Category Archives: ethics

A Terse View of Law

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This is from Ron Wyden, a Progressive-Democratic Party Senator from Oregon:

In the coming days a lawless Trump-appointed judge is expected to ban access to abortion medication nationwide. I’m calling on the FDA to protect the safety of every woman in America by keeping the drug on the market no matter the ruling.

He insists that doctors also ignore the court’s ruling, and the law of the land, if that ruling goes against the Progressive-Democrat’s personal views.

This is the contempt that Party has for law, for court rulings, for our Constitution, and for us average Americans. Law, courts, our Constitution are not even suggestions; they’re simply to be ignored because these Know Betters are above all that petty stuff.

We need to remember this despotic attitude of Party in 21 months. And inject backbone into our non-Progressive representatives at all levels of government in the meantime.

“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.