Tag Archives: ethics

Censorship

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Mark Zuckerberg and his Facebook are moving to delete from Facebook postings items, which Zuckerberg is pleased to term “misinformation” or “false information” (and for which he’s been unable to provide a definition, coherent criteria, or a balanced set of “fact” checkers), that in addition to being somehow false incite violence.

Facebook will rely on local organizations of its choosing to decide whether specific posts contain false information and could lead to physical violence[.]

Because local sources in Sri Lanka or Malaysia, or Indonesia, are going to provide objective analyses—especially when the “incitement” is against the groups particularly hated in nations like those.

Sure.  I might know of some beachfront property north of Santa Fe that might be of interest, too.

No, this is just another excuse for Facebook to inflict censorship. Aside from the naked lack of objectivity inherent in the foregoing, the larger item is this.  Online posts, whether on Facebook, Twitter, random blogs, or news outlet Web sites, are not responsible for violence. The persons inflicting the violence are the ones responsible for the violence. Attempts to shift responsibility don’t alter that in the least. Zuckerberg knows this.

Rights

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Some people have more of them, others have fewer.  That’s the position of the People’s Republic of China.

The Hong Kong National Party is being threatened by the PRC government, through its Hong Kong Secretary for Security, John Lee Ka-chiu, with being banned.  The heinous crime of which the party (and its leader, Andy Chan) is speaking too freely in favor of freedom for Hong Kong.

Or, as another man put it a while back, some people are just more equal than others.

Media Bias

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We’ve seen how Facebook openly favors liberal news outlets; now we can see the unconscious bias against conservative outlets that media moguls have.

Facebook at least has started paying lip service to (and may actually be serious about) correcting its own bias.  The company held an allegedly off-the-record meeting with a dozen or so publishing executives (allegedly because of the leaks of the meeting’s contents by participants).  BuzzFeed‘s Editor in Chief Ben Smith, though, objected to the presence of “six conservative-leaning publications among the dozen or so outlets” present.  Apparently, actual balance between conservatives and liberals is biased representation.

Mr Smith said that the number of conservative publications in attendance indicated that Facebook had bought into the idea, promoted primarily by conservatives, that mainstream outlets such as the New York Times are liberal and should be counterbalanced by right-leaning opinion outlets, said people familiar with his remarks.

As if the NYT is a bastion of conservatism and needs no counterbalance.  Or, as if liberalism itself needs no counterbalance.

Then he attacked the journalistic standards of The Daily Caller, a conservative outlet that was represented at the meeting.  Lacking coherent argument, the liberal Smith stooped to character assassination, this time of a competitor.  He’s not alone in the character assassination; Lydia Polgreen, HuffPost Editor in Chief, in a canonical example of a pot complaining about a kettle, echoed Smith’s plaint.

It’s bad enough that the NLMSM is biased.  It’s bordering on dangerous when the NLMSM can no longer discriminate bias from balance.

Union Politics

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Here’s what the American Federation of Teachers union “agency fees” would have been spent on absent the favorable ruling in Janus vs AFSCME, which said that public unions can no longer make non-union employees pay into union coffers as a condition of employment.  These are actual resolutions to be offered at the AFT’s convention this weekend.

Keep in mind, too, that those agency fees typically ran to 60% to 80% of member union dues—which gives an idea of how much a public union’s intake was spent on politics rather than on member matters.

  • single-payer health care
  • opposition to the Dakota Access pipeline
  • President Donald Trump’s “immediate resignation or removal”
  • denounce[ing] Mondelez for moving Nabisco cookie production to Mexico [and non-union plants]
  • urg[ing] local affiliates to pressure “employers to sell or carry only Nabisco products made in free union workplaces in their schools and on their campuses.”
  • support for “anti-war groups”
  • removal of the US’s Terminal High Altitude Area Defense system in South Korea, which “enhances the effectiveness of a US first strike with nuclear weapons by drastically weakening any nuclear retaliation by a potential target nation such as China or North Korea”

Regarding that last, I certainly wish it were true that THAAD would drastically weaken an enemy’s second strike, especially after its first strike.  That’s secondary, though.  Primary is the lack of relationship with actual education or with enhancing a teacher’s ability to teach that these AFT resolutions have.

The union does have a couple of education-related resolutions.

  • free college
  • [urging] “school districts, colleges, and universities to offer their students diverse views about military service and the Reserve Officers’ Training Corps, balancing arguments for military service and ROTC training with the arguments of critics of military service, including its health risks.”

Yeah, those are serious education proposals.

Reactionary Ideologue

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President Donald Trump has nominated Brett Kavanaugh, of the DC Circuit, to the Supreme Court, and “within seconds” Democracy for America called him a reactionary ideologue.

DfA, without correction from the Progressive-Democrats of Congress, or anyone else on the left, also has foretold Kavanaugh’s confirmation would

directly lead to the deaths of countless women with the dismantling of abortion rights.

Even taking the manufactured hysteria seriously, it’s instructive here as an aside (of no small size) to consider that the Left worries about the risks to grown, adult women who make the conscious choice to run a risk, but they care not a red sou for the deaths of countless babies who cannot speak for themselves and for whom the Left insists no one should so speak.

That the Progressive-Democrats’ opposition to the Kavanaugh nomination has nothing to do with principled disagreement with how the man might adjudicate cases and everything to do with naked politics is further illustrated by a fund-raising email House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D, CA) sent Monday.  In it she wrote that [emphasis added]

she is “determined to avenge President Obama if it’s the last thing I do” by preemptively opposing President Trump’s Supreme Court nominee….

All of this is confirmation of the Progressive-Democrats’ view of the Constitution.  That core of our nationhood is just something to be modified at will by unelected judges—so long as they’re properly selected by Progressive-Democrats.  It’s Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s “living” constitution.

Or, as a journolist put it more bluntly,

[The constitution] has no binding power on anything.  …the text is confusing because it was written more than a hundred years ago….

Never mind that there’s nothing at all reactionary in a judge upholding the Constitution.  That’s what his oath of office enjoins him to do.  On the other hand, a judge modifying the Constitution to fit a personal view of social justice is rank judicial activism—and a violation of his oath of office.