Category Archives: ethics

Hypocrisy

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Progressive-Democrats are accusing Republicans of that as they move to confirm Judge Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court “in a Presidential election year.” Typical of them is this bit by Congressman Gerry Connolly (D, VA):

I’m focused on the hypocrisy of the Republicans who promised, Lindsey Graham [R, SC, and Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman] being number one, his own words, said they wouldn’t do this.

What Connolly is carefully ignoring is that Graham, subsequent to that commitment and in response to the then-Judge Brett Kavanaugh Supreme Court confirmation hearings, said in no uncertain terms, that as a result of Progressive-Democrat (my term) behavior during those hearings, all bets were off.

What Connolly also is carefully ignoring is that his Progressive-Democrat confreres on the Judicial Committee during Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearings utterly refused to engage in a serious confirmation process. Those worthies instead executed a deliberate character assassination campaign in an attempt to destroy the man; their effort against Kavanaugh made Progressive-Democrat treatments of Robert Bork, Clarence Thomas, and Samuel Alito look absolutely gentle.

It’s not Republicans who are being hypocritical in this manufactured kerfuffle.

Revised Rules

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Jack Dorsey has them for his Twitter. In response to the blowup over his (and Mark Zuckerberg’s over at Facebook) decision to censor the New York Post‘s reporting on emails found on a laptop allegedly belonging to Hunter Biden and seeming to indicate connections among Hunter, his business efforts in Ukraine and the People’s Republic of China, and his father Progressive-Democratic Party Presidential candidate Joe Biden—or more likely in response to the pending subpoena compelling his sworn testimony in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee next week regarding his censorship—Dorsey had his legal, policy and trust & safety lead, Vijaya Gadde, announce some unspecified changes. Dorsey also said through her, though, that

All other Twitter Rules will still apply to the posting of or linking to hack materials, such as our rules against posting…synthetic and manipulated media….

In other words, Dorsey still will censor obvious satire and political ads because he’s too lazy to think about what he’s actually looking at. Or because he assumes his customers are too droolingly imbecilic to understand what they’re looking at.

After this, Dorsey claimed to have withdrawn all blocks; he would simply attach a “context” label to the tweets and retweets.

That “changes” turn out to be untrue. The New York Post still is locked out of its own account unless and until it withdraws—withdraws—its tweets regarding its prior two articles.

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.