Tag Archives: culture

Diplomatic Cowardice

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In response to a remarks US Ambassador to the UN, Nikki Haley, made regarding Hamas’ role in the deaths and injuries of Gaza inhabitants as they keep trying to storm the fence separating Gaza from Israel, Palestinian Ambassador to the UN Riyad Mansour said Haley’s remarks “lacked credibility.”

What Haley said:

She said the terrorists hide behind innocent women, children and men to further their cause.

Haley in part said that, “Anyone who truly cares about children in Gaza should insist that Hamas immediately stop using children as cannon fodder in its conflict with Israel.”

What Mansour said:

We challenge the liars who advocated lies in the Security Council yesterday.

When asked if he was calling Haley a liar—was she one of the “liars” to whom he was referring—Mansour said she:

created a very strong resentment among the entire Palestinian nation.

And

With regard to Ambassador Haley, the fact that she goes on the tangent that she did…would make her whole story not credible, in addition to being extremely insensitive.

Mansour didn’t have the moral courage to say straight up that he was calling Haley a liar—or that he was not and clarifying that he was not.

This diplomatic cowardice is of a piece with the physical cowardice of the Hamas terrorists who do, indeed, cower behind women and children (and men who want nothing to do with terrorism, even if they do protest the fence).

Battle Against Hate Speech?

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Bob Pearson, co-author of Countering Hate and CIO of W2O Group says that AI is able to identify hate speech today.

All human beings follow patterns online.  You can see what language, content, channel, and people matter to them. You can see which words trigger information seeking, which language is most associated with hate topics or sites, which people are the most important influencers and you can see a range of behavioral characteristics.

Except that humans can’t define “hate speech;” we can’t even define “hate.”  All that can be done is for each of us, individually, to identify what it seems like that to us—not what it is to anyone else.  A Justice’s remark about pornography—that he couldn’t define it, but he knew it when he saw it—is worse than wholly inadequate when Government tries to regulate speech, or when private enterprises try to regulate speech in the public spaces they create as their business models or offshoots of them.  Such regulation is a threat to individual liberty.

Artificial Intelligence certainly is not up to this task of discriminating unacceptable speech from acceptable.  The definitions of those terms will be programed by a select group of humans—who can’t define the terms except as they personally apply the terms to themselves.  This frangibility is demonstrated by those cases that go to jury trials and the differing outcomes differing juries reach on substantially similar cases.  All AIs can do is reflect the prejudices of their programmers.

How, indeed, is “hate speech” to be discriminated from the merely rude or offensive or uncivil speech?  To narrow the thing a bit, think about civility—simple courtesy.  Why should a New Yorker’s version of civility be forced to take a back seat to a Midwesterner’s or a Californian’s version of civility?  Why should one of the other two be forced to take a back seat to a New Yorker’s version?  On what basis would any definer pick one or identify a middle ground that doesn’t wind up being a more insidious censorship?

Consider Marshall McLuhan’s the medium is the message.  Sometimes the overt rudeness—even “hate”—is a demonstration of a point.  Is burning our national flag an act of hatred or political speech?  Is posting a picture of Mohammed…?  Prove it: it’s a hard line to draw between that and rudeness on the one hand or actual hate on the other.

Not even civility is “simple.”  How is something as complex as hate speech to be handled?

Yet the whole argument over identifying, and then censoring, hate speech is irrelevant other than the threat to freedom that is that effort to identify and censor.

The problem he [Pearson] says, is that Facebook and other companies have not taken up the charge to make the battle against hate speech a major priority.

No, Pearson is utterly wrong on this.  Facebook, et al., must not take up the battle, any more than can Government be allowed to.  Any effort along these lines can only be the despicable bigotry and the equally shameful cowardice of censorship.  Bigotry because all such efforts amount to is one man, or a small group of them, imposing his prejudice of acceptability on the speech of all others.

Hackneyed as it’s become, Justice Louis Brandeis still is right: the answer to bad speech—however defined—is more, and better, speech—however defined.

Engage in the discourse, don’t cower away from it.

Foolishness of Zero Tolerance

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…or of intolerance; the two are interchangeable terms in this context.  This context is the overreaction of school management and local police departments to remarks concerning “threats” to schools.

Gina Gobert’s 12-year-old daughter was detained overnight at a police station in Oakdale, LA, after allegedly talking to schoolmates about a social-media post she said she received that threatened violence against the school.

School management, it seems, decided the girl had received no such threat and turned her over to the police, who decided to charge the child with “terrorizing.”

And this:

“You can’t joke about this stuff. It’s just unacceptable behavior in today’s world,” said Sheriff Craig DuMond in Delaware County in New York, where an 8-year-old was arrested in March on a felony charge of terroristic threat for allegedly threatening to burn down his school in Davenport, NY.

With adults, maybe.  But with children?  This is ridiculous, not least because, as minors, they are by definition incapable of making their own calls on such matters.  As a practical matter, though, they’re just too inexperienced—they literally haven’t lived long enough—to be able to form such judgments or to reason through the associated implications.  And: it’s the nature of children to push boundaries as they seek out their places in the world—and to change those places.

And this:

“If you threaten a school, you are going to be charged,” said Eric Smith, a prosecutor in Macomb County in Michigan, where 54 students have been charged in school-threat cases in the two months since Parkland, up from 17 in all of last year. “We get a lot of kids saying they were just joking, wanted attention, were acting out against bullies. Law enforcement doesn’t know if it’s real or not.”

Don’t know, therefor it’s OK to arrest them, lock them up, then do the investigation.  Guilt by accusation, guilt by dislike of what’s being said.  Jokes are no joke.

Even with adults, though, the matter is contextual; blanket bans are just the inflexibility of intolerance, and it suffocates even legitimate interactions.

My usual question, this time for school management and the police: what’s your limiting principle? Where will this naturally stop, and joking around—including dark humor joking—be successfully discriminated from actual threat?

And: is the “zero” tolerance foolish, or is it dangerous to our liberty?

“Special Prosecutor”

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The 9th Circuit has appointed one to “investigate” President Donald Trump’s pardon of ex-Sheriff Joe Arpaio last summer.  This was done in response to the fiction offered the court by the Perkins Coie law firm that the pardon, an explicitly named power of the President under Article II, Section 2, is somehow unconstitutional and a violation of due process.

Never mind that the due process—to the extent this…claim…is relevant to the matter of pardons—was supplied by the prior trial and conviction of Arpaio, a trial without which there would be no pardon to grant.

9th Circuit judges William Fletcher and Wallace Tashima, making their own claim that their Circuit “needs ‘the benefit of full briefing and argument’,” of the legitimacy of a President’s Constitutionally authorized pardon, appointed their “special prosecutor.”

Two things must flow from this usurpation of Executive Branch power.  One is that the Senate must get off its collective duff and confirm Trump’s nominees to fill the 9th Circuit vacancies.

Separately, judges William Fletcher and Wallace Tashima have violated their oaths of office, which include a promise to support and defend the Constitution. As they’re no longer hold[ing] their Offices during good Behavior, they need to be removed from the bench.

From the DNC’s Lawsuit

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Recall that the Democratic National Committee is suing the Trump campaign, the Russian Federation, Wikileaks, and several of their brothers and uncles over the hack of DNC emails and the DNC’s loss of the 2016 elections.

Here, via The Wall Street Journal, is a brief excerpt to the DNC’s filing along with my perhaps rude comments.

V. THE SIGNIFICANT HARM INFLICTED UPON PLAINTIFF

135. The illegal conspiracy inflicted profound damage upon the DNC. The timing and selective release of the stolen materials prevented the DNC from communicating with the electorate on its own terms. These selective releases of stolen material reach a peak immediately before the Democratic National Convention and continued through the general election.

This is bogus.  The release (the timing of which is wholly irrelevant) went alongside DNC communications “with the electorate;” it did not prevent anything.  The DNC easily could have refuted the claims in the release, point by point.  Oh, wait—how does one refute claimed statements, when the statements are plain for all to see?

It’s also highly suspicious that, when the FBI sought access to the hacked servers, from which the “stolen materials” were stolen, the DNC denied the access.  Why would the DNC not want the cops to investigate the crime it claims was committed, and the hackers caught and prosecuted?

136. The timing and selective release of stolen materials was designed to and had the effect of driving a wedge between the DNC and Democratic voters. The release of stolen materials also impaired the DNC’s ability to support Democratic candidates in the general election.

See above.  In addition, the wedge was driven by the DNC leadership, who were busily stacking the race against one of the candidates—a stack against which “Democratic voters” would have demurred from the jump had they been permitted to know the bias was being acted on before the hack and release.

A question the DNC, even now, has declined to address: had Bernie Sanders won the Party nomination despite the leadership’s best efforts, would they have supported him with the same level of effort and zeal they did the candidate they had designated as the Party nominee before the primary campaigns?

137. The public release of stolen DNC materials was enormously disruptive to the convention, undermining the party’s ability to achieve unity and rally members around their shared values. The release cast a cloud over the convention’s activities, interfering with the party’s opportunity to communicate its vision to the electorate.

Again, bogus.  What was disruptive and undermining was the plain dishonesty of DNC leadership and its having been caught in its attempt to fix the election.  Besides, Sanders worked very hard, and successfully, to bring the Party together for the general election, despite the leadership’s having so thoroughly cheated him.  This beef has no actual damage done.