Category Archives: ethics

QOTD

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Or maybe it’s the quote of the week. Or the month. Or the year.

It seems that

[a]t least 44 schools in San Francisco could see their names changed, as officials believe some were named after those with potential connections to slavery, genocide, and colonization, according to a report on Thursday.
The San Francisco School Names Advisory Committee researched school names and identified certain ones for renaming.

The move isn’t sitting well with the folks and their children who will have to live with the outcome of this move. Here’s one concerned parent:

Principals are devoting resources to this. We’re not actually helping disadvantaged children by changing the name of the school they can’t attend.

Unfortunately, though, this is typical of the vapidly saccharine pseudo-policies of the virtue-signaling Left. Worse, it’s all the Left seems to have; there’s nothing substantive or practical to their claims.

Free Speech

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Jason Loftus, CEO of Lofty Sky Entertainment, had an excellent op-ed on free speech in Wednesday’s Wall Street Journal.  He closed his piece with this:

Politicians shouldn’t aim to restrict access to social-media platforms. It is reasonable, however, to require that any platform operating in the US uphold the freedoms that Americans hold dear.

Absolutely. However, since companies in the People’s Republic of China are bound by PRC law to satisfy any request for information made by the PRC government’s intelligence facility, a requirement to uphold American freedoms is impossible for PRC-based or -owned PRC companies to meet.

Accordingly, WeChat and other PRC companies should be barred from operating in–not just be given restricted access to–our economy.

Censorship

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Here are a couple of New York Post items that Facebook and Twitter are so nakedly censoring. These are in their second article:

And

And

These items are in the NYP‘s second article, published 15 October, the day after the Post published its first article—which Twitter and Facebook began censoring. These two social media enterprises went so far as to lock White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany out of her personal Twitter account unless and until she deletes her own Twitter post that carried that original Post article, which broke the fact of the laptop and emails thereon.

Twitter has extended its censorship to the point that it is blocking a United States Senator—Ted Cruz (R, TX)—from tweeting about this second article.

True, false, or misunderstood, the laptop and these emails and the others on that newly exposed laptop need to be openly discussed and their provenances clearly identified.

With this censorship, Facebook and Twitter have ceased to be pipelines and created themselves publishers controlling what information they will choose to publish.

That makes it imperative to withdraw their immunity from the regulation to which any publisher of information is subject, including in particular the requirement to provide equal time under equal conditions to all sides of any discussion of information.

With their censorship, Facebook and Twitter have drastically abused their monopoly power. With that, it’s necessary, also, to break them up into smaller, independently operating enterprises with management teams and employee suites that are entirely separate each enterprise from the others.

Read both articles. The first one can be seen both here and via the Senate Judiciary Committee’s Web page.

Pettiness

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And sulking reminiscent of a tantrum-throwing two-year-old. That’s Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer’s (D, NY) position regarding the confirmation hearings for Judge Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court.

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer says Democrats will not “supply quorum” for votes on Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett, effectively declaring that they’ll boycott the process in an attempt to stall her confirmation.

Never mind that he and his fellow Progressive-Democrat Senators could be working with the Republican Senators on getting Wuhan Virus situation-related aid to Americans, including his constituents, instead of refusing even to allow floor debate on the targeted aid bill he personally blocked just last month.

Never mind that he and his fellow Progressive-Democrat Senators could be working with the Republican Senators on Senator Tim Scott’s (R, SC) police reform bill instead of refusing, just a bare few months ago, even to allow floor debate on the bill—and condoning Senator Dick Durbin’s (D, IL) despicable characterization of the black Senator’s bill as a token.

Never mind that Schumer’s ducking away from consideration of this confirmation process will add only a few hours’ delay and considerable irritation for irritation’s sake to the confirmation process: there are too many ways to work around his refusal to appear for the votes, especially since there aren’t even enough Progressive-Democrats in the Senate actually to deny a quorum.

It’s like Schumer has only tantrums and sulking to offer.

Follow the Narrative–I Mean Science

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Here’s some science—the Great Barrington Declaration.

James Freeman, in his Tuesday Wall Street Journal column, opened with this:

This week dozens of esteemed medical experts with blue-chip academic credentials published a warning about the destructive policies adopted to address Covid-19. Since the Sunday publication of this Great Barrington Declaration more than a thousand biological scientists and more than 1,500 medical practitioners have added their names to the petition. Yet it’s been almost entirely ignored by the media outlets that spend much of their days presenting themselves as obedient to science.

The declaration says this, in part:

Current lockdown policies are producing devastating effects on short and long-term public health. The results (to name a few) include lower childhood vaccination rates, worsening cardiovascular disease outcomes, fewer cancer screenings, and deteriorating mental health—leading to greater excess mortality in years to come, with the working class and younger members of society carrying the heaviest burden. Keeping students out of school is a grave injustice.

The declaration closes with its recommendation for how we should deal with the virus [emphasis added].

Adopting measures to protect the vulnerable should be the central aim of public health responses to COVID-19. By way of example, nursing homes should use staff with acquired immunity and perform frequent PCR testing of other staff and all visitors. Staff rotation should be minimized. Retired people living at home should have groceries and other essentials delivered to their home.  …
Those who are not vulnerable should immediately be allowed to resume life as normal. Simple hygiene measures, such as hand washing and staying home when sick should be practiced by everyone to reduce the herd immunity threshold. Schools and universities should be open for in-person teaching. Extracurricular activities, such as sports, should be resumed. Young low-risk adults should work normally, rather than from home. Restaurants and other businesses should open. Arts, music, sport and other cultural activities should resume. People who are more at risk may participate if they wish….

Of course the Great Barrington Declaration and its Focused Protection proposal have been ignored by the media outlets. They’re also being ignored by Progressive-Democrats everywhere from Biden, Pelosi, and Schumer on down.

The Great Barrington Declaration is the wrong science to follow; it’s too politically inconvenient to settled narrative.