Category Archives: rights

Censorship and Timidity

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YouTube censored took Alexei Navalny’s material down from the video sharing social media platform ahead of the Russian “election” of Vladimir Putin to yet another term as President. YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki, in an interview with Bloomberg refused to say whether she ordered the material removed at the behest of Putin.

Bloomberg: Navalny said that YouTube deleted a video—one of his videos. Was that at the request of the Russian government?
Wojcicki: I mean, we certainly, we certainly get requests from government. Umm, and, and we look and consider what, you know, why are we getting the request, what’s actually happening on the ground, umm, and based on a whole bunch of different factors, we make a decision. We don’t always, those are not always requests that make sense for us to honor, but in certain cases, we will honor them, um, in that country.

Since Wojcicki is too timid to explain her company’s censorship, apparently at the behest of “that country”—Russia—the question should be put to her boss, Google CEO Sundar Pichai. If that individual is too jittery regarding Putin to answer the question, it should be put to his boss, Alphabet CEO…Sundar Pichai.

It’s a Start

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A coalition of 10 States, led by Texas, has filed an amicus brief in the 11th Circuit Appellate Court supporting Florida’s law requiring Big Tech to

consistently apply content-moderation practices and disclosures to affected users.

The Texas law, in particular and on which Florida’s law was modeled, specifies that

…social media sites in question must…disclose their content management and moderation policies and create a complaint and appeals process. The new law also prohibits email service providers from impeding the transmission of email messages based on content.

So far, so good for the two laws, but not far enough for either.

These platforms’ moderation teams also must be required to advise the poster/communicator, in advance of any adverse action, that the team is contemplating such action. In that advance notice, the moderation teams must advise the poster/communicator which platform criterion or set of criteria that the moderation team believes is being violated, and how—in concrete, measurable terms—the team believes that violation(s) is occurring.

For instance, in the case of “might offend some,” that notice must specify the group or groups the team believes might be offended and how that offense might occur—vis., if the potential offense is along the lines non-inclusiveness, the team must specify precisely how the non-inclusion is believed to be occurring.

The team also must suggest alternative phrasings (yes, plural) and for each alternative explain how the team’s suggestion conveys the same message as the original.

This advance notice also must provide the name and business contact data of the moderation team lead and the name and business contact data of the platform Director or Senior Vice President overseeing the platform’s moderation function.

The appeal itself must go to an independent arbitration board agreeable to both the poster/communicator and the platform and at the platform’s sole expense.

John Kerry Fails Again

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[L]ife is always full of tough choices and the relationship between nations. That was John Kerry answering David Westin, a Bloomberg Television anchor, who asked Kerry, “What is the process by which one trades off climate against human rights?” Kerry actually said that in all seriousness regarding the Biden-Harris administration’s prioritizing global warming over the People’s Republic of China’s genocide against Uyghurs.

Never mind that the Uyghurs are being murdered today, and even if Climatistas are right, nobody dies for generations under the warming.

But Kerry wasn’t done.

The point I’m making is that even as there were egregious human rights issues, which Ronald Reagan called them [Gorbachev and his Soviet Union] out on it, we have to find a way forward to make the world safer, to protect our countries, and act in our interests[.]

Never mind, either, that the Soviets—the Russians—were pushing serfdom, slavery. Serfs, slaves, however horrific their lives, are in fact alive and have a chance of escaping, of getting help to escape, their condition. The dead have no such opportunity.

This is what the Biden-Harris administration appoints and supports.

She Said No Such Thing

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The ACLU, pretending to celebrate the late Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg and her position on abortion, has utterly changed—falsified—what she said about the matter.

The ACLU’s fabrication:

The decision whether or not to bear a child is central to a [person’s] life, to [their] well-being and dignity… When the government controls that decision for [people], [they are] being treated as less than a fully adult human responsible for [their] own choices[.]

What Ginsburg actually said was this:

The decision whether or not to bear a child is central to a woman’s life, to her well-being and dignity. It is a decision she must make for herself. When Government controls that decision for her, she is being treated as less than a fully adult human responsible for her own choices.

But that wasn’t woke enough to suit the “lawyers” at the ACLU, so they fabricated a claim and falsely attributed their artifice to her.

Greg Scott, Senior Vice President of Communications at Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), has one aspect of this:

The ACLU literally erasing women.

Additional to erasing women, this is an example of how blatantly dishonest the American Civil Liberties Union—the ACLU—has become.

Mandates and Military Discharges

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The House version of the current National Defense Authorization bill for 2022 contains a provision barring a service member being discharged over his refusal to take the Wuhan Vaccine from being given any other form of discharge than honorable. The Biden-Harris administration strongly opposes the provision.

The Pentagon, according to Fox News, has described the vaccine mandate as a “lawful order” that must be obeyed.

The Biden-Harris administration added

To enable a uniformed force to fight with discipline, commanders must have the ability to give orders and take appropriate disciplinary measures.

Certainly. However, whether the order, or the mandate in general, is lawful has yet to be established.

In any event, anything less than an honorable discharge is vast overkill for something as minor as disobeying an order to get a particular vaccine. Dishonorable discharges are handed down for crimes like sexual assault, murder, desertion, sedition. Refusing an order to get vaccinated hardly fits with those.

Assuming an order to get vaccinated is lawful, there are much more appropriate penalties: nonjudicial punishment and fines come to mind.

Insisting on a DD over such a minor act is nothing but an exercise in power for the sake of exercising power—petty ego by the authority doing the exercise.