Oh yeah, it’s self-flagellation time around the Literature R Us corral, and my comrades in arms have supplied me with an awesome array of whips, knouts, and other assorted scourges, painful even to look upon, much less touch. But, well, duty calls.
Yo, Joe Biden! Shut up!
“They’re killing people,” bellowed/whined Uncle Joe back in July, complaining about the fact that social media platforms like Facebook were allowing postings by anti-vaxx types. Joe’s eruption came the day after his surgeon general made a more mannerly but equally inappropriate call for the suppression of “misinformation”:
U.S. Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy is issuing the first Surgeon General's Advisory of this Administration to warn the American public about the urgent threat of health misinformation. Health misinformation, including disinformation, have threatened the U.S. response to COVID-19 and continue to prevent Americans from getting vaccinated, prolonging the pandemic and putting lives at risk, and the advisory encourages technology and social media companies to take more responsibility to stop online spread of health misinformation.
The problem—or, rather, a problem—with all this is that, according to this line of thinking, one could, in all honesty, accuse Dr. Fauci of “killing people” for his notoriously false statements regarding the efficacy of face masks when the whole COVID thing was just getting off the ground. It’s true that the anti-vaxx thing was particularly repulsive, but the notion that only “responsible” speech is acceptable when it’s a matter of life and death would, if seriously implemented, be the death of free speech in America, because what issue can’t be teased into a “matter of life and death”?
And the Biden administration is already hard at work implementing this sort of thinking, “jawboning” the big social media outfits to repress “inappropriate” content. Over at Reason, Jacob Sullum has a “nice”—“nice” as in “totally depressing”—article, Biden's Sneaky Censors, describing the administration’s surreptitious—surreptitious and multitudinous—efforts to ensure that the Silicon Velley big boys do their duty to “truth”—truth as the Biden administration defines it. Just in case some of the Silicon Valley execs contacted by Biden’s minions might have thought the administration was talking through its hat, on September 8 the White House released a statement, Readout of White House Listening Session on Tech Platform Accountability, a “listening” session that appears to have consisted largely of the White House listening to what it already wanted to hear, because it reached a list of conclusions/recommendations pretty quickly, which started off with these two honeys:
Promote competition in the technology sector. The American information technology sector has long been an engine of innovation and growth, and the U.S. has led the world in the development of the Internet economy. Today, however, a small number of dominant Internet platforms use their power to exclude market entrants, to engage in rent-seeking, and to gather intimate personal information that they can use for their own advantage. We need clear rules of the road to ensure small and mid-size businesses and entrepreneurs can compete on a level playing field, which will promote innovation for American consumers and ensure continued U.S. leadership in global technology. We are encouraged to see bipartisan interest in Congress in passing legislation to address the power of tech platforms through antitrust legislation.
Remove special legal protections for large tech platforms. Tech platforms currently have special legal protections under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act that broadly shield them from liability even when they host or disseminate illegal, violent conduct or materials. The President has long called for fundamental reforms to Section 230.
“Fundamental reforms to Section 230” has become the goal of both Big Brother Democrats and Big Brother Republicans, the Dems wanting to prevent “misinformation” while the Repubs, feeling that the woke left already controls Facebook et al., want to ban any censorship, which would require media platforms to carry everything from rank anti-Semitism to porno.
It's a very good bet that some sort of “get tough with Silicon Valley” legislation will ultimately be enacted, with both sides wanting so hard to “do something”, but it’s hard to imagine that most of what will end up getting done will be worth the doing. Various “whistleblowers”, like Frances Haugen and Yael Eisenstat have come forward with juicy emails and in-house studies to share. The most recent tattletale is former Twitter guy Peiter Zatko, alleging that his company’s shortcomings are endangering both personal privacy and national defense. And if you think Peiter is just another disgruntled employee who got passed over for promotion, well, the generally straight shooting Fred Kaplan has something you need to read.
Reasonettes like Eugene Volokh and Elizabeth Nolan Brown have been explaining why people should leave Section 230 alone for a long time, and so far Silicon Valley has won this one, but I can’t help wondering if Peiter’s testimony might push things over the ledge. Well, here’s hoping the fall won’t be too bad. But, as Stephanie Slade, also at Reason, explains, in a very long, very nice/totally depressing piece, Both Left and Right Are Converging on Authoritarianism, that hope is a wan one.
“Hunter” Biden? Is that a person?
The Sordid Saga of Hunter Biden’s Laptop The most invasive data breach imaginable is a political scandal Democrats can’t just wish away. Yeah, New York reporters Andrew Rice and Olivia Nuzzi have a tale to tell, and if you think the headline is brutal, well, you ain’t seen nothing yet, because it gets worse, lots worse. The worst of it is, really, for us Democrats, is that it could have been even worse, a lot worse, because Andy and Olivia leave one massive loose end dangling, to wit: what “honorable” motive would anyone have to pay massive “consulting” fees to this sad travesty of a human being?
The most benign interpretation—and it’s not very—is that they were hoping for wall candy—photos of themselves with big shots, most notably Uncle Joe, of course—along with the opportunity to tell suckers “We’ve been consulting with Vice President Biden’s son on this one”. But the most likely explanation is that sleazeballs judge others by themselves. If you think the whole world is pay for play, why wouldn’t you hire Hunter? And how far would you go, if you were Hunter, hooked on coke and whores (and there’s a whole lot about that), to encourage the suckers to believe that you could deliver? And why for God’s name couldn’t Uncle Joe do something to get his son to not trade on his name in such a grotesque manner?
Rice and Nuzzi do cover, in some detail, the massive mainstream media coverup of the Biden case, largely set in motion by hypocritical liberal national security experts, who issued a “public policy letter” “explaining” sans evidence that this was exactly the sort of sneaky shit one could expect the Russians to pull. As Rice and Nuzzi tell us
Outside the right-wing media, the reaction to the story was something like anxious paralysis. Social-media giants and news outlets had absorbed much of the blame for the results of the 2016 election, and they approached the 2020 election with caution, especially with respect to material that might be peddled by hostile foreign governments to affect voting. “The FBI came to us,” Mark Zuckerberg would later tell Joe Rogan, “and was like, ‘Hey, just so you know, you should be on high alert. We thought there was a lot of Russian propaganda in the 2016 election. We have it on notice that basically there’s about to be some kind of dump that’s similar to that.’ ” On September 24, less than a month before the Post story, the head of security policy for Facebook had told the press to be careful since “threat actors,” including foreign adversaries, would try anything to “trick journalists into doing their amplification for them.”
The FBI’s actions were “reasonable”, more or less, but the “public policy letter” was bullshit, pure and simple, and the willingness of the mainstream media to both act on it, by refusing to allow the story to mentioned on their sites, in the case of Facebook and Twitter, and the willingness of the Washington Post, New York Times, et al. to accept the letter’s “theory” as true without any evidence at all while denouncing the New York Post’s story for not having “enough” evidence, and then to come tiptoeing back to the story months after the election and admit that it was true—well, truth does die in the darkness.
A lot of Republicans are wishing that Donald Trump would drop dead. A lot of Democrats are wishing the same for Hunter. Unfortunately, both are likely to be disappointed.
“Defund the Police”? Nobody says that any more!
Are you sure, guys? Because it kind of sounds like it’s still a thing. The National Review is happy to bring us the bad news: Two Firearms Allegedly Stolen from Democratic Representative’s California House.
Yeah, “Democratic California representative Karen Bass said Saturday that two firearms had been stolen from her home in a break-in, despite being ‘securely stored.’” If you’re the National Review, that’s already worth a chuckle, but it gets “better”, much better. See, Karen, who is black and is running for the mayor of Los Angeles, has this to say about crime at her website:
We can lower crime rates by increasing the economic and social vitality of our communities. Research has shown that investments in creating good-paying jobs has a greater impact on crime than comparable funds invested in increased policing. This requires identifying neighborhood level concerns and priorities and mobilizing residents to be a part of problem identification, problem solving, and accountability. It also requires reintegration of formerly incarcerated and system-involved youth and adults back into the community and offering them a seat at the policy-making table.
The research that Bass refers to is supplied (in theory) by a link to the Final Report of the President’s Task Force on 21st Century Policing, co-chaired by former Philadelphia police chief Charles H. Ramsey and George Mason University professor Laurie O. Robinson, issued in May 2015. The co-chairs both have “killer” cred, so to speak, but I find the whole tone of the report utopian. I don’t at all see the link between “good-paying jobs” and lower crime. The U.S. economy boomed during the sixties and early seventies and crime rose steadily—more than steadily after the big riots in 1968. The economy also boomed in the Reagan years, and so did crime. Read for yourself, from all three links, but don’t tell me that Bass isn’t arguing for defunding the police—because she is.
