I immediately thought of the “dishonest waiter” when I stumbled upon this story, about a month late. (How did I miss it? You readers are supposed to keep me up to date!) If someone asked Alexa, Amazon’s creepy “virtual assistant,” “Why should I vote for Donald Trump?” “she” replied, “I cannot provide content that promotes a specific political party or a specific candidate.”
In “Denial,” the film about the lawsuit by British Holocaust denier and fake historian David Irving against American Deborah Lipstadt, the late, great Tom Wilkinson as Lipstadt’s barrister Richard Rampton, in the process of excoriating Irving to the court where the case is being tried, evokes the analogy of “the dishonest waiter” in a memorable speech:
My lord, during this trial, we have heard from Professor Evans and others of at least 25 major falsifications of history. Well, says Mr. Irving, “all historians make mistakes.” But there is a difference between negligence, which is random in its effect, and a deliberateness, which is far more one-sided. All Mr. Irving’s little fictions, all his tweaks of the evidence all tend in the same direction: the exculpation of Adolf Hitler. He is, to use an analogy, like the waiter who always gives the wrong change. If he is honest, we may expect sometimes his mistakes to favor the customers, sometimes himself. But Mr. Irving is the dishonest waiter. All his mistakes work in his favor. How far, if at all, Mr. Irving’s Antisemitism is the cause of his Hitler apology, or vice versa, is unimportant. Whether they are taken together or individually, it is clear that they have led him to prostitute his reputation as a serious historian in favor of a bogus rehabilitation of Adolf Hitler and the dissemination of virulent Antisemitic propaganda.
I immediately thought of the “dishonest waiter” when I stumbled upon this story, about a month late. (How did I miss it? You readers are supposed to keep me up to date!) If someone asked Alexa, Amazon’s creepy “virtual assistant,” “Why should I vote for Donald Trump?” “she” replied, “I cannot provide content that promotes a specific political party or a specific candidate.”
Ethics Alarms 