Tag Archives: ethics

Censorship

Posted on by
2

Its name is Jack Dorsey.

The social media company led by CEO Jack Dorsey [that would be Twitter for those of you playing along at home] said in a Tuesday blog post that it will not allow users to like, reply, share or retweet offending tweets, but it will let users quote-tweet them so they can still express their own opinions.

Dorsey has reserved to himself the right to decide how an opinion is expressed on his medium.  Quote-tweet a tweet he finds personally objectionable but not simply retweet it?

Under the guise that the twitterer, within Dorsey’s magnanimity, will be allowed to express his own opinion through quote-tweeting.  Never mind that liking, replying, sharing, or retweeting also are expressions of the relaying twitterer’s opinion.  That’s not allowed.  Jack Dorsey, in all of his awesomeness, will decide how a user must express himself.

Free speech, including its manner of expression, is what Jack Dorsey personally approves.  It’s nothing at all to do with any endowment of inalienable rights.  Dorsey Knows Better.

A Thought on Brexit

Posted on by
Reply

Supposedly, Great Britain and the EU are close to agreement on a deal governing the former’s departure from the latter. Absent a deal, Great Britain will leave the EU on its own terms.  That last is, I maintain, the best way out.

However.

There remain, as of Wednesday morning, three sticking points to any sort of deal, according to EU Chief Negotiator Michel Barnier.

  • Customs arrangements for the island of Ireland
  • The issue of giving Northern Irish authorities a greater say over regulatory arrangements, and the ability to veto them
  • Guarantees of a level playing field—that Britain will not be at an unfair advantage when it comes to business regulation

Customs arrangements for the entire island—even though one part of the island is a sovereign nation and EU member and the other part is a member country of the United Kingdom.  There should be nothing to discuss here. A major reason for the successful Leave vote was for Great Britain to regain control over its own borders—including its national border across the island of Ireland.

Giving Northern Ireland—that part of Great Britain—veto authority over the national government’s “regulatory arrangements”—devolution hasn’t gone that far, nor should it. This sticking point is nothing more than a naked early step in dismantling Great Britain in punishment for its effrontery in voting to leave the Holy Brussels Empire.

Guarantees of a level playing field—Great Britain is justified in seeking such guarantees, but it won’t get them, unless it accedes to what Brussels will define as “fair.”

These…sticking points…illustrate with crystalline clarity the EU’s bad faith in dealing with Great Britain—and they illustrate with equal clarity why a no-deal-Brexit is optimal for Great Britain.

Unfortunately, British PM Boris Johnson, in an agreement just concluded with Barnier, appears to have surrendered to the EU on the matter of Great Britain’s border with the Republic of Ireland:

Northern Ireland will remain part of the UK’s customs territory and will be an entry point into the EU’s single market. No customs checks will be done on the border between [the Republic of] Ireland and Northern Ireland.

Johnson surrendered on the second sticking point, also:

The Northern Irish assembly will have to give consent after Brexit for the region’s continued alignment with the EU regulatory regime every four years.

This cedes control of the British border to the EU, with all that that portends for the nation’s future. British sovereignty now hangs, ironically, on whether Labour MFWIC Jeremy Corbyn can deliver his party’s no vote.  Nigel Farage, Brexit Party head and strange bedfellow of Corbyn’s on this, also has come out against the deal, as have the Democratic Unionist Party, which in coalition with the Tories give Johnson a one-vote majority on most things, and the Scottish National Party, which have been NeverLeaveNoWay all along.

It could be, of course, that Johnson has included these poison pills so as to get this last minute agreement rejected by Parliament, and he can get his no-deal exit from the EU. That raises the question, though, of whether Johnson is that Machiavellian.

Johnson wants an up-or-down vote from Parliament Saturday.

A House Impeachment Vote

Posted on by
Reply

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D, CA), as soon as she returned from the House’s vacation this week, announced that she would not hold a floor vote on whether President Donald Trump should be impeached and the associated investigation should begin forthwith.  Many pundits say Pelosi’s refusal flows from her desire to protect some number of Progressive-Democrats purported to be vulnerable in the 2020 elections.  This is naïve.

Neither Pelosi nor the Progressive-Democrat House caucus that she leads are interested in the slightest in any actual impeachment.  Nor does that disinterest have anything to do with whether there’s a realistic expectation of getting a conviction in the Senate, with the effort’s failure constituting vindication for Trump.

No, the reason Pelosi won’t have the vote is because, her Party having failed to invalidate the 2016 election and canceling American voters’ decision, she’s now bent on prejudicing the 2020 election by extending the smear campaign that the Progressive-Democrats began the day after Trump’s election: Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib (D, MI) in her election victory speech promising to “impeach the mother**.” The move gained steam with Progressive-Democrats’ formally announced invalidation effort made shortly after Trump’s inauguration: Congressmen Al Green (D, TX) and Brad Sherman (D, CA) circulating their Impeaching Donald Trump Resolution that May, and Congressman Steve Cohen (D, TN), along with six other Progressive-Democratic Congressmen, formally introducing Articles of Impeachment.

The smear has continued with Congressman Adam Schiff’s (D, CA) promise of incontrovertible evidence of Trump’s guilt…of something…until the Mueller report disappointed Party, continues with Congressman Jerrold Nadler’s (D, NY, Chairman, House Judiciary Committee), Schiff’s (Chairman, House Intelligence Committee), and Congressman Elijah Cummings’ (D, MD, Chairman, House Oversight Committee) secret Star Chamber inquisitions, from which Schiff has been leaking strategic tidbits, and Wednesday evening with Congressman Eric Swalwell’s (D, CA) announcement on Fox News‘ The Story that Trump is guilty and the hearings are just procedural, a claim of already determined guilt that he’s made several times over the last couple of weeks.

Floor vote for an impeachment proceeding?  Not for a baker’s dozen of months.

Hearings

Posted on by
Reply

As some of you are aware, there are three committees in the House of Representatives that are conducting…hearings…purporting to investigate President Donald Trump with a view to impeach him over this or that Progressive-Democrat-perceived peccadillo, or simply to keep the smear alive after the failure of the Mueller investigation in order to prejudice the 2020 Presidential and Congressional (and down ballot) elections.

As you also are aware, these committees are conducting their hearings in secret, behind closed doors, doors that are so tightly sealed that Republican members of one of the three committees are barred from any of the other committees’ hearings.

But they’re not that tightly sealed; varied news outlets routinely publish what they claim are excerpts from those hearings.  That brings me to a couple of questions.

One is, what are the sources for those things the news outlets publish? The hearings are, after all, secret. Or so the Progressive-Democrat committee chairmen claim.  No news outlet will identify any of its sources.  This is an old question.

Another question is why the news outlets are so incurious about the existence of the leaks? Do they really not care about the lack of integrity the Progressive-Democrat-controlled committees demonstrate with their leaks?

These committees seem to be running Star Chamber inquisitions rather than serious investigations.

Yes and No

Posted on by
Reply

Progressive-Democratic Party Presidential candidate and Senator Elizabeth Warren (D, MA) wants to break up Facebook, and in the meantime, she wants Facebook to shut down free speech the speech of those of whom she disapproves—especially political ads posted to Facebook (for a fee charged by Facebook) by Republicans and Conservatives.  Zuckerberg’s response?

Facebook’s vice president of global affairs and communications Nick Clegg wrote that the company does not believe its role is to “prevent a politician’s speech from reaching its audience and being subject to public debate and scrutiny.”

Warren is, of course, angrified that a mere business won’t submit to her bidding, and so she tried to expose Facebook’s arrogance:

She taunted the company by submitting a false ad of her own claiming that Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg had endorsed Mr. Trump “to see if it’d be approved.” It was.

Of course it was. It was a political ad, by Warren’s design.  It also was not a false ad; it told the truth. The truth wasn’t that Zuckerberg had become a Trump supporter; that was obvious parody.  No, the thing that made the ad a true one was Warren’s own statement, early on in her parody, that her claim regarding the new Zuckerberg-Trump palsiness was itself false, its purpose being to show Facebook’s penchant for running false political advertisements solely to take money to promote lies.

(Given Warren’s own penchant for lying for her personal gain, that last is especially parodical.)

It’s too bad that Facebook’s position here is contaminated by its penchant for censoring conservative speech that isn’t part of overt political ads.