Mrs. Alito and the Bad Flag

Plus: Taiwan’s TikTok strategy, Open AI resignations, nicotine freedom, and more…

LIZ WOLFE

According to the Times, an upside-down American flag was flown at Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito’s house for a few days in January 2021—between the January 6 Capitol riot and President Joe Biden’s inauguration. The nation’s esteemed paper of record suggests this action indicates that Alito thinks the election was stolen from former President Donald Trump.

There is very little evidence available to make this case. People fly upside-down flags for all kinds of reasons; it typically signals “SOS” or a sense that the country is horribly off course. People have historically flown flags in this manner out of protest for the Vietnam War, out of protest for the Supreme Court’s 2022 decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, to contest election results (believing the election was stolen or that voter fraud was rampant), or—and don’t get the two confused—to signal displeasure with the election results.

This reminds me of when media outlets and the Anti-Defamation League claimed the “OK” symbol was actually a white supremacist gesture. If you look hard enough, you can find disturbing symbols anywhere you look, but you must sometimes suspend logic and reason in order to do so. This does not seem like a situation where a sitting Supreme Court justice is supporting overthrowing election results; it looks like a situation where The New York Times is straining to make that the narrative.

How Taiwan handles TikTok: Taiwan, which has long labeled TikTok a national security threat, eschews a national ban on the Chinese-owned app.

Five years ago, the government banned it on the devices of employees. For the last eight years, the ruling party (which will be in power for another four, at least, as the new president is being inaugurated on Monday) has refused to use the app. Legislators in Taiwan say “they do not have the luxury of thinking of TikTok as the only threat,” reports The New York Times. “Disinformation reaches Taiwanese internet users on every type of social media, from chat rooms to short videos.”

With China—which contests Taiwanese independence and wants reunification (and seems likely to attempt it by military force at some point)—always looming as a threat, TikTok is the least of Taiwanese politicians’ worries.

Note that Taiwan is no libertarian tech paradise. Lawmakers there are weighing “measures that tackle internet threats—fraud, scams and cybercrime—broadly enough to apply to all these existing social media platforms,” which may end up encroaching on free speech rights. Still, Taiwan has a robust online fact-checking ecosystem and lots of alternative media sites where users might be able to get better information.

All of this is instructive as legislators in the U.S. have passed a ban on the app and more broadly contemplate how much of a threat to national security the Chinese-owned app poses.

Scenes from New York:

QUICK HITS

• “When you’re paralyzed from the neck down, the last vestige of normalcy that you have left comes from your brain,” writes Bloomberg‘s Ashlee Vance. “Arbaugh was allowing Neuralink direct, physical access to his, in a procedure that came with all the standard risks of serious surgery as well as the unknown risks of something so new. Doctors would be removing part of his skull and sticking Neuralink’s coin-size device with its electrode-laced threads—a foreign object that had never before been tested on humans—into his brain.”
• A Change.org petition is calling for the Kansas City Chiefs—yes, a football team in the Midwest—to dismiss one of their players for having given a commencement speech at a Catholic college that says…standard Catholic things. I know it is very upsetting to some people that a football player in the Midwest does not enjoy bell hooks, but we should probably tolerate this nonetheless.
• Interesting thread from Haviv Rettig Gur about the difference in mindset of American Jews and their Israeli counterparts.
• There has been a wave of resignations recently at OpenAI, which some are using to substantiate AI doomerism. Others have commented that you don’t resign and post cryptic tweets if you’re legitimately worried about the product’s safety, which could ostensibly be better influenced from the inside. More on this.

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