Category Archives: culture

The Contempt of the Left

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Progressive-Democratic Party Presidential candidate Joe Biden says it’s time to start censoring private enterprise eliminate protections for tech platforms that publish user posts [emphasis added].

“Section 230 should be revoked, immediately should be revoked, number one,” Biden said in the interview, which was published on Friday.
The law, which was enacted in 1996 as part of the Communications Decency Act, gives websites like Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter broad legal immunity—essentially, it eliminates the possibility of legal consequences over what their users post. The statute was created to protect free speech on the internet.

Biden went further:

…we should be setting standards not unlike the Europeans are doing relative to privacy[.]

This is just more of Progressive-Democrats “be like Europe” sewage.

Biden did more:

[The Times] can’t write something you know to be false and be exempt from being sued. But [Zuckerberg] can….

This…foolishness…is a deliberately false analogy. Facebook isn’t originating content like [The Times] does. A more honest, albeit equally loose, analogy would be to liken Facebook to the distributor of editions of [The Times].  Maybe Biden wants newsstands, or the neighborhood paperboy, censored as responsible for [The Times]’s content.

It is propagating falsehoods they know to be false….

This is yet another example of the utter contempt in which Progressive-Democrats hold us average Americans. We’re just too grindingly stupid, Biden and his fellows insist, to discriminate for ourselves among the false, the erroneous, the satire, the foolish, the uncomfortably true, the simply true, etc. Our Know Betters have to do that for us.

There’s much over which to criticize Facebook, but government censoring free speech isn’t on that list.

Political Parties

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Joseph Sternberg, in his WSJ op-ed last Thursday, opined that the Democrats aren’t the only liberal party in collapse, averring that Great Britain’s Labour Party and Germany’s Social Democratic Party are in similar straits. He claimed early in his piece that

three of the West’s major economic powers are undergoing leadership turnover within their main center-left parties.

While the US’ and Great Britain’s leftist parties are threatened with leadership turnover (Germany’s SPD has already undergone one, and it may be continuing), Sternberg is operating under a false premise with most of his claim. Neither the US nor Great Britain have a center-left political party anymore.

The US has only the Progressive-Democratic Party, a far-left party given life by Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton and vigor by Pete Buttigieg, Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, and such (so far) lesser lights as Bill de Blasio and Gavin Newsom.

Great Britain has only its Labour Party, which has gone as far-left in the British political spectrum as has the Progressive-Democratic Party in ours. Labour has been enthusiastically taken there by the party’s continued and continuing leader, Jeremy Corbyn and the party’s own lesser light Sadiq Khan.

It would be good for both our nations did our two actually have center-left parties, but there’s nothing forming even in the wings for either of us.

Impeachment

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Now the House Progressive-Democrats have deigned deliver their Articles of Impeachment to the Senate, and the Senate’s trial will begin in earnest (the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court has been sworn in, and the Senators have been sworn in) tomorrow right after lunch Eastern Time.  There remains speculation about whether the Senate will call additional witnesses in the course of the trial or whether the Senate should simply dismiss the case.

The matter seems clear to my august self.

Under our Constitution, the House has the sole responsibility to conduct an impeachment investigation and to produce the resulting Articles of Impeachment. Further, only the House is allowed to conduct that investigation. Finally, that investigation is entire and complete with the writing of the Articles. Art I, Sect 2:

The House of Representatives…shall have the sole Power of Impeachment.

Under our Constitution, the Senate has the sole responsibility to try the House’s impeachment Articles. Further, that’s all the Senate is allowed to do vis-a-vis impeachment. In particular, it cannot conduct its own investigation. Art I, Sect 3:

The Senate shall have the sole Power to try all Impeachments.

The Senate should hear the cases presented by the House’s and President’s impeachment managers, evaluate the case as presented in the Articles, and then vote to acquit or convict. No further investigation, no witnesses, nothing else at all is required or legitimate.

Disagreements and Lies

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Progressive-Democratic Party Presidential candidates and Senators Elizabeth Warren (D, MA) and Bernie Sanders (I, VT) disagree with each other on whether Sanders ever told Warren that a woman could not win an election for President. That disagreement came to the fore in Tuesday’s Progressive-Democrat primary debate, and became manifest in a post debate, still on the debate stage, spat between the two:

“I think you called me a liar on national TV,” Ms Warren said, according to audio released by CNN.
“What?” Mr Sanders responded.
“I think you called me a liar on national TV,” she repeated.
“You know, let’s not do it right now. If you want to have that discussion, we’ll have that discussion,” Mr Sanders said.
Ms. Warren responded: “Anytime.”
“You called me a liar,” Mr Sanders said.

The WSJ asked in the article at the link,

Do you think this spat will influence voters as Democrats move forward to the primaries?

It certainly should influence voters in the general election. What the exchange demonstrates is that it isn’t possible to disagree with a member of the Progressive-Democratic Party. The one who disagrees must be a liar or must be calling the one with whom he disagrees a liar.

In Progressive-Democrats’ ideology, disagreements can’t possibly be differences of interpretation, and they certainly can’t ever be matters of saying that one or the other is mistaken.

No. The one is must be a liar or must be calling the other a liar. That’s a deliberate, consciously done effort to suppress dissent, to stifle disagreement. It’s an attack on free speech.

And it’s what we can expect, nationally, should a Progressive-Democrat occupy the White House.

Privacy and DoJ

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I don’t often disagree with Attorney General Bill Barr, but on this I most certainly do.

Attorney General William Barr demanded Monday that Apple help the US government unlock two iPhones in its terror investigation of the Saudi air cadet who last month killed three sailors at a Navy training base in Pensacola, Florida. “This situation perfectly illustrates why it is critical that the public be able to get access to digital evidence,” Mr Barr said.

“The public,” not “the government” or “the police investigators.”  Now, it’s clear that Barr could have been speaking metaphorically in this, so I’ll not pursue this aspect beyond pointing out the possibility of misunderstanding or of misplaced priority.

The larger matters, though, are two.

Apple has no need to help DoJ on this, neither empirically nor legally.

Empirically because DoJ is crying wolf. The agency bleated about the need for Apple’s…cooperation…after San Bernardino, and then a 3rd party cracked that phone for DoJ. Now DoJ is at it again. In the last couple of days, though, WSJ published an article listing a number of phone cracking software packages already on the market. DoJ no longer has credibility in this.

It simply wants Apple to do the DoJ work because DoJ doesn’t want to drop a dime on some software and, more, because DoJ wants to put its boot on Apple’s neck to demonstrate just who it is who’s in charge.

Legally because there is no Constitutional requirement for any private enterprise to destroy its software—which opening the software for Government, at Government’s veriest demand, would do. More, we—neither us individual citizens nor our private enterprises—are here to give Government something to do.

Government is here to work for us. That Apple’s intransigence—our intransigence generally—on this sort of thing is a matter of government convenience not a matter of compelling government investigative need.