Category Archives: ethics

In Which the NLMSM and Politicians

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…of both parties jumped the gun in their blind panic to disparage an actual attempt to end a war.  Recall the hooraw over President Donald Trump’s decision to withdraw our forces from Syria and from a war with no coherent plan or victory conditions.

Now the facts of the withdrawal start to come out.  National Security Adviser John Bolton made these points in Jerusalem while on a diplomatic trip:

  • the safety of Kurdish allies is being considered as part of its pending withdrawal plan
  • [t]imetables or the timing of the withdrawal occurs as a result of the fulfillment of the conditions and the establishment of the circumstances that we want to see. It’s not the establishment of an arbitrary point for the withdrawal
  • Trump has told Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan that withdrawal is pending assurances that Turkey will protect Kurdish fighters who have long provided the US with solid support in the campaign against Islamic State militants
  • [a]ny use of chemical weapons will be met by very strong response, as we have done twice before
  • [t]he US could leave some troops at a key military outpost in southern Syria

Patience, Grasshoppers.

Has Jeff Flake Relocated to Utah?

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After Mitt Romney’s unprovoked tirade in his New Year’s Day op-ed in The Washington Post—before he even was sworn in as the Republican Senator from Utah—I have to ask.

The Trump presidency made a deep descent in December.

It’s downhill from there.  America is divided and getting more so—and that’s President Donald’s fault, not at all the Progressive-Democrats’.  It was the Progressive-Democrats that tried to assassinate with smear a Supreme Court nominee.  It’s Progressive-Democrats that daily dismiss those who disagree with them as ignorant, racist, misogynists.  It’s Progressive-Democrats who want to abolish ICE, hamstring CBP, and functionally eliminate our nation’s borders by demanding they be entirely open.  It’s Progressive-Democrats who move to protect illegal aliens, even at the cost of murdered cops, American citizens, and the expansion of our drug abuse epidemic, while declining to protect those same cops and citizens with the same energy.

But divisiveness only comes from one side.

It’s early in Romney’s Senate term, but he’s not off to a promising start.  Except, perhaps in the eyes of his BFF.

Facebook’s Secret Rule Book

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Facebook has written a massive, byzantine, and secret document of rules packed with spreadsheets and power point slides to help it censor the news posted tackle misinformation posted to its facility.

Even the New York Times gets it, at least to an extent.

The closely held rules are extensive, and they make the company a far more powerful arbiter of global speech than has been publicly recognized or acknowledged by the company itself[.]

It’s also internally inconsistent.

The [NYT] discovered a range of gaps, biases and outright errors—including instances where Facebook allowed extremism to spread in some counties while censoring mainstream speech in others.

Are these deliberate?  It’s hard to believe the smartest kids, Mark Zuckerberg, Sheryl Sandberg, their management team, wouldn’t be doing this deliberately.  But it’s also hard to discern the logic of their inconsistencies in their rulebook, too.

Inconsistencies like

outsource[ing …] content moderation to other companies that tend to hire unskilled workers…. The 7,500-plus moderators “have mere seconds to recall countless rules and apply them to the hundreds of posts that dash across their screens each day. When is a reference to ‘jihad,’ for example, forbidden? When is a ‘crying laughter’ emoji a warning sign?”

Sara Su, a senior engineer on Facebook’s News Feed:

It’s not our place to correct people’s speech, but we do want to enforce our community standards on our platform. When you’re in our community, we want to make sure that we’re balancing freedom of expression and safety.

Facebook’s definition of “balance.”  Facebook’s definition of “freedom of expression.”  Facebook’s definition of “safety.”  And so Facebook, appropriately, does not try to correct speech.  Instead, it openly bans speech of which it—Zuckerberg and Sandberg—personally disapprove.  And so it bars some individuals altogether, it blocks some Presidential tweets, it blocks administration immigration advertisements.

An this, from Monika Bickert, Facebook’s global policy management honcho:

We have billions of posts every day, we’re identifying more and more potential violations using our technical systems.  At that scale, even if you’re 99% accurate, you’re going to have a lot of mistakes.

This is utterly disingenuous; it shows that Facebook isn’t even trying.  Not in a world where car makers and other manufacturers have, for years, demanded and achieved six-sigma accuracy.  Can’t reach six-sigma accuracy in speech censorship?  Not yet, perhaps.  But a serious effort would achieve better than 99%.  Or–work with me on this; it’s a concept still under development–maybe Facebook should stop censoring altogether.

Or: Facebook already is achieving that greater accuracy—it does, after all, succeed in censoring speech from the right side of center.  It hides its evident bias, though, behind an internally inconsistent, multi-thousand-page rule book.  Maybe that’s the logic to the inconsistencies.

And maybe that’s why they wanted to keep their rulebook secret.

Election Fraud

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I follow a tax strategy discussion board on The Motley Fool and one question asked was whether the stipends a county pays its election monitors is whether the stipend is taxable income (whether or not a 1099 is issued.  Answer: Yes.)  This comment in the thread jumped out at me.

We both [husband and wife] got a stipend for the working at the polls [election monitor] this year…$150 each. The county did not ask for our SSN’s, nor a W-9.

There is no reason to believe this commenter is dishonest, but this lack of checking is election fraud waiting to happen.

Religious Tests for Federal Office

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Here’s what our Constitution says about religious tests for Federal office, from Article IV [emphasis added]:

The Senators and Representatives before mentioned, and the Members of the several State Legislatures, and all executive and judicial Officers, both of the United States and of the several States, shall be bound by Oath or Affirmation, to support this Constitution; but no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States.

Despite this, the Progressive-Democratic Party’s Senators, on two separate occasions, challenged judicial nominees over their religious beliefs.

The prior occasion was when Senator Dianne Feinstein (D, CA) objected to Amy Coney Barrett and her nomination to the 7th Circuit.

Dogma and law are two different things.  And I think whatever a religion is, it has its own dogma. The law is totally different. And I think in your case, professor, when you read your speeches, the conclusion one draws is that the dogma lives loudly within you, and that’s of concern.

Progressive-Democrat Senator Dick Durbin (IL) challenged Barrett with his own religious test:

Do you consider yourself an “orthodox Catholic”?

Fortunately, Barrett was confirmed despite the slurs.  However, this turns out to be not an isolated incident; the religious test is the Progressive-Democratic Party’s actual, out loud position.

The Party also objected to the (Catholic) religion of current judicial nominee Brian Buescher, this time through the voices of Mazie Hirono (D, HI) and Kamala Harris (D, CA).  Here’s Hirono:

The Knights of Columbus has taken a number of extreme positions. For example, it was reportedly one of the top contributors to California’s Proposition 8 campaign to ban same-sex marriage.

As if opposing same-sex marriage on religious grounds, especially in a purely State-level debate, is somehow extreme.  As if it’s in some way extreme to disagree with Heavenly Master Buddha Hirono.

Harris asked Buescher whether he was aware that the Knights of Columbus was anti-abortion and anti-gay marriage at the time he joined.  As if that matters to a judge who is called to apply the law as it’s written, not at the Party demands it be applied.

I had trouble with the weakness of Buescher’s responses (it would have been good had he pushed back on this blatant bigotry and violation of the Senators’ oath of office), but that doesn’t excuse the religious bigotry so obvious in the Progressive-Democratic Party, nor does it excuse the lack of understanding of our Constitution or of the nature of oaths (as my friend Grim pointed out in his blog, Grim’s Hall).