Tag Archives: ethics

The Will of the People

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The West Virginia House of Delegates has returned articles of impeachment against every one of the sitting Justices of the State’s Supreme Court.  One Justice, Robin Davis, has resigned her post, doing so before any of the impeachment cases proceed to the West Virginia Senate for trial.  In her resignation press conference, Davis complained

The majority members have ignored the will of the people who elected the justices of this court.  They have erased the lines of separation between the branches of government.

The will of the people in electing Supreme Court Justices is overruled, is it?  Certainly it has been—by the will of the people as expressed in their election of the Representatives who voted for (and against) the impeachment. Those elected Representatives will be subject to the will of the people again, and much sooner than the Justices would be—the one stands for election every two (Senators, who will conduct the trial, every four years); the other only every dozen years.

Beyond that, it’s a critical function of the Legislature to remove misbehaving people from government, including those of the other branches of government.  This is what impeachment and trial proceedings are for.

The will of the people is being well served.

Courage of One’s Convictions

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Ben Shapiro offered to donate ten stacks to Progressive-Democratic Party candidate Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s campaign for a House seat from a New York district if she would debate him on “all the topics under the sun.”  Shapiro also offered to debate her for charity.

Ocasio-Cortez’s response was to call Shapiro a cat-calling man with bad intentions and to refuse to debate him.

It seems the face of the Progressive-Democratic Party hasn’t the courage of the Party’s convictions.

Integrity Redux

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I wrote about the level of integrity in the Manafort trial a bit ago as it concerned an accountant who sold her testimony to Mueller’s prosecutors for immunity from her confessed crimes (or who was browbeaten into it with the potential charges as cudgel).  Here’s another example of the level of integrity in Mueller’s case against Manafort, this time involving Mueller’s prosecutors’ star witness, Rick Gates.

Gates, long prior to the start of the Manafort trial, pled guilty to a count of conspiracy against the United States and a count of lying to the FBI.  As part of the plea, Mueller dropped 22 other charges against Gates.  Also on the table are the sanctions ensuing from the deal: a reduction of his likely jail sentence from 100 years (!) to 5-6 years—and potentially to just probation—and a reduction of his fine from $500,000 to as little as $2,000.

Another part of the plea deal is the kicker: to get those reductions, he must cooperate with Mueller’s prosecutors in their investigation and trial of Manafort.  That cooperation, with the Manafort trial underway, clearly centers on how well he testifies to the prosecutors’ satisfaction.

Since so much of Mueller’s case against Manafort depends on witnesses who’ve sold their testimony so blatantly, or who were browbeaten into giving the testimony those prosecutors demanded, how can this case have any credibility at all?

Privacy

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Now Facebook wants to hook up with banks to collect our financial information and our shopping habits as revealed by our credit card charging history.

No. Not ever. Not with Facebook’s lack of concern for our privacy or our personal data.

Facebook said it wouldn’t use the bank data for ad-targeting purposes or share it with third parties.

Sure. I might know about some beachfront property for sale north of Santa Fe, too.

Any bank that hooks up with Facebook in any way loses my business altogether.  Full stop.

An Oxymoron

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Apple has chosen to conceal accesses to Infowars by removing links to it from Apple’s podcast facility because Apple thinks Infowars is too far right for Apple’s taste and because the site pushes bad speech.

This is rank censorship.

Eliminating easy access to Infowars podcasts marks a rare, prominent foray for Apple into an issue confronting many major internet companies: how to remove hateful or conspiratorial messages from their platforms without infringing on free speech.

This is an impossible task to achieve legitimately.  Our 1st Amendment is explicitly intended to protect unpopular or disgusting or hateful speech as well as “approved” speech.  The Amendment recognizes the ability of individual American citizens to think for themselves and to evaluate for themselves what speech they choose to hear, free from Government “advice.”

It’s true enough that the Amendment enjoins Government and not private enterprise.  However, the principle the Amendment protects is a universal one; it applies to all of us, individuals and enterprises alike.

Apple’s MFWIC, Tim Cook, clearly thinks he’s above all of this.  His attaboy for resisting the FBI’s demand that Apple destroy individuals’ ability to encrypt effectively their private communications has been used up.