Category Archives: ethics

Cancelation

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There’s cancelation and there’s cancelation.

The Left is busily canceling folks and institutions over historical transgressions—nearby or old, real or perceived, major or minor—including canceling heroes of the fight to end slavery because they were flawed. Why, then, are they so studiously not working to cancel the symbols of the Democratic Party, the leaders and other prominent members of that party, and the party itself? After all, it’s the Democratic Party that

  • actively fought for slavery anti-bellum and created the KKK post-bellum
  • moved to enact gun control laws explicitly to keep blacks unarmed and helpless against continued depredations
  • enacted Jim Crow laws
  • resegregated the Federal government under Woodrow Wilson
  • refused to integrate the military under FDR
  • nationalized minimum wage laws explicitly to keep blacks from competing for jobs by being willing to work for less than white union members wanted to
  • created today’s “welfare” system that keeps blacks (and other poor) trapped in welfare cages
  • perpetuates racist segregation with their identity politics today
  • and on and on.

Oh, wait—that would mean the Left and the Party would have to cancel themselves.

Speech and Private Enterprise

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Some companies are reaching the conclusion that it’s become necessary to pull advertising from Facebook over the latter’s mishandling of speech, if in many cases they’re misapprehending the types of speech being abused.

The WSJ article at the link led off with this:

Facebook Inc said it would start labeling political speech that violates its rules and take other measures to prevent voter suppression and protect minorities from abuse.

Pick one. Suppressing political speech is suppressing voters.

Furthermore, Zuckerberg is hardly in a position to define “abuse;” his censorship is itself abuse.

There’s also this from a commenter in the article’s comment thread, which illustrates the breadth of the misunderstanding regarding free speech obligations:

Facebook is a private company, and platform. It can do as it pleases so long as you sign off on their terms and conditions agreement….

As a legal matter, sure. However, the principle underlying the injunction against Government abridging the freedom of speech is universal and applies to everyone. Zuckerberg knows this full well, and he knows further from that that he has a moral obligation to actively support free speech as well as to passively not abridge it.

His obligation is expanded by the size and control over political—and other—speech his Facebook has achieved and exercises.

An Independent DoJ

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Some pundits are complaining about a DoJ run by an Attorney General that is becoming a President Donald Trump ally rather than leading an independent Cabinet facility.

They’re misunderstanding, if not distorting, the situation.

These, for instance:

While those allies [of Attorney General William Barr] believe the attorney general’s actions are justified, they worry he is inviting excessive scrutiny that will undermine his agenda and do nothing to help the Justice Department’s already bruised morale.

Not at all. If the actions are justified, scrutiny—”excessive” or otherwise—is no excuse for not taking them.

In addition, if entrenched careerists in DoJ are unhappy with the changed corporate culture, they’re free to be unhappy on someone else’s payroll.

 

[Jonathan Turley said,] “This is a failure to consider the optics and impact of this type of announcement….”

This is not a failure at all. A major part of depoliticizing DoJ after the Eric Holder/Loretta Lynch depredations and the failures of the Jeff Sessions/Rod Rosenstein tenure is to take actions because they’re the right things to do, independently of “optics” or “impact of this type.”

 

Inside the Justice Department, Mr. Barr…is known for impatience when his orders aren’t quickly carried out.

Imagine that—insisting the Department move with all deliberate speed instead of the glacial pace of politics.

This is what independence looks like, and neither Progressive-Democrats nor deep-rooted bureaucrats like it.

Occupation by Remote Control

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Details of the People’s Republic of China’s overt takeover of Hong Kong via its new “security” law have been released by the government organ Xinhua News Agency. The high points, summarized by OANN, are these:

  • Hong Kong must establish a “local” national security council to enforce legislation, headed by the city’s Chief Executive, Carrie Lam
    • to be supervised and guided by a new PRC commission specially created for the purpose
    • a PRC “adviser” will be a member of the council
  • New local police and prosecution units to be set up to investigate, enforce the new law
    • backed by PRC security and intelligence officers deployed to the new commission
  • Lam will have power to appoint judges to hear cases related to national security
    • bypasses existing judicial appointment procedures

Notice the supremacy of the PRC law over Hong Kong domestic law.

Notice, too, that those entities each have a Communist Party of China apparatchik embedded.

Misapprehensions

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Here is one. In an editorial in Friday’s Wall Street Journal concerning the ripened crop of charges brought by Fulton County District Attorney Paul Howard Jr against a cop in the Rayshard Brooks shooting, the Editorial Board hazarded this bit:

Yet amid protests and riots over police brutality—arsonists burned down the Wendy’s where the Brooks shooting took place—prosecutors are under pressure to pursue maximum charges against officers.

No. Prosecutors aren’t under any pressure at all beyond what they inflict on themselves in their fetid timidity. The howling mob cannot threaten their jobs. Only their bosses can and then only through specified procedure—which in the Georgia county prosecutor’s case is the next election—and his bosses haven’t spoken yet.

Even at that, though, if this prosecutor feels pressure now from his bosses, it’s only because he favors his job over his honor.

Howard’s surrender to any (self-inflicted) “pressure” simply amplifies the…foolishness…of his stampede to virtue signal; it simply increases the risk to confidence in the legal system should Rolfe be acquitted on the overcharged, hastily done batch.

In the event, Rolfe’s legal team should push hard for his Constitutional right to a speedy and public trial, since of course Howard is ready to go to trial, else he would not have filed the charges.