Month: January 2021

Comment Of The Day: “If Progressives Agree With Hate Speech, It Isn’t Hate Speech Any More…Do I Have That Straight?”

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

Pennagain responded to this post with invaluable background on our still complex attitudes toward gay and lesbian relationships. It is long, and essential reading.

Here is Pennagain’s Comment of the Day on the post, “If Progressives Agree With Hate Speech, It Isn’t Hate Speech Any More…Do I Have That Straight?’:

For all who are getting into this “any woman (many women) can be lesbians if they want to” bag, recognize that you are confusing sexual liberty in today’s society with natural sexual-partner preference.

It’s an easy generalization to fall into. Another generalization, but one borne out by statistical evidence, is that you might even be able to transform your body to conform to another gender but you will still have the same sexual preference. Being lesbian (or gay) doesn’t come (nor will you, so to speak just by wanting or trying. The L and G of LGBT are as varied in as many ways as straight girls and boys. Wee just got along better until the wicked woke women turned up the heat.

Here us a handy review of things that have significant impact on everyone – you, me and the ones who aren’t sure:

Traditionally — that is, not so many decades ago, and most definitely in my memory — men socialized mainly outside the home and had access to individual activity that included sexual satisfaction elsewhere. Women mainly stayed in the home and, if outside, had fewer opportunities for engaging in social, much less erotic, activities. . Remember?

Women — of course — were supposed to have no (or far lower) need or desire for sexual activity. In a way that’s true, though not lessening the equal strength of the desire. Women’s emotions were and are often centered on their children. There wasn’t some magical extra feeling focused on the exploration of a sex object’s genitals: When the natural urge arose, women often tried to tamp down her own needs in favor of the needs of the family. A woman might cry on her friend’s shoulder, but it didn’t occur to most women to peer under her dear friend’s skirt.

Boys knew more about their own external genitalia (and as much as possible about girls’ as well) while girls had almost no knowledge of their hidden female anatomy. Most didn’t know how they got pregnant — many, it appears, still don’t. Some never learned they could have orgasms, and because they were so traumatized by blood, they rarely explored the matter.

If you were born in the post-war baby boom, your parents were still influenced (one way or another) by the 40s. Considerable confusion was taking place between diametrically opposing images like this:

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“The Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Impeachment” Becomes An Ethics Fiasco: Ten Observations

/ Jack Marshall / 31 Comments

johnson-impeachment

In this post, “Nancy And The Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Impeachment “—could it really have just been 12 days ago?—I wrote in part,

Nancy Pelosi came right out and said that her objective in impeaching Trump this time was to stop him from running again. That’s not what the Founders designed impeachment for. She’s admitting that this Congress and her party regard impeachment as just one more political stunt, like ripping up the State of the Union message, boycotting the inauguration, or nominating Kamala Harris. Worse, unless the Senate agrees to rush through a trial the way Pelosi rushed through the impeachment, Trump will already be out of office and a private citizen before he can be convicted—which he wouldn’t be anyway. The Constitution speaks of impeachment and the Senate trial as a means of removing a President, not as a device to say “I hate you! Ooooh, I hate you to pieces!” to an ex-President.

Thus it’s a joke. The first impeachment was a dud. Trump hasn’t been embarrassed, but Congress and the news media have been embarrassed and exposed as fools.

Not that they hadn’t been exposed as fools already.

But “Wait!”—as they say on infomercials–“There’s more!” And it only gets worse:

1. Since the impeachment vote in the House, further investigation of the attack on the Capitol and its time-line has shown that many of the participants had planned to storm the building in advance, in fact had begun preparations before the President addressed the protesters, and had begun to take action while the President was speaking on January 6. Thus the House’s impeachment theory that the President had incited a riot by providing a lit match to an obvious powder-keg is unsustainable n the facts: the powder had already been lit. Nor do the facts support the argument that the President intended to spark a riot, since the words of his speech never suggested violence or alluded to it.

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Incompetent Jealous Spouse Of The Millennium: “Leonora N”

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

Never mind

This story is so, so stupid–but funny!— that I had to devote a whole post to it.

Mexican police report that a woman whose full name has been withheld out of kindness (I suppose) and known only as “Leonora N” was snooping around in her husband’s cell phone and found several photos of him being suspiciously affectionate with a younger, slimmer, more attractive woman. Outraged, the scorned wife attacked her husband with a knife as soon as he walked in the door, stabbing him repeatedly until he managed to get the knife away from her. Police responded to neighbors reporting screams and an altercation, and Leonora was taken into custody.

It turns out that the photos were of her husband with her, when Leonora N was younger, slimmer, and I assume—I hope— a lot smarter.

Wow.

What a moron.

Now, I know what you’re thinking. Nobody allowed to move around without a leash is this stupid. I’d be inclined to agree, but the police seem to buy the story, which both the husband and wife vouch for, and there is always this: never underestimate the awesome power of stupidity when it collides with blind emotion.

Well, That’s One Phony Impeachment Theory Down For Good…

/ Jack Marshall / 29 Comments

C

The Supreme Court today threw out lawsuits claiming that Donald Trump violated the obscure Emoluments Clause, and thus profited from his Presidency. The issue, it concluded, was moot because Trump is no longer in office.

The specious accusation President Trump is violating the Constitution by owning businesses while he is President (Plan C on the list) claimed an ethical breach never anticipated by the Founders and an issue that was barely discussed by the news media during the campaign. Once the President was elected, his haters and saboteurs demanded that he surrender his interests in a vast business empire, something that was both logically and practically impossible. The Emoluments Clause of the U.S. Constitution (Article 1, Section 9, Paragraph 8), a true Constitutional dead letter, stipulates that no federal officeholders “shall receive gifts or payments from foreign state or rulers without the consent of Congress.” But payments obviously means pay-offs, and payment for services isn’t a gift. Nor are Trump hotel and other organization receipts payments to the President.

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Ethics Warm-Up, 1/25/21: Wait, MSNBC Admitting Its Bias? The UN Praising the US On Climate Change? The Armed Services Being Reasonable About Hair?

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

1. Naturally, this was never going to come out before the election, and if it did, it wouldn’t have been reported. Or is that too cynical? Yesterday, The United Nations released its Emissions Gap Report 2020, an annual assessment of contributions to greenhouse gas and carbon emissions. Here is what it said about the U.S.:

“The United States of America emits 13 per cent of global GHG emissions…China emits more than one-quarter of global GHG emissions….Greenhouse gas emissions per capita in the U.S. are dropping precipitously while those of China, India and Russia continue to rise. With the world’s most successful economy (over $21 trillion in 2019), it is not a surprise that the U.S. pollutes more per person, but the U.S. is making great strides in changing this. “

Forbes notes that the U.S.has been decreasing its greenhouse gas emissions faster than any other major polluter, and it did so without the Paris agreement.

2. Well, duh. Via  NewsBusters: MSNBC Live host Stephanie Ruhle said of Biden’s inauguration, “Let’s be honest, you know if President Trump did this, he would be getting crushed for holding a super-spreader event. We’d all be saying it.”Gee, Stephanie, why be honest now? Oh…right.

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It Appears Great Britain’s Anti-Racism Madness Is Even More Advanced Than Ours

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

Hear_No_Evil,_See_No_Evil,_Speak_No_Evil

The obvious question is whether this is encouraging or depressing: does this brain-explodingly absurd story mean that The Great Stupid has finally passed over the U.S. and is reaching its ridiculous peak across the Atlantic, or is the insanity moving in the other direction?

In what may be the best examples yet of the principle “if you can hear the dog whistle, you’re the dog”—except that it involves monkeys, not dogs—the University of York removed the iconic image of the “Wise Monkeys, better known perhaps as “See no evil, Hear no evil, Speak no evil,” from its website because somebody decided the image was racist and nobody had the courage and common sense to tell them that the theory was crackers and made the whole institution look like monkeys. The image had been used to promote an upcoming art history conference, and the organizers issued an apology rich in scholarly gibberish, saying-–don’t giggle now, these are intellectuals—

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If Progressives Agree With Hate Speech, It Isn’t Hate Speech Any More…Do I Have That Straight?

/ Jack Marshall / 18 Comments

Clarence Darrow said, in his famous closing argument that saved Dr. Ossian Sweet and his family from a murder conviction,

“I am the last one to come here to stir up race hatred, or any other hatred. I do not believe in the law of hate. I may not be true to my ideals always, but I believe in the law of love, and I believe you can do nothing with hatred.”

Darrow was a progressive, you know, and sometimes a radical one. He was, after all, a great admirer of John Brown. A constant theme in his work, however, both in court and in his many debates and essays, was avoiding hatred, and seeking love. In another of his famous trial, in which he saved thrill-killer Nathan Leopold and Dickie Loeb from the gallows, he concluded his closing argument for mercy this way:

If I should succeed in saving these boys’ lives and do nothing for the progress of the law, I should feel sad, indeed. If I can succeed, my greatest reward and my greatest hope will be that I have done something for the tens of thousands of other boys, or the countless unfortunates who must tread the same road in blind childhood that these poor boys have trod, that I have done something to help human understanding, to temper justice with mercy, to overcome hate with love.

I was reading last night of the aspiration of the old Persian poet, Omar Khayyam. It appealed to me as the highest that can vision. I wish it was in my heart, and I wish it was in the hearts of all:

“So I be written in the Book of Love,
Do not care about that Book above.
Erase my name or write it as you will,
So I be written in the Book of Love.“

But at some point, and relatively recently, wielding hate as a weapon has become a fetish of the Left that once styled itself in Darrow’s tradition. Even though today’s progressives and Democrats loudly deplore what they call “hate speech,” even to the point of insisting that speech they disapprove of is unprotected by the First Amendment, they are willing and eager to not only deploy the rhetoric of hate but to encourage hate in furtherance of their own agenda.

This is undeniable; mine is an objective observation. Donald Trump was defeated by four years of carefully cultivated (but still reckless and destructive) hate. (Not surprisingly, his supporters—and Trump himself—hated right back. Hate is like that.) As the year closed and a new one dawned, Lefist allies like Twitter, Facebook and the Big Tech companies escalated their campaign to silence opinions that their highly selective and biased definitions of “hate” required, while allowing other, equally inflammatory opinions from those with whom the metaphorically traveled ideologically (or who were the enemies of their enemies, as the saying goes.) As the New York Post said of Twitter, “All the evidence suggests Twitter doesn’t police according to any neutral standards, but with an eye on what bothers its woke workforce.”

On January 19, the latest entry in the category of approved woke bigotry and hate arrived. HarperCollins released “I Hate Men,” a recent French sensation by Pauline Harmange and translated by Natasha Lehrer. Gushes the Amazon blurb,

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Sunday Ethics Irony, 1/24/2021: Now Remember, It’s The Trump Voters Who Are Deplorable

/ Jack Marshall / 24 Comments

In “Utopia,” the strange and violent Amazon series about a mysterious graphic novel that turns out to be both true and a coded guide to an upcoming pandemic, the diversity propaganda is so heavy-handed that it could knock out Godzilla with a left cross. Let’s see: all the good couples are mixed race. A middle -class black woman takes in troubled white children. A white husband and wife have a family including multiple black and Asian children, which you would think violates the good couples are mixed-race rule, but it’s a trick: that white couple is villainous, and their white children are too, tough the minority kids seem to be OK. A group of assassins appears to include only whites, and the main heroine is black, though her character in the graphic novel that everyone is chasing after is white. Her female mentor is white, but she is so covered in grime that she looks black. (Why isn’t that blackface?)

At what point does this become so forced and absurd that audiences object to it? None of the race obsession adds a thing to the story except weirdness, and trust me, “Utopia” needs no more of THAT.

1. Welcome to my world! Here is a submitted comment to this post: the proud idiot “RidenwithBiden” (Oooh, clever!) writes, “My God, an entire website dedicated the the sanctimonious and bottomless brainwashed hypocrisy of traitorous right wing nut jobs.”

2. Here are some Biden voters I have no sympathy with whatsoever…President Biden signed an executive order that will require institutions receiving Title IX funding to allow biological males who identify as female to compete in women’s athletic events. This should effectively kill women’s sports while making a joke out of “competition.” Women voted overwhelmingly for Joe Biden, a serial sexual harasser who was accused of rape on the record by a staffer, and he was clearly going to do this. Now feminists and women’s sports advocates are whining?

Bailey tweet

What betrayal? Sorry that you weren’t paying attention, but it was always obvious that the most extreme end of the LGBTQ lobby was pulling Joe’s strings. The one who betrayed female athletes were feminist voters. Own it, ladies.

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Ethics Quiz: Fairness To Lauren Wolfe

/ Jack Marshall / 23 Comments

NY Times

The New York Times dumped editor Lauren Wolfe yesterday. I had written about Wolfe a few days ago:

“Biden landing at Joint Base Andrews now. I have chills,” New York Times editor Lauren Wolfe said in a tweet yesterday with a screenshot of a report from CNN showing Biden’s plane landing….Wolfe was immediately mocked and excoriated on social media, so she returned with several tweets denying any bias and claiming that she was just naturally exited about a historic moment. Riiiiight. Among her tweets,

  • “I’m shocked that you all don’t feel the importance. Such historical events are deeply moving and thrilling. This attempt to shit on me is nothing more than shortsighted presumption”
  • “So a bunch of people think me being excited for the transfer of power tomorrow is somehow disgusting/idiotic/against journalism. It’s a shame. We should all be interested on historical moments”
  • (to Brit Hume) “Really, Brit? You’ve never felt excited at historical moments? Stop inciting your fans who are coming after me with threats. This was an innocuous tweet and you know it.”

Of course, it was a biased tweet that exposed her and the Times’ unethical bias that screams out from the paper every single day, and she knows it. Wolfe eventually deleted the tweets, which are similarly self-indicting.

On what basis was Wolfe fired? Surely not for being biased in favor of the Democratic President! The entire paper is biased that way and flagrantly so. The Times offices has to be teeming with staffers and editors openly basking in Donald Trump’s defeat. Wolfe must have been surrounded by people talking about their “chills.” The Times can’t possibly care about political bias; if it did, it would hide its own better. It wouldn’t keep putting progressive hacks and Democratic Party operatives with press credentials on its op-ed pages.

It certainly isn’t fair to fire Wolfe for stating on social media a bias that the Times tolerates and approves.

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Ethics Quote Of The Month: Glenn Greenwald

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

A republic

“Unleash this monster and one day it will come for you. And you’ll have no principle to credibly invoke in protest when it does. You’ll be left with nothing more than lame and craven pleading that your friends do not deserve the same treatment as your enemies. Force, not principle, will be the sole factor deciding the outcome. If you’re lucky enough to have important and famous media friends…you have a chance to survive it. Absent that, you have none.”

Glenn Greenwald, in his post on the attempted “canceling” of writer Will Wilkenson over a facetious tweet.

The “monster” Greenwald is referring to is mob anger and indignation, magnified by social media, and enabled by self-preservation and cowardice. His essay, titled “The Moronic Firing of Will Wilkinson Illustrates Why Fear and Bad Faith Mob Demands Reign Supreme,” was triggered by the recent firing of an intellectual I never heard of by a think tank I never heard of, as well as his looming dismissal by the New York Times. His “crime” was this tweet…

Willkerson tweet

…which a hoard of online cretins and power-hungry wastrels pounced upon, falsely calling it a call to do violence to the ex-Vice-President and thus mandating his public humiliation and rejection.

As Greenwald correctly concludes, no reasonably intelligent reader could think the tweet, posted the night of Joe Biden’s inauguration, was anything but a pointed joke. Extreme Trump supporters were furious with Pence for not taking action to reject the 2020 election results. Anti-Trump extremists wanted Pence to remove President Trump using the inapplicable 25th Amendment ploy, which he correctly refused to do (and could do constitutionally anyway.) Thus lunatics on both sides of the U.S. ideological divide could be unified in their anger and hatred toward Mike Pence, ironically making his mistreatment a potentially unifying act. Wilkinson rueful point was valid (if clumsily made), and he wasn’t personally advocating violence against Pence. But a wealthy hedge fund manager and large-money GOP donor, Gabe Hoffman, condemned the tweet which he claimed “call[ed] for former Vice President Mike Pence to be lynched.” Hoffman asked the New York Times, which employs Wilkinson as an opinion writer, to comment on its ” ‘contributing opinion writer’ calling for violence against a public official,” then tweeted to Wilkinson’s other employers, the Niskanen Center, a moderate public policy think tank, to pressure them as well. The Center quickly fired Wilkinson, while his fate with the Times hangs in the balance. A spokesperson for the paper told Fox News: “Advocating violence of any form, even in jest, is unacceptable and against the standards of The New York Times. We’re reassessing our relationship with Will Wilkinson.”

Naturally, as happens in 99% of these increasingly common episodes, the victim of the deliberate misunderstanding resorted to a grovelling apology, saying in part,

“Last night I made an error of judgment and tweeted this. It was sharp sarcasm, but looked like a call for violence. That’s always wrong, even as a joke. It was especially wrong at a moment when unity and peace are so critical. I’m deeply sorry and vow not to repeat the mistake. . . . [T]here was no excuse for putting the point the way I did. It was wrong, period.”

No, actually it didn’t look like a call for violence, and apologizing for something it wasn’t but was deliberately misrepresented as being for malicious purposes is far worse than the tweet itself.

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