Tag Archives: ethics

Silence is Violence

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The Ukrainian industrialist and philanthropist, Victor Pinchuk, has a simple plea for the West:

We thank you for the food, the money, the sympathy and the painted blue-and-yellow flags. But if you want to save us, Ukraine needs planes, antiaircraft and antitank missiles, armed drones, and other weapons of war. So I beg our friends in the West: please give Ukraine the planes and other weapons it needs—now. Stop buying coal and oil from Russia. Don’t think about it; don’t evaluate options; don’t consider. Just do it. Time is life.

What he said.

What is that Leftist slogan? Silence is violence. More to the point for Biden-Harris and the persons leading NATO and the EU, so is dithering.

Such Naivete

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Douglas Feith and John Hannah want, not so much a no-fly zone over Ukraine, as much an air bridge via which to fly in humanitarian materials—food, meds, etc—and to fly out civilians wishing to evacuate the nation. They actually think such a facility would put useful pressure—or inconvenient choices—on Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Vladimir Putin would either consent and facilitate distribution of supplies or provoke more denunciations of Russia for its inhumanity. Even if criticism doesn’t move him, his top lieutenants may worry about their image and their vulnerability to war-crimes trials. This proposal may aggravate whatever divisions exist within Mr Putin’s team and trigger further antiwar sentiment among ordinary Russians.

This is incredibly naive, bordering on disingenuous, which is disappointing in Feith particularly.

Putin cares not a fig about denunciations; criticism won’t move him. Putin’s top lieutenants are in those positions because Putin chose them; they’re not going to fold because foreigners say mean things about them.

Antiwar sentiment among ordinary Russians? Quite possibly. But Feith and Hannah seem to have missed the fact that this is a tsarist Russia, not any sort of democracy or republic, or even enlightened dictatorship. Putin is the Tsar, and the people have no power at all unless and until they take to the streets as a population. They did that in the later days of the collapse of the USSR, but Yeltsin and Gorbachev were much more…civilized…than Putin is today.

And what war crimes trials? Do Feith and Hannah really envision a Western occupation of Russia when its invasion of Ukraine is ended? That’s the only way that there will be any chance at all of rounding up Putin and/or his minions. Of course, they may well be tried and convicted in absentia, but such things are cynically empty gestures; Putin and his lieutenants still will be sitting in their dachas enjoying their little water and their girls.

Do the flights, certainly, but when they’re shot down by Putin’s military—as surely they will be just as the humanitarian ground corridors to which Putin pretends to agree are attacked as soon as those corridors are filled—more concrete responses from the US and NATO will be required than just angry finger-wagging and stern press releases.

Deaths from Wuhan Virus Vaccine Side Effects?

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Lancet claims so. Leave aside that the magazine long ago went political and abandoned serious medical paper publication, having already had to publicly retract one paper that was shown (not by the magazine’s putative peer reviewers) to be badly flawed and written from a predetermined political conclusion.

This paper is just as badly flawed, in its own right.

The paper begins by depending in part on the CDC and FDA jointly maintained Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System database. VAERS is a badly flawed database, being a collection of claims voluntarily reported by anyone who felt like interacting with it—and lacking who knows what other information that others didn’t feel like reporting.

The Lancet paper writers also depend in part on v-safe, a smart phone app(!) through which users can self-select their own reported symptom claims (or choose not to report them).

With those flaws at the center of the writing—which in an objective medical journal would have gotten the paper rejected—the paper’s writers claimed that 1.3% of the reported Wuhan Virus mRNA vaccinations resulted in deaths, and that 6.6% of the reports resulted in inpatient hospitalization [sic], prolongation of hospitalisation [sic], permanent disability, life-threatening illness, congenital anomaly, or birth defect.

Nonsense like this badly dilutes serious reporting and the public’s perception of serious reporting of the vaccines’ effectiveness and side effects. There may well be serious, but sub-lethal, and lethal outcomes to getting an mRNA vaccine against the virus. But sloppily done papers like this shed no light on the rates of those outcomes and sully legitimate reports that accurately estimate those rates.

Stepping Up

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Former Presidential Advisor Kellyanne Conway thinks President Joe Biden (D) needs to stop blaming us Americans for our nation’s problems and instead to step up and actually work on our problems, actually acknowledge who we are.

You cannot have an American president that has an America-last policy and blames Americans and America for what’s going wrong. He needs to step up and reflect the best of who we are.

But that’s hard to do for a President who openly thinks 15% of us are just no good. It’s hard to do for the head of a party that pushes its own racist identity politics while insisting, through Party’s enthusiasm for CRT, that we as a nation are fundamentally racist.

The Judge’s Ruling is Correct

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Michael Sussmann, the Hillary Clinton campaign lawyer (among other roles) moved in court to strike portions of Special Council John Durham’s indictment of him, including in particular, the indictment’s “Factual Background” section. Sussman claimed that the section had “prejudicial” information and “false allegations” and so would taint the jury pool from which his jurors would be drawn. DC District Judge Christopher Cooper waved the BS flag at Sussman’s move.

I’m not going to strike anything from the record. Whatever effect the filing has had has already passed.

That’s correct. More important, though, are these factors. One is that, of course the indictment contains “prejudicial” information: grand juries are, by design, one-sided affairs intended solely to determine whether there’s enough material to warrant a formal charge and a trial. That’s why the evidence presented to a grand jury is sealed until trial; only the fact of the indictment and the nature of the government’s case can be made public before that trial—and never made public at all if, with or without indictment, the government decides not to proceed to trial.

The other factor, regarding the “false allegations” claim, is a so what one. The accuracy of the allegations, along with the accuracy and believability of any facts or other evidence underlying the allegations, are for juries to determine at trial, not for judges to deny jury access to via prosecutorial presentation.