Month: December 2024

I Don’t Understand This Story AT ALL, I Don’t Understand the Biden Administration At All, I Just Don’t Understand…

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

From Israel news sources: “Despite heavy pressure from the United States, Israel refuses to allow the transfer of weapons to the security forces of the Palestinian Authority (PA)…According to a report from Army Radio, the U.S. requested that Israel approve the transfer of AK-47 Kalashnikov rifles, ammunition and armored vehicles. After discussions among security officials, IDF Chief of Staff Lt.-Gen. Herzi Halevi decided to recommend the political leadership not approve the transfers….Under the terms of the [Oslo] Accords, Israel must approve the transfer of heavy weaponry to PA security forces, which occasionally confront terror group members that are armed with superior weapons smuggled with Iranian assistance…

“Israel Ganz, the head of the Binyamin Regional Council and the chairman of the Yesha Council, praised the ‘correct decision’….’Transferring ammunition and weapons to the enemy, especially during wartime, is complete madness and a breach of security for the citizens of the State of Israel….The Palestinian Authority is a terrorist organization – and a terrorist organization should be defeated,’ Ganz declared.”

Ya think?

My favorite quote is “Transferring ammunition and weapons to the enemy, especially during wartime, is complete madness.” Whether or not the Palestinian Authority is fairly described as a terrorist organization, the official position of all the various Palestinian organizations, convoluted and unstable though they are, is that Israel has no right to exist.

I will admit to the possibility that I am missing something, but it seems to me that pressuring Israel at this time to hand over weapons to any Palestinian group is as responsible as pressuring them to make the official language of their nation Swedish and have Israelis wear their underwear on the outside.

Just because the President is demented doesn’t mean we should try to make other countries behave irrationally too.

Comment of the Day: “Presuming Bias Also Makes You Stupid…and a Failure”

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

I think it is fitting to end 2024 with one of Steve-O-in NJ’s historical epics, this one in response my challenge at the end of the post to name a figure who would rebut the statement on the Victory Girls blog regarding Kamala Harris, “Never has so much been handed to one person who didn’t deserve it.” My mind immediately went to the Kim Kardashian’s sisters Khloe and Kourtney, who attained fame, celebrity and riches because their oldest sister had a viral sex tape. But moving from government and politics into pop culture is cheating.

Steve-O takes up that challenge with gusto in this Comment of the Day to the post, “Presuming Bias Also Makes You Stupid…and a Failure”. Here is it is….

***

It really depends on how far back in history you are willing to go. I could name you at least 10 monarchs who were handed a whole lot they didn’t deserve for no reason other than accident of birth without even putting on my thinking cap:

  1. Edward VIII of the UK – a child who never quite grew up and just wanted everything his own way, also TERRIBLE judge of character.
  2. Louis XVI of France – clueless and careless, led him to the guillotine
  3. Alfonso XIII of Spain – not up to the job and paved the way for fascist Franco.
  4. Selim II of the Ottoman Empire – called the Drunkard or the Sot for a reason, led to the huge defeat at Lepanto and Turkey’s long slide down into the Third World.
  5. Henry VIII of England – initially might even be considered heroic but ultimately destroyed by his excessive appetites and dictatorial nature.
  6. Mary I of England – Henry’s eldest daughter, called Bloody Mary for a reason.
  7. Charles II of Spain – the misshapen result of generations of Hapsburg inbreeding.
  8. Hirohito of Japan [above, with Khloe and Kourtney] – allowed himself to be a puppet for overambitious generals and admirals, didn’t stand up to them until defeat was certain.
  9. Cixi Yukian of China – waited till it was too late, then foolishly threw in with the Boxers, resulting ultimately in the Chinese Empire collapsing.
  10. Oh yes, lest we forget William II of Germany, who pushed wise old Bismarck aside and led the German Empire into WWI and its destruction.

If I put on my thinking cap, I could probably triple that list. The fact is that when you hand someone power based on something other than merit, you throw the dice and risk ending up with someone who’s either useless or a puppet for the unscrupulous.

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Ethics Hero: Me, Dammit!

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

I’m not happy about this, but there it is.

Back in October I wrote this post about how the boobs at Safeway managed to give me over $300 in food for my wife’s memorial event without charging me for it. I ruefully observed that as an ethicist I was obligated to go to the store and pay what I owed them despite the fact that the Safewayers were none the wiser: it was a classic example of “ethics is what you do when nobody’s watching.”

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Ethics Quiz: Discrimination As a IA Right

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

Seriously? Will this ruling stand? Can it? Should it?

The Superior Court of New Jersey’s Appellate Division ruled Dec. 20 against Rajeh A. Saadeh in his lawsuit alleging that the New Jersey State Bar Association had violated the New Jersey Law Against Discrimination. The NJSB has a diversity policy that reserves 13 out of 94 leadership positions for members of specified underrepresented groups. Saadeh is a Palestinian Muslim American attorney, and his group didn’t make the cut. He argued that this was discriminatory, while the bar association argued that it had a First Amendment right to select leaders “consistent with its values regarding diversity in the legal profession.”

The Appellate Court overruled a trial judge who had held that the diversity program was an illegal quota system under New Jersey law. “[T]he undisputed facts in this record establishes beyond peradventure that the bar association qualifies as an expressive association, and that compelling it to end its practice of ensuring the presence of designated underrepresented groups in its leadership would unconstitutionally infringe its ability to advocate the value of diversity and inclusivity in the association and more broadly in the legal profession,” the appeals court said. Since the ruling was that the discriminatory policy was protected speech, it did not even address the question of discrimination.

[Two side points: 1) I have an automatic prejudice against any judge, or anyone, who uses the term “peradventure” and 2) I will not forgive the NJSBA for firing me after years of providing it with (acclaimed, profitable and discounted!) musical ethics CLE programs because I exclaimed “Fuck!” a single time to no one in particular in a moment of frustation during a tech check on Zoom when the bar association’s technical staff proved that it had no idea what it was doing.]

Your Ethics Alarms Ethics Quiz of the Day…

Is that an ethically defensible decision?

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Before We Close the Book On Jimmy Carter…

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

“Cynical Publius,” a practicing lawyer and retired Army colonel who writes under that name at The Federalist, couldn’t stand the Carter record airbrushing flooding in the media yesterday and was moved to post this on his lively Twitter/”X” account:

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‘Nah, Those Prosecutions of Trump Weren’t Political!’

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

One inconvenient aspect of creeping senility is that the sufferers often say out loud what is normally filed in the brain file labeled “Never Speak of This, Ever.” And so it is that, as the Washington Post reports,

“In private, Biden has also said he should have picked someone other than Merrick Garland as attorney general, complaining about the Justice Department’s slowness under Garland in prosecuting Trump, and its aggressiveness in prosecuting Biden’s son Hunter, according to multiple people familiar with his comments. [….] Had the Justice Department moved faster to prosecute Trump for allegedly seeking to overturn the 2020 election and mishandling classified documents, they say, the former president might have faced a politically damaging trial before the election.’

Of course, we all knew that the plan was to burden Trump with dubious and politically motivated prosecutions in the year leading up to the election, and with a normal human being, it would have worked, or at least caused him to have a stroke or a breakdown. Instead, the Democratic Party’s “democratic norms”-wrecking strategy alienated Americans who don’t like to see their government acting like the Stasi. It showed a strength of character and fighting spirit that Americans still seek in their leaders. It proved how desperate and hypocritical Trumps foes and adversaries were. But the Axis denied it all—and now the intended beneficiary of the plot to make Donald Trump run for President as a “convicted felon” and “adjudicated rapist” has admitted that a better Attorney General would have nailed Trump before he could get elected.

And Donald Trump was the existential threat to the republic, this same man told us.

Has there ever been a time in our history when an entire political party and all of its voters and supporters so deserved to wear paper bags over their heads in disgrace?

Silly Ethics Dunce: NBC Sports

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

It almost seems absurd to mention this trivial ethics misdemeanor when discussing a soulless, greedy TV network that happily promotes a sport that sends young men onto its fields to maim their brains so team owners and sponsors can make millions. Yet somehow this level of moronic rote wokeness deserves our attention.

Here is part of what the election last month was a reaction against. Let’s hope NBC and the equally disgusting National Football League are tardy enough reading the metaphorical room that they both lose audiences, popularity and millions. I know it won’t happen. But I’m a dreamer…

Jayden Daniels, the quarterback of the Washington Commanders, set a record last night as he led his politically correctly named team into the NFL play-offs while breaking the old record for most rushing yards by a rookie quarterback. A Washington QB had held the previous record too: Robert Griffin III ran for 815 yards in his rookie year (2012), and Daniels topped him with 830.

So NBC quickly put that graphic up that you see above, but not before blotting out the name of Griffin’s team when he was playing…the REDSKINS!

NBC had to protect the delicate sensibilities of Sunday night football fans who thrill to see players break bones and crack skulls, making sure that their viewers wouldn’t suffer psychic trauma by being reminded that the Commanders once had a racist name, or so the Mad Left decreed. Thus it made sense to a news organization that it should misrepresent history, tamper with evidence and sacrifice truth to satisfy progressive crazies—you know, like it has done regularly for years now—and as PBS was doing tonight until I couldn’t stand watching any more, running a documentary about what a great President Jimmy Carter was.

Nah, airbrushing away a team name on a jersey is petty censorship. I know it. I also know that a news organization that will bother lying about something nobody cares about won’t blink at lying when it advances its own interests.

Addendum to “The Jimmy Carter Assessment”: Bless Those Libertarians’ Hearts!

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

Libertarians contribute significantly to civic policy discourse by staking out an extreme position that serves as useful ballast against extreme statists from the other side of the spectrum. I often use Reason, which I used to subscribe to in its print format, for ethics topics. Unfortunately, libertarians constantly erode their credibility by taking absurd positions, arguing for open borders, wanting to legalize heroin, and mu particular favorite, arguing that the U.S. should have sat out World War II.

Today the libertarians, or at least too many of them (one would be too many) are arguing that Jimmy Carter was an excellent President. Yes, I am really reading that. Here is Reason quoting Gene Healy, a vice president at the Cato Institute, with favor:

“Abroad, he favored diplomacy over war, garnering the least bloody record of any post–World War II president. So what if he didn’t look tough, or even particularly competent, as he did it? A clear-eyed look at the Carter record reveals something surprising: This bumbling, brittle, unloveable man was, by the standards that ought to matter, our best modern president.”

Because, you see, the standards that “ought to matter” mean that reducing the American Presidency in influence, prestige and power is a good thing. So what if Americans have no respect for the office or the man holding it? So what if the new template for future leaders is fecklessness and apathy? What “matters” is that if chaos reigns all over the globe, the United States canconfidently eschew all responsibility because no one we care about gets hurt.

Heck, if diminishing the Presidency is an accomplishment, Joe Biden must stand as one of the all-time greats!

I have tried arguing with libertarians periodically over the years, and found them to be cultists, like climate change fanatics, abortion activists and the Trump Deranged. Reality doesn’t impose on their beliefs at all, at least not the libertarians who have swallowed the whole philosophical enchilada. It is useful to have vocal individuals who express principled objections to government over-reach, but when they declare weak leaders good leaders and praise passivity as an absolute virtue, such voices disqualify themselves as serious advocates.

In short, if Jimmy Carter was our best modern President, I’m Woody Woodpecker.

Let Us Give Belated Thanks To President Biden’s Ventriloquists For Another Vivid Example of Unethical Anti-Gun Propaganda

/ Jack Marshall / 23 Comments

I missed this, but the White House statement from “President Biden” (Who wrote it? Who approved it? Did the President even know about it?) following the Madison, Wisconsin school shooting two weeks ago couldn’t be a better demonstration of the intellectual dishonesty and ruthlessness of the Left’s anti-Second Amendment fanatics. Apparently gun-phobics are thrilled any time a gun-related tragedy occurs so they can rush out junk like this and fundraising appeals to exploit the event for all it’s worth, and the higher body count the better. The alleged Presidential sentiment deliberately misrepresents the shooting by linking it to standard tenets of the anti-gun agenda that literally have nothing to do with the incident being exploited.

The Biden statement also brands itself as standard issue cant by using the deliberately meaningless Axis phrase “commonsense gun safety laws,” overwhelming used by those whose idea of “common sense” is not to allow legal private gun ownership at all. Then the letter advocates universal background checks, a national red flag law, a ban on assault weapons, and a ban on high-capacity magazines, not one of which would have done anything to prevent the shooting that is supposed to be the subject of the letter.

The shooter in Madison was a 15-year-old girl who couldn’t legally purchase a gun anyway: background checks don’t apply to shooters like her. Nor would a “red flag law” have flagged her, since it doesn’t include children too young to own guns. The shooter didn’t use an “assault weapon”; she used a pistol; nor was a high-capacity magazine involved. Never mind! Guns bad, so this tragedy that might have been prevented if only “we could melt all the guns and give a new world to our daughters and sons” (which we can’t: Who recognizes the song lyric?) justifies rushing out anti-gun propaganda when the appeal to emotion would be most effective.

Yecchh.

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Pointer: Not the Bee

The Jimmy Carter Assessment [Updated]

/ Jack Marshall / 18 Comments

Jimmy Carter, the 39th President, finally died at the age of 100 in, of course, Plains, Georgia, which no one ever heard of before he arrived on the national scene. Ethics Alarms last discussed Carter here, in the fifth chapter of its inquiry to name the Worst President Ever. Carter made the final field that was announced this month, along with Franklin Pierce, James Buchanan, Andrew Johnson, Woodrow Wilson, Richard Nixon, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and, last but not least, Joe Biden.

I doubt there are many strong arguments that can be made to assert that Carter doesn’t belong there, just as there is little doubt that he doesn’t deserve the booby prize. Carter’s Presidency stands as testimony to the foolishness of the belief that good intentions mitigate failure. Carter supporters’ argument for his Presidency ultimate devolves into rationalizations such as #3A,  The Road To Hell, or “I meant well,” #14, Self-validating Virtue, #38, The Miscreant’s Mulligan or “Give him/her/them/me a break!,” #18, Hamm’s Excuse, or “It wasn’t my fault,”and the dreaded #22, Comparative Virtue, or “It’s not the worst thing.” Given its crippling leftward bias, the mainstream media is tying itself into knots today to make Carter out to be something he was not, an effective President.

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