…or anything else, of course.
Today’s relevant story: a Milwaukee radio station admitted late yesterday that it edited a taped interview with President Biden when his campaign asked them to, because two of Biden’s responses were, in turn, embarrassing and incoherent. The station apologized and came clean, because now the mainstream media allies of the progressive and Democratic Party are dedicated to dumping Biden rather than pretending he’s a great President.
How many media outlets were working with the White House to deceive the public about Biden’s cognitive problems before his debate disaster? How much smoking gun evidence has been “scrubbed” over the past four years, including during the 2020 campaign?
It’s all truly disgusting, and Biden has the gall to claim that Trump is the threat to democracy.
Don’t get me started. Write about whatever ethics issues intrigues you.
Ethics Alarms 
Just for the sake of some serious poetic drama:
Some operative somewhere really really needs to be lobbying Biden’s son hard to make him a “you’ll-be-taken-care-of” deal to get him to make a speech at the DNC convention asking his dad to step down so Biden can stagger around under the final metaphorical dagger blow and say “Et tu, Hunter?”
You think Hunter’s the only one being approached with “just give us a number” conversations?
PWS
No. But it would be poetically dramatic if it were him.
Hunter’s got this thing, and it’s F****N’ GOLDEN
PWS
Paul, I think you’re right. I’m guessing President Biden & Co. – mostly “Co.” at this point since Joe is probably unable – is talking amongst themselves regarding the number to write on the check to make it happen.
No way the GOP is going to 25th him out. It’s a shame to write it, but the GOP is probably thrilled to see the Democratic Party wearing the exact albatross around its neck that it planned for the Republican Party with all the ridiculous charges against President Trump.
I don’t know. The polls seem to indicate that more people are willing to vote for Joe Biden in a coma to be president for 4 years than are willing to vote for Kamalah Harris (42% to 31%). With Harris, it would be difficult to manufacture enough fake votes to win. We have 161 million registered voters in this country. Last election, 161 million people voted despite 30% voter turnout in a lot of places. If Donald Trump gets 100 million votes in 2024, it will be difficult to beat him with 101 million votes. Some people might wonder where all the votes came from. Those voices were squashed in 2020 (the woman in Detroit who refused to certify the election at first because the votes were 110+% of registered voters, for example), but today people might not take it. The Democrats would have to destroy Trump votes as well. You can print the ballots on the wrong sized paper in Republican areas so the machines won’t read them (like happened in the Republican areas of Arizona), or you can program the machines to digitally alter a section of the ballot (as happened in Atlanta), or you can inform the voters that the machines are reading the ballots backwards, so they have to vote for iiden/Harris to actually vote for Trump (as happened in some areas), but that is a lot of votes to do that to.
When you see your enemy destroying themselves, why interfere? Right now the GOP and Trump need to just stand down and wait until all the dominoes have fallen. There is no way in hell that any GOP representative in either house of Congress will aid in removing Biden under the 25th amendment, and without them the Democrats do not have the numbers. In the best of all possible worlds, they might help “for the good of the country,” since having a president who is clearly incompetent does not do this country any good.
However, to do that would require that they essentially pretend that everything that happened the last nine years did not happen and that the Democratic Party and their allies in the legacy media are something that they are not. Since 2015 the two factions have worked together to do two things and two things only: keep the Democrats who are in power in power and bring more Democrats into power.
They started by pushing Trump as a potential GOP candidate while making it impossible for the Democratic Party to have any candidate other than Hillary, then, once the two nominations were in place, going after Trump ruthlessly, making sure Hillary would wipe the floor with him. The idea backfired, but they barely lost a step in making sure Trump would face a resistance from day one, from salacious and ridiculous statements that Russian prostitutes urinated on him to two failed impeachments.
They got the greatest luck in the world, and I’m not sure it was all luck, when China unleashed a deadly virus on the world right after Trump beat their first impeachment effort, allowing them to shut down the economy and deprive Trump of his biggest selling point. They got greater good luck when a lifelong petty criminal died at the hands of a crazy but not racist cop while resisting arrest and high as a kite and they were able to fan that spark into a flame of chaos. They thought they got the greatest luck of all when they found a long-serving party elder who they could portray as a moderate and a decent person against a chaos manager who couldn’t do or say anything right and was just EVIL. Then they put their thumb on the scale any way they could to make sure things could go only one way. The last piece of good luck they had, at least in the short term, was the death of the notorious RBG and her rushed replacement by Amy Coney Barrett, in a necessary but hypocritical action, enabling them to say to vote to save Ginsburg’s legacy.
However, those not blinded by partisanship or who’d been around long enough to know, knew that Joseph Robinette Biden was a. never all that bright to begin with, b. a liar as big as Trump if not bigger, c. about five if not seven years past his sell-by date, and d. a mental time bomb that could go off without warning. Still, he was their best hope, since Bernie Sanders was noisy, but without support outside college towns.
So, they gave him a black woman vice president to attract the black vote, the female vote, and the woke vote, and they moved him quickly to the left as soon as he was in office and covid began to recede as the doomsday threat it was for about three months. You know the rest: inflation, open borders, a withdrawal from Afghanistan that couldn’t have been worse if it were planned that way, backing a war in the Ukraine just enough to keep the Ukrainians from losing, but not enough to enable them to win, backing prosecutors who wanted to lock up police rather than criminals, trying to play both sides against the middle after an assault on Israel by Hamas, allowing college campuses to dissolve into chaos, and so on.
All of this bad policy was bad enough, but through it all he, his minions, and the media kept telling everyone who dared to point out the flaws in any of these policies to pipe down and sit down. Again and again, they told the public that the economy was doing great, that the president was sharp as a tack and younger people had trouble keeping up with him, and if you couldn’t see this, the problem was you. It’s classic bullying combined with classic narcissism. Never mind the fact that inflation was stubborn, never mind the fact that crime just didn’t seem to want to come down, never mind that they did their damnedest to keep the president out of sight.
Meantime they tried to cow the opposition by inflating a piddly riot of about 300 that had no hope of going anywhere into a government-threatening insurrection and linking any opposition to this myth. Meantime, they tried to throw their main political opponent into jail. Meantime, they started making a lot of noise about packing courts and punishing disinformation and a whole lot of other proto-totalitarian stuff.
The gamble that they took was that the public would stay cowed, the president’s increasingly failing mental health could be hidden, and the coordinated lawfare could keep the opposition on the back foot if not incarcerated long enough for them to get another four years. It almost worked.
Unfortunately, a lot of the public saw the lawfare for what it was. That’s what happens when you send the #3 guy at Justice to oversee a state prosecution, inflate paperwork errors into felonies, overcharge, and set up a jury with instructions that make them take about 16 hours to come back on 34 charges, meaning they deliberated for less than half an hour on each. That’s also what happens when you sue on behalf of institutions that were not harmed in an attempt to bankrupt the political opposition. The next thing you knew, Trump was getting huge donations that Biden could only dream of. Also, the Supreme Court decided the only way it could, that presidents have immunity for official acts, so that stopped a lot of this cold.
The president’s cognitive abilities had been declining for some time, but his team made a colossal mistake when they challenged Trump to an early debate. Maybe they hoped they could win early, before further decline set it. You know what happened, and everyone with eyes and a brain knows what happened. There is no unseeing that. What’s more, they compounded the mistake by sending Biden into a tv interview and a “press conference” that just exposed him farther as the demented old man he is. There is no way around this, and the Democratic party is now split as to what to do.
I was initially surprised at the public response to the conviction of Trump, but not 100% so. I think it’s hit a lot of people in this country that the party in power can target the opposition for destruction, and that can include you.
And how have the president and his supporters responded to all of this? Trump is the one who lies, not him, and he lies all the time, he’s the real threat to democracy. Mmmhmmm. The president’s actions are just fine, it’s the court that’s corrupt. Riiiight. The president just had one bad night, so fall in line. Um, no, it wasn’t just one bad night. Everything’s fine, you must be missing something. All right, enough is enough here.
The fact is that the Democratic Party built an entire administration on lies, bullying, and intimidation. This is exactly the kind of stuff we decried in places like the old USSR. The Communist Party believed that they had created the perfect form of government, and anyone who disagreed or questioned it must be a traitor or thinking wrong. In reality all they had created was yet another way to keep those in power in power and those out of power permanently out. The Democratic party now thinks they have achieved the perfect government or close to it, when they know damn well this is just another way to get power, keep it, and get more. Unfortunately, their plan is coming apart, and they’ve painted themselves quite nicely into a corner.
The thing is that it’s almost impossible to get Biden out of there, partly because they worked so hard to get him there and keep him there, partly because he doesn’t want to go and his wife and son don’t want him to go, since without him Jill is greatly diminished, and Hunter is just another junkie and convicted felon. Congress can’t push him out, because only his own party wants him out and they don’t have enough votes. He won’t take a test, so he can’t be declared legally incompetent. Oh, it’s quite a pickle the Democratic Party has landed itself in. The thing is, it’s a pickle of their own making and it’s significantly diminished their chances of holding on to the White House this time out. What is more, even if they could just swap out the candidate, none of them are polling well against Trump either, least of all Kamala Harris, who has demonstrated she isn’t capable of doing the job or even giving a good oral presentation, so much so that they had to shuffle her off to the back of the stage in the first year.
If the Democratic Party had any integrity, they’d acknowledge that they’ve been caught in their own web (“oh what a tangled web we weave when first we practice to deceive”) and they are just going to have to take the loss at the top this time out and try to save as much of the down ticket as possible. I don’t see it, though. I think they are going to try every possible way to avoid the consequences of their own actions.
After Trump was elected, I was expecting the Dems to start goading him into picking fights with the Republican leadership in Congress, as well as Republican leaders in state governments.
Instead, we got “salacious and ridiculous statements that Russian prostitutes urinated on him”.
As world-renowned author and my Facebook friend, Stephen Michael Stirling, once wrote, they let sincerity get in the way of rational thought.
Not to change the subject, but…
I found this article in Inside Higher Ed really interesting. I was asked not infrequently if students could record my lectures, but never to record class discussion, which can indeed become heated.
I taught Anna Deveare Smith’s Fires in the Mirror several times, for example. It’s about the 1991 altercation between the Lubavitch (Orthodox Jewish) and black residents of Crown Heights Brooklyn. Taken out of context, the comments of my Jewish students could be interpreted as racist, and those of my black students as antisemitic. In context, they weren’t, but, as we all know, context is anathema to those with a Cause.
On the other hand, accommodating the legitimate needs of disabled students is not only legally required, but ethically imperative.
Let’s leave aside the legal questions. What should the law be in cases like this one?
I think I know where I stand on this one, but I see legitimate arguments on both sides.
Ok, this is really easy. You make official recordings of the class. I have videoed most of my lectures for people who are absent, etc. I use a wireless microphone that picks up me, but not the students. So, I ask questions of the class, and I repeat the answer the student gives. The professor needs to do this. It gives the students with a (justified or unjustified) disability the information they need, while allowing the students to express controversial topics and stay anonymous. The professor takes the heat.
The biggest problem with this is that such video (and audio) is large. The CMS’s of most schools don’t have the storage space to allow the professor to store the terabytes of video required. YouTube would be ideal, but their AI scanning of files would get such an account deleted almost immediately. You could place them on one of the smaller streaming sites that believe in free speech. Maybe get Elon Musk to make a ‘university courses’ section on X/Twitter?
A great piece about antisemitism’s virulence following the Hamas genocidal mass murder in Israel:
Matti Friedman: We Misunderstood the Nazis. Plus… | The Free Press (thefp.com)
As I’ve asserted before, “the Holocaust” is such a misnomer. It makes what the NAZIs did sound like a natural catastrophe, a wildfire or a tornado or an earthquake. I prefer “The time an entire population in a European country industrially murdered nearly ten million defenseless men, women and children, including the elderly, for no apparent reason.” The “no apparent reason” component is the crucial one and the one the author touches on in the article. The entire effort to “remember” the time an entire population in a European country industrially murdered nearly ten million defenseless men, women and children, including the elderly, for no apparent reason has failed to answer the “why.” The resurgence of antisemitism since last October has been stunning. Why is antisemitism still perfectly acceptable? It’s truly unique and needs to be addressed.
How about “The time the most progressive population in a European country, using the most progressive political and economic ideas, industrially murdered nearly ten million defenseless men, women and children, including the elderly, to implement those progressive ideas.” We could add “Coincidentally, those political and economic ideas are currently very popular in today’s ‘woke’ culture, that is seeing a resurgence of antisemitism.” I’m sure there is no connection.
I guess there is “socialist” in the name there somewhere, isn’t there, Michael? And of course, they did call it “the final solution.” Much the same as current day progressives are always solving problems with government “programs.” But why has it always been the Jews, since even the time of the Pharaohs?
If you look in the Pentateuch, the laws of the Jews are meant to keep them separate from other people. One meaning of Holy is separate. The Jews have to eat special food so they can’t eat with others, they wear special clothes, and they wear their hair different than others. The men are circumcised, which separates them in the communal baths of Greece and Rome. The Jews aren’t allowed to interact with people who are ceremonially unclean. All of this keeps them separate. People don’t like groups that don’t conform and separate themselves.
In the case of the Shoah, though, the initial persecution of Jews in Germany wasn’t against a segregated minority. A large number of German Jews had assimilated into German culture. Many of them had converted to Christianity. They spoke German, they dressed like Germans, they didn’t follow a kosher diet and gave no impression that they wanted to live separately. They looked down on Eastern European Jews that refused to assimilate, in fact. There is some reason to believe, per a book I read about why Jews chose to stay in Germany for so long, that some Jews actually thought Hitler’s ranting was directed at those unassimilated Eastern European Jews that stuck out like sore thumbs and not all Jews (good Jews, like themselves!).
While you are correct in that visible minorities are often targeted, in this case, Nazi racial laws – nonsensical on the face of it – labeled as ethnic blights people whose parents or grandparents practiced a religion and turned that practice into an immutable characteristic that could not be changed.
Fascism IS a form of socialism. It is national socialism (or corporatism) , where the government controls the means of production and society through corporations while international socialism (Communism) controls everything directly. They are enemies not because they were diametrically opposed, but because they are similar. Both believe that socialism will wipe away capitalism and liberal democracy. The real question for them is “which form of socialism will prevail?”
Everyone seems to think fascism was a flash-in-the-pan one time extravaganze of racism. Everyone seems to forget that Spain was fascist from the 1930’s until the mid 1970’s. There are still a lot of Spainiards who miss Franco.
OB,
I am curious why you think “Holocaust” sounds like a natural catastrophe. The term holocaust was, until just recently, understood as a god’s burnt offering, from the ancient (Koine) Greek word holokauston, meaning completely (holos) burnt (kaustos). Many religions offered holocausts to their gods, but the Jewish religion had many holocausts and sin offerings as part of the temple worship that pre-dated 70 AD when Solomon’s temple in Jerusalem was destroyed by the Romans. If you are up for a stultifying read, Leviticus describes these holocausts in great detail.
I had always thought that the name Holocaust, for the period of time when Nazi Germany tried to wipe Jews from the earth, was given BECAUSE the Jews were giving their very lives. From a Jewish perspective, the blood of God’s chosen race was being spilled and their bodies (at least a large number) burnt in the crematoriums made the term Holocaust particularly poetic (and heartbreaking) to me.
How about France? I mean, Macron made a deal with the extreme left to hamstring the non-Paris party of Marine Le Pen. Now, Paris is in flames with 2 weeks before the Olympics. Why? The French left is protesting…their victory?!?
The French protest. That’s all there is to say on that front.
The VA testified in Congress today that if the Veterans 2nd Amendment restoration act becomes law, the VA will not comply with it because of the way the DOJ interpreted the Brady Act. When questioned, the VA representative affirmed that the VA would follow a rule that sprang from the interpretation of a law rather than follow a clear law they don’t like. I’m sure the VA will say it is to save democracy!
For explanation, the VA voids the 2nd Amendment rights of veterans if they need assistance in handling financial affairs. If someone takes out a financial power of attorney for a veteran, that veteran loses their Constitutional rights. This has happened to 250,000 of them. The bill before Congress would restore those rights. The VA said that even if the bill is passed, the VA will not restore their rights because they will follow an interpretation of the Brady Act that led them to strip those rights in the first place.
https://x.com/GunOwners/status/1811070850461745362
How is the VA able to do this on its own?
What provision of law allows them to do this?
They got the DOJ to back them up. Who is going to do anything about it? They are the bureaucracy, they tell Congress what to do. If not, all that stuff the DOJ/FBI/etc found when they hacked into the Congressmen’s computers or when they confiscated the Congressmen’s phones will get used against them. Notice how unworried he is. What can they do? Censure him? Recommend the DOJ prosecute him? That only works for Republicans. Bannon is in jail, all the Democrats who did the same thing are free.
Laws are for little people and Republicans.
Whoever @patty_groves is on Twitter, she deserves some recognition – she reposts all of your articles.
I used try to diligently retweet each time you auto-posted to Twitter but you don’t do that anymore so I’ve been irresponsible in promoting the blog.
But your ethics warrior, Patty Groves, has been quite faithful.
WordPress won’t post automatically to Twitter anymore, and I keep forgetting to do it. I’ll have to start.
https://reason.com/2024/07/12/louisiana-federal-court-affirms-the-right-to-peacefully-protest/?comments=true#comment-10638362
So if someone organizes a protest and someone misbehaves, they are not automatically liable on this basis alone?
Who knew?
I’m a little late to the party. The Goldens were on vacation this week taking a whirlwind tour through Harper’s Ferry, Manassas Battlefield, Mount Vernon, Fredericksburg-Chancellorsville-The Wilderness-Spotsylvania Courthouse battlefields, Richmond (including the statehouse and Hollywood cemetery where lies the remains of James Monroe, John Tyler, Jefferson Davis, George Pickett and JEB Stuart), James Madison’s Montpelier, the Lexington burial sites of Stonewall Jackson and Robert E. Lee and a bunch of other nonhistorical attractions.
We had to cut out so much, including Appomattox Courthouse, due to time and aging bodies that couldn’t hack the 90-plus degree heat all week.
Nevertheless, we had an experience in Richmond that got me thinking about Tour Guide ethics. What is the job of a tour guide? To lead, to inform and to make the tourists feel welcome. Is that about it?
In Richmond, we checked into a hotel because we’re trying to rack up Marriott points. This was apparently a relatively new hotel and appeared to be skewed toward the younger crowd (board games in the lobby, inexplicably dark hallways, body wash in the bathroom replacing soap. A stash closet was at the end of each floor’s hallway with ironing boards, irons, extra towels, toothpaste/toothbrush, etc. But no soap. A minifridge was offered if needed. The one provided was smaller than a bread box and could barely fit the leftover crispy brussels sprouts we brought home from a restaurant).
It was very hot in Virginia this week. I had gotten the idea that we should do the outdoor stuff early in the mornings so we could save the hotter time of day for indoor air conditioned attractions. We started off at the statehouse. We generally go inside the capital buildings, look around for about half an hour and then walk around the grounds to see the statues. Self-guided tours allow us to go at our own pace without being bogged down by other tourists. For some reason, Mr. Golden jumped at the chance of a guided tour offered by an elderly female docent. I mentioned vaguely about maybe doing our own thing, but I figured I’d let him have a tour if he wanted it.
The tour got derailed pretty early on when the guide asked the obligatory questions, “Where are you from?”, “What brings you here?”, etc. She also asked where we were staying. When we mentioned the name of the hotel – it’s within walking distance of the statehouse – she’d never heard of it. Several long minutes were spent describing where the hotel was and what it looked like, etc. Fortunately, she decided to keep the tour going and led the two of us onward. Until she ran into a coworker and asked him if he knew anything about that hotel. Then another coworker appeared and he got roped into the discussion. Where was this hotel? How much are the rooms? We could have stayed at such-and-such a place for cheaper. By this time, my mind was wondering what about our hotel was so mystifying that we were spending an inordinate amount of time discussing it. True, we’d admitted we weren’t in a hurry but not being in a hurry is not the same as saying we had all day. We didn’t even have the luxury of other tourists with us verbally or nonverbally urging the tour along as we were the only two people on this particular jaunt.
That didn’t last.
The time wasted caused other tour groups with other guides behind us to catch up. More than one room in the place we were chased out of while our guide was midway through her spiel because those groups (including one with kids) were on time limits and could not wait. At one point, she apologized to us profusely and had us stand outside of the room we’d just been kicked out of to point out features. My attempts to take pictures were stymied by our guide who wanted me to hear what she was saying and advised we could come back to the rooms and take pictures later (in other words, a self-guided tour!). The Virginia statehouse has loads of busts and statues, as opposed to other capital buildings (Montpelier, VT, I’m looking at you!). While she was friendly and very knowledgeable, I found myself becoming irritated thinking about how we would have had more time if we’d just stayed on track at the beginning.
The tour finally ended, almost 2 hours after it began. We got back to the other rooms, snapped our photos, then exited – hearing our guide exclaiming about our hotel to yet another coworker – and went out into the heat of post-11 AM to survey the grounds, having lost all coolness of the morning hours we’d hoped to use to see other outside monuments.
We have been told by people that we are too nice. There is a history of our time being taken advantage of by others, admittedly. She was otherwise very nice and certainly had a lot of information. We made no complaints there. But it got me wondering what are the ethics when you have a captive audience? What would have been an ethical reaction to the fixation on our hotel that wasted so much time?
Oh look. A progressive doing exactly what they accuse conservatives of wanting to do.