I barely have to comment on this one. Incredibly, the British House of Commons sent the letter above to Chris Pavlovsky, asking Rumble’s CEO to censor actor/comic Russell Brand as YouTube has (discussed in this post from yesterday.)
Pavlovsky’s response:
The Brits really never have gotten our Constitution, have they? Unfortunately, an increasing number of Americans, including those who run news, social media and Big Tech platforms don’t get it either.
For the second Comment of the Day on the controversial assertion that Google helped rig the 2020 election (a “completely baseless” claim, you understand), we turn to Curmie. “What?” you well may say. “Curmie has his own column in Ethics Alarms! What is this, the Curmie Show?” In the absence of what I consider a sufficient number rational, civil and well-articulated opinions on EA from the left side of the political and ideological spectrum, Curmie’s takes, often but not always dissenting from the main post, are not just welcome and appreciated but also treasured. I’m hoping that maybe the angry progressives, proto-trolls and one-note social justice warriors who visit here will read and learn from Curmie’s works. Then they wouldn’t have to get banned and then keep sneaking in quickly-trashed comments arguing that the mainstream media isn’t really biased, just to pick a wild hypothetical out of the air.
Besides, Curmie almost never has a typo…
You can read even more Curmie on his blog, here, where he cross-posts his EA contributions as well as thoughts on non-ethics topics. This is his Comment on the Day on “Observations On The Revived Claim That Google “Steered 6 Million Votes” to Biden in 2020”:
***
I find this interesting for a variety of reasons.
First, there’s nothing new here. Epstein’s analysis came in the immediate aftermath of the ‘20 election. Reportage from then is all over (wait for it) Google. So why is it a stand-alone story now? I could understand it as background for a subsequent critique, but that doesn’t seem to be happening, at least not yet.
It’s also purely speculative. We’re not talking about changing people’s votes after the fact, or adding or subtracting votes directly. This is about changing voters’ perception of who is the better candidate prior to their voting, and there is no conceivable way of determining the extent to which Google’s alleged manipulation affected voters’ choices. We can speculate, but it starts getting really mushy when we start suggesting numbers. Of course, virtually every part of society is engulfed in a quantification fetish, so I suppose that part is understandable.
Even assuming the allegations have a foundation, we’re looking at a phenomenon that’s been played out innumerable times by media from every political perspective. The “everybody does it” excuse may be unethical, but the fact remains that yes, everybody does it, which makes this a little less newsworthy. I’ve often referenced the year I spent in England working on my MA. You knew that what you read in the Guardian was filtered through a liberal lens, and what you read in the Telegraph was through a conservative one. But you also knew that both papers maintained integrity. We can’t say the same for any outlet, left or right, in the US in the 2020s.
It’s also true that anecdotal evidence is often misleading. I have no doubt that Jack’s blog posts are “buried” by Google, but there are multiple possible reasons for that, including good old capitalistic amorality: somebody else paid them to move their site higher on the list.
I also tried a little experiment this morning. With Jack’s permission, I have also posted things I wrote for the “Curmie’s Conjectures” series here on my own blog, as well. So I copied the title of one of those essays and plugged it into Google. The post on Ethics Alarms came up #1. The one on Curmudgeon Central, with precisely the same title, didn’t appear at all. That’s hardly evidence that conservative perspectives are being silenced at the expense of liberal ones!
I wouldn’t take on faith an assertion by PJ Media that NBA centers tend to be tall, but Epstein is a far more complicated and therefore interesting individual. His training is in psychology rather than quantitative analysis or marketing. This doesn’t discredit his critique of Google, but if the right is going to grant him omniscience, I await their agreement with him in the area of his actual specialization: for example, his claims that bisexuality is the natural norm for humans and most people claim to be straight due to social pressure rather than their lived experience.
It’s perfectly possible to be really good at one thing and really awful at another. But if Epstein is brilliant, then he’s brilliant; if he’s a wackadoodle, then he’s a wackadoodle. ‘Tis a tangled web out there, whether or not anyone is practicing to deceive. (Apologies to Sir Walter Scott.)
Back in June, I wrote about the Connecticut Supreme Court deciding that a student accused of rape and expelled by Yale University could sue the female student who accused him for defamation because the hearing that resulted in his expulsion lacked due process, including the ability to cross-examine witnesses. Today the New York Times bemoans the development as the lawsuits by Saifullah Khan against his accuser and Tale can proceed. Khan was found guilty by Yale in a process that did not permit him to face his accuser, a female student who had graduated, as she gave a statement by teleconference to a university panel. Nor could his lawyer, under the rules of the hearing, cross-examine her. Yet before the hearing, Khan had been found not guilty of the crime in a criminal proceeding where his accuser was cross-examined sharply.
In June, I wrote in part, “The Connecticut Supreme Court ruled 7-0 that a former Yale student is not immune from being sued for defamation by the male student she accused of raping her. Saifullah Khan was found not guilty in a criminal trial of raping “Jane Doe” in her dorm room in October 2015 in what Khan insisted, and a jury agreed, was an incident of consensual sex. Yale had expelled Khan using the “preponderance of the evidence” standard forced on educational institutions by the Obama Department of Education. The court determined that because Khan had fewer rights to defend himself in university proceedings, which, again prompted by the Obama administration, provided limited due process protections, his accuser should not benefit from the civil immunity granted to witnesses in criminal proceedings. “Statements made in sexual misconduct disciplinary proceedings that are offered and accepted without adequate procedural safeguards carry too great a risk of unfair or unreliable outcomes,” the unanimous opinion held….
“The Connecticut ruling is likely to be an influential one, cited in future cases. Nonetheless, it comes too late for many students caught in the trap Obama’s DOE “Dear Colleague” letter set. The elimination of fairness and due process protections from college and university disciplinary proceedings after sexual assault accusations led to hundreds of lawsuits and egregious injustices. If the result of this decision is that female students take special care that their claims are legitimate and provable, it will restore much needed balance and fairness to process that was warped by the destructive “Believe all women” fixation.” Continue reading
That was Dean Obeidallah, long an extreme deranged leftist featured on the air and on the web by MSNBC (because extreme deranged leftists are the only alleged journalists and pundits that MSNBC deems worthy of a public platform), confirming again the totalitarian impulses of Democrats and the progressives of 2023. In an interview with Mediaite’s most left-biased reporter, Obeidallah ranted in part,
Trump MUST die in prison because I don’t care if he was 45 years old, you should get life in prison if you attempt a coup, and there should be no chance of parole. I don’t care who it is….That’s why I’m so passionate about, like with every fiber of my being, that Donald Trump has to live out his natural days, his last days of natural life in a prison cell…….And people accuse me like, oh, you say things that get people riled up like, nope, I or get what you said. I get organically riled up about this because I believe in this system. And, and if you don’t believe in it, so be it. But if you believe in it, I don’t think there’s any conclusion could bring that. Donald Trump has to end up in a prison cell and live his last days out in that prison cell.
In those three dots, Obeidallah claimed that the riot at the Capitol was an “attempted coup,” which is legal, factual and linguistical nonsense, and that’s what he thinks Donald Trump should be locked up for without a chance of parole. I’ve instructed my family that if I ever say anything that stupid in private they should bash in my head with a brick, and Obeidallah is paid by MSNBC for to give that level of ignorant, hysterical, inflammatory and irresponsible commentary over the air. I guess I owe Tucker Carlson a mea culpa: I thought he was too much of a demagogue to be allowed on TV. Continue reading
The first stunned Ethics Alarms story about a cabal of idiots with education degrees persecuting a little boy for making a crude imaginary gun out of his fingers was in 2013, just as the Post Sandy Hook Ethics Train Wreck got rolling and the anti-gun hysterics were going off the rails (to which they, obviously, have never quite returned). I wrote of the first incident, which was in Montgomery County,
The NBC story concentrates on “whether the boy understands the implications of the gesture.” What implications of the gesture? That he is about to shoot bullets out of his finger? That he intends to kill someone with all the firepower an unarmed 6-year-old can muster? That he is making a mimed reference to a Connecticut school massacre he probably doesn’t know a thing about? Why should it matter what his “intent is? It’s a hand gesture! It isn’t vulgar or threatening except to silly phobics in the school system.
I concluded that it was child abuse by the school, and that “such irrational fearfulness, bad judgment, panic, disregard for the sensibilities of the young, lack of proportion and brain dysfunction forfeits all right to trust, and such fools must not be allowed to have power over young bodies and minds.”
But the finger gun lunatics struck again the next year, as Ohio crazies punished a 10-year-old boy for wielding an imaginary gun without a license. This time I figured out what was really going on—political and cultural woke indoctrination— writing in part,
The radical gun-hating progressives who disproportionately occupy administrative positions in the schools are willing to endure some ridicule as well as to victimize some children if it helps make guns and gun-related play less attractive, thus pointing to a Nirvana where the NRA is a shadow of its former self, and the only ones who own guns are criminals, the police and the government….Is public school political indoctrination more sinister than the proliferation incompetent teachers and administrators? Yes.
I also should have realized that this was the dawning of The Great Stupid.
In March, disbarred South Carolina lawyer Alex Murdaugh was sentenced to two consecutive life sentences after a jury found him guilty yesterday of the 2021 slayings of Maggie and Paul Murdaugh, his wife and son. Murdoch, who already faced life in prison for his financial crimes and who is a compulsive liar, was convicted despite an extremely weak case in which the prosecution barely proved necessary elements of the crime. The only motive for his murdering his family the state could come up with was that he did it to was to take attention away from his other offenses. Okaaaaay…
Here is what I wrote about the case after the trial…
“Reviewing the astoundingly thin evidence, I do not understand why the trial judge didn’t throw out the jury’s verdict and declare Murdaugh acquitted because there was not enough to convict him beyond a reasonable doubt as a matter of law. There wasn’t. This was an example of a jury convicting a defendant of murder because they decided he was a bad guy and there were no other suspects. Alex Murdaugh lied repeatedly regarding the deaths of his wife and son and he was undeniably a thief and a sociopath—but prosecutors couldn’t and didn’t present much more than theories about whether he was the killer. Judges are understandably, reluctant to over-ride juries, but in this case it was necessary. If the Trump Deranged reasoning that the conclusion that someone is just an untrustworthy bounder is sufficient to assume guilt of criminal activity is becoming a cultural norm, our justice system is approaching a crisis, if it isn’t in one already.
The news yesterday suggests that the jury verdict may have another explanation.
“I am here today to surrender to an indictment that should never have been brought. It represents a crossing of the Rubicon for our country, implicating the fundamental First Amendment right to petition the government for redress of grievances. As troubling, it targets attorneys for their zealous advocacy on behalf of their clients, something attorneys are ethically bound to provide and which was attempted here by “formally challeng[ing] the results of the election through lawful and appropriate means.” – An opportunity never afforded them in the Fulton County Superior Court. Each Defendant in this indictment, no less than any other American citizen, is entitled to rely upon the advice of counsel and the benefit of past legal precedent in challenging what former Vice President Pence described as, “serious allegations of voting irregularities and numerous instances of officials setting aside state election law” in the 2020 election. The attempt to criminalize our rights to such redress with this indictment will have – and is already having – profound consequences for our system of justice. My legal team and I will vigorously contest every count of the indictment in which I am named, and also every count in which others are named, for which my knowledge of the relevant facts, law, and constitutional provisions may prove helpful. I am confident that, when the law is faithfully applied in this proceeding, all of my co-defendants and I will be fully vindicated.”
John Eastman, respected conservative legal scholar, lawyer, law professor and former Dean of Chapman University Law School, as he surrendered last week to authorities on charges in the Georgia case alleging an illegal plot to overturn the Trump’s 2020 election loss.
I’ve mentioned this toxic phenomenon before, but yesterday I was in Hell. While walking Spuds and driving I saw 14 pedestrians striding along staring at their phones. Three were walking their dogs, and paying no attention to them. One was pushing a baby carriage.
In contrast, I saw only nine adults who were not staring at their phones.
The phenomenon is one of many that is isolating members of society, crippling social skills, undermining the interaction between strangers and neighbors, and giving social media and remote communication an outsized influence over society and the culture. We paved the way for it with such developments as the Sony Walkman, now, if self-isolation and absorption in public isn’t a social norm, it is rapidly becoming one.
Is the conduct unethical? It is tempting to argue that it hurts no one but the phone screen addict, though that definitely doesn’t apply to those behaving like this while caring for dogs, babies and children (or crossing the street). The counter argument would be Kant’s Universality Principle: would we want a world where everyone walks through the world oblivious to everyone and everything but their phone? Well, that’s what we are on the way to creating.
The coverage of the recent rulings in Students for Fair Admissions v. University of North Carolina and Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard almost universally created the impression that they were further attacks on democracy by a rogue Supreme Court, foiling the will of the people. In particular, these decisions blocking institutionalized institutional racist discrimination, which is what higher education affirmative action is, were assailed as creating disastrous hurdles to black Americans as they strive to succeed in this nation plagued by systemic racism.
Two recent polls show that this narrative was fake news from the news media and misinformation from the Left. A Rasmussen Reports national telephone and online survey found that 65% of “Likely U.S. Voters” approve of the rulings, with 49% approving “strongly”. Just 28% disapprove of the conclusion that the prohibition on discriminating by race means no discrimination by race. You can read how the questions were posed here. Another poll from YouGov/The Economist asked “Do you approve or disapprove of Supreme Court’s ruling on affirmative action?” Both sexes, all races, every age group, and every level of income approved more than not. (See here.)
Yeah, I know: polls. In this case, however, these easily manipulated surveys perform a service. The Supreme Court’s function does not and should not involve following the mob, but appealing to mob emotions has been a central strategy by progressives as they seek to de-legitimize the one branch of the government they don’t control. An accompanying myth is that the Roberts Court is an obstacle to “the will of the people,” even when, as in this case, the will of the people is supported by the Constitution and our laws.
Even after a concerted and ongoing effort to inflict Marxist goals, racial quotas and “good” discrimination on the culture, our core values have stood up to the propaganda siege—so far.
There is hope.
Ethics Alarms 