Friends, while I've not been among the biggest fans of social media empires like Meta and Google, I find today's ruling by a jury in Los Angeles troubling. It found Instagram and YouTube liable for a young woman's mental illness, on the theory that the addictive nature of social media platforms is psychologically damaging. Well, no doubt that's true, but the addictive nature of almost anything, from booze to BMWs to badminton to banana bread, can be damaging, if one indulges too much. If you ask me, anyone who uses social media excessively has done injury to themselves, and personal responsibility ought to be the operative principle here, not entitlement and self-pity. I suppose reasonable people might disagree about these matters, but consider this: if this ruling stands, it will be lawyers and judges who decide what the permissible parameters of social media will be, and do we really want THAT???
In other news, the UN has voted to name the transatlantic slave trade as "the gravest crime against humanity". A very timely decision, no? I mean, otherwise, the slave trade could restart any day now! Of course, the motivation for this ridiculous decision, which I'm happy to say that the United States opposed, was to justify open-ended reparations. Luckily, resolutions passed by the UN General Assembly have no practical effect. I must say, the sheer cheek in naming any one atrocity "the gravest" of all time is impressive. As I understand it, the Afro-Middle Eastern slave trade actually took more lives, but who has even heard of it??? What an unseemly spectacle these efforts to monetize historical grievances are.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cvg06q36052o
According to President Trump, Iran is about ready to pull a Venezuela and give us everything we want. Well, I'll believe it when I see it... The truth may be that, at this stage, no one is in firm control of Iran, and concessions granted by some could easily be undermined by others. That is to say, our destabilization of the country may make a clean resolution to the present conflict difficult to achieve. Always be careful what you wish for!
Finally, those of us who support President Trump's efforts to facilitate regime change in Iran are understandably frustrated by the pro-Iranian propaganda that fills the mainstream media to overflowing. Be that as it may, you can't deny that the Trump haters have had a certain measure of success in convincing the public that this operation has been a failure and that it endangers American lives, and the global economy, needlessly. Trump's approval numbers have ticked down, and in fact they've been falling (gracefully) more or less since the outset of his second term. This trend naturally does not reflect the quality of his leadership or the objective reality of political and economic conditions, so much as the accumulated weight of anti-Trump narratives in the media and social media. We conservatives have utterly failed to intimidate our enemies, and we have also utterly failed to transform the media and social media landscape, by hook or by crook. In short, we've left a giant machine in operation that wants nothing more (and nothing less) than to convince as many people as possible to hate, hate, hate Donald Trump all day, every day. It's working, albeit not as much as the Left would like. If we're not very careful, therefore, the second Trump Administration will follow much the same arc as the first, and the strains imposed by unpopularity will create something of a doom loop from which Trump and his top lieutenants will find it hard to escape. I know this is a depressing way to look at it, and I would like nothing more than to be proven wrong, but this is where prevailing trends seem to be taking us, in my estimation. And this, I hasten to add, is all within the context of an economy that is generally strong. If the economy goes south, things get even bleaker!
https://www.realclearpolling.com/polls/approval/donald-trump/approval-rating
Dr. Waddy from Jack: I once read that the totality of human understood information multiplies at some astonishing figure (doubling or more in just a few years) and that that interval is constantly decreasing.
ReplyDeleteI'm thinking of the space telescope photo showing hundreds of galaxies in one "small "spot. We can see it but we are incapable of fully comprehending it; its just too much for our relatively limited intellects. Similarly, credible prediction of the extent of the information we may someday utilize and the processes by which we may take advantage of it may well never be at our command. And its effects on mundane life, including legal developments may be infinite. I agree with the concerns you have expressed above and your assertion (as I see it)that personal responsibility for personal behavior ought always to be a prime tenet of free living.
Democracy has so far fostered an , ON BALANCE, humane legality in countries like ours. Perhaps we should be guardedly hopeful that it will continue to help to provide sometimes painful democratic compromises to address a probably never ending evolution of the power of information.
An apparently accredited commentator on Fox opined yesterday that this verdict is eminently appealable. That process may well advance the free dialogue and dialectics which could make this intensely historic macrodevelopment - INFORMATION -reasonably manageable .
Dr. Waddy from Jack: Somehow I think the U.N.s judgement of the "gravest crime against humanity" was not the result of extensive debate or of serious consideration of other credible phenomena. Eg.: the Mongol Invasions, applied Marxism, venal and primarily self seeking wars, religious , national and racial hatred ,and the atavistic and continuing curse of Jew hatred . World slavery , a subject of which Dr. Orlando Patterson is a distinguished scholar, may not have been fully considered.
ReplyDeleteThere is obvious considerable hatred for Western civilization at work in much of the U.N. That the Western aspect of the historical reality of world slavery was judged as it was may have been a manifestation of that bias.
Dr. Waddy from Jack: Re what I said above about information. You are right; it would not be good to have judges (at least alone and independently) interpret the increasingly complex objective truths about information technology. In our democracy such knowledge is generated by myriad public and private sources. But judges by profession do referee by definition formal, highly principled procedures in the consideration of the integrity of competing perceptions of esoteric technical credibility or of well supported facts ,in all of which expert testimony is honored. They must be careful not to arrogate to themselves qualification to decide issues beyond their legal ken but we know, don't we, that they do it sometimes. In a democracy like ours, grievously infected by a presumptuous , precedent disdaining , totalitarian doctrine like Marxism and its poisonous offspring , our courts do sometimes serve up decisions prematurely and/or frivolously and or purely doctrinally
ReplyDeleteresolved upon. But then, appeals courts, legislatures and executive branches can balance or even remedy such overreach.
I think as long as we remain a very plural democracy, competition , politics, pioneering technology and serendipity may, in intricate dialectical interplay ,afford us a modicum of benefit from the incalculably important evolution of INFORMATION.
We might look to the Industrial Revolution (in democracies that is , NOT, in the untimely and murderous imposition of it upon captive nations by presumptuous and well insulated monsters like Stalin and Mao) for some guidance on how this Information revolution may develop. We know that there was much eventually favorable interplay between business, labor, the law and unforeseen factors such as WWI and WWII. We know that in free countries it has brought about standards of living so redeeming that the wisest persons before it started could not have imagined them. That could well be the road that the "Information Revolution" takes , as long as we retain faith in the positive and constructive miens which prevail in the West and the East Asian littoral. (China may be a unique case; there prosperity has evolved from a terribly tyrannical base but it necessitated the defacto return to exceedingly productive traditional and essential Chinese enterprise and its noble work ethic.)
Dr. Waddy from Jack: In WWII, our disenpowerment of utterly pernicious regimes in Germany and Japan necessitated limited periods of comprehensive physical investment and rule over them. It required all out commitment of our industrial and military strength, including use of nuclear weapons.
ReplyDeleteIn Korea we were constrained by arguably creditable factors from going all out to destroy the expansive communist N.Korean regime. It would have meant , only five years after monumental WWII, yet another massive effort, this time against the endless hordes of the tyrannically commanded Chinese army and possible reuse of nuclear weapons (with who can say what consequences ). So we settled for the repulse of the N. Korean onslaught and left their base intact. In Vietnam our effort simply to stop totalitarian N.Vietnam from expanding was torpedoed by some of the tragically mistaken multitudinous and credulous children of the American WWII winning generation and by totalitarian Marxist campus mentors. In Afghanistan and Iraq we again went "in country" but without the final resolve to stay the course, which might have meant permanent forceful American presence.
Now we seek to disempower another heartless regime embracing fanatic intent to annihilate those who contradict it and its tyrannical doctrine. After Pearl Harbor , the political will to completely defeat Japan was manifest. Similar consensus does not obtain in our country now. Still, our resolute President is prosecuting a possibly regime changing onslaught on Iran's physical power to attack those it considers heretic. Some occupation (eg. of Kharg Island or the littoral around the Strait of Hormuz )to keep Iran in its quarantined place, may be politically viable , despite the best efforts of the "American" far left to give aid and comfort to the neomedieval Iranian regime with unrelenting domestic subversion.
Above I should have added public outrage to the list of factors mitigating judicial overreach. Jack
ReplyDeleteJack, to be sure, the total volume of information is constantly rising. Is it in inverse proportion to wisdom, though? Or maybe totally unconnected to it! Very possibly.
ReplyDeleteFunny, isn't it, how only evils committed by Western men are ever perceived as evil. DEI is alive and well at the United Nations, and unfortunately right here in the good ole USA. It will take a lot more than an executive order to expunge it.
Jack, what's different about the present conflict is that majority public opinion and elite opinion and media commentary was against it, full stop, from day one. That's a measure of the thoroughness and thoughtlessness of TDS, but it's also a testament to how little President Trump prepared the American people for this sacred mission, and indeed how vague the mission has been, from the outset. Are we set on regime change or not? I still don't know.