Who would have thought that New York Times readers could do such a terrific Peter Sellers impression?
Paul Krugman, once a Nobel Prize winner, now the very model of a modern progressive hack, issued his contribution to the current “Protect Joe Biden!” hysteria among pundits and journalists. It’s called “Why You Shouldn’t Obsess About the National Debt,” and if this won’t get the Nobel people to demand their prize in economics back, nothing will.
The intellectual dishonesty of the piece is stunning even for Krugman—I remember how an old friend favorably posted one of Krugman’s columns to Facebook and the scales fell from my eyes making me realize that the old friend was an idiot and had always been one—and the rationalizations he uses to shrug away the $34 trillion national debt are breathtaking in their audacity. Some examples:
Once again, a pile-up on Route Ethics has me doing another Saturday multi-story post. These take twice as long as most posts to prepare, and generally attract less than average traffic and minimal comments. Nonetheless, they are necessary, for me if not anyone else, just to come closer to covering the topic.
2. The D.E.I. Ethics Train Wreck hasn’t stopped yet, Harvard notwithstanding. The University of California, Los Angeles, was accused by a whistleblower of discriminating on the basis of race in violation of California and U.S. law. Black and Latino applicants. it was alleged, are held to lower standards than whites and Asians on exams and other measurements of competence. The dean of the medical school, Steven Dubinett, denied the claims and said that students and faculty “are held to the highest standards of academic excellence.” Hiring and admissions decisions are “based on merit,” not race, “in a process consistent with state and federal law.” Oopsie! Dubinett himself directs a center within the medical school, the Clinical and Translational Science Institute, that includes an illegal a race-based fellowship.
3. More on UCLA: You can read about how far UCLA’s medical school has fallen here. The take-away from the report is that both admissions and graduation standards are being lowered for minorities. One professor claimed that “a student in the operating room could not identify a major artery when asked, then berated the professor for putting her on the spot.” “I don’t know how some of these students are going to be junior doctors,” another UCLA professor said. “Faculty are seeing a shocking decline in knowledge of medical students.”
Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Juan Merchan revealed Friday that a Facebook user claiming to be a “cousin” of a juror in former President Donald Trump’s hush money trial suggested he had advanced knowledge of last week’s guilty verdict.
“Today, the Court became aware of a comment that was posted on the Unified Court System’s public Facebook page and which I now bring to your attention,” Merchan wrote in a letter to Trump attorney Todd Blanche and the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office.
“In the comment, the user, ‘Michael Anderson,’ states: ‘My cousin is a juror and says Trump is getting convicted … Thank you folks for all your hard work!!! ….’” the judge explained.
The story also reveals that “Michael Anderson” is a self-admitted “shitposter,” someone who uses social media to spread falsehoods and derail serious discussions on politics and other matters.
Hmmmm.
So the guy, if he is a guy, who revealed this supposed conspiracy to rig the jury verdict against Donald Trump has no credibility at all. He’s a lying asshole and proud of it—you know, like Michael Cohen.
It is only responsible for the judge to reveal this, and for an investigation to take place. This, in turn, will probably give “Michael Anderson” the fifteen minutes of fame he craves, and inspire more assholes to enter the wonderful, profitable, destructive field of “shitposting.”
Meanwhile, I saw MAGA types all over the web last night calling for the trial verdict to be abandoned based on this almost certain trolling effort, thus making themselves look like gullible fools, and confirmation bias victims.
What a freak Ethel Merman was! She was 68 when she performed that madly optimistic Anthony Newley-Leslie Bricusse song, one of my all-time favorites (Newley sang it better).
Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences announced that it will stop requiring a diversity, inclusion, and belonging statement as part of its faculty hiring process. Dean of Faculty Affairs and Planning Nina Zipser announced that the change was made because existing requirements were “too narrow in the information they attempted to gather” and potentially confusing for international candidates. Sure. This is a face-saving explanation, because Harvard’s DEI obsession has lost the staggering school alumni support, donations, prestige and credibility, and also because DEI is a fad that couldn’t stand up to long term scrutiny.
What’s Nakba? It is a pro-Palestinian framing of the forever conflict in the Middle East between Israel and the Palestinians. Nakba refers to the beginning, when the United Nations announced its two-state resolution of the Palestine conflict with Israel getting one of them, and the Arab states along with the Palestinians attacked the new Israel territory with the objective of making the Israeli state a single Palestinian state. Israel won, and that historical episode is referred to as Nakba, “the disaster,” by the Palestinians.
I view it as the equivalent of the die-hard Confederacy fans in today’s South calling the Civil War “the war of Northern aggression.” It’s a false and biased framing that justifies everything the Palestinians do and try to do to Israel (like wiping it off the map), including terrorism. It is the reverse of the more correct and honest Israeli framing, which is that Palestinians could have had their state in 1948, tried to wipe out Israel instead, and now reside in the mess of their own making.
Soon after Hamas’s October 7 terrorist attack (the hostages appear to all be dead by the way, which should have been assumed by now), the Harvard Law Review asked Rabea Eghbariah, a Palestinian doctoral candidate at Harvard Law School and human rights lawyer, to prepare a scholarly article taking the Palestinian side of the latest conflict. Eghbariah, who has tried landmark Palestinian civil rights cases before the Israeli Supreme Court, submitted one, a 2,000-word essay arguing that Israel’s attack on Gaza following the Hamas act of war should be evaluated through the lens of Nakba, and within the “legal framework” of “genocide.”
I suppose I should clarify that by noting that what the New York Times calls “extremists” are really “Americans who believe that organizations shouldn’t be aiding and abetting law-breakers and those who deliberately defy U.S. immigration laws.”
This Times story (again, I’m making a gift of it, because I pay the Times fees so you don’t have to) is a virtual cornucopia of fake news and progressive propaganda devices by the Times (but I will doubtless get a protesting email from self-banned Time apologist “A Friend” saying that it’s OK because some Times readers point out the dishonesty.)
Let’s see: the gist of the thing is that “after President Biden took office in 2021 promising a more humane approach to migration, these faith-based groups have increasingly become the subjects of conspiracy theories and targets for far-right activists and Republican members of Congress, who accuse them of promoting an invasion to displace white Americans and engaging in child trafficking and migrant smuggling. The organizations say those claims are baseless.”
I’m dizzy already:
“More humane approach to migration” means and meant “less enforcement of immigration laws against illegal immigrants.” Enforcing laws in general is considered cruel and racist by the 21st Century version of progressives.
“faith-based groups” is being used here to signal virtue and good intentions because that suits the writer’s agenda and that of the Times market. Being “faith-based” is considered meaningless, however, when the “faith-based” are opposing the killing of unborn children or objecting to being forced express support for same-sex weddings.
See that framing? Any objections to open borders is based on the “Great Replacement” conspiracy theory, sayeth the Times. That’s a lie by omission. Most Americans who object to letting illegal immigrants get away with breaking our laws do so because illegal immigrants shouldn’t get away with breaking our laws. I, for example, don’t care if they end up voting for Truth, Justice and the American Way. I wouldn’t care if they were all white, or albinos even. They don’t belong here. Let them get in line like they are supposed to. And the “human trafficking” stuff: this is a classic example of deceptive cherry-picking, making a position look ridiculous by only mentioning the bad arguments for it while ignoring the valid ones.
Sure, those claims are baseless. The claims that the “faith-based organizations” are aiding and abetting illegal conduct, however, are 100% true.
Major League Baseball’s absurd and self-wounding decision to lump all of the old Negro League season and career statistics in with those of its own players is impossible to defend logically or ethically. Ethics Alarms discussed this debacle of racial pandering here, three days ago. What is interesting—Interesting? Perhaps disturbing would be a better word—is how few baseball experts, statisticians, historians, players and fans are defending this indefensible decision or criticizing it. As to the latter, they simply don’t have the guts; they are terrified of being called racists. Regarding the former, there is really no good argument to be made. MLB’s groveling and pandering should call for baseball’s version of a welter of “It’s OK to be white” banners and signs at the games. Instead, both the sport and society itself is treating this “it isn’t what it is” classic like a particularly odoriferous fart in an elevator. Apparently it’s impolite to call attention to it.
— Citizen Free Press (@CitizenFreePres) June 1, 2024
On the Josephson Institute’s Pillars of Character, one of the values comprising the fourth pillar, Fairness, is proportionality. Proportionality is essential to perspective, and understanding te need to maintain a broad perspective is essential to fairness, a core ethical value.
When I first started watching that video meme above, my immediate reaction was, “Oh, please. This is ridiculous. Then I saw the pay-off, and laughed out loud. I would have laughed just as hardily if the two men had been reversed.
Being unable to appreciate good-natured, puckish satire when it is aimed at your favorite politician, party, elected official, organization is a sign of a closed mind and an absence of proportionality and perspective. That video makes both candidates look silly, and that’s just fine.
If you can’t see the humor, I feel sorry for you. And I fear you. You have lost all perspective, and that leads to fanaticism.
Just think: these are the people who run the high-priced institutions that are supposed to teach our rising generations critical thinking, logic and life skills.
Would you let this happen?
The University of California at Santa Cruz hired Amanda Reiterman to teach two 120-student lecture classes on classical texts and Greek history. Reiterman who holds a Ph.D. and has taught as a part-time lecturer at the university since 2020, was paid to design the course, do the lectures, and plan the discussion sessions. She recommended a former student of hers who had just earned her bachelor’s degree to be hired as her teaching assistant. Administrators began the hiring process and copied Reiterman…causing her to discover that thanks to a 2022 strike settlement after 48,000 graduate students, postdocs, and researchers in the University of California system walked off thee job to win pay increases and expanded benefits, many teaching assistants are earning more than lecturers, and in some cases, like this one, more than their supervisors and the instructors in their own classes. When Reiterman learned that her teaching assistant would earn $3,236 per month, $300 more than her own monthly pay, she quit. It was not about the money, she told the Chronicle of Higher Education, but the principle. “I felt like I could not teach a class under those circumstances.” Reiterman dropped out as instructor for one class and arranged to teach another class in a different department with fewer students and no teaching assistant.
Brava! No weenie she.
Why did no ethics alarms ring for these administrators? I suspect that when your entire sense of fairness and equity is being mangled and distorted by compensatory benefit theories and DEI cant, little matters like paying a subordinate more than a supervisor with far more experience and credentials just doesn’t resonate the way it once would have, before The Great Stupid spread its dark bat-wings across the horizon, blotting out the sun.
Decades ago, running a foundation where my supervisor negotiated salaries after I decided on who to hire, my first male staff member extracted a higher salary than his equivalent female member on my staff, who had been there longer. I immediately pointed this out to my boss, who agreed to raise the salaries of the women on the staff to the same level. I didn’t even have to argue with him: he knew immediately that it was the only just course.
It’s so disheartening. One has to fight, working in my field, not to conclude, “Not only is a majority of the public cripplingly stupid, ignorant and ethically obtuse, a frightening percentage of those who run our private and public organizations and institutions are also stupid, ignorant and ethically obtuse.” That way despair and madness lies.
I’ve been getting a lot of inquiries about the verdict in the falsely dubbed “hush-money trial” that came down with unseemly speed yesterday. As with other high profile trials where I have not been on the jury or in the courtroom, I don’t have a legitimate basis for much ethical analysis of the trial itself, including the competence of the attorneys or the judge. The Kyle Rittenhouse prosecution was an exception, because of the blatant prosecutorial misconduct in that case that was evident from direct quotes (and the defense’s ethics were dodgy as well).
The position that it was unethical to bring this case to trial as a form of what has been dubbed “lawfare” by critics is already locked in for me, and that is the most important feature of the case. As to the substance of the charges, the absurd number of counts in the indictment were obvious over-charging, an unethical prosecution trick but one that isn’t ever punished. The fact that Michael Cohen was the “star” witness against Trump should have, in my view, made the prosecution’s case insufficient to sustain a conviction on its face. Maybe others in historically significant criminal trials have been convicted “beyond a reasonable doubt” based on the testimony of such a throbbing habitual liar—the Lincoln assassination conspirators and Sir Thomas More come to mind—-but the former was a pro forma military tribunal affair where the defendants’ rights were severely restricted and there was never any chance that they would not be convicted, and the latter took place in England under the direction of a vengeful despot.
The fact that the verdict came down so quickly in what was a very strange and complicated case—with judge’s instructions to the jury that would take me a couple of days to read and understand—strongly suggests a jury that had made up its mind already. I believe that it was wrong not to sequester the jury: I did see a lot of the broadcast media coverage, and it was generally disgusting. The ugly cheerleading for a conviction on all the channels except Fox News, which sounded like an arm of the defense team, couldn’t help but bias the jury.
