This might be the easiest Ethics Dunce pick ever; at least I am certain that there couldn’t have been an easier one. When I heard which ever Democratic Party hack it was introduce Robert DeNiro as a featured speaker for the Biden campaign’s Trump Hate presser outside the Manhattan courthouse where this kangaroo kaper is inching to a conclusion, I thought, “No! They can’t be this crude, obvious and stupid. They just can’t be.”
This sort of thing shouldn’t warrant an Ethics Hero designation, it really shouldn’t. If substantial numbers of public experts, pundits, opinion-leaders and academics were all open-minded, professional, civil, lacking hubris and arrogance, capable of taking criticism without taking it personally—I could go on—Prof. Mayer’s cordial and collegial visit to Ethics Alarms to continue a discussion I began ( a bit more nastily than I should have, but, sigh, that’s me all over) by criticizing a column he authored for that Weekly Reader of daily newspapers, U.S.A. Today, would have been nothing remarkable.
But most of the people I write about here are not like that, and members of our academic bastions particularly these days are simply not in the mood to do what Prof. Mayer has done this week, engaging in good humored and provocative discussions with members of the EA commentariat on this post. This has been a gift to the readers here, and also shows class, guts, respect, humility and confidence.
I still am convinced that the professor is dead wrong about Biden being able to drop out at this stage and not trigger a catastrophe for his party even worse than what it faces by allowing him to run. In fact, I wish I could think of an amusing wager to make with him: maybe he’ll have some ideas.
And I wonder what he thinks of Monty Python….
It has been too long since a Comment of the Day featured Michael West’s commentary; maybe I take his almost always sharp and though-provoking observations for granted. He goes back to 2012, and has graced this blog with 16, 612 comments, many in the course of intense debate.
Here is his Comment of the Day on public education, sparked by the post, “Ethically Provocative Quote of the Month: Duval County School Board Member Charlotte Joyce”…
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I genuinely feel for the public educators that are *just* trying to do their jobs and seeing parents fleeing to non-public options and are as frustrated as the parents are about the collapse of public education. A large component of my family are either educators or in direct support of educators and they all are frustrated. However, public education under command of the unions are just one more Democrat money laundering, politician-lobbying and vote-buying scheme as educational bureaucracies bloat like a beached whale.
Tons of discretionary cash allows “philanthropists,” who are frequently tunnel-visioned ideologues and aspiring authoritarians, to magnify their mistakes, misconceptions, biases and delusions into widespread catastrophes, all with the arrogance that luck and good fortune so often creates. Melinda Gates, Bill’s ex, has a couple billion dollars to play with thanks to marrying well and divorcing better, and her recent op-ed in the New York Times illustrates this principle.
There are so many ominous tells in Gates’s “The Enemies of Progress Play Offense. I Want to Help Even the Match” that I don’t have time to flag them all. The headline is one: doctrinaire progressives always equate their agenda items with “progress,” which is a word that implies beneficial change. That rhetorical trick has handicapped conservative thought and policy-making for centuries, though it is demonstrably false. Communism wasn’t “progress,” it was and has been a blight on civilization. The acceptance of promiscuous sex and having children out of wedlock wasn’t “progress;” the acceptance and legalization of recreational drugs isn’t “progress;” letting aliens stream over our borders largely without interference and consequences isn’t “progress;” using abortion as a primary means of birth control wasn’t “progress.” As obvious as these conclusions should be, the “change equals progress” fiction still works, which is why the Left still employs it regularly..
Her declaration to launch her new foundation vibrates with bias as well as bigotry. “We know” she writes, “that women’s political participation is associated with decreased corruption. That peace agreements are more durable when women are involved in writing them.” No, we don’t. That’s hoary anti-male propaganda (and “is associated with” screams “Weasel words!”)
Gates deplores “the Taliban takeover” that “has erased 20 years of progress for women and girls” without having the guts to risk the ire of her progressive audience by pointing out exactly who was responsible for abandoning women to the cruelty of the Taliban. She calls U.S. maternal mortality rates “unconscionable,” which implies wrongdoing. The Times link provided in the column suggests otherwise: the problem of high mortality rates in the U.S. is substantially the result of lifestyle choices available to mothers in a free society, including women in the U.S. delaying child birth past the healthiest time to have children.
Of course Gates doesn’t have the integrity to use plain language when it conveys unpleasant facts that undercut her advocacy: her cover-phrase for being able to kill a nascent human being is “reproductive rights,” neatly skipping the “right to grow and live” component of the issue. She also revels in pseudo-science, writing, “the number of teenage girls experiencing suicidal thoughts and persistent feelings of sadness and hopelessness is at a decade high.” Sure, Melinda. Because of all the advances in mind-reading, I’m sure. How would one get that “number”?
And what kind of leader does Gates regard as a model for achieving her version of “progress”? “Recently, I offered 12 people whose work I admire their own $20 million grant-making fund to distribute as he or she sees fit,” Gates reveals. “That group….includes the former prime minister of New Zealand, Jacinda Ardern.” Gates’ op-ed keeps referring to lost rights, yet one of her most admired people is the dictatorial former leader of New Zealand during the pandemic, who imposed draconian measures on her nation that crushed individual rights, while she sucked up to China, one of the world’s worst human rights offenders, in pursuit of economic benefits. China, of course, was responsible for the pandemic that Asdern used to expand her power to dictatorial levels.
Someone as arrogant and biased as Gates with two billion dollars to blow is like an ADD teen running amuck in a glass factory. Good luck, everyone!
—-Duval County school board member Charlotte Joyce during a recent board meeting, quoted by Politico in “School choice programs have been wildly successful under DeSantis. Now public schools might close. The Republican governor’s school choice programs may serve as a model for other GOP-leaning states across the country.”
I saw that two-day-old story from Politico while web-surfing late last night, and had two immediate reactions: “What a perfect opportunity for Bruce to make an appearance from the Ethics Alarms Hollywood Clip Archive!” and “Good!”
I know nothing about Charlotte Joyce, her political affiliation or her attitude toward public schools, but I do know this: America’s public school system is broken, and was broken deliberately by ideologues who decided that the best way to achieve radical transformation of American rights, society and culture was to use mandatory public education to indoctrinate children from the youngest ages right through high school, after which college would pick up the assignment. Parents, lazy, apathetic, uninvolved and often badly educated and uninformed themselves, allowed this to happen under their metaphorical noses. The horrific result, among many others, is that chaos on college campuses as students whose minds have been poisoned by intersectionality cant now equate the terrorism of Hamas with the civil rights march on Washington.
Good job, everybody!
Bravo to Prof. William Jacobson’s Equal Protection Project. Its civil rights complaint filed against the Massachusetts Institute of Technology exposed the flaming racial discrimination engaged in by the Creative Regal Women of Knowledge, or “The CRWN” program. (Nice acronym-making there, MIT. I’d let the folks at Harvard try the next one while you stick to equations…) Jacobsen’s blog, Legal Insurrection, announced the complaint in a post, MIT Program Open Only To “Women of Color” Challenged By Equal Protection Project As Violating Civil Rights Laws,a week ago. After it received considerable local publicity, MIT tried to weasel its way out of the scandal by changing the way the program is described on its website, as you can see above.
Are they really that dense at MIT? Do its lawyer really think an announcement that says, “This program is designed to exclude white women, but we can’t stop you if you’re white and are determined to take part in a program where you’re obviously not welcome” complies with anti-discrimination laws. Can you imagine a college program described as one “designed to inspire white women” and “to support and celebrate” whites, but adding that its “open” to non-whites too causing anything but an uproar?
Steven Mintz, Professor Emeritus from Cal Poly San Luis Obispo and also known as “The Ethics Sage,” is a serious, thoughtful, aspirational ethics commentator whom I have enjoyed reading for a long time. Thus it is with profound sadness and disappointment that I must report that his perception and objectivity have been corrupted badly, probably, I’m guessing, by living in California and by being stuck in the biased bubble created by his colleagues in academia. That someone like Mintz could be so addled regarding his perceptions is a cautionary tale.
In his most recent post, “The Fallacy of D.E.I.,” Mintz begins with a list of what he says are evidence that “We have lost our moral compass as a society and it’s likely to get worse before it gets better.” Here is the list:
…the main one being that the distress signal is appropriate, because the Axis of Unethical Conduct proved with this fiasco that it is ruthless, shameless, untrustworthy, and will do anything in 2024 to mislead the public if it might mean a few extra votes for Democrats. Or maybe the main one is that your friendly neighborhood ethicist was right about this story from the very start, which is why Fredo asked to make another appearance as my spokesman.
And this, my friends, is why we can’t have nice things.
Or a functioning republic.
Let me not get to far ahead of myself. Right now, the whole, biased, corrupt, anti-Trump, anti-conservative, Biden-protecting propaganda-spewing mainstream news media, the third partner in the Ethics Alarms-dubbed Axis of Unethical Conduct (“the resistance,” and Desperate Democrats completing the troika) is doing a mass Jumbo (“Flags? What flags?”) regarding what was its favorite earth-shattering scandal a week ago. This sudden amnesia was brought on because the Washington Post, perhaps seeking to embarrass its old rival, effectively eviscerated the Times’ “Get Justice Alito!” scoop, which EA first discussed here, and subsequently here, here, and here. (Don’t make me describe it again: I was sick of it days ago.)
Two days ago, the Post revealed that it had known about the first flag episode more than three years ago and had decided that it wasn’t newsworthy (because, as the revealed facts showed clearly, it wasn’t). Now-retired SCOTUS reporter Robert Barnes traveled to the Alito’s home on January 20, 2021, the day of Joe Biden’s inauguration, to follow-up on an anonymous tip he had received from some Alito-hating asshole neighbor about the flag. After investigating, Barnes and the Post concluded there was no story, because the flag-raising appeared to be the work of Martha-Ann Alito, Alito’s wife, not the Justice, as part of her dispute with her neighbors.
Kristie Periera was told by veterinarians that her beagle-mix puppy Beau had serious neurological problems and advised that her most humane option was to have little Beau euthanized. Despite her determination to fight for the puppy despite the likely expense and slim chances of success, she was persuaded to end Beau’s suffering by colleagues at the shelter where she worked, the Lost Dog and Cat Rescue in Maryland. The little dog was scheduled to be euthanized in late March 2023, but Kristie was told she couldn’t be with him, as the shelter had a policy of not allowing owners to witness their pets’ demise.
As an aside, I have never heard of such a policy, and I would immediately question the competence and motives of any shelter that had one. Sounds like a dog trafficking operation to me….
This revolting development tempts me to write a dark parody of “Abraham, Martin and John” called “Ireland, Norway and Spain.” it would end with…
Anybody here not like terrorism?
Would you care to explain?
I guess it’s OK as long as it kills Jews
Say Ireland, Norway and Spain…
Spain, Norway and Ireland announced this week that they would recognize an independent Palestinian state. The coordinated announcements from the leaders of the three countries said that Palestinian independence should not have to wait for a negotiated peace deal with Israel.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel immediately condemned the announcement as validating Hamas terrorism, which it undeniably does. Netanyahu has always held that the establishment of a Palestinian state would pose an “existential danger” to Israel, called the decision by the three nations “a prize for terrorism” that would “not stop us from reaching a victory over Hamas.” Israel Katz, Israel’s foreign minister, said that Spain, Norway and Ireland had decided “to award a gold medal to Hamas terrorists.” The announcements were made just days after the International Criminal Court’s chief prosecutor requested arrest warrants for Netanyahu and Israel’s defense minister, Yoav Gallant, on suspicion of war crimes.
Ethics Alarms 