Pun Salad

If Musk is to succeed in this endeavor, he ought to take three immediate steps to improve the platform. First, he should replace Twitter’s vague guidelines with a long list of more specific rules. I know, I know — that sounds paradoxical. Usually, I am of the view that the fewer the rules, the better the outcome for liberty. But, in this case, I suspect that the opposite is true. “Don’t Be Evil” might be a good policy for a society that agrees upon the nature of “evil,” but, in one that does not, it is next to useless. As a result, Musk ought to insist on a larger set of narrower limits — “You may not threaten to kill another user” — and to assiduously avoid any of the broader concepts that have been captured and corrupted by the DEI-types that are ruining the American workplace. Twitter should not promise to protect “dignity,” or to avoid “harm,” or to uphold “equality.” It should not vow to keep people “safe,” or to outlaw “hatred,” or to combat “misinformation.” Hell, given the absurd hierarchies of immutable characteristics that progressivism has imposed, it should not base any rules on race, gender, or religion, either. Instead, it should focus on the specifics. “You may not publish another user’s physical address” is a good rule. “You may not use Twitter in the commission of a crime, as determined by a court” is a good rule. If certain words are to be verboten, Musk should list them. Sure, a Terms & Conditions page with 500 items on it would be a touch unwieldy, but it would ultimately be less of a problem than having five intrinsically vague statements that accord carte blanche to the spoiled children of Oberlin.

Over the last week, SpaceX and Tesla founder Elon Musk arranged $46.5 billion in financing to follow through on his unsolicited offer to Twitter's board to buy the social media site from them. This afternoon, the board accepted Musk's offer to buy the company for $54.20 a share.

Long a Twitter power user/troll/loudmouth, Musk bought a 9.2 percent stake in the company last month, becoming the largest shareholder, before deciding he'd rather have the whole thing.

Cue hysteria! Musk haters have taken to the site to declare that Donald Trump will now probably win the 2024 election, that Musk's bid is really about white power, that Section 230 must be reformed, and that, yes, Musk's new policies will be lethal. (Perhaps the death toll will be even larger than net neutrality's!)

Founded 20 years ago in the panic-stricken days after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) was originally tasked with guarding the borders and preventing similar future assaults from abroad. Since then, the agency's focus has shifted to enemies closer to home in the form of Americans the government has tagged as potential threats. That's unfortunate, because throughout its brief existence, DHS has demonstrated poor judgment, worse respect for individual liberties, and an impressive inability to implement necessary reforms of the sort that watchdogs now recommend.

The shift from chasing external threats to looking for those found inside the country is no surprise to anybody familiar with DHS's political sensitivities. Just as Republicans fret over immigrants, Democrats worry about radicals under the bed. Donald Trump's loss to Joe Biden in the 2020 presidential election meant DHS announcements stopped talking about border walls in favor of warning about "domestic violent extremists" motivated by the "online proliferation of false or misleading narratives." But it's still the same plodding bureaucracy with lots of resources and only a modicum of decency.

A feminist philosopher was disinvited from speaking at Harvard University for penning academic literature that pushed back on some demands of the transgender movement.

Dr. Devin Buckley had prepared a highly specialized talk on British romanticism “that had nothing to do with gender or feminism,” she told National Review, until coordinator Erin Saladin of the college’s English Department unearthed some of her scholarship on the Internet. She discovered that Buckley is a board member of Women’s Liberation Front (WoLF), a radical feminist organization that has been outspoken about maintaining sex segregation in women-exclusive spaces to protect vulnerable females. Because of this involvement, Saladin determined that Buckley was a guest for whom the department could not provide a platform.

“There is simply no such thing as ‘social’ justice,” writes Jordan Peterson. “Whatever those who rely on this cliched phrase are aiming at has nothing whatsoever to do with justice. Justice is meted out at the level of the suffering individual.” Indeed, if the term “social justice” rightly suggests a larger idea of justice beyond simply leaving others in peace, it offers an unhelpful explanation of what that larger idea might entail. Instead of seeking to divine the meaning of “social justice,” a better course would be to consider Adam Smith’s three-layered concept of justice.

In The Theory of Moral Sentiments, Smith distinguishes between commutative justice, or not messing with other people’s stuff; distributive justice, or making a becoming use of what is one’s own; and estimative justice, or estimating objects properly. When a claim not to have our possessions messed with is made against government, it is called liberty. Yet even classical liberals can sense that justice extends further. What, after all, justifies commutative justice or liberty but some larger principles?