Tag Archives: ethics

Yet Another Reason…

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…for State and local jurisdictions to stop taking government funds. This one is from HUD.

In proposed regulations that would touch any jurisdiction that accepts any sort of HUD funding, fair housing must mean a plan to “promote equity in their communities, decrease segregation, and increase access to opportunity and community assets for people of color and other underserved communities.”

Sounds reasonable.

However.

Those required to comply will include more than 1,200 cities and counties receiving HUD funding. All will be required to develop “equity plans.”
Such equity could mean anything from building low-income housing to redrawing school district lines for racial or socio-economic integration, all as assessed by the HUD bureaucracy.

Because folks moving from here to there still will be told, on arrival there, where they will be permitted to live and where their kids will be permitted to go to school and on and on—they’ll still be under government control. If they want, for good or bad reasons, to live with folks who look like them, or who share their values, or…, central government under these rules will not permit them that choice.

Racial discrimination in housing is pernicious, Husock concluded his piece (at the link). But he doesn’t go far enough in his conclusion. For Washington to invoke it to socially engineer neighborhoods across America is dangerous. No. For the Federal government itself to give special treatment to one group of Americans over other groups of Americans is especially pernicious racism.

This is another example of Federal government funds that are being transferred to State and local jurisdictions coming with strings attached, for good reasons or ill. Government strings only increase the central government’ ability to dictate terms to locals, to reduce our States to the same relationship to the central government as counties have relative to their States: merely convenient districts whose sole purpose is to enforce Federal law. That works for counties in States, but the structure of our system of federal government puts the States—individually as well as a group—on par with our central government on nationally domestic matters—and on higher authority on matters domestic to an individual State.

It is this federal republican structure, the role of our several States as [50] separate experiments in democracy, that string-loaded Federal funds transferred to States and locals so severely deprecates.

Sometimes

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The FBI doesn’t engage only in pernicious activities—investigating mothers and traditional Catholics as terrorists, for instance, or lying to FISA courts.

Sometimes FBI personnel are just incompetent, and along a number of axes.

  • One agent left a highly lethal M4 carbine unsecured in his government car during a Starbucks run and had the weapon stolen…. “Although there was a lockbox in the trunk for storage of weapons and sensitive items,” the agent chose to store the rifle bag behind the car’s front passenger seat, one report shows.
    • [and] three dozen agents reported guns being lost, stolen or handled unsafely….
  • one agent who accidentally discharged his weapon and shot a hole through the floor of his hotel room….

If any Americans should have their guns taken away from them, maybe it should be FBI personnel. [/snark]

  • …inappropriate [sexual] affairs with felons in prison, confidential sources and subordinate employees.
  • agents and Bureau staff driving under the influence (DUI)….
  • One [agent] stole drug evidence to feed a heroin addiction….
  • [An FBI] employee pulled a gun on a private citizen during [the employee’s] road rage.
  • an [FBI] employee who shot and killed his neighbor’s dog….
  • [An FBI agent sent] “a threatening and vile email to his girlfriend’s ex-husband,” was faced with a temporary protective order. The agent then threatened to shoot the process server….

And so on. And on.

There’s this, too, which should saucer and blow the whole…affair:

The extensive reports were in fact so impactful that the FBI suspended distributing them for seven months in 2021-2022, due to complaints that the “employees harmed by misconduct” might feel shamed.

The FBI needs to be disbanded and certain of its investigative facilities transferred to a different, independent facility located in Middle America and created from scratch.

A Terse View of Law

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This is from Ron Wyden, a Progressive-Democratic Party Senator from Oregon:

In the coming days a lawless Trump-appointed judge is expected to ban access to abortion medication nationwide. I’m calling on the FDA to protect the safety of every woman in America by keeping the drug on the market no matter the ruling.

He insists that doctors also ignore the court’s ruling, and the law of the land, if that ruling goes against the Progressive-Democrat’s personal views.

This is the contempt that Party has for law, for court rulings, for our Constitution, and for us average Americans. Law, courts, our Constitution are not even suggestions; they’re simply to be ignored because these Know Betters are above all that petty stuff.

We need to remember this despotic attitude of Party in 21 months. And inject backbone into our non-Progressive representatives at all levels of government in the meantime.

“Common Sense”

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The Progressive-Democratic Party is attempting to use its Newspeak Dictionary to redefine “Nonsense” as “Common sense.” The latest example of this is President Joe Biden’s (D) latest call for “common sense” gun reforms. He made his latest demand in response to a series of murders with guns in Mississippi. In that series, the murderer used a shotgun and two handguns to murder six people across three locations in his single rampage. Biden’s demand:

That includes requiring background checks on all gun sales, banning assault weapons and high-capacity magazines, fully closing the boyfriend loophole to keep guns out of the hands of domestic abusers, requiring safe storage of guns, and eliminating immunity for gun manufacturers who knowingly put weapons of war on our streets.

Because any of that, like banning mythical devices—assault weapons and weapons of war on our streets—would have kept shotguns or handguns away from this murderer, or any other. And surely “high capacity magazines,” of whatever definition that becomes convenient from time to time to an overreaching government, would have kept shotguns and handguns away from criminals.

Holding gun manufacturers liable for the abuses of their products by criminals will only limit the availability of firearms to us honest ­average Americans. Oh, wait: that’s the goal of Party. Party members know full well that laws are ignored by criminals; that’s at the core of what makes them criminals.

Nonsense is common sense to Party. And Party expects us meekly to accept that. Or else.

Liability

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The Supreme Court is taking up a case centered on Internet platform liability, or lack of it, for things posted on those platforms by users. Wall Street Journal editors asked a couple of questions on the matter.

But are internet sites liable for the algorithms they use to sort and present content?

Liable for the algorithms in the legal sense? That’s an open question, and the Supremes are likely to answer it Gonzalez v Google, albeit unusefully narrowly.

However, the Internet sites most assuredly are responsible for the algorithms and what the algorithms sort and present. Those algorithms, after all, were written by the Internet sites’ human employees.

On the other hand,

Do social-media sites have immunity for fact-checks they append to disputed posts? What if search engines use language models to directly answer user queries, with text synthesized from the web?

Absolutely, they do not have immunity. This is the social-media site doing after-the-fact commenting on the legitimacy of what a user has posted, and so the site is creating its own liability with that after-the-fact legitimacy-checking. Keep in mind, too, those search engines, language models, and text synthesizing algorithms all are written by human employees of those social-media sites. Since that software does only what the human programmers code it to do, and those human programmers code what the site employs them to do, the use of that after-the-fact software deepens the social-media sites’ lack of immunity.