be read here.

Not Too Circular….

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During last Wednesday’s House Committee on Oversight and Accountability hearing regarding the Federal government’s collusion with social media, social media powdered wigs were asked whether they had used disappearing message apps to talk with government officials.

Twitter’s ex-Chief Legal Officer Vijaya Gaddee’s response:

Not to the best of my records.

Which, of course, her records would not indicate, her messages with government officials (like another “witness” in front of the committee, then-FBI General Counsel James Baker) having disappeared via those apps.

Incidentally, Baker, in front of the Committee in his role as ex-Twitter Deputy General Counsel, claimed I don’t recall whether he had used disappearing message apps.

Go figure.

Lies of a Progressive-Democrat President

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President Joe Biden (D) has long claimed that his tax-raising plan and his IRS would not target anyone making less than $400,000 per year. He repeated that claim in his State of the Union speech last Tuesday.

Under my plan, nobody earning less than $400,000 a year will pay an additional penny in taxes.

Never mind. His IRS’ latest proposed rule:

The proposed SITCA [Service Industry Tip Compliance Agreement] program is designed to take advantage of advancements in point-of-sale, time and attendance systems, and electronic payment settlement methods to improve tip reporting compliance.

Not even that vaunted and highly successful barkeep, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, pulled down 400 stacks in a year when she was working saloons in New York City.

The IRS claims the program is “voluntary,” but watch what happens to the hapless waitress or waiter, or any other low-wage person for whom tips are a significant fraction of his income, who doesn’t report his tips in a manner that suits the revenooers.

Biden has lied again.

Separately, I’ll no longer include my tip on the charge card receipt that’s increasingly often offered to patrons as a “convenient” way to tip wait staff on their presentment of my bill. Instead, I’ll return to an earlier practice of leaving my tip on the table as cash. The busboy is more trustworthy than this President and his IRS. That’s an appallingly low bar for the busboy, but I do not mean the comparison as faint praise for him. Far from it. I may go a step farther, and pay the whole bill with cash.