Category Archives: ethics

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.

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.

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.

Climate Modeling

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Readers here have known of my long-standing disdain for climatistas’ climate modeling skills: their models cannot simultaneously predict our past and our present, and their predictions of our future have wildly exaggerated for the last 20 years, and counting.  NASA (yes, an agency that has been caught altering past temperature data to “true up” current temperature change) also has commented on the matter.

Working from cloud modeling and clouds’ effect on climate change, NASA noted that [emphasis in the article]

In some models “clouds decrease the net greenhouse effect, whereas in others they intensify it.”
Because the uncertainties are so pervasive, NASA concludes that “today’s models must be improved by about a hundredfold in accuracy” if we wish to make climate projections.

And

When both the cloud and the forcing uncertainties are allowed to accumulate together, after 5 years the A2 [greenhouse gas-induced] scenario includes a 0.34°C warmer Earth but a ±8.8°C uncertainty. At 10 years this becomes 0.44±15° C and 0.6±27.7°C in 20 years. By 2100, the projection is 3.7±130°C.

So far, climate models are useless.

Private Charity

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Readers of this blog know that I’ve long championed private charity as better suited to working our social ills than Government welfare—better economically, better for individual liberty, better for personal responsibility/morality.

Karl Zinsmeister, Editor in Chief of Philanthropy Magazine, offered some ways in which this is shown empirically to be true in his Wall Street Journal op-ed, which was adapted from his piece in the magazine’s winter 2020 issue.  One statistic that jumped out at me is this one:

77 million citizens volunteer time and labor [annually]

At Progressive-Democrats’ minimum wage, that works out to just under $1.2 billion per year that’s donated freely and on individual initiative. At current minimum wages, that still comes to nearly $560 million donated freely—at greater personal cost, too, to hear those pushing the higher minimum wage insist no one can live on such a puny wage.

Those numbers understate the donated time and labor contributed.  Many of those tasks done voluntarily are skilled tasks, and so are worth more in the doing.  Many of those volunteering time and labor are skilled individuals drawing high pay, and so their donated labor is worth far more.

But this is what progressive editorialists and political candidates openly call[ing] for deep cuts in the charitable deduction, an end to tax protections for churches and other charities, the taxing down of personal fortunes, and new regimes in which government becomes the sole ministrant of societal needs want to do away with.

Because these Know Betters are the font of what should be the target of largesse, who should pay for that largesse and how much, and how that largesse should be delivered—not the folks whose money, time, and labor would be confiscated.