Rep. Bowman has just issued a statement regarding his pulling a fire alarm switch to delay yesterday’s vote in the House on the stop-gap funding bill:
“bias makes you stupid”
More On The Unethical “Stand Up For Science” Mug (I Can’t Help It…I’m “Triggered”)
The asinine “Stand Up For Science” mug I wrote about earlier today still rankles, and I just realized that a video that surfaced this month is relevant to it. I had seen a recently released TEDTalk given in 2013 by S. Matthew Liao. He is the Director of the Center for Bioethics and Affiliated Professor in the Department of Philosophy at New York University, and has previously been on the faculty of Oxford, Johns Hopkins, Georgetown, and Princeton. He’s also the Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Moral Philosophy. Several conservative commentators had freaked out over the video; naturally, the mainstream media buried it. They did that because it represents the outer limits of a climate change panic whackadoodle, and this guy is unquestionably not just a SCIENTIST of the sort that the mug-makers want us to fall down and worship as the all-knowing, all-seeing societal architects they are, but also an ethicist as well. I considered it as a post topic but decided against using it, because, well, it seemed too silly to have to point out how irresponsible Liao is.
Then came..the mug.
The ‘Great Stupid’ Woke Mug That’s Even Worse Than The ‘Great Stupid’ Woke Lawn Signs
This embarrassing thing has over 5,000 “likes” on Facebook, including many from friends of mine who I will henceforth have a hard time looking in the eye.
The mug, which is available free of charge “for a limited time only,” annoys me more than the “In this house we believe” signs with their fatuous virtue-signaling, generalizations (“Love is Love”) and rationalizations (“No Human Being Is Illegal”). because the game it plays is more sinister and confusing to the intellectually handicapped. It is a political propaganda device that deliberately uses false equivalencies in order to ridicule and denigrate legitimate dissent from current progressive cant.
The smug mug’s three statements of the obvious (“The Earth is not flat,” “Chemtrails aren’t a thing” and “We’ve been to the moon”) contradict fringe wacko conspiracy theories that don’t require debunking, since only a tiny and insignificant percentage of the public believes in them or ever has, and almost all of that group breathe through their mouths. However, mixed in among those topics as if they are in the same category are reductive generalizations about two public policy issues involving serious and valid controversies. That’s dirty pool, and worse, the statements aspire to end debates that they don’t even fairly reference.
I’m Curious About How Progressives In The Media And Democratic Party Will Try To Duck Responsibility For This Phenomenon. Are You?
News item: As of this morning, at least 61 people had been arrested in connection to widespread looting over two days in Philadelphia. The looting began Tuesday night with at least 30 people arrested for crimes including burglary, theft and participating in rioting. Those arrested included Dayjia Blackwell, aka. “Meatball,” a Philadelphia social media influencer who helped organize and then live-treamed the looting barrage. The viral lawlessness continued for two more days, with shoe stores, pharmacies, beauty parlors and liquor stores being attacked, among other businesses. At least 25 people were arrested for the looting that took place the nextt evening, Wednesday.. Thursday night businesses across the city hired private security. Police officers were stationed outside several establishments, including drug stores and liquor stores. Claudia Silmeas, the owner of the beauty supply shop that was targeted, told reporters, in tears, “I just want them to stop. Stop. Just stop. We are innocent of all of this. I just want them to stop.”
Someone ask Claudia if she voted for a city government that has emphasized the de-criminalization of non-violent crimes and has enabled hostility to law enforcement to flourish in the wake of the demonizing of police following the Black Lives Matter pathogen. If the answer is yes, she is assuredly not innocent.
Ethics Quiz: Is This An Ethical Teacher Training Film? Just Kidding: Of Course It Isn’t…
Imagine a culture that could permit something this biased, divisive, reductive and vile to get funded, green-lighted, produced and used.
Never mind: you don’t need to imagine it. That culture’s here.
Now what?
More Cause For Hope! NYT Readers Call BS On Ibram X. Kendi And Michelle Goldberg
The reliably woke, intellectually dishonest and frequently ridiculous New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg issued another one of her propaganda pieces, this time trying to excuse and rationalize the implosion of Boston University’s Ibram X. Kendi’s Center for Antiracist Research, which is laying off most of its staff and looks headed for the dustbin of history. As for that, good. Kendi is one of the worst race-hustlers extant, and BU giving him such a platform for his divisive and destructive ranting was academic malpractice.
Goldberg’s dutiful excuse-making in “Ibram X. Kendi and the Problem of Celebrity Fund-Raising,”meanwhile, would be an embarrassment to the Times if it were a legitimate paper any more. She absolves Kendi of blame because he had no management experience and it was irresponsible of woke donors to give him so much money in their rush to signal their virtue. (I guess all those corporations should have just stuck with discriminating against white applicants in their hiring…) What she is admitting without having the integrity to do so openly is that Kendi was and is a blowhard phony who talked big but was untrustworthy. Ann Althouse sharply observes the hypocrisy here:
If we’re going to do critical race theory, let’s not hold back when the insights are inconvenient. Lavishing money on an unprepared — but charismatic — black person and then treating him like a naif when he fails to perform according to existing conventions — that too is racism… under the theory.
Bingo.
See? Cultural Rot CAN Be Reversed!
The Senate yesterday unanimously passed a bill that requires members to follow a dress code that will include a coat, tie, and slacks for men. Just a bit less than three weeks ago, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, in a vulgar and obnoxious capitulation to lowered standards of public conduct and a blatant endorsement of the King’s Pass had ruled that all Senators could dress like Pennsylvania’s senatorial slob, John Fetterman, whose favorite attire is a sneakers shorts hoodie ensemble. This was an itsy-bitsy microcosm of what the party of Fetterman and Schumer are attempting to inflict on American society, and, incredibly, the vox populi rebelled. It seems that a lot of Americans don’t like the idea of their elected representatives in the U.S. Capitol appearing in public dressed like Frankenstein’s Monster on vacation.
Surveying The Left’s Three Desperate Reactions To The Biden Presidency Implosion
1. President Biden? Who’s that?
In order to go on covering other issues and stories in which aspects of the Biden mess would normally require a reference, the mainstream media instead just pretends there’s nothing there. Thus it can continue to run attacks on Donald Trump for “defying democratic norms,” being a threat to “lock up” his opposition if elected, and “lying” even when the current president, their client, continues to engage in all three.
Today the New York Times sent me a lament from columnist Amanda Taub headlined, “The Litany of #MeToo News Continues. Is Anything Really Changing? It can appear as though society is no closer to a future in which women can go about their ordinary lives without being harassed, assaulted and coerced into silence.” She begins with Russell Brand, but goes on to discuss how “each time a powerful man is held accountable for sexual misconduct, it seems like progress. And yet, when the allegations reveal a similar pattern of institutional actions that allowed the abuse to go on for years, and they provoke the same reactions of denial and victim-blaming, it can appear as though society is no closer to a future in which women can go about their ordinary lives without being harassed, assaulted and coerced into silence.”
Huh! I wonder why that’s happening? Could it be that the “fish rots from the head down”? Could it be that #MeToo has beclowned itself because by making it obvious that only conservatives and Republicans were in any peril of #MeToo consequences, and that powerful male Democrats could continue their harassing ways with either impunity or minor consequences? How can a serious analysts write about patterns “of institutional actions that allowed the abuse to go on for years,” and not mention any of this…
???? The President of the United States has been a serial and unapologetic groper, sniffer and cop-a-feel specialist for decades. Leaders set the standard for their organizations; Presidents set the standards for U.S. society. Biden was also accused of sexual assault by a former Senate staffer. If you want an explanation for why #MeToo has deteriorated, look no further than this White House.
But Biden’s enablers and agents want us to look away from there.
Reactions To Being Confronted With A Racist T-Shirt [Corrected]
This ticked me off.
I was leaving a rehab clinic office after dropping off my wife and got onto the elevator with an African-American mother and her son, who appeared to be 12 or 13. He was wearing the t-shirt pictured above.
That’s a racist message. If I were to wear a shirt or a cap saying “White is my happy color,” it would be viewed by any non-whites I encountered as a veiled insult, and correctly so. This is no different. Thanks to Barack Obama and George Floyd, anti-white racism is considered sufficiently justifiable, indeed deserved, that blacks can wear this shirt with impunity. Google even covers for them: “What does black is my happy color mean?” it asks. “This is the color you are most comfortable and most confident in and the one that reflects your character. I wear black a lot and experts say that wearing black means that you are confident, powerful and success driven. I’ll take that. Black is also perceived as the most attractive color,” Google says in answering it’s own question (bolding theirs).” Riiiiight. The kid was making a fashion statement.
To state the obvious, if I had worn a “White is my happy color” shirt, it would be regarded as a white supremacy boast, and properly so. (Notice of Correction: I had written “There are no ‘White is my happy color’ shirts for sale.” Commenter Steve-O helpfully informs me that there are indeed. I dare him to wear one in my neighborhood…) I came within a filament of saying something to the mother. This is how you raise a racist. This is how you guarantee racial divisions and tensions forever. This is how American blacks lose potential political and social allies who are not going to be sympathetic to complaints about “microagressions” from the same people who make me read racial insults on their shirts.
Sure, it’s another “black lives matter” rhetorical trick: “Hey, saying black (skin) makes me happy doesn’t mean that I have anything against white people!”
Now you’re insulting my intelligence too.
An Ethics And Integrity Dilemma: When Is A Personal Boycott Of A Company Ethical?
Some lines need to be established, and the sooner the better, but boy, I am having trouble drawing them.
Ethics Alarms has consistently taken the position that it is wrong to discriminate against people for their beliefs and opinions. The idea that business establishments would refuse service to customer based on their political affiliations (or because they wear a MAGA hat) is repugnant to the the value of pluralism and individual liberty, both central to the founding principles of the United States. Similarly, EA has taken the position that corporations should be judged solely on the basis of how well they deliver the services they render and the quality of the products they introduce. How those companies or their owners use their profits, as long as what they do is legal, should not be the consumer’s concern. Investors have a different perspective: investing in a company makes the investor a participant in that company’s activities beyond producing products and services.
Starting with these basic principles, Ethics Alarms opposed the efforts in several cities to punish Chic-Fil-A because its owner was a prominent supporter of groups that opposed gay marriage. I regard this as economic extortion to bend an individual (or his/her company) to the majority’s will, and dangerous to democracy.
The key distinction is whether the company itself, in delivering good and services, connects its business to political and social advocacy. Nothing in the Chic-Fil-A restaurants hinted at any position regarding gays or same-sex marriage, and the company’s owners (or its foundation) should be allowed to support whatever groups and political positions they choose, just like anyone else. But what if a company starts using its products and services, marketing and public visibility to promote political positions, public division, and questionable social engineering?
Ethics Alarms 