Tag Archives: ethics

Who’s Doing the Blocking?

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Yoram Hazony has a book coming out—The Virtue of Nationalism—that he wanted to advertise on Facebook.  Fat chance.  After he accepted Facebook’s Boost Post process, he got some boosted postings of his book, and then he got

Your ad was not approved because your Page has not been authorized to run ads with political content.

Never mind that the book is a history of the rise of the nation-state and a comparison of nationalism with imperialism.  Doesn’t matter.  It’s about nationalism, and so it’s political.

Hazony wrote an op-ed in Wednesday’s Wall Street Journal outlining his ultimately failed effort to get Facebook to let him promote his book on that social medium. The sub-headline on that piece summarizes the problem from Hazony’s perspective:

The robots won’t let me advertise my book on nationalism

His concern is mis-aimed, though. Hazony’s book advertising is not blocked by any Facebook algorithm (“robot”); it’s being blocked by Facebook’s management team. Facebook’s algorithms only do what they’re programmed to do. Facebook’s management team employs the programmers who program the algorithms, and those programmers are only doing what their bosses have employed them to do.

Facebook’s censorship is the direct result of instructions from Zuckerberg and his senior management team members.

No Need to Waste the Time

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…arguing the matter.  In an opinion piece, The Wall Street Journal Editorial Board called out “Tricky Dick Schumer” (their appellation) for his stalling effort centered on his demand for millions of pages of documents from Judge Brett Kavanaugh’s past pursuant to evaluating Kavanaugh’s nomination to the Supreme Court.  Schumer has said he’ll try to block any discussion of Kavanaugh’s fitness until he gets those millions of docs.  The WSJ also noted that

Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley [R, IA] is trying to work out a document deal with ranking Democrat Dianne Feinstein.

This against the backdrop of

The White House has said it is willing to produce some 80,000 document pages and 200,000 email pages from Mr Kavanaugh’s time in the White House counsel’s office.

The WSJ was too mild, though.  There’s no need for the Senate to go along with the Progressive-Democrats’ hysterical obstructionism.  Grassley should accept the White House’s offer—it’s already larger than what the Progressive-Democrats demanded of then-Supreme Court nominee Neil Gorsuch—and then he should hold the hearings, regardless of Feinstein’s attempts to stall, and hold the committee vote.  After that, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R, KY) should hold the floor vote on Kavanaugh while ignoring Schumer’s attempts to stall.

The Senate has actual work to do; it has no time for the Progressive-Democrats’ childish games or temper tantrums.

The Man Has a Point

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On the matter of revoking the security clearances of certain senior government officials after they’ve left office—the Trump administration’s thinking about doing that with former CIA Director John Brennan, former FBI Director James Comey, et al., and the associated flap come to mind—former Deputy State Department spokesman Adam Ereli has a point.  Such a move would ring alarm bells, and one alleged motive for doing so raises this problem identified by Ereli:

I think that we’re going down a slippery slope.  Who’s to decide what’s political and what’s not political?

He’s right.  However, the wrong motive does not make the move wrong.  These folks are no longer employees of the Federal government, and so they no longer have the need to know that is one of only two Critical Items in granting a security clearance.  Nor should they have access to classified material—the other Critical Item in granting a clearance.

The right answer here is a blanket one.  All persons, on leaving government employ, should have their security clearances completely revoked; they should not have any security clearance at all.  If government needs to consult a particular individual—a senior official, like an ex-CIA Director, for instance—on a particular matter, it’s perfectly straightforward to (re)vet such an individual and grant him the clearance regarding that item which he needs in order to advise effectively on it.  The vetting and granting process could streamlined further by putting in place protocols optimized for just such a situation with just such a set of ex-senior government persons.

Similarly, it would be easy enough to grant, under the same protocols, limited clearances of limited duration to ex-Presidents so they can assemble their Presidential libraries.

There are Security Breaches

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…and there are security breaches.  The NLMSM wants to talk about some, and it wants to spike reports about others.

Here’s one that the NLMSM is doing its best to spike.  It seems that Peter Strzok, a most highly paid and senior HR specialist in the FBI, had a meeting in 2016 with two people the then-Intelligence Community Inspector General Chuck McCullough had sent to brief him and three other FBI folks on a…matter…concerning

an “anomaly” that their forensic analysis had found in Clinton’s server.

According to [Congressman Louie (R, TX)] Gohmert, the inspector general discovered that, with four exceptions, “every single one” of Clinton’s emails—more than 30,000—”were going to an address that was not on the distribution list.”

In other words, according to the information Gohmert received from the intelligence inspector general, something was causing Clinton’s server to send copies of all of her email communications outside of the country “to an unauthorized source that was a foreign entity unrelated to Russia.”

If true, this means that Clinton’s email communication with her top aides, department leadership, ambassadors, and other officials, including President Barack Obama, may have been read by an alien entity, perhaps a foreign power hostile to the United States. That could include confidential, sensitive, and even classified information about our foreign policy or our allies.

In response to Gohmert’s question about that during Strzok’s testimony before a joint committee hearing, Strzok claimed that while he could remember the fact of the meeting, he could remember none of the substance of it.  Which means he’d chosen to do nothing about the information the two IC IG personnel had just told him about.

Apparently, to paraphrase David Frost’s paraphrase of Richard Nixon, if the Clinton does it, that means it’s not a security breach.

It’s also interesting that Frank Rucker and Janette McMillan, the two people McCullough had sent to do the briefing, have not been called to testify.

Whose Divide?

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Gerald Seib, in his Wall Street Journal‘s Capital Journal, has an odd take on the political (personal?) divide moving through our nation.

From the moment he rode down the escalator at his eponymous Fifth Avenue skyscraper to announce his candidacy three years ago, President Donald Trump has divided Americans[]

goes his lede, and he proceeds from there.

Never mind that it was then-Majority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D, CA) who dismissed Tea Partiers as mere Astroturfers.

Never mind that it was the NLMSM that insulted Tea Partiers with the careful slur of being mere tea bagger.

Never mind that is was then-Congressman Emanuel Cleaver (D, MO) called Republicans terrorists for disagreeing with Congressional Progressive-Democrats on a bill.

Never mind that it was ex-President Barack Obama (D) who dismissed millions of Americans as mere bitter Bible-toting gun-clingers in flyover country and who insisted, while agreeing that he didn’t have all the facts, that police act stupidly.

Never mind that it was Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton (D) who dismissed millions of Americans as irredeemably deplorable racists, misogynists, homophobic, and Islamophobic.

Never mind that it’s the Left’s Antifa and BLM who routinely shout down and deny the right to speak to Americans with whom they disagree.

Never mind that it was the Left who, on Inauguration Day, didn’t just protest Donald Trump’s election and inauguration, they rioted and burned private businesses.

Trump’s comments often are personally demeaning, but they’re exactly that: personal.  Trump disparages, in uncommonly rude terms for a public office holder, other people, but he does it to individual persons.  He also only does so in response to a personal attack on him.  He doesn’t denigrate whole groups of Americans, and he doesn’t do it as the opening shot in a manufactured series of insults.

No, the divisions in our nation are long-standing and growing—and it’s the Progressive-Democrats and their Left base who are doing the dividing, and doing it with increasing zeal.