Tag Archives: rights

Spreading Disinformation

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Jay Bhattacharya, in his Tuesday Wall Street Journal op-ed, (mostly) correctly called out and decried YouTube for censoring and spiking a public-policy roundtable hosted by Florida Governor Ron DeSantis (R) and in which Bhattacharya had participated.

Among other things discussed by the participants was the wisdom of requiring children to wear masks in the face of the Wuhan Virus situation. The panel said the requirement was foolish and counterproductive, and this was too much for the Know Betters. YouTube

removed the video “because it included content that contradicts the consensus of local and global health authorities regarding the efficacy of masks to prevent the spread of COVID-19.”

Bhattacharya, though, in his op-ed cited study after study supporting the panel’s position: requiring children to wear masks is deeply suboptimal, and is so across a wide range of dimensions.

Never mind.

Never mind that the panelists, in addition to Bhattacharya, who is a physician, economist, and Stanford Medical School professor, consisted of Sunetra Gupta, infectious disease epidemiologist and epidemiology professor at Oxford; Martin Kulldorff, professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School and biostatistician and epidemiologist at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital; and Scott Atlas, radiologist, health care policy advisor, and senior fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution. They’re only experts; they know nothing.

Their position is contrary to The Narrative. How dare anyone contradict Settled Narrative.

I said above “‘mostly’ correctly called out…YouTube” because YouTube is wholly owned by Google, and Google is wholly owned by Alphabet. The latter two are run by Sundar Pichai.

It is, in fact, Alphabet and Sundar Pichai who are peddling disinformation under the guise of preventing “misinformation,” using YouTube as the vehicle for their machination.

Once again, Pichai is pushing the Left’s Newspeak dictionary and doing so at the direct and deliberate expense of objective discourse.

This also is a prima facie case for treating Alphabet, et al., as public accommodations—or as common carriers—and limiting their ability to discriminate or to censor.

Pesky Democracy

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We’ll have none of that here. Much too noisy. Much too disordered. Much to great a risk to our rule.

And so the People’s Republic of China has extended its despotism further into Hong Kong.

China has sharply reduced the number of directly elected seats in Hong Kong’s legislature in a setback for the democracy movement. The changes were announced Tuesday after a two-day meeting of China’s top legislature.
In the new make-up, the legislature will be expanded to 90 seats, and only 20 will be elected by the public. Currently, 35 seats, or half of the 70-seat legislature, are elected.
China’s top legislature approved amendments to Hong Kong’s constitution on Tuesday that will give Beijing more control over the makeup of the city’s legislature.

Those 20 will be carefully selected by the PRC’s Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress:

Local national-security officials will also get effective veto power over election candidates, allowing authorities to bar opposition figures from elected office.

This is not the behavior of a civilized, much less enlightened, nation. It is, though, of a piece with the barbarism of genocide against the Uyghurs, the occupation of Tibet and the South China Sea, and the threats of war against the Republic of China.

Jim Eagle and Joe Biden

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Georgia has just enacted a law reforming and improving its voting processes. The reforms include such things as expanding weekend before Election Day voting from one Saturday and Sunday to two Saturdays and a county-level option to add a second Sunday. Instead of a hazy, subjective signature-matching bit of guesswork on absentee ballots, the State now requires a State-issued (for free) ID. It makes drop boxes mandatory, but they’re available only in in-person voting areas, they’re kept locked after hours, and they’re always under surveillance. The State now allows no-excuse absentee ballot voting.

This expansion of voter access and increased protection of the sanctity of an eligible voter’s vote is what President Joe Biden (D), in his…something…has termed “un-American,” “sick,” “pernicious.” He says, “This makes Jim Crow look like Jim Eagle.”

It would be sad, were it not so insulting and racist. This is, after all, Biden (along with his Progressive-Democrats, who with their silence if not their own hue and cry, agree with him) playing the race card (and thereby demonstrating their own racism), which they do because they can’t make a rationale argument for any of their policies.

And: for those keeping score at home, Jim Crow was a creation of the Democratic Party, as was the KKK, which Biden’s partner in the administration said was the equivalent of today’s ICE.

For those keeping further score at home, Georgia’s voter law compares with Biden’s home State of Delaware, which requires a shorter in-person voting period than does Georgia’s reformed law, to the point that Delaware does not allow in-person early voting at all. Delaware doesn’t allow no-excuse absentee ballot voting.

Relics

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In last Thursday’s matinee press conference, President Joe Biden (D) agreed with a reporter’s question and suggested answer regarding the filibuster:

“President Obama said he believed the filibuster was a relic of the Jim Crow era. Do you agree?” a reporter asked Biden.
“Yes,” he answered.

So, ex-President Barack Obama (D) and Biden, both of whom previously loudly defended the filibuster, have confessed themselves as racists for having done so, the filibuster being a relic of Jim Crow, and all.

Still, their racism is entirely consistent with the intrinsically racist core of the Progressive-Democratic Party of which they’re leading lights: its forebear and least-left wing of the Progressive-Democratic Party, the Democratic Party, is the Party of Jim Crow and of racism generally, and the current Progressive-Democratic Party subsumes that core into its body and actively extends it with its racist—and sexist—identity politics of rank segregation.

Slander

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Our slander laws are convoluted, and as part of that convolution, they put certain Americans—celebrities and politicians, for instance—out of effective reach of their protection, and they put other Americans—journalists, for instance, functionally immune to their restrictions. Glenn Harlan Reynolds, a University of Tennessee law professor, in his Thursday Wall Street Journal op-ed, wants to niggle around their edges to improve them.

No. It’s time, to coin a phrase, to go big. Libel law, in fact, is simple enough to simplify: if someone lies about or otherwise slanders another, the liar/slanderer is liable. If someone mistakenly mischaracterizes another and doesn’t correct the mischaracterization when advised of the error, mischaracterizer is liable, if to a lesser degree.

That’s pretty simple and straightforward. The only grey area—and this is where juries earn their pay—is in that area between lie and mistaken mischaracterization.

That straightforward correction of slander laws can be made simpler, yet. The new law should apply to the press—it’s really not that hard for a pressman to tell the truth, except, apparently, in the minds of those of the journalist guild—and it should apply equally to the politician or celebrity who’s the victim.

But, but—according to Reynolds, New York Times Co v Sullivan, the Supreme Court ruling that created the imbalances involving the press and celebrities and politicians,

grew out of a concerted effort by Southern states to use libel lawsuits as a weapon in a sort of asymmetric warfare. Civil-rights organizers had powerful support from national media organizations, but local judges and juries were sympathetic to segregation.

No, it didn’t. Those judges’ rulings and their influences on juries via judicial instructions to those juries had nothing to do with slander, per se, and everything to do with those judges acting in accordance with their personal agendas rather than in accordance with the text of the laws before them.

Sullivan needs to be reversed.