Citizenship

Ethics Observations on Negative Commentary On The U.S. That A Critic Is Ethically Estopped From Making…

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

…or, “Shut the hell up!”

Ann Althouse today pulled the following quote from “Happy birthday USA. But is America’s revolution unravelling? When the USA turned 200, the nation came together as one. Fifty years on, what are the chances of the same thing happening under Donald Trump? A special series from The Sunday Times Magazine is dedicated to the 250th anniversary of the USA”:

“And beneath the bluster, Trump’s limited view of the American Revolution is very familiar… it reflects, like so much else about him, the mainstream culture of the Cold War era, when museums and films did indeed tell a relentlessly upbeat story of American accomplishment — in vivid contrast to the plodding drudgery of communism. The leftist radicals of the 1960s and 1970s dissented noisily from this cozy view, but the majority accepted it unquestioningly. Since then a more extreme view has taken root: those who see the revolution not as the start of an unfinished project but as a fixed source of authority, a 250-year-old set of final answers. But as the US blows out its birthday candles, does it still have the capacity it once had for political renewal, while retaining its founding principles? It is always easier to start revolutions than to end them. This is why so many Americans have believed theirs was superior to others: it had been brought to an elegant conclusion by the constitution of 1787. Americans, it seemed, had escaped the spirals of radicalism and authoritarianism that beset France, or Latin American republics….”

I’m going to take a bit of time off from having to fend off insults, protests and rationalizations from the alleged legal ethicists who are furious at me for raising this issue to point out why I couldn’t be less interested in a Brit’s critique of the U.S.

Althouse summed up one excellent reason concisely with her sole comment on the article: “That’s the London Times. The view from the losing side.” That losing side has seen its empire collapse, its culture overwhelmed and destroyed by unrestrained immigration, the right of free speech trampled, its women brutalized, and its economy disastrously mismanaged while the country stands as a cautionary tale regarding the false promise of socialism. Its Prime Minister just resigned, the sixth leader of the government since the beginning of 2016: a seventh will arrive before the year ends. Meanwhile, its revered royal family is riddled with scandals and embarrassments, for King Charles’ pedophile brother to the obnoxious expats grifting off of their titles in the U.S.

Where does this rotting country get off criticizing us?

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Not Surprisingly, “The Ethicist” Is Hoplophobic

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

I have a like-hate relationship with Prof. Kwame Appiah, the current proprietor of the New York Times Magazine’s “The Ethicist” column. The most credentialed of the many individuals who have manned the column (one was female) has provided me with fodder for many EA posts, often critical ones, and I am properly grateful. However, his embedded New York Times Standard Progressive bias is a constant problem for him (and me, as an ethicist observing his conduct), and his latest column is a particularly annoying example.

A friend of a senior married couple [Aside: the Times illustrator draws them as an inter-racial pair, though there is nothing in the facts to suggest that. This is just one of the thousands of little ways our media tries to surreptitiously embed its priorities into the culture. I feel my arm being twisted. Don’t you?] writes,

“I have friends in their 70s who have taken in their adult son following his divorce. It is going on two years now, and he is making no progress at finding work or moving out. Granted he has mental-health issues, like panic disorder and depression, but he lives rent-free, has a dog he does not take care of and berates his parents on a regular basis. His parents won’t even ask him to help around the house because they are afraid of his volatility. He can become extremely angry, especially toward his father. He also owns a gun. This last bit scares the heck out of me. His father is going to retire in a couple of months, and they are planning to sell their home and move out of state. They have told their son that he is not coming with them, and the son is upset about this. His mother is trying to put together family counseling sessions but is having difficulty finding something they can afford. As the deadline of the move approaches, I truly worry the son will shoot himself or shoot his parents and then himself. I’ve known this family for 35 years. Do I call adult protective services? Do I alert the police that a mentally ill man owns a gun? I am truly concerned.“

Fine. Be concerned. Give them advice. However, there is literally nothing in the friend’s narrative—and she doesn’t live with the family—that suggests that the son is going to shoot himself or his parents except the single fact that he owns a gun, which he has every right to do. Hoplophobia is popularly known as gunphobia, and a lot of American have it, especially women and progressives as well as Democrats and members of the news media like “The Ethicist,” and, obviously, “Name Withheld,” who writes most of the questions that get published in Prof. Appiah’s column.

I find it incredible that The Ethicist’s advice in this case includes,

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Public School Indoctrination Update: Here’s Another School That Should Be Plowed Under and the Ground Seeded With Salt

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

That this episode could occur anywhere is ominous evidence of just how determined our progressive-infested institutions are determined to indoctrinate rising generations.

Gabby Stout, a junior at Ardrey Kell High School in Charlotte, North Carolina, and part of the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools district, received permission from the school to paint a message on the school’s “spirit rock.” This is a large boulder on school grounds traditionally used by students to paint various opinions and messages. They don’t have to be wise or uncontroversial either: one such message was “Black Lives Matter.”

Stout painted a Bible passage and her support for the recently assassinated Christian conservative leader of Turning Point USA, Charlie Kirk. For reasons never explained (but you can guess, can’t you?) the school quickly reversed itself. Within hours the school officials ordered her message to be painted over.

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Madison Square Garden/New York Knicks Ethics [ Updated ]

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

The New York Knicks finally won an NBA Championship after over half a century, bringing to a happy end one of the longest current fan base frustrations in professional sports, but also a series of ethics messes arising out of Madison Square Garden.

There were some post-victory ethics botches outside of the Garden last night. I don’t understand why winning a sports contest is provocation for a riot. I get the drunken fool effect, but even so: there were no riots in Boston when the Red Sox broke their 86 year-long World Series blight, “The Curse of the Bambino.” Gee, I wonder how many of those Knicks fans will be sent to jail for long periods on the theory that they threatened an “insurrection.” After all, President Trump made it clear that he was rooting for the Knicks. Wait, that’s it! The rioting was Trump’s fault!

Here’s an incomplete list…

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And Speaking Of Swallowing Indoctrination Regarding Racist America, That Is How Brianna Turners Are Created…

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

What a moron.

Ethics Dunce Brianna Turner of the WNBA has announced that she refuses to wear the league’s special jerseys to celebrate the U.S.’s 250th Anniversary. “Whoever called for the WNBA all-star uniforms to have the USA 250 patch should have thought that through considering no WNBA players would have been free 250 years ago. The majority wouldn’t even have their freedom 100 years ago,” she tweeted.

This kind of intellectually flabby and historically dunder-headed calculation is typical of the sad victims of anti-USA hate, which is inflicted on them through devices and lies like the “1619 Project.” Hers is also the intellectually handicapped mindset that accepts the “reparations” propaganda: she is personally angry at ancient conditions that never affected her directly or personally.

Citizens who live in the United States of America derive many benefits therefrom. There is no professional women’s basketball in England, for example: Turner is a direct beneficiary of what happened 250 years ago this July. Without the second-rate basketball league that pays Brianna six figures, my guess is that her intellect would have her working at a diner or bouncing drunk and disorderly lesbians from gay bars rather than basketballs.

To be fair, there is no reason why Turner’s stupid historical observations on social media should have any more publicity than anyone else’s. Indeed, at least she isn’t a New York Times reporter posing as a historian or a DEI history professor or one of the anti-white racists elected to Congress. They and others like them make the same offensive statements about the nation they are so lucky to live in, but have sufficient credentials, however dubious, that many Americans take them seriously. You know. They are “experts.”

Come to think of it, I don’t know why what Brianna thinks about anything that doesn’t involve throwing a ball through a hoop is newsworthy. Why is Fox News, Newsweek, USA Today and other allegedly serious news sources reporting this? In fact, why am I writing about it? She’s not even a real celebrity outside of Las Vegas, which is where her team plays its inferior brand of basketball that any of the top 100 men’s college teams could trounce them in.

Never mind. She is a stupid and ignorant woman, and this is a wasted post and I wasted my time thinking about it.

But the all-anti-white–race-victim-propaganda all-the-time site “The Root’s” America-haters were impressed. It writes,

“Turner’s critique cuts straight to the core of an ongoing issue in professional sports, how many marketing campaigns prioritize shallow patriotism over historical reality. By forcing a league made up predominantly of Black and LGBTQ+ women to wear a blanket celebration of 1776, the league completely ignored the systemic chattel slavery and disenfranchisement that defined that era.”

Morons.

Hey! I’m back where I started!

Graham Platner, The Human Smoking Gun

/ Jack Marshall / 21 Comments
@theroguednc

A Maine voter said they would not support Platner if he had an Israeli flag tattoo.

♬ original sound – RogueDNC

There is no more mystery to be solved about Graham Platner, whom the Democrats really and truly want to inflict on the U.S. Senate, the nation, and the dumb people of Maine (if they vote for Platner, they are by definition dumber than planaria). As David Brooks explained on PBS, “The guy is a moral degenerate. The abuse of women, the sexting, the Nazi tattoo, I don’t even need to say anything beyond his Reddit posts, which are not in the past, by the way. He did that for a long time, abusing rape — people who might have been raped, diminishing rape in the military, insulting fellow military officers, calling himself a communist. It’s just — it’s a pathetic empty guy who postures in a way that’s kind of repulsive.” There was no rebuttal from his fellow leftists on the show because there is no rebuttal to be made. Jonathan Capehart, who had just endorsed voting for Platner (because Trump, and all Democrats are by definition better than all Republicans, so there!) could only mutter “I agree with you” and then go on to try to rationalize the indefensible, sounding, as usual, like an idiot.

This is the quality of the character of those urging Mainers to vote for the most repulsive major political party U.S. Senate candidate in recent history. Yes, even worse than Roy Moore (R-AL, 2017) and worse than Todd Akin (R-MO, 2012). [You remember Todd, don’t you? He was the genius who said that a woman couldn’t get pregnant from being raped, because her body would reject the sperm of a bad person, or something.] The woman in the video above, incidentally, is a journalist, Caroline McCaughey, who was at a Platner rally. Nice.

The “resistance” /progressive/ Democratic Party position is that Platner is worthy of a Senate seat over a moderate Republican, Susan Collins, because he might give the Democratic Party a Senate majority to do all of the irresponsible, proto-totalitarian things they crave, like packing the Supreme Court. They would take the same position if he said things as stupid as Akin or stalked little girls, like Moore. (To be fair, Platner wouldn’t stalk them, he would just text them photos of his penis.)

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Update on the Update: “Trump Derangement Update: A Conversation With a Sufferer”

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

This post, which attracted a surprising amount of traffic for a sleepy Sunday, was also the target of cherry-picking criticism from some quarter, because that’s what progressives, Democrats and the Trump Deranged do when they can’t debate fairly on the substance.

“Your friend never ends up on substantive outrages? Not one? Ever?” “Does that mean the discussion always ends up on non-substantive outrages and never substantive outrages?” The theme of the post was clear to anyone willing to consider it. A numbered point in the post also immediately became a current news flashpoint: I wrote,

4. The discussion keeps coming back to the Capitol riot and the fact that Trump keeps claiming that he “won” the 2020 election. My response is that it’s quite possible that he did win in 2020, though unlikely, and that nobody should care what he says he believes. (I suspect that Trump keeps saying this to drive people like my friend to the edge of madness.)

Now, see, let me be clear because there are readers out there incapable of fairly absorbing the issue. I regard the fact that Trump keeps saying that he won the election as non-substantive. It’s trolling. I regard his motivation for saying this very substantive. The Trump Deranged’s fury over his style and trolling technique is emblematic of how they (and the Axis that has indoctrinated them) are unwilling to focus on the serious, indeed dangerous, destruction of public trust that the Left’s assault on election integrity has inflicted on the nation. Here is a perfect example of where the reflex news media deflection to “Republicans pounce!” in order to distract the public from the unethical Democrat conduct that caused them to “pounce” is blazingly obvious.

When Trump walked out of the “Meet the Press” interview yesterday, the catalyst was his accusation that the primaries in California for Mayor of Los Angeles and Governor were rigged, just as the 2020 Presidential election was rigged. “Meet the Press” hostess Kristen Welker immediately, her face contorted with anger…

…took the Axis position: “You have no evidence!” But there is evidence. It is mostly circumstantial, but it is still evidence:

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A “Nah, There’s No Mainstream Media Bias!” Spectacular!

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

1. In a clip from a post-firing interview, the unbearable Scott Pelley actually says that nobody on the “60 Minutes” staff, including Pelley, thought that the long-time left-leaning Sunday magazine show was biased. Pelley himself is living proof that the show was biased. Here’s a brief montage of Pelley being what he thought was objective and fair over the years,

2. Former National Security Advisor John Bolton pleaded guilty of deliberately mishandling classified documents, a deal that requires him to pay a $2.5 million fine. He pleaded guilty because he was guilty. ABC and NBC, however, framed the news as President Trump getting “revenge” on a critic.

“He was a prime target of President Trump’s retribution campaign, said ABC’s justice correspondent. “And tonight, sources tell ABC News Trump’s former National Security Adviser, John Bolton, is planning to plead guilty to mishandling classified information.”

That’s classic deceit and false framing for partisan purposes, but also typical of how the Axis networks cover news regarding the Trump Administration. On NBC, the same game plan was in view. “Bolton was national security adviser during Trump’s first term,” the nightly broadcast began. “Then became a fierce opponent of the President. Now, sources tell NBC News he plans to plead guilty to one count of retaining national security information. For a year and a half now, the Justice Department has been pursuing cases against the people you see here, those the President believes have wronged him…”

The investigation of Bolton’s crime began under the Biden Administration’s Justice Department. Both ABC and NBC got that in at the very end of their reports, which is deliberately reversing the priority of the facts. This was by definition not a “retribution prosecution” by Trump because it began under Biden. That information belonged at the start. The fact that Bolton was a Trump critic is of interest but not central to the story. Placed up front, however, it “poisons the well.”

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Proposition: A Basic Knowledge Of US History Should Be Prerequisite For Running For Congress, Because It Is Incompetent And Irresponsible For Any Rep. To Be As Ignorant As Rep. Judy Chu (D-CA)

/ Jack Marshall / 16 Comments

A straight “Unethical Quote of the Week” or “Incompetent Elected Official” EA honor still doesn’t do Rep. Judy Chu (D-CA) justice. She is special. Well, I hope she is.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent was crossing rhetorical sword points with Rep. Judy Chu (D-CA) during the House hearing over U.S. military action in Iran. When Rep. Chu accused the administration of not caring about Americans’ financial struggles—which is, after all, completely irrelevant to the decision to defang a hostile nation seeking nuclear weapons that has been at war with the U.S. since 1979— Bessent asked her who was President of the U.S. during World War I. After a pause, apparently to check all the blank files in her memory banks, Chu answered “I don’t know.”

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Jill Biden’s Elder (And Former President) Abuse

/ Jack Marshall / 17 Comments
What an awful human being...

This story is too awful to contemplate. If you have a soul, maybe you don’t want to read it.

Former President Joe Biden was planted in the audience this week at a New York City stop on his wife’s tour promoting “Dr.” Jill’s memoir, “View from the East Wing.” Whoopi Goldberg was moderating the Q and A segment (How’s that career going, Whoop?) when President Biden wandered up to the edge of the stage and said “I have a question.”

“Joe has a question? Like you couldn’t ask it later?” the distinguished author said. Oh, nice! If you didn’t want Joe to embarrass you or himself, why did you place a mentally declining old man in a position where he might do so? Or was he having another “stroke”?

Joe, as he has been for years now, was oblivious. “Who do you love most in the whole world?” what is left of Joe Biden asked. “I love you most, Joe. Was that it? Was that the answer he wanted?,” Jill said to the group, talking about him in the third person as if he were a toddler. The 46th President of the United States stood and blankly faced his wife.

The shell of Joe Biden then said, “It’s overwhelming, isn’t it?,” whatever that means. At least he didn’t say “We beat Medicare.”

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