Tag Archives: ethics

Flip Flops

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The Wall Street Journal concerned itself with Progressive-Democratic Party Presidential candidate Joe Biden’s flip flop surrender on the question of abortion rights and the Hyde Amendment.  I have some thoughts on that.

Joe Biden’s best claim to the Democratic presidential nomination is that he’s a moderate liberal who can pull centrist votes from Donald Trump.

?? Biden himself has never made this claim during the present campaign. He led off his campaign by saying he was the most Progressive of all his fellow candidates.

That’s a non sequitur [the premise abortion rights are dependent on zip code]. The existence of a right doesn’t assume the government’s obligation to pay for it.

The second is WSJ‘s own non sequitur. Government doesn’t pay for anything; us taxpayers do. Government only brokers the deal. However, the WSJ‘s sentiment is on track, sort of: we taxpayers aren’t obligated to pay for anyone’s abortion, either.

Biden’s about-face…underscores how far left the Democratic Party’s activist base has moved.

This raises the more important and more general question. As the Progressive-Democrat candidates race each other to the far left to pander to the Progressive-Democratic Party’s base, what will the winner do in the general election?

Will that candidate betray the Party’s base in an effort to appeal to the center and to Independents, or will he betray the center and those Independents in order to stay with Party base?  In either event, how can he be believed by any voter?

Alphabet Censorship

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They’re at it again.  This time, it’s Alphabet’s YouTube, owned through Alphabet’s subsidiary Google that’s inflicting censorship.

YouTube has blocked some British history teachers from its service for uploading archive material related to Adolf Hitler, saying they are breaching new guidelines banning the promotion of hate speech.

Alphabet restored the censored data, but only after it had gotten caught in its censorship and the ensuing uproar got too uncomfortable.

Alphabet’s censorship was because the material consisted of

content that promotes hatred or violence against members of a protected group.

Yeah—the protected group here was Alphabet’s censors.

One of the victims of this censorship, though, seems to have missed the lesson.  Scott Alsop owns the MrAllsopHistory website saw Alphabet censor his efforts to upload archival Hitler imagery and video clips because Alphabet disapproved of them.

I fully support YouTube’s increased efforts to curb hate speech, but also feel that silencing the very people who seek to teach about its dangers could be counter-productive to YouTube’s intended goal[.]

“Counter-productive?”  Well, NSS.

Alphabet’s IT personnel are professional folks, fully versed in what they’re doing.  So are Alphabet’s folks responsible for testing IT’s…fixes.  This failure shows that Alphabet either did this deliberately and got caught—to stop people being radicalized, because these Precious Ones know better than their users—or it demonstrates the inevitable outcome of well-intentioned incompetence.

Either way, censorship itself is a failure that directly attacks free speech.  Some speech is inherently uncomfortable.  The discomfort, though, is in the perception of the hearer (who plainly is not a listener) and not at all in the speech of the speaker.  The hearer can listen better or stop paying attention to the speaker altogether.  The hatefulness of other speech is in the speaker, true enough, but those who receive the speech still have only two choices: stop attending to the speaker, or answer him with their own speech.

The Alphabets of the world—private enterprise, as in the present case, or government man—have no business dictating to us what they, in their precious awesomeness, will presume to permit us to say.  Or to hear.  And we have no business sending them our money in the form of buying their product, nor do we have any business electing them to office.

Rule By Law

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The House Progressive-Democrats insist that they, in the words of Rules Committee Chairman James McGovern (D, MA),

will not allow this president and his administration to turn a blind eye to the rule of law[.]

Current House rules regarding subpoenas issued to Executive Branch personnel that those personnel do not comply with must go to a full House floor vote in order for enforcement in Federal court to be sought.  That’s not fast enough or powerful enough to suit the Progressive-Democrat leadership.  It also exposes Progressive-Democrats from competitive districts to the risk of losing in the 2020 election.

Under their proposed new rule (scheduled for vote Tuesday), committee chairmen can seek court enforcement without even a committee vote, much less an ensuing floor vote.  They would only need to get the agreement of a small group of House leadership: the Speaker, the Majority and Minority Leaders, and Majority and Minority Whips.

Guess which way those votes will go.

Changing the rules solely for the purpose of achieving a narrow partisan end is not the rule of law that McGovern so piously claims to want.  It’s naked rule by law.  It’s what tyrannies do.

Another Reason

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…to not have these things in our homes.

According to internal documents seen Wednesday by local media, German interior ministers are considering a proposal that would allow data from speech assistants to be legally permissible as evidence for the prosecution of crimes.

“Speech assistants”—is that what the kids are calling these things?  The speech assistants to which those German interior ministers refer are “smart” home devices like Alexa, Siri, smart TVs, presumably Cortana, and on and on—any device we allow in our naivete into our homes—that listen to our every word, every sound we sigh, and records the most current of them.

Those interior ministers say those “digital data saved on devices” are there to be “collected and evaluated by authorities.”  Those data, those interior ministers piously claim, are “‘increasingly important’ for investigating capital crimes and preventing terrorist threats.”

All very high-minded and pure of intent.  There’s no need of any natural limiting principle to constrain this surveillance.  Because no government would ever grow…curious…of the doings inside a private home.  No government would ever get so protective of its own prerequisites that it would look preemptively for untoward, or rude, criticisms.  No government’s bureaucrat would ever eavesdrop on the sounds of pleasure flowing through a home for his own jollies.

No.

This is the People’s Republic of China’s overt, face-by-face surveillance of citizens in the public square brought into the privacy of a home. And, like the PRC’s surveillance, this one would be done solely with speculative intent.

So far, this effort is overt only in Germany, but we need to be vigilant against its spread and to ensure our own government doesn’t try to embrace such an invasion of our castles, our homes—our privacy.

“Freedom” in Hong Kong

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Natasha Khan had a piece in Sunday’s Wall Street Journal concerning the implications of the People’s Republic of China’s 30 years ago Tiananmen Square bloody crackdown on today’s Hong Kong, especially in light of the PRC’s increasing and increasingly direct control over Hong Kong.  In the course of that piece, Khan asked about the implications of tightening freedoms on Hong Kong’s position as an international finance center.

To which I answer:

The implications of the PRC’s “tightening” of freedoms in Hong Kong are obvious and universal. The “tightening” is not that, it’s a direct attack on those freedoms with a view to converting them from actual freedoms to freedom to do as the PRC and its ruling Communist Party of China require.

Such an attack can only result in the destruction of freedom, and from that, the destruction of a people’s ability to prosper physically and morally.

The proximate impact will be the destruction of free market business in Hong Kong, followed by the departure of foreign businesses from Hong Kong, taking with them their economic activity and their jobs. That will lead to the impoverishment of the Hong Kong people.

There’s an upside, though. It’ll provide a clear, empirically done object lesson of the differences in outcomes between free markets and freedom on the one hand and a centrally controlled economy and freedom to do whatever the men running the Communist Party of China will allow from time to time on the other hand.