Category Archives: ethics

Censorship Continued

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The Poynter Institute, an organization that masquerades itself as a…watchdog…built a list of what it claimed to be unreliable news outlets and then urged censorship through boycotting these offending outlets. “Unreliable,” mind you, was determined by Poynter personnel.  Then they got caught, and they’re claiming to have withdrawn their list.

Here are two critical clues to the nature of their list. One is [emphasis added]:

…initially released a list of more than 500 “unreliable” news outlets purportedly “built from pre-existing databases compiled by journalists, fact-checkers, and researchers around the country.”

Even those purported researchers were carefully unnamed.

And this one:

The index was created with the help of an employee for the Southern Poverty Law Center.

That’s by itself is a fatal condemnation.

From those two clues, it’s clear that the Poynter Institute got exactly what it was looking for.  It just got caught, like the Ezra Klein’s JournoList of a few short years ago.

Do we have, though, any reason to believe the list actually has been scrapped? Or is it merely being better hidden? Like that JournoList. This is, after all, a long-established member of the NLMSM.  The Managing Editor of Poynter, Barbara Allen, had this about that in her statement:

[W]e are removing this unreliable sites list until we are able to provide our audience a more consistent and rigorous set of criteria. The list was intended to be a starting place for readers and journalists to learn more about the veracity of websites that purported to offer news; it was not intended to be definitive or all encompassing

In other words, they’ll be back with a more effectively disguised version of their attempt at censorship, a censorship goal made plain by her next sentence. A starting place for readers and journalists to learn more about the veracity of websites, indeed. A “starting place” written by journalists and JournoList members who will define for us “veracity,” because we’re too stupid to recognize it on our own.

And not intended to be definitive….  Yewbetcha.

An All Too Common View

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In a Wall Street Journal article reporting on President Donald Trump, some of his family members, and his businesses suing a couple of banks to block Congressional subpoenas for 10 years worth of business records, a commenter in the comment thread had this to say:

The lawsuits by POTUS, et al., are an admission of domestic tax and business fraud.

This is a broadly held view by folks on the Left.  Objections of innocence are admissions of guilt.  Attempts to protect proprietary materials from prying eyes are admissions of guilt.  Attempts to protect privacy are admissions of guilt.

After all, goes their…logic…if someone hasn’t done anything wrong, if there’s nothing to hide, that person shouldn’t object to Government rummaging through his stuff.  Privacy, proprietary-ness—these aren’t things to be kept private or proprietary.  Let Government have a peek.

More dangerous than that severe danger, because it’s both more insidious and has broad-ranging implications, is the concept that if a Government issues a subpoena, it must be obeyed forthwith; it’s wrong to challenge it.  If that becomes the case, though, then the subpoena process will be reduced to a formality: everything in a man’s, or a business’, life will become free for the formal demanding by an unchallengeable Government.

That failure easily extends to the 4th Amendment: warrants will issue as easily as ever, but they cannot be challenged, either, even after the fact.  To do so would be another admission of guilt; after all, if the person or business has nothing to hide, then Government should be allowed to rifle through persons, houses, papers, and effects, only satisfying the formality of a claim of probable cause—which claim also must be beyond question.

Felons Voting

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That’s what Democratic Socialist and Progressive-Democratic Party Presidential candidate Bernie Sanders (I, VT) thinks ought to happen.  He couches this as all citizens having a right to vote, “even terrible people.”

Unfortunately, though, Sanders has misunderstood the nature of the social compact, and the Lockean nature of our American social compact.

Certainly, all American citizens ought to be able to vote in American elections.  However, felons, by dint of their voluntarily done criminal acts, have placed themselves outside the bounds of our social compact—they’ve made themselves outlaws in several senses of that term.  As felons under the terms of our social compact (Locke’s terms went a bit farther), these persons have surrendered a number of their citizen rights: freedom of movement, of keeping/bearing weapons, of association, of communication, and from search and seizure, among others.  Felons still can do many of these things, but they are severely restricted in the doing (and in some, completely barred) by the requirements of law and the strictures of the prison in which they’re held as those requirements are executed.

Since felons are outlaws, also, though, they’ve surrendered one more right of citizenship: the right to vote.

Biden Takes Obama’s Apology Tour Domestic

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Rafael Mangual wrote about Progressive-Democratic Party Presidential candidate Joe Biden’s apology tour in a Wednesday Wall Street Journal op-ed.

Even before announcing that he would seek the Democratic presidential nomination, Joe Biden was busy apologizing. At a Martin Luther King Day speech to Al Sharpton’s National Action Network, Mr Biden said “I haven’t always been right….”

This, in response to criticism of his role in getting the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994 enacted and his role in getting the preceding Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986 enacted, this one especially with the support of 16 of the then-19 members of the House Black Caucus.

And so on goes Biden.

His steady drumbeat of apology over non-offenses just shows how weak of character Biden is.

Alternatively, if his apology drumbeat is legitimate, it shows how routinely offensive Biden is.

Either way, he’d be a President very dangerous to American values and to American national security.

Obstruction

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President Donald Trump, along with many of the rest of us out in flyover country, are fed up with the Progressive-Democrats’ obsessive inquisition into his administration, and he’s decided to actively counter, now by saying he’ll “resist all efforts by the House to question current and former administration officials about special counsel Robert Mueller’s report.”

That report, recall, acknowledged officially what those of us in non-coastal US and outside enclaves like Chicago and Austin and San Antonio already understood: that despite repeated efforts to suborn them, the Russians failed utterly to get Trump, family members, or associates to go along with Russian attempts to sow FUD in our election processes and republican democracy.  That report also found no obstruction to have occurred, recounting as it does a short dozen of occurrences of an angry Trump venting and his staff having the skill to recognize that as such (even as Congressional Progressive-Democrats loudly contort venting into obstructing).

Those House Progressive-Democrats are responding to Trump’s latest effrontery.

Congressman Elijah Cummings (D, MD), House Oversight Committee Chairman, said

the White House was engaged in a “massive, unprecedented and growing pattern of obstruction.”

And Jerry Nadler (D, NY), House Judiciary Committee Chairman, said

the effort to block the subpoena for Mr McGahn was “one more act of obstruction by an administration desperate to prevent the public from talking about the president’s behavior.”

It is, after all, obstruction to object to attacks, it’s obstruction to defend oneself against any charge, whether the charge is grounded on actual evidence or is blatantly false.

The accused should simply roll over, surrender, and accept punishment.

This is the kind of government we can expect from a Progressive-Democratic Party reign.