Tag Archives: ethics

Political Power

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Here come the Progressive-Democrats, and they’ve made their priorities clear in the House with the first things they want to get done.  Here’s some of what’s in their HR1:

  • “campaign-finance reform”—requires some advocacy groups to publicly disclose the names of donors who give more than $10,000, even if the groups aren’t running ads that endorse candidates but merely inform voters about the issues. Except when rich folks like Tom Steyer or Mike Bloomberg are spending on Progressive-Democrats.  Those names aren’t required to be exposed.
  • provisions from the Honest Ads Act—just regulates online political ads the same as broadcast television. Regulation: name those donors, again. Never mind that even nefarious ads intended to “influence” the 2016 elections accounted for all of 0.01%—that’s 1 in 10,000—of all the online ads in that cycle.
  • expanded definition of “electioneering communications” to include communications targeted to any particular constituency. An online ad running only in Texas that mentions a New York politician would be “regulable.”
  • The Federal government would gain control over the means by which States run elections. Because a remote, isolated central government, especially one run by Progressive-Democrats, Knows Better than a local State government how that State should run its elections.

For Progressive-Democrats, it’s all about personal political power.  Remember this in the coming election season.

A “Caravan” Participant’s Comment

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A Fox News piece centered on the refusal of some “caravan” participants’ refusal to leave a closed Tijuana warehouse and go to a better shelter facility—but a few miles farther away from our border—closed with this comment from 40-yr-old Honduran Norma Perez, who traveled with her 5-yr-old child.  She wants President Donald Trump to

personally go to Honduras so he can see with his own eyes that we simply can’t go back, that there are no jobs, no companies, nothing.

Never mind that all the foreign aid we’ve been sending to Honduras to help with precisely those conditions has been going into the pockets of Honduran authorities; very little of it has made it to folks like Perez.  Since she’s never seen any of the money or any of the economic benefits from the money, there’s no reason she would know of it in the first place.

However, it is well-known that the Mexican government has offered all of the “caravan” participants asylum and work permits.  Perhaps Perez should personally go to those Mexican authorities and accept the asylum and work permit offers.  And stop holding her child at risk.

In Which the NLMSM and Politicians

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…of both parties jumped the gun in their blind panic to disparage an actual attempt to end a war.  Recall the hooraw over President Donald Trump’s decision to withdraw our forces from Syria and from a war with no coherent plan or victory conditions.

Now the facts of the withdrawal start to come out.  National Security Adviser John Bolton made these points in Jerusalem while on a diplomatic trip:

  • the safety of Kurdish allies is being considered as part of its pending withdrawal plan
  • [t]imetables or the timing of the withdrawal occurs as a result of the fulfillment of the conditions and the establishment of the circumstances that we want to see. It’s not the establishment of an arbitrary point for the withdrawal
  • Trump has told Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan that withdrawal is pending assurances that Turkey will protect Kurdish fighters who have long provided the US with solid support in the campaign against Islamic State militants
  • [a]ny use of chemical weapons will be met by very strong response, as we have done twice before
  • [t]he US could leave some troops at a key military outpost in southern Syria

Patience, Grasshoppers.

Has Jeff Flake Relocated to Utah?

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After Mitt Romney’s unprovoked tirade in his New Year’s Day op-ed in The Washington Post—before he even was sworn in as the Republican Senator from Utah—I have to ask.

The Trump presidency made a deep descent in December.

It’s downhill from there.  America is divided and getting more so—and that’s President Donald’s fault, not at all the Progressive-Democrats’.  It was the Progressive-Democrats that tried to assassinate with smear a Supreme Court nominee.  It’s Progressive-Democrats that daily dismiss those who disagree with them as ignorant, racist, misogynists.  It’s Progressive-Democrats who want to abolish ICE, hamstring CBP, and functionally eliminate our nation’s borders by demanding they be entirely open.  It’s Progressive-Democrats who move to protect illegal aliens, even at the cost of murdered cops, American citizens, and the expansion of our drug abuse epidemic, while declining to protect those same cops and citizens with the same energy.

But divisiveness only comes from one side.

It’s early in Romney’s Senate term, but he’s not off to a promising start.  Except, perhaps in the eyes of his BFF.

Facebook’s Secret Rule Book

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Facebook has written a massive, byzantine, and secret document of rules packed with spreadsheets and power point slides to help it censor the news posted tackle misinformation posted to its facility.

Even the New York Times gets it, at least to an extent.

The closely held rules are extensive, and they make the company a far more powerful arbiter of global speech than has been publicly recognized or acknowledged by the company itself[.]

It’s also internally inconsistent.

The [NYT] discovered a range of gaps, biases and outright errors—including instances where Facebook allowed extremism to spread in some counties while censoring mainstream speech in others.

Are these deliberate?  It’s hard to believe the smartest kids, Mark Zuckerberg, Sheryl Sandberg, their management team, wouldn’t be doing this deliberately.  But it’s also hard to discern the logic of their inconsistencies in their rulebook, too.

Inconsistencies like

outsource[ing …] content moderation to other companies that tend to hire unskilled workers…. The 7,500-plus moderators “have mere seconds to recall countless rules and apply them to the hundreds of posts that dash across their screens each day. When is a reference to ‘jihad,’ for example, forbidden? When is a ‘crying laughter’ emoji a warning sign?”

Sara Su, a senior engineer on Facebook’s News Feed:

It’s not our place to correct people’s speech, but we do want to enforce our community standards on our platform. When you’re in our community, we want to make sure that we’re balancing freedom of expression and safety.

Facebook’s definition of “balance.”  Facebook’s definition of “freedom of expression.”  Facebook’s definition of “safety.”  And so Facebook, appropriately, does not try to correct speech.  Instead, it openly bans speech of which it—Zuckerberg and Sandberg—personally disapprove.  And so it bars some individuals altogether, it blocks some Presidential tweets, it blocks administration immigration advertisements.

An this, from Monika Bickert, Facebook’s global policy management honcho:

We have billions of posts every day, we’re identifying more and more potential violations using our technical systems.  At that scale, even if you’re 99% accurate, you’re going to have a lot of mistakes.

This is utterly disingenuous; it shows that Facebook isn’t even trying.  Not in a world where car makers and other manufacturers have, for years, demanded and achieved six-sigma accuracy.  Can’t reach six-sigma accuracy in speech censorship?  Not yet, perhaps.  But a serious effort would achieve better than 99%.  Or–work with me on this; it’s a concept still under development–maybe Facebook should stop censoring altogether.

Or: Facebook already is achieving that greater accuracy—it does, after all, succeed in censoring speech from the right side of center.  It hides its evident bias, though, behind an internally inconsistent, multi-thousand-page rule book.  Maybe that’s the logic to the inconsistencies.

And maybe that’s why they wanted to keep their rulebook secret.