Tuesday, January 14, 2025

Part I

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SCOTUS Seems Poised to Uphold TikTok Ban: SCOTUS Could Settle the Issue This Week, But Will President Trump Unsettle It Once Again?

On Friday of last week, the Supreme Court of the United States heard a case concerning TikTok, and it comes down to the fact that ByteDance, the parent company of TikTok, is appealing a decision of a US Federal Court of Appeals that said that a law adopted by Congress and signed into law by President Joe Biden that says that if ByteDance does not exchange ownership, that is change ownership from Chinese to something more acceptable to the United States then the app will simply be discontinued as of January the 19th, not coincidentally one day before Inauguration Day this month.

It is a complicated situation because the TikTok app wouldn’t just disappear on January the 19th, even if the law goes into effect, ByteDance does not change ownership, and it effectively is banned in the United States. The ban would not take place immediately, but the app would not be supported by the platforms, and it would not be updated, and eventually it would just cease to operate.

Now, almost immediately, the company filed for an appeal to the US Supreme Court, those oral arguments on an expedited basis, which means the court speeded up the process. Those oral arguments were held on Monday, and just about everyone observing the oral arguments came to the conclusion that the justices do not appear to be taking the side of ByteDance or TikTok and do not appear poised to reverse that appellate level decision that said that the law will go into effect, and if the ownership does not change, that TikTok will simply be banned in the United States.

Now, this is an extreme action. That’s not to say that it is an unjustified action. Indeed, I believe this is a fully justified action by Congress, and it appears that the Supreme Court of the United States, at least a majority of the justices, basically agree with that logic.

Now, ByteDance, which is to say TikTok, it’s the parent company, ByteDance and others have been arguing that it’s an infringement of free speech, but even as one of the justices said on Friday, there is no reason why that speech could not move to a different platform which means that government is not restricting the speech, it is simply restricting the activity of a major corporation that has access to privileged US information and that includes the private information of about 170 million TikTok users in the United States, and it is simply stating that this kind of interference or endangerment, this vulnerability to a foreign country officially designated as an adversary of the United States, simply cannot continue.

So let’s just think about the larger issues here for a moment. First of all, we have every issue involved in social media already involved in this situation. All those moral issues, all those worldview issues are already baked into the cake. The same thing in that level will be true of Instagram or Facebook or any number of other platforms including presumably what was formerly known as Twitter and is now known as X.

But what makes ByteDance different, what makes TikTok different is not just the user profile, it is the information on users and frankly patterns that could deeply affect the national security of the United States that could be immediately accessed by the Communist Party, which is to say, a force a nation already indicated as an official adversary to the United States of America.

Now, just to state the matter bluntly, empires of the past, nations of the past did not have this particular worry. Every nation throughout history has worried, every empire has worried about spies, about incursions, about guerrilla tactics. Espionage has certainly been historically at the top of that list, but when you talk about the digital age, you’re talking about a massive collection of information, and you can say, “Well, that’s just largely innocuous.” Well, knowing exactly the shampoo preferences of a 24-year-old young woman in St. Louis might not be a dire matter of national security, but that’s not really what we’re talking about here. That would be problematic actually in itself, but what we’re talking about here is the fact that this information could be used and could even be translated into targeted disinformation by a hostile foreign power.

Furthermore, let’s just state the obvious. There is no American corporation that is collecting this kind of information on millions upon millions of Chinese citizens. The Communist Party would never allow that. Well, you say, the United States is different because of the First Amendment and because of what Karl Popper defined as an open society, basically open and open for business to this kind of platform application corporation. Well, there’s some truth in that, but an open society cannot sustain efforts to try to undermine itself from the outside. It just can’t sustain that. It can’t survive that. And so I think there are good grounds for banning TikTok here in the United States.

Of course, the entire situation would change if the ownership shifts from a company that is basically under the control and authority of the Communist Party in China, and there are apologists for the company that’ll come right back and say, “Well, look, it is not under direct control of the Communist Party.” Well, here’s the thing. In China, the Communist Party in one party rule has access to everything. There is even a formal board that is assigned by the Communist Party oversight for just this kind of operation. You can imagine why the Chinese Communist Party, the totalitarian government of China, which is after all extremely aggressive, you can understand why it would just delight in having this kind of platform and this kind of access.

Now, as I said, all the moral worldview issues already concerned with the entire world of say, social media, all that is in play here. It would be in play on the other platforms as well. But even then, TikTok has had a particular profile and even in the operation of the company going back to 2016, the reality is that it has operated in such a way that even independent of the ownership or the control by the Chinese Communist Party, it has been accused of targeting individuals in the United States in the collection of information that frankly was far beyond anything justified in a business model. We are looking at all kinds of sensitivities that would be raised but are especially raised when we are talking about this information being accessible to a hostile foreign power.

Now, here’s something else that’s interesting. It’s a worldview matter of significance that when you look at issues of national security and this kind of threat, there is more bipartisanship than you might otherwise expect.

So for instance, one of the justices of the Supreme Court, the very conservative Justice Samuel Alito, after all, he was the author of the Dobbs decision reversing Roe v Wade, he appeared to make statements that were more or less in line with President Biden’s Solicitor General making the case for the administration before the justices. So when you talk about a lot of issues, you can pretty much predict exactly how the justices are going to line up. On an issue like this, not quite so predictable, but nonetheless, it did appear, and just about every observer watching the oral arguments came to the conclusion that it certainly appears a majority of justices are going to let the law stand which is to say they see the law justified and the First Amendment grounds, which as some had argued, even as the appeals court ruled, there is a freedom of speech issue, but ByteDance is not an American company and thus it does not have its own free speech rights, and the free speech rights of Americans could actually be infringed by the Chinese government’s control of this platform. So interesting arguments and a very interesting pattern.

The decision on this situation is likely to have to come down just to this week. Because after all, the key date is January the 19th. So we are looking at what will probably be a settled issue by the Supreme Court coming very quickly. So that settles the issue, right? Well, maybe yes, but maybe no. Former President Donald Trump, now President-Elect Donald Trump in just a matter of days to become President of the United States again, in his first term, President Trump was very much opposed to TikTok and indeed sought to gain control and even a limitation on the app. But during the 2024 campaign, he made very positive statements about TikTok and actually his campaign was quite adept at using TikTok in terms of messaging.

So what will the administration do? Here’s where the issue could quickly get back to the court. And by that I mean get back to the Supreme Court. The President of the United States could certainly slow down the implementation of this law, or in the case of President Trump, considering himself quite the deal maker, he may try to come up with a deal in which the law can be satisfied by some change in ownership. But the President of the United States can’t just ignore a duly adopted law that’s passed by Congress and signed even by his predecessor in office into effect, so it’s going to be very interesting. There are worldview issues aplenty here, and I just want to remind listeners to The Briefing that these worldview issues apply to many other platforms in the main, but specifically the issues in the case of TikTok or ByteDance have to do with the access to this information by a hostile foreign power. Let’s just say that no wise nation would allow such a thing, and at the end of that sentence, you can pretty much put a period.

Part II

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Lotteries are a Tax on the Poor: There is a Great Moral Cost to the Lottery, and the Lottery Preys on the Poor

But next, let’s shift to another issue with massive worldview significance, and this has to do with gambling, and not just gambling in general, but gambling that is government-sponsored, state-sponsored, so let’s start there. USA Today had a very interesting article in recent days. The headline was this, “Lotteries Help States Boost Revenue.” True enough. Then comes the subhead, “Some Call Practice Unfair Tax of People in Poverty.” Well, it’s a very interesting article. It doesn’t really pile new ground, but it does point to the fact that the states are increasingly dependent upon revenue from lotteries. Now, one of the interesting points made in the USA Today article by Carissa Waddock is the fact that this does go back further in American history than you might think. It actually goes back to the founding era, at least in terms of some of the states. They were turning to mechanisms such as lotteries for special projects, and very quickly it was clear that a state-sponsored lottery could be offered to the people as some way of avoiding the people having to pay higher taxes.

Now, there’s no doubt that the math does work out that way if you load the math to do so, which is to say that in a state with a big lottery, the reality is the lottery does bring in a lot of income, and you could say, “Well, that’s preferable to a tax.” Well, in some sense, maybe yes, but in other ways almost certainly, no. Because one of the realities of the lottery is that it is a socioeconomically divided issue.

Now, just to make the issue clear, when you look at where lottery tickets are sold, let’s talk about lotteries, legal, state-sponsored lotteries in the United States right now, state-by-state, it is a firmly established pattern, and that is to say that people in less economically advantaged areas, they buy far more lottery tickets than people in more economically advantaged areas. As USA Today points out, an executive with a healthy income is unlikely to buy lottery tickets. Meanwhile, people who have very little and frankly are easily enticed to take what money they have and to buy it for an irrational chance that they will somehow receive a jackpot, well, that’s exactly how states prey on their own citizens. 

And it is a pattern that is now so well documented that the state’s no longer deny it. Instead, they try to say, “Look, we’re going to mitigate the damage. We’re going to try to lessen the harm to these less advantaged neighborhoods and to the people in them. We’re going to put some special programs in place. We’re going to put state paid for programs to help people who have gambling addictions and other behaviors. We’re going to do this, and we’re going to do that.” But you know what? Those same legislators are counting on spending even more income from an ever expanding lottery, which means the state is simply preying on its own people.

And this is something that also spread across the country because this did not happen in 50 states at once. Instead, you had states establish these lotteries, and the income was huge. So a state like Georgia in the south was fairly early, and the state of Georgia sold it to the people, at least in part, on the basis of a massive college scholarship program for the citizens of the state. It did indeed establish that scholarship program, and it has paid out massive amounts of money in terms of scholarships.

But when you look at the cost to the state of having the lottery when it comes to moral costs, well, that’s not something the legislators want to talk about, but it is something that neighboring states saw as an opportunity. Or to put it this way, if you are in, say, Alabama or Florida, and people in your state are going to Georgia to buy lottery tickets that are going to help fund the state budget of Georgia or provide scholarships in Georgia, well, you’re going to say, “Why should we have our money leave Alabama and Florida to go to Georgia? We need to have our own state lottery.” And frankly, now you see them just about everywhere.

To the credit of USA Today, they do raise the issue as to whether or not this is basically what is known as a regressive tax. That is to say a tax on the people least able to pay it. USA Today’s article says this. “About half of Americans buy a lottery ticket every year according to a 2016 Gallup survey.” I’ll note that’s quite dated for this kind of article. Nonetheless, “While money from lotteries often goes toward public programs, some argue that they act as a tax on low income groups who are more likely to spend their money trying to strike it rich on lottery tickets.” That’s something that was pointed out by Victor Matheson, a professor of economics at the College of the Holy Cross in Massachusetts, and he went on to say that when you look at this regressive effect, it does come with a moral cost.

Frankly, if you’ve ever been at one of these lottery ticket sites, it could be a gas station or a convenience store, and you’ve been behind someone buying these tickets, you can see exactly how this comes down to predatory behavior. You can also see how it comes down to addictive behavior. 

Now, one thing that is a moral test in economics is just to look at pools of money, and so here’s a pool of money, say, at the upper end of the economy, here’s a smaller pool of money at the lower end of the economy, here is someone making, say, $30,000 a year, over here is someone making say a million dollars a year. The fact is the person making a million dollars a year is not particularly attracted to the lottery. Furthermore, he probably, or she probably understands the math well enough to know that the chances of actually winning are nearly infinitesimally small, especially when you look at the big jackpots.

On the other hand, if you have less money, you have less expectation of moving ahead, you might try to justify or rationalize spending money on a lottery ticket or several lottery tickets spread across several lottery games, precisely because the state is holding out the opportunity that this just could be your lucky day.

Part III

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Young Men are Increasingly Addicted to Gambling: Gambling Companies are Targeting Young Men with Online Sports Gaming

Well, okay, let’s leave that particular dimension of this issue and turn to an article that ran in yesterday’s edition of the New York Times. In the international section, here’s a headline for you, “Casino Apps Threatening Mafia’s Grip on Lottery.” The story’s dateline from Brazil, and the bottom line is that the Mafia is losing business to the shift of some of the gambling onto online platforms, particular on apps based on phones. So here’s a sign of what life is like in a fallen world. This is how sin operates. So if the Mafia has been losing business, what does the Mafia need to do? Well, the Mafia, according to his own business plan, basically has to get in this business. That just tells you how this works. The gambling operators, regardless of whether they are states, as in state governments, or the Mafia, they know how it works, and they know just how much money is at stake.

But then I want to turn to another particular issue related to gambling, and this has to do with gambling and how it’s becoming more and more a danger to teenagers and young people, and in particular teenage boys. It’s also affecting some girls, but overwhelmingly it is teenage boys and young men, and here’s where there are multiple vulnerabilities that Christian families, Christian parents, Christian pastors, and others need to be thinking about. Number one, where you have organized sports, at virtually any level, you have some exposure to gambling, and that had been illegal through most of American history, but it’s become more and more legal in the United States with the official sports betting. And then you also have the fact that many young males, and in particular adolescent and young adult males, let’s just put it this way, they are deeply involved in gaming, in digital gaming, in playing games that are computer-based, digital, Cloud-based. They’re games, and these games often come, of course, with all kinds of opportunities by score, to basically imply gambling, to simulate gambling, but now it’s going beyond that. It is actually turning into gambling.

There’s even a category of what is known as skin gambling, and this is where on many of these platform games, people can rack up points and then they can invest those points, and those points can sometimes be bought, that is to say, bought with dollars, and the Washington Post recently ran a really important investigative report, also followed by an editorial statement in which they pointed out that what you have here, the fact that many young males are deeply involved in this kind of gambling, and sometimes it’s in a bedroom right down the hall. Parents aren’t aware until all of a sudden some massive charge appears on the credit card, and it is because of certain, say, tokens that are bought on the online game, and it’s real money we’re talking about, and it also becomes a very real vulnerability in terms of addictive behavior.

For one thing, it is becoming documented that involvement in this kind of gambling is simulating involvement in this kind of athletic activity, or this kind of online gaming in the release of dopamine, which is a very, very powerful endorphin, which does have an addictive effect, and this is something that is also tied, by the way, to pornography and other issues. It is an addictive accelerant, and you can see with all these things just come together in something of a triple threat when it comes to sports gambling and young people in America. The headline of the editorial in the Washington Post is this, “As Sports Gambling Becomes Normalized, More Teens Bet on Games.” The article also makes clear that this particular vulnerability doesn’t end with the teenage years, but the teenagers are supposed to be economically protected from this kind of activity or vulnerability, but increasingly they’re not.

As some of the boys interviewed for the article, the investigative report made clear it is not supposed to be something that they can buy, but they just find a workaround so that even with the age restriction or even the legal restriction on age put in place, they find a way to get around it, and honestly, the platforms and apps and the gambling outlets are quite aware of that.

Now, interestingly enough, later this week we’re going to be talking about another case coming before the Supreme Court of the United States, oral arguments held this week in a case in which a situation in Texas comes to the Supreme Court because Texas has passed legislation requiring AIDS certification and ID certification when it comes to porn sites because so many of these porn sites which aren’t supposed to be accessed by young people are indeed accessed because these companies have avoided any kind of objective verification process. It’s a parallel situation, but there’s so much more to the pornography issue, and once those oral arguments are held this week, we’ll have more to talk about, I can assure you.

Part IV

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Nursing Mothers are Saving Lives: God’s Design in Motherhood is an Imperative to Optimize Breastfeeding for Mothers

But in conclusion, I want to shift to a very different issue, and this is mothers nursing their babies. Nicholas Kristof of the New York Times on Sunday ran a piece with the headline, A Low-Tech Way to Save Babies’ Lives. Nicholas Kristof makes the point that nursing babies, breastfeeding babies, is to great benefit to them, and especially in many parts of the world where infant mortality rates are high, and frankly, the risk of babies is also very high, encouraging mothers to nurse their babies would actually turn out to be a health advantage, and as he describes it, it is a low-tech way to save babies’ lives.

Now, there’s another moral dimension to this you might not know, and I’m not saying that it’s immoral to use baby formula. That’s not the point, certainly it is not. But it is also true that the manufacturers of these kinds of infant formulas, they did advertise them decades ago and put pressure on governments and on consumers all over the world arguing that in some ways at least their product is superior to mother’s milk. That is absolute nonsense. There’s some women who can’t nurse their babies, understandably so, but nonetheless, I think there’s a very interesting angle to this particular argument because Nicholas Kristof comes to the end, and this is what he says. “In many ways, breast milk is miraculous. It has been custom designed for babies’ health over thousands of years. Given that it can also save more lives than many of the other interventions we poured billions of dollars into, we have the imperative,” he says, “an imperative to make optimal breastfeeding easy for mothers and let them take it from there.”

I want to state, I think Nicholas Kristof is onto something important here. I think this is the kind of argument that cannot only improve situations, it can also save lives, but I do want us to note how he introduces the issue. He says, “In many ways, breast milk is Miraculous.” He then goes on to say, “It’s been custom designed for baby’s health over thousands of years.” That implies it’s just some kind of cosmological accident, which is the process of evolution. I want to state this, that particular gift, breast milk, is not merely an accident, but it certainly is, to use his own word, miraculous. Or to put it this way, when you consider the benefits to mothers nursing their babies, you just might come to the conclusion that a divine creator intended it this way and equipped mothers this way.

Seen in a Christian worldview, this is another opportunity to praise God for what he has shown and given us in creation, even revealing his own glory. If you don’t start from a biblical worldview, all you can end up saying is “Consider something like a mother nursing her child. Isn’t that nice? What a lucky development.” 

Thanks be to God. We know there’s a lot more to it than that.