Government & Politics

A Symptom of Creeping Totalitarianism: The Left’s Embrace of Newspeak

/ Jack Marshall / 20 Comments

In the appendix to his novel “1984,” George Orwell explained the principles of “Newspeak,” the mandated lexicon of Big Brother’s dystopian society. The idea behind Newspeak was to prevent free thought and speech by limiting the public’s vocabulary to the point that “wrongthink” was impossible. Maybe nobody reads “1984” any more, and maybe the public is just as ignorant, apathetic and gullible as our political elite count on its members being. It still amazes me that the proliferation of “Newspeak” in the media and political discourse doesn’t create appropriate awareness that the U.S. is being pushed into a totalitarian regime. There is active censorship of certain words and ideas because our Dark Lords think they will upset us (or risk undermining partisan cant). Abortion? What’s that? There is only “reproductive health.” Sex-change operations and hormone treatment for minors? What are you talking about? We have “gender-affirming care.” There’s no illegal immigration, just “newcomers,” and you always want to welcome newcomers!

And so on.

Some words are so upsetting that the news media literally won’t publish them even if a story can’t be understood as a result. Yesterday Boston Red Sox star Jarren Duran, having a rough game, was taunted by a fan and caught on a live mic retorting, “Shut up, you fucking fag!” The Boston papers, however, couldn’t let their readers know what the outfielder said, because it might upset them. So the statement was published as “Shut up you (expletive) (expletive.)”

This is the Orwellian culture progressives are slowly but surely constructing for us, if we let them.

There is no apparent stopping place on the slippery slope. The Museum of Pop Culture in Seattle, one of our most left-addled communities, has an exhibit on the rock band Nirvana that informs visitors that the band’s leader, Kurt Cobain, “un-alived himself at 27.”

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From a Cornucopia of Disturbing Ethics News, Which Story Shall We Start the Week With Today? How About This One…

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

Accountability!

Guess what company was just awarded a $2.56 billion contract from the U.S. Air Force? Why, Boeing, of course! The fact that the aircraft company’s corruption and incompetence have been almost continuously in the news for years now, that it finally dismissed its lying CEO recently and that the company currently has NASA astronauts trapped in outer space appears to trouble the United States government not one bit. (Here is the first Boeing story posted about here on Ethics Alarms in 2024.)

The contract is for the production of two rapid prototype E-7A Wedgetail AEW&C (Airborne Early Warning & Control) aircrafts, similar to the one pictured above. I’m sure it will reassure you to learn that the Wedgetail is based on Boeing’s 737 design that has been working out so well lately.

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Look! Now the Secret Service Is Violating the Third Amendment!

/ Jack Marshall / 18 Comments

Gee, will somebody be fired now? Oh, probably not.

The Berkshire Eagle reports that while the U.S. Secret Service was protecting Vice President Kamala Harris’ during her July 27 visit to Pittsfield, Massachusetts, its agents used Alicia Powers’ hair salon, Four One Three Salon at 54 Wendell Avenue, as a comfort station without her permission. They taped over a security camera on the building’s back porch, broke into her establishment, used the bathroom, ate the mints on the counter and left without cleaning up or locking the back door.

After the Secret Service conducted a security sweep of the building in preparation for Harris’s appearance, Powers went to Cape Cod for a scheduled vacation. On the Saturday morning of Harris’s event, Powers’ phone alerted her at the Cape that there was activity on the salon’s back porch. A female agent had “walked around the porch, walked around the side of the building and then popped back up on the porch, grabbed the chair, hopped up and taped [over] the camera,” Powers said, explaining what her security cameras showed. “[The tape] blacked out the camera completely.”

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Stop Making Me Defend the Hypocritical, Lying, Crypto-Totalitarian Democrats!

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

This post is very close in objective and perspective to this one, but the principle bears emphasizing. There was nothing unconstitutional about President Biden being persuaded, forced, extorted or threatened into taking himself off of the top of the Democratic ticket for the November election. The conservative media persists in saying otherwise, calling it a coup, which is ridiculous, so much so that it undermines the credibility of the pundits making the charge. As I wrote in the post just three days ago,

“That’s politics. Nobody complained that Richard Nixon being persuaded to resign rather than fight through an impeachment was unconstitutional, because it wasn’t. For leaders of the GOP to meet with Nixon and say, “Step down now, for the good of the party, the nation and yourself,” was responsible, and the only course available in a terrible situation. The same was true for Biden.”

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Ethics Quiz: The Border Humanitarian

/ Jack Marshall / 30 Comments

I am having a hard time with this one.

This week the New York Times and other publications gave a hero’s send-off to Eddie Canales, who died on July 30 at the age of 76. No doubt about it, he was a caring, selfless, compassionate man.

Unfortunately, his caring and compassion were applied to assist those seeking to break U.S. law. From the Times obituary:

For over a decade, Mr. Canales placed dozens of water stations — giant blue plastic barrels marked “Agua” filled with gallon water jugs — along the region’s routes for migrants evading a checkpoint on U.S. Route 281, about 70 miles north of the border with Mexico. The migrants, who are usually led (and sometimes abandoned) by smugglers, known as “coyotes,” leave the main road and undertake a perilous journey through featureless scrub and bush to evade the Border Patrol.

Some don’t make it. Those who fail succumb to severe dehydration, hunger and exposure to the unforgiving elements in a semi-desert where temperatures can easily reach 100 degrees in the summer and drop below freezing during the winter. Mr. Canales led a campaign to recover, identify and ensure proper burials for the migrants’ remains. The mission required forcefulness and tact. The land is private and belongs to South Texas ranchers, many indifferent or hostile. Some have created armed posses dressed in military gear to hunt up the migrants and turn them over to the authorities, as shown in a trenchant 2021 documentary about Mr. Canales’s work, “Missing in Brooks County.”

…Mr. Canales successfully placed more than 170 water stations across seven counties, the outposts recognizable from afar by flags with a red cross flown high….

Your Ethics Alarms Ethics Quiz of the Day is….

Is it ethical to honor someone for intentionally facilitating the efforts of others to violate U.S. law?

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Comment of the Day: “Accountability? What’s Accountability? Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle Still Has Her Job…”

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

I have neglected Comments of the Day of late I know, and I am sorry about that. There have been many excellent comments, and also many I have not had time to read carefully: the responses to the “What do you believe?” post alone generated many strong COTD candidates (and they are still coming in).

I might as well start with a comment I said I would post under the designation three weeks ago, and whiffed: Michael R.’s brief arguing that the Secret Service’s epic botch in Pennsylvania that only avoided getting Donald Trump killed by the intervention of moral luck was no accident.

Is the EA post that inspired Michael moot? After all, Kim Cheatle finally resigned after the indignity of having Congress members of both parties tell her to. However, the information that has been drip, drip, dripping out about the near-assassination has not disproved Michael’s thesis; if anything it bolsters his argument.

Ultimately, the question, as it so frequently does in the Age of the Great Stupid, comes down to Hanlon’s Razor: Is it intentional malice, or is it incompetence? The COTD concludes, “To cling to an incredibly unlikely incompetence argument in light of a much more likely explanation is only required if you don’t want to acknowledge something you are unwilling to accept.”

Maybe, but I will still cling even while admitting that other recent Hanlon’s Razor mysteries that have been popping up (“Did Democrats and the media just miss the fact that Joe Biden was a proto-vegetable because they are lazy, biased and inept, or did they deliberately participate in a conspiracy to deceive the American people ‘to save democracy’?” is one obvious example) demand the malice label.

Here’s Michael R’s Comment on the Day on the post, “Accountability? What’s Accountability? Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle Still Has Her Job, and Only the Prominence of a Confederacy of Ethics Dunces Can Explain That.”

***

You have to make a lot of hand wringing arguments to state:

(1) They didn’t put snipers on the roof that THEY identified as a threat.

(2) They didn’t secure the building despite the threat of the roof.

(3) They didn’t notice the guy on the roof despite the fact that the crowd had been taking pictures of him for 25+ minutes.

(4) They let a 20 year old kid drive up, unload a ladder, climb onto the roof spread out his blanket, assemble the rifle and take 7 or 8 shots accidentally. That is the most generous assessment. If THEY left the ladder to the roof there for access, it is worse.

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Weekend Ethics Update, 8/10/24: Paul Harvey and Other Alarms

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

That’s a famous segment from Paul Harvey’s radio show, unearthed by Citizens Free Press. It’s fascinating in retrospect and worthy of reflection no matter what your political orientation may be. I place it in the same category as “A Clockwork Orange” and “Network,” commentaries that seemed dystopian and extreme when they first appeared, but that when viewed now are disquietly familiar. The date makes Harvey’s commentary particularly interesting, for 1964 was the cusp of the Sixties, right before its tornado winds blew traditional values and American respect for its institutions into tiny pieces, never again to be assembled quite as securely again.

Harvey was a proud conservative, of course: many of his beliefs today are considered Cro-Magnon. He was not responsible for the video, which engages in several cheap shots; the gay couple from “Modern Family,” for example, don’t deserve their appearance here: it was a loving same sex marriage between two kind men who were loving parents (and the least strange characters in the show). Nevertheless, Harvey was prescient in many ways, unfortunately for all of us.

1. How do PolitFact’s partisan hacks look at themselves in the mirror? The most biased and dishonest of all the factchecking organizations—and that’s quite a distinction—was at it again this week as it joined the effort to pretend Kamala Harris isn’t what she is.

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A “Great Stupid” Court Case SO Stupid That It Makes “The Great Stupid” Look Almost Smart…

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

That crude, ambiguous drawing above got a first grader—we’re talking six-years-old here—suspended. That’s almost all you have to know for your head to explode if it is properly wired.

The Ethics Villains and Dunces are so thick in this fiasco you could use it to lay bricks. I’m almost embarrassed to tell the story, which I first saw at Reason…

In March of 2021, a first grader referred to as “B.B.” ” drew a picture we are told was intended to show people of different races, representing “three classmates and herself holding hands.” (I’d save the money the family was planning on spending on art school for B.B., if that was their intent.) Above the drawing, B.B. wrote “Black Lives Mater” (Latin!) with the words “any life” stuck in-between the slogan and the jelly beans, or whatever they were. B.B. then gave the drawing to a black classmate, as what B.B. testified was intended as a friendly gesture. But the classmate either ratted out B.B. or the principal was told about it by the teacher, or something (because school administrators don’t have anything better to do than to police the political correctness of kids’ drawings).

The school’s principal, Jesus Becerra, admonished B.B., saying that the drawing was “inappropriate.” B.B. was ordered to apologize to her classmate, prohibited from drawing any more pictures in school, and prevented from going to recess for two weeks.

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Incompetent Former Elected Official of the Month: Ex-North Dakota State Senator Ray Holmberg (R-Hall of Shame)

/ Jack Marshall / 26 Comments

Be proud, Republicans!

How do creeps like this get elected? Never mind: the question is futile. “Incompetent” doesn’t quite do Holmberg justice, either.

Ray Holmberg, a powerful GOP state senator served in the North Dakota Senate for 45 years, representing Grand Forks. He resigned in 2022 as a consequence of his interesting and expensive hobby. He admitted in federal court yesterday that he liked to take trips to Europe so he could have sexual relations with children.  “The boys rent at around $60 (sex is extra),” Holmberg wrote in an email to a friend using an alias. Good to know!

Holmberg traveled to Prague 14 times between 2011 and 2021 to purchase sex and other intimate contact with boys under 18. Some of the these trips were paid for with taxpayer money. Now that was just careless: I told you he was incompetent. Holmberge resigned after reaching the pinnacle of his power as North Dakota Senate Appropriations Committee chair because he was the target of a federal investigation into child pornography and traveling for sex with children.

A search of his home under a federal warrant had uncovered incriminating emails. The age of consent in the Czech Republic is 15, but U.S. law forbids travel for sex with adolescents under the age of 18 whether it is legal in the locale or not.  What do you want to bet that U.S. libertarians think Holmberg is a victim of excessive government interference with personal liberties, since he broke no laws in his man-boy sex playground?

When an elected official is discovered to be this despicable, disgraceful and untrustworthy, the party that nominated him should have to suffer some kind of penalty, and a more serious one if it is determined that the party knew or should have known how bad its representative was. (Hi there, George Santos!) Maybe then parties will start taking their responsibilities to the public seriously.

A candidate for high state or national office should have to endure background checks as stringent as those one must undergo for positions requiring national security clearance.

Good To Know: Major League Baseball Demands More Accountability Than The U.S. Government.

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

The Chicago White Sox announced this morning that manager Pedro Grifol has been fired. “As we all recognize, our team’s performance this season has been disappointing on many levels,” general manager Chris Getz said in a statement within this morning’s press release. “Despite the on-field struggles and lack of success, we appreciate the effort and professionalism Pedro and the staff brought to the ballpark every day. These two seasons have been very challenging. Unfortunately, the results were not there, and a change is necessary as we look to our future and the development of a new energy around the team.”

Ya think? Under Grifol, the White Sox just finished tying the all-time American League record for consecutive losses at 21. He leaves with the third worst winning percentage of any manager in Major League history who has managed more than a single season. But believe it or not, his two and a two thirds-season tenure at the helm of the ChiSox was even worse than those stats indicate.

Last season, Keynan Middleton publicly criticized the White Sox’ clubhouse culture after he was traded to the Yankees. The pitcher said that there were “no rules” and “no consequences;” he said he knew of instances of “rookies sleeping in the bullpen during games” and players skipping team meetings and fielding drills. Veteran pitcher Lance Lynn was asked if Middleton’s comments were just the complaints of a disgruntled ex-, and he said that Middleton was “not wrong.” This year there were reports that the White Sox had a “fractured” clubhouse that wasn’t helped any when Grifol told his players that they would be remembered as the worst team in MLB history if they didn’t shape up. One player told a local sportswriter, “It’s been really tough in there. Pedro is a really good guy, just not the man for the job.”

So he was fired. That’s what’s supposed to happen to the leader of an organization that falls flat on its metaphorical face with terrible consequences. Was the White Sox losing all those games—nobody expected the team, which is a re-building mode, to be good this season, just not so spectacularly bad—as spectacular an organizational failure as, just to pick a random example out of the air, the Secret Service? Nobody has been fired for its astounding incompetence in Butler, Pa., although many culprits have been identified. Nobody has been fired from a leadership position during the entire Biden Administration, although the culture of incompetence is throbbingly obvious. (I guess Joe himself comes the closest to having been fired.)

In an essay on substack, conservative law professor and blogger Glenn Reynold sees the culture rotting from the head down:

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