Tag Archives: ethics

Diversity

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A brief thought. Joseph Epstein wrote about true diversity, as opposed to the Left’s and their Progressive-Democratic Party’s ideology of race, sex, et al., diversity before merit in his Wednesday Wall Street Journal op-ed.

In the main, he’s right. I want to add a little, though, to his concluding sentence.

The best way to celebrate diversity, perhaps, is to begin by celebrating diversity of thought.

Number one.

Number two is overtly recognizing the inequality of individual talent, interest, work ethic, plain luck, and a host of other inequalities intrinsic in every man that culminate in unequal outcomes flowing from the utterly necessary equality of opportunity.

That equality of opportunity is at the center of individual liberty, which includes the freedom to speak diversely—out loud and publicly—from that diversity of thought.

That ability to speak freely is a critical part of every man’s right to show the best that there is in him, a right that is truncated by demanding equality of position or of outcome.

Additionally, that demand for equality of position or of outcome insults every one of us by insisting that our best isn’t worthy of consideration or that we cannot achieve that best without Know Betters in government doing for us.

Surveillance State

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And it’s not the People’s Republic of China this time. It’s a European ally.

Spain is planning to keep a record of individuals who refuse to receive the coronavirus vaccine, said the country’s minister of health on Monday.

Worse, Salvador Illa, Spain’s Minister of Health says,

The log of people who refuse vaccination will be shared with the country’s “European partners,” but will not be shared with employers or otherwise made public….

Not even simple, ordinary doctor-patient confidentiality matters here. This medical information will be shared around so all of Europe’s governments can participate in a pan-European surveillance state, even though the putative purpose of such surveillance—so that local employers, et al., can take “appropriate” measures—will be blocked.

The contradiction is so obvious it can only be taken as a distraction from the move’s true purpose: to take an initial step in tracking the details of the daily lives of citizens.

This is the Europe Joe Biden and his ilk want us to emulate. Of course, that dovetails nicely with the administrative state he and his want to expand in our nation.

Checks, Balances, and Pardons

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Alan Dershowitz made short work of this and of the objections to President Donald Trump’s recent small number of pardons.

The media is just wrong: President Trump understands better than previous presidents that the pardon power is part of the system of checks and balances. He understands when the executive and judicial branches get out of whack, it’s the job of the president to restore justice.

And

Not only is it not corrupt, it’s absolutely proper. The president feels very strongly that the Mueller commission acted improperly—and if that’s his belief and he believes that strongly, and he has a basis for it, he should be pardoning and commuting people who were the victims of an injustice.

What he said.

Apologies

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Daniel Henninger had a thought in Wednesday’s Wall Street Journal on the relationship between the Wuhan Virus situation (my term, not his) and apologies.

I have my own thought on the broader matter of apologies themselves.

…difficult this year to tell which is greater—the number of people infected with Covid-19 or the number of politicians issuing apologies….

Other than Operation Warp Speed’s chief, General Gustave Perna, I’ve heard almost no politician apologize for anything. In truth, though, the apology was killed long ago.

What is issued in lieu of apology, and not only by politicians, has long been an expression of “regret” for “any offense that might have occurred.” Never mind that offense plainly was taken, or there’d have been no objection. Doubting that is dishonest.

On top of that, the utterer piously announces his regret—for an offense that he’s not convinced even occurred—but he has not a syllable of actual apology for his misbehavior that led to the offense. Masquerading his utterance as an apology is a very large lie.

Aside from that, “accepting responsibility,” “owning the matter,” and similar self-serving claims are cynically meaningless phrases, uttered only to distract from the fact that the speaker does nothing to change his behavior or otherwise to correct his error.

A Thought on Section 230

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Rick White, Republican Representative from Washington at the end of the last century, had a thought on Section 230—he wants to repair it rather than eliminate it—and so (of course) do I. He began with this:

…some saying it allows big tech companies to censor political views, and others saying it enables the spread of disinformation.

What far too many who should know better miss, though, is that both of these are true; it’s not a matter being mutually exclusive, or even a matter of one or the other.

What those worthies also miss is that only one of them is of any concern at all. Regardless of the bleatings of the Know Betters in the press and in our political elites, ordinary Americans are fully capable of discriminating (uncensored) disinformation from (uncensored) misinformation from (uncensored) information.

One idea that White suggested in lieu of eliminating Section 230 was this, and he was serious about it:

We could also establish a plan for self-regulation by the online industry.

It’s hard to see how White could be so naive or so…misinformed. The online industry isn’t the problem. The small cartel of social media is the problem. And we’re already seeing what Jack Dorsey’s, Mark Zuckerberg’s, and Sundar Pichai’s self-regulation looks like.

Section 230 is beyond repair; the conditions extant when it was written no longer obtain. Pipelines don’t manage the information flowing through them. Publishers do.

The Section needs repeal.