Uh, NO…This is Not How To Engage In Civic Discourse

Incredibly, the conservative website “Not the Bee” called that “an absolute masterclass in dealing with godless commies.” Where’s Extradimensional Cephalopod when we need him/it?

I know the EA herald of respectful disagreement would be all over this. On the other hand, Debra Lipstadt, the Holocaust historian, has maintained that engaging in debate with Holocaust deniers give them too much credibility, and I believe it is valid to hold that Communists warrant the same dismissive treatment. It is pretty funny that when asked to name an accomplishment of Communism, all the male Communist can come up with is “The Bolshevik Revolution.

However, shouting insults and talking over people is not an ethical debate practice no matter what the topic or who is involved.

Ethics Dunces and Incompetent Elected Officials of the Month: The Arlington (VA.) County Board

My current state of legal residence has gone nuts.

On November’s Virginia ballot, Virginia’s voters will consider “Amendment 1,” which would:

  • Make abortion freely available throughout the third trimester of pregnancy, all the way up to birth;
  • Abolish the right of parents to be consulted on, and to consent to, abortions sought by their young daughters; and
  • Enable anyone to perform an abortion and to escape legal responsibility for botching an abortion.
  • Enable a child, without her parents’ knowledge or consent, to receive puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and sterilization surgery.

Like the earlier Democratic attempt to sneak a Constitutional amendment past voters with a dishonest description on the ballot, this one employs misleading and deceitful language (“reproductive health” standing in for “the ability to kill unborn babies in the ninth month of pregnancy”) and belies Virginia Governor Abigail Spanberger’s promise that she would govern as a “moderate Democrat.”

But wait…there’s more!

The Arlington County Board just voted to put aside $50,000 for families whose head of the household is an illegal immigrant and has been detained or deported by ICE. Moreover, the county won’t require families to prove detention or deportation or provide employment records. Each eligible family can get up to $2,000. The money will be distributed by Arlington Thrive, a non-profit organization that provides emergency financial assistance.

“This investment in our families is about the urgency we have seen in our community in the last month,” said Arlington County Board Chairman Matt de Ferranti. “And we are going to respond with care. and we are going to respond proudly. That’s what this $50,000 is toward with Thrive.”

Former Acting ICE Director and former federal prosecutor Jonathan Fahey said the county may be violating federal law, arguing, “Arlington County is putting aside money for presumably people that are not even legal in the country, as opposed to giving it to Arlington County residents or American citizens.” “But I think the one thing that’s really interesting about what they’re doing here, there’s this alien harboring statute, a federal statute that makes it illegal to do something that induces or encourages someone to come to the country illegally or to reside in the country illegally, and I think Arlington County has a real problem with that statute.”

“They’re going to induce more illegal aliens into Arlington County, which will also cost the taxpayers even more money,” added Fahey. “There’s probably so many things that could be done that are better for the taxpayers and the residents and the legal residents of Arlington County.”

Ya think?

Ethics Observations on the GOP Mid-Term Convention

I could write full posts about many of these, and if I had time, I would. The networks and the Axis want to ignore it and are trying to bury it in negatives, but the event is obviously news, and attention should be paid….

Observations:

1. Competence! If this was the President’s idea, it was a great one. The GOP has to get voters to the polls (or to mailboxes, if he can’t stem mail-in balloting). If the event picks up just one or two percentage points in Republican voter participation, it will have been a success. If Republicans hold Congress, I guarantee both parties will make this tactic a tradition.

Incidentally, adding a mid-term convention is another so-called “democratic norm” that Trump is violating. The Horror.

2. Fetterman! One of the two biggest stories to come out of last night’s opening of the convention was Senator John Fetterman’s surprise video appearance, shot in front of a steel mill. Fetterman praised and endorsed his fellow Pennsylvania Senator David McCormick, a Republican, and said that they would work together “and work with President Trump and defend the steel way of life.” This makes Fetterman the Ethics Hero of the convention thus far. It also tells Democrats that if they are going to try convict Trump after a House impeachment and try to pack the Supreme Court, they will need to flip an extra Senate seat to their side.

More Lindsay Clancy Trial “Res Ipsa Loquitur” Horror…

As EA noted from the beginning of the Lindsay Clancy Ethics Train Wreck, the trial presents an excellent argument for why women should be subject to peremptory challenges in voir dire when their biases are likely to result in jurors like this woman.

The prosecution isn’t supposed to show “compassion” for accused murderers. Nor are prosecution opening statements supposed to be warm and fuzzy toward a defendant. The state’s concern is with the victims, as well as the fabric of society wounded by terrible crimes.

Moreover, no “character witnesses” need testify that a woman who murders her own children is a “bad mother.” In a sane world, a woman who strangles her own children is by definition a bad mother. Presuming that a mother must be insane to do this is a pre-existing bias that should have disqualified this juror and any juror.

Yes, Football Is Still The Most Unethical Sport and Supporting It Is Unethical Too.

Item: From the New York Times…

New data provides a sobering indication: At least one in four of all the people who have played in the N.F.L. might expect to end up with chronic traumatic encephalopathy, according to a study of hundreds of cases over a recent six-year period.

Researchers considered every former N.F.L. player who died from 2016 to 2021. There were 878. Some died in their 20s, some in their 80s, most in between.

The study’s main finding was simple math: At least 215 of those 878 former players — 24.5 percent — had C.T.E.

The actual prevalence could be far higher. The roughly 25 percent rate does not consider the 643 brains that were not examined. Some of those, maybe many of them, likely had C.T.E. too.

C.T.E. is a progressive neurological disease caused by repeated impacts to the head. It can be definitively diagnosed only by examining the brain after death.

Studies have shown that the rate of C.T.E. in people who have not sustained repeated impacts to the head is nearly zero.

If the new study’s statistics were applied to today’s players — 1,696 on the league’s 32 regular-season rosters, not including more than 500 members of practice squads and those ineligible due to injury — at least 400 of them would be diagnosed with C.T.E.

Experts say that the rate of brain disease represents an occupational safety hazard with little comparison in the American workplace.

I have written this before, and had this story on the EA runway for a long time because it makes me angry. People who cheer on football are literally encouraging young men to cripple themselves for their entertainment. It is unethical, and indefensible.

Unethical Quote of the Month: Lindsay Clancy Trial Juror Kellie Farina

“He had the hardest time getting off the fact that Lindsay viciously killed her children.”

Kellie Farina, one of the three jurors interviewed following the mistrial called in the Lindsay Clancy murder case, after the jury deadlocked 11-1 with a single hold-out male juror refusing to vote for acquittal.

That may end up being an iconic unethical quote, one that echoes through the years as America comes to realize how shattered the values of American women have become in the wake of the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade.

The especially nice touch is the use of “viciously,” don’t you think? ‘Imagine, this idiot was somehow stuck on the fact that a mother murdered her three small children viciously! What’s the matter with him?’

I’d like to know what’s the matter with anyone who can “get over” the fact that three children were murdered by their own mother “viciously.”

Unethical Tweet Of The Month, Stupidest Question of the Year, and What The Hell Is Wrong With ABC?

WSYX is the Columbus, Ohio ABC affiliate, and the reaction to that head-exploding tweet was so negative that the station took down the tweet as well as the article it was linked to. That doesn’t change the fact that to even suggest that U.S.schools shouldn’t teach the single most important event in the 21st Century and one of the most transformative events not only in U.S. history but modern world history is signature significance. To even ask the question demonstrates fealty to propaganda over truth, and a conviction that generations must be taught by withholding any information that might provoke non-conforming thoughts and belief.

The U.S. has a major broadcasting network—several, if we’re being honest— that employs people who want to manipulate the public, lying about the past through omission. Every now and then the aspiring totalitarians of the Left slip up and tell us who they really are. This is one of those times.

Yes, the 9-11 attacks should be taught in schools so Americans learn that Islam is not “a religion of peace,” and that unrestricted, unvetted immigration from Muslim nations poses an existential threat to our values, culture and democracy. It also should be taught in the schools because it is history, and those who want to obscure history never have good intentions.

[As an aside, my harsh response may have run off commenter kawaii65c843be72 after he compared the Left’s tearing down statues of Confederate generals with the fact that there are no statues of Hitler’s henchmen in Germany. I certainly hope so.]

Ugh. Bend-Over-Backwards-To-Avoid-The-Ugly-Truth-ism On Higher Education Rot

I have had a substack post from academic Nate Honeycut sitting on EA’s metaphorical runway for more than a week now, and I’m sick of looking at it. It is a long, long discourse, citing his research and those of others, to supposedly seek answers to what has gone wrong in higher education, how the public perceives it, and how academia should deal with it. Like so many pundits from te academic side, the essay equivocates and evades stating what should be obvious so as not to, I presume, offend anyone and to maintain the illusion of scholarly dispassion. Jonathan Turley used to write like that, attracting mockery here for finding flamingly unethical conduct “troubling” and “concerning” rather than wrong. Since he’s been red-pilled by the Axis, Turley’s prose had become more direct. He needs to talk to Honeycutt.

As far as I could tell from slogging through 1,778 words, the grand conclusion is that there is even more leftist bias in our colleges and universities than people think, so for higher education to believe that more and better information on how the schools really are will improve their sagging reputation is a serious fallacy. But we knew, didn’t we, that colleges and universities are convinced that their extreme progressive bias is fine and dandy, because it’s so, so right. They are the smart ones, after all. The public doesn’t understand that they know better.

It’s arrogance and prejudice all the way down. I get the Harvard Alumni magazine every month. There has never been an acknowledgement in its pages, not in the regular column by the president, not anywhere, that the selection of Claudine Gay as president despite weak qualifications was signature significance, final proof that Harvard had compromised its academic integrity for progressive activism. Nor has there been any analysis of what is rotten on Harvard’s board, when even undeniable evidence of Gay’s academic misconduct failed to dissuade members that that she had to go. Ultimately, it was a student, writing for The Crimson, who forced accountability by pointing out that a student guilty of what Harvard’s president had done would be expelled.

I’d love to know what happened to that student. I bet she had to go into the witness protection program.

Now THIS Is An Unethical Foster Parent…

Brenda Deutsch, 70, a serial foster mother in Missouri, was sentenced to seven years in prison for child endangerment, because, among other things, she traded her teenage foster daughter for a monkey.

 Nonetheless this creature—Deutch, not the monkey—avoided prison time, or even zoo time. Judge Thomas Frawley condemned her in open court as reprehensible and apologized to her alleged victims for a foster care system that had failed them, but he suspended execution of the sentence and placed her on three years of probation. Hey, after all, she was good to the monkey! The judge also revoked Deutsch’s foster care license and criticized the state of Missouri for allowing her to keep it.

Deutsch was arrested in April after authorities investigated allegations that she sent the girl she was fostering, now 17, to Texas to stay in a home that Deutsch admitted in court she knew nothing about. After Deutsch sought permission to take the girl to visit “a friend” in Texas, an anonymous caller alerted the Missouri Department of Social Services Children’s Division that Deutsch was allegedly physically and mentally abusing a child. Investigators later learned that the girl had been allegedly traded for “an exotic animal,” aka. the monkey, and was now living in Texas with the “friend.” She was also apparently living in squalor, because her new home was packed with animals. The teenager told investigators that Foster Mom had told her trading partner that she could keep the girl, but that Deutsch “will be keeping the check.” And the monkey, of course.

I don’t understand why Deutch isn’t receiving the same kind of passionate support Lindsay Clancy is. Heck, all Deutch did was trade a child for a monkey; she didn’t kill her. And everyone knows that teenagers are much more annoying than toddlers and babies.

It also seems pretty clear that Deutch is at least as nuts as Clancy is, just in different ways. (Note that I resisted saying that she was “bananas”…) So where’s the compassion? Where are the demonstrators in pink? How many mothers haven’t had moments when they would have happily traded their unruly, hateful teen for a monkey, a Hershey Bar or a 1958 Gino Cimoli baseball card? I see no signs reading “Listen to Mothers…Who want to Trade Their Teens for Monkeys!” This is a double standard.

Apparently Deutch has fostered over 200 kids. What a great child welfare system we have!

It’s An Amy Acton Double-Header, As The Democratic Candidate For Governor of Ohio Stoops To Claiming a Fake Assassination Attempt As Her Cheating Party and the Axis Media Run With The Lie

I have mentioned that Democrats cheat, haven’t I? I’m pretty sure I have.

This episode is pretty nauseating, though I must say I don’t recall any non-President earning two EA brickbats in such rapid succession, so Acton has at least distinguished herself. At the same event where the Democrats’ candidate for Governor of Ohio demonstrated how not to speak in public (Hey Amy: I could fix that in about two hours if you had the sense to hire me, or any other competent speech coach for that matter) Acton witnessed a brief disruption in the crowd which her campaign decided to sell as an assassination attempt.

Naturally, the Axis news media rushed to spread the false narrative. As usual. Gotta elect these Democrats, Socialists and crypto-totalitarians by any means necessary, right guys?

Here is how the New York Times described the incident:

“Dr. Acton was giving a speech at the Mahoning County Democratic Party tent at a fair in Canfield, in the northeastern part of the state, when a man pushed through the crowd, knocking over two elderly audience members, according to the county sheriff, Jerry Greene, and two witnesses. The man did not draw his weapons, according to Sheriff Greene and the witnesses. Dr. Acton was not injured. Two officers of the Ohio State Highway Patrol, part of Dr. Acton’s security detail, detained and handcuffed the man, according to Dr. Acton’s campaign and the sheriff. The man was found to be carrying two pistols and a Taser in the shape of brass knuckles after he was detained, according to the sheriff and the Ohio State Highway Patrol. Ohio law allows residents to possess and carry concealed firearms without a permit.”

That was, by far, the most accurate report I have read. I won’t even blame the Times for its misleading headline (“Armed Man Arrested After Charging Toward Democratic Candidate for Ohio Governor”) since its report had to debunk what other news organizations were claiming, thanks to Acton’s campaign’s deceit. The incident didn’t “involve” Acton, unless you regard anything that happens in a crowd listening to a speaker as involving the speaker. The arrested man also didn’t “lunge” at Acton. He wasn’t close enough to her to “lunge.” Acton was never touched, injured, or threatened. Nor has his motive in rushing through the crowd been determined; the incident is still being investigated.

The Times story says that 38-year-old Patrick Havas has been charged with disorderly conduct and two counts of misdemeanor assault, one for each of the seniors he knocked over, who were apparently uninjured. There were no charges involving any crime aimed at Acton. Witnesses say he was trying to get close enough to the candidate to ask a question, because he was calling her name.

Never mind. Democrats still leaped at the opportunity to paint Acton as an assassination victim.