Very wan week for comments for some reason; volume was way down, though the quality remained high as always, and several new commenters emerged.
Maybe you can make-up for the last six days with a rollicking Open Forum. There is an amazing amount of ethically troubling stuff going on out there.
Ethics Alarms 
Please watch the following video in its entirety.
Democrats Are Pressuring Companies to Censor For Them: a Violation of the First Amendment
The constitutional issues that arise from the intentional efforts of the Biden Administration and Democrats to suppress free speech are obvious to me. The Biden Administrations efforts to use businesses as political tools to squash free speech is not only a constitutional issue but it’s wildly unethical, as in not morally correct, and it’s evil, as in profoundly immoral and wicked.
Totalitarianism is already here, how the hell do we combat this lunacy?
Please watch the following video in its entirety.
Democrats Are Pressuring Companies to Censor For Them: a Violation of the First Amendment
The constitutional issues that arise from the intentional efforts of the Biden Administration and Democrats to suppress free speech are obvious to me. The Biden Administration’s efforts to use businesses as political tools to squash free speech is not only a constitutional issue but it’s wildly unethical, as in not morally correct, and it’s evil, as in profoundly immoral and wicked.
Totalitarianism is already here, how the hell do we combat this lunacy?
My approach is on the battleground of presentation mindset: to make points and raise questions in painstakingly reasonable ways, so that anyone who tries to censor them cannot help but reveal themselves as completely unreasonable. There are probably other approaches that we’ll need to take in addition to that, but this is the one I’m best equipped to advise on.
Part of the reason the AUC is able to get away with censorship is that their constituents don’t see anything of worth in what is being censored. I know how to discuss issues in ways that get the point across while being unobjectionable in method. It forces the opponent to respond reasonably, or to do something unreasonable which I can then respond to in a reasonable way that makes them look stupid, or to remain silent. All paths lead to a win.
To take an example from the video, one of the censorship advocates Greenwald quoted mentioned something about forcing sites to offer links to accepted “facts” like “your probability of getting sick with a mask is X percent” or something like that.
Most people don’t realize it, but it’s unreasonable to state most probabilities as facts. The vast majority of probabilities in science aren’t like probabilities used in human gambling games. Scientific probabilities describe varying levels of certainty and ignorance about a complex situation with many unknown factors. Expressing a probability is a way to condense a large collection of actual facts (we did these experiments and studies with these parameters and got these results) so that people can talk about them more easily, but that’s no good if people don’t trust the methods used in the experiments or in analyzing the results.
The honorable thing to do would be to design experiments and studies that people can be confident in. If nobody’s willing to do that, then they reveal their true intentions.
“A terrible decision was made” is not the best way to start an apology:
https://www.tmz.com/2022/01/17/delta-sigma-theta-doctor-viral-posting-patient-surgery/
-Jut
I just submitted a comment and it did not post. I tried again thinking I must have messed up something and I again got no posted comment. This is weird! If it’s in spam only post one of them.
On it….
Got it. Video links usually go to spam. Just give me a heads up when that happens.
Jack wrote, “Video links usually go to spam.”
I had absolutely no clue that happens. I wonder what Word Press’s logic is to support that.
I’ll try to remember that in the future.
I take a special joy in reading commentary by democrat operatives with press passes. There was a certain level of creativity in attempting to defend this administration. My favorite of the last few days is inflation is the result of a booming economy.
It’s a whole genre now: let’s spin the worst start of a Presidency since Hoover to try to make it seem wonderful. Today’s Krugman column is “Biden’s Hidden Health Care Triumph.”
Potemkin Rhetoric is any rhetoric that is solely to deceive others into thinking that a situation is better than it really is.
Derived from the following definitions:
Potemkin: having a false or deceptive appearance, especially one presented for the purpose of propaganda.
Rhetoric: language designed to have a persuasive or impressive effect on its audience, but often regarded as lacking in sincerity or meaningful content.
Another thing to discuss.
Michael Ejercito wrote, “Another thing to discuss.”
Ethically speaking; what specific part of this do you think should be discussed?
The prosecutor’s rationale for asking for a lesser-than-typical sentence.
The fact the U.S. Attorney’s office appears to be run by BLM or George Soros? They want this guy’s sentence for killing a guy by setting fire to a business to be reduced significantly because he’s a black guy and justifiably upset by George Floyd’s death? He evidently had good intentions or was otherwise justified in setting the business ablaze! Amazing.
Did you notice the sleight of hand where the prosecutor compared the base guidelines for attempted murder to the calculated results for his actual crime including modifiers? It’s at the start of page 7, and it seems to me to be either deliberate deceit or incompetence.
I suppose it could be an argument that the modifiers are inherently flawed, but that doesn’t appear to be the argument he proceeds to make. I could have missed something in the following paragraphs.
If you are married and have Netflix, enjoy “The Tinder Swindler” with your spouse and be thankful for all that you have been spared from.
Deion Sanders: NFL should mandate Black ownership for three new expansion teams
https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.clarionledger.com/amp/6743214001
Thoughts? I was especially impressed by Deion’s eloquence, on full display with this, um, sentence:
“We’re trying to entice billionaires who are at least 50 or 60 years and older who grew up in a different time and era to hire who you desire them to hire when in fact they are where they are, they’re a billionaire because of the decisions that they made personally, assisted by a staff I’m pretty sure.”
Easy! He’s ignorant and nuts. No business can discriminate like that.