Government & Politics

(Pssst! Democrats! Grandstanding And Seeking The Approval Of Dummies Isn’t Governing…Or Ethical)

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

This is bad even in the rotten “Jeopardy!”category of “Bills that can’t possibly be passed and that will probably be over-turned as unconstitutional anyway.”

A witch’s brew of some of the most unethical and incompetent members of the U.S. Senate ( Senator Cory “I am Spatracus” Booker, Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.), Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) and Sen. Alex Padilla (D-Calif.), and it was co-sponsored by Sensator Mazie Hirono (D-Hawaii), easily the dumbest member of the Senate, Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.), Peter Welch (D-Vt.) and Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii) have entered a court-packing bill allowing the President to appoint a new Supreme Court justice every two years, with that justice hearing every case for 18 years before the law would limit his or her authority to only hearing a “small number of constitutionally required cases,” a smaller subset under the court’s “original jurisdiction,” such as disputes between states or with foreign officials.whatever that’s supposed to mean.

The Hill explains the alleged reasons for the proposed law as “ongoing concerns over court ethics and its increasingly conservative makeup.” The ethics issue wouldn’t be addressed by the law at all, and “its increasingly conservative makeup” is at once over-stated and not a valid justification for weakening the Court. Head dolt Booker made this inadvertently clear in his statement, as Democrats want to hamstring this Court because they don’t like its decisions:

“The Supreme Court is facing a crisis of legitimacy that is exacerbated by radical decisions at odds with established legal precedent, ethical lapses of sitting justices, and politicization of the confirmation process. This crisis has eroded faith and confidence in our nation’s highest court. Fundamental reform is necessary to address this crisis and restore trust in the institution.”

(Which party politicized the confirmation process beyond repair, Sparty? Which party has pursued the tactic of dredging up dubious accusers to smear nominees with unproven allegations?)

Whitehouse—boy, this guy is awful—added,

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Cartoon Ethics Quiz: Hamas-Israel Ethics Train Wreck Edition

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

The British newspaper The Guardian fired its long-time (over 40 years) cartoonist Steve Bell after he submitted what is being called an anti-Semitic political cartoon (above).

Your Ethics Alarms Ethics Quiz of the Day is…

Does that cartoon justify termination?

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The Wholly Ethical “Cancellation” Of Ryna Workman

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

Many NYU law students are indignant and outraged that Chicago-based super-firm Winston & Strawn has withdrawn its offer of employment to Ryna Workman. As president of NYU Law’s Student Bar Association, Workman issued a statement stating that “Israel bears full responsibility” for the long-planned terrorist attacks that left more than 1,300 Israeli citizens dead, including at least 30 Americans.

The law firm had every right and many valid reasons to reconsider its offer to Workman, who had worked at Winston & Strawn as a summer associate. In a statement, the firm said her comments “profoundly conflict” with the firm’s “values.” Yes, that, and there was also a substantial likelihood that having a terrorism-celebrating associate would cost the firm clients as well as risking tension among other firm lawyers. I would add that as a potential client, I would question the judgment of any law firm that would hire someone who showed such a reckless disregard for history, facts, and the impact of inflammatory rhetoric.

Like demented lemmings, other anti-Semites, race-baiters and critical thought-deprived NYU students issued a letter supporting Workman and condemning Winston & Strawn. The firm’s decision is an instance of the “systemic, concentrated violence” Workman has experienced since issuing her anti-Israel screed, the letter claims. That’s novel: deciding not to hire someone is “violence”! The letter’s signatories, including the Black Allied Law Students Association and the Women of Color Collective, declare that NYU is complicit “in the abuses of the Israeli government,” and condemns “the broader NYU administration for not protecting Ryna as a student and important member of our community.” How exactly can any school protect a loud-mouthed student from the consequences of her own foolishness? Oh never mind: people who reason like Ryna and her fans are always victims, and nothing is ever their fault. This is also a good reason not to hire her….or her defenders.

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I’m Shocked…SHOCKED!… To Learn That DEI Policies Harm Black And Hispanic Students!

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

Back when the Great Stupid was really picking up steam in 2020, the San Diego Unified School District (SDUSD), the second largest school district in California with over 106,000 students, announced that it would be overhauling how students will be evaluated as part of a larger “a larger effort to combat racism.” The school board voted unanimously to eliminate yearly grade averages. Meeting deadlines for assignments and classroom behavior would not affect academic grades. The district decided to de-emphasize discipline and penalties for cheating.

This crack-brain approach to education, essentially rejecting everything that had been learned over centuries about how students learn, was justified as way to eliminate the accumulated deficits of “systemic racism.” Soon “Diversity Equity Inclusion” budgets exploded and almost every school system jumped on board the latest fad. This was reparations, not education; no respectable research supported the theory that holding minority kids to lesser standards would help them succeed, but never mind: Fact Don’t Matter to ideologues and race-hustlers.

Now come Jay P. Greene and Madison Marino of the Heritage Foundation’s Center on Education Policy with a study suggesting that black and Hispanic students had “significantly greater learning loss during the pandemic in the school guided by diversity officers than those schooled in districts without one.” Minority students lost more ground than their white classmates, especially in math, the researchers found. “Racial achievement gaps went from bad to worse in these districts.” Of course they did: having an official directing policy who insists that black and Hispanic students not be held to the same standards of behavior or academic achievement as other students—must combat that structural racism!—was guaranteed to undermine minority student success.

The news gets worse: nearly half of the school districts with at least 15,000 students employ a chief diversity or equity officer, and the number is 89% for districts with more than 100,000 students, the study found.

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Comment Of The Day (1): “Perplexed Ethics Thoughts On This Video…”

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

Michael R authored the first of three Comments of the Day on this disturbing video, and I could easily add a few more: it was a terrific thread, and one that few other sites around the web could produce (if I do say so myself).

I must admit, as I have been featuring posts about my biases of late, that I have a massive bias against anyone who behaves like the woman above no matter what the provocation. It was suggested in the comments to the original post that this was staged. I considered that, and maybe it was, but in the end the ethics issues remain the same. Her conduct is still an accurate presentation of the reaction of the entire Woke World mob to one imagined offense after another, from Donald Trump’s election and Hillary’s defeat, to the replacement of swing vote Anthony Kennedy on the Supreme Court with Bret Kavanaugh, to the long-deserved reversal of Roe v. Wade and the rejection of affirmative action as the unconstitutional discrimination it always was. It is all hate, intolerance and emotional fury now, even from the office that is supposed to represent and serve us all….

That was as close to a Presidential primal scream as we are ever likely to hear. (Nope, I’m not letting that go. I will never let that go, and I will never forgive it.)

Here is Michael R’s Comment of the Day on the post, “Perplexed Ethics Thoughts On This Video…”

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This seems like the perfectly reasonable result of college campus culture from the last 30 years now demanding that society become a college campus. How many videos can you find of conservative speakers being shouted down by the dominant culture (the ‘tolerant people’) on college campuses? In how many cases was this tolerated by the administration, the police, the government?

After being trained by ‘higher education’ for decades that the way to deal with opinions that differ from the official orthodoxy is to shout them down, use bullhorns, and scream at them, why would you expect this not to happen?

This isn’t the only video of a woman doing this; it seems fairly common.

Here is how I see liberals dealing with heretical ideas in today’s society:

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The President Going To Israel Isn’t A “Remarkable Gamble”—It’s Stupid, Desperate, Irresponsible And Unethical

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

According to the front page of the New York Times, President Biden is taking the trip this week “to show unwavering support for Israel — after what officials say was the deadliest day in its history — and to speak with the country’s leaders about several urgent issues, including hostages held by Hamas and humanitarian aid to Palestinians in Gaza.” The Times calls it “a remarkable gamble,” but one should gamble, if at all, only when the potential reward is somewhere close to the anticipated risks, and sufficiently beneficial. There is no rational calculation that makes this absurdly risky journey a justifiable gamble by that definition. The President of the United States is risking the stability and welfare of the nation he was elected to lead to “show support”? Joe Biden can show sufficient support for Israel from the safety of a padded room at the White House.

The trip can only be explained as a Barn Door Fallacy operation, like the reported temporary retraction of the unfrozen Iranian funds that may well have given Iran the encouragement it needed to back the deadly Hamas attack. The President is grandstanding to avoid Democratic Party accountability after that botch before the attack, and for the disgusting, “let’s look at the context,” pro-terrorism and anti-Semitic response of so many Democratic supporters after it, notably on college campuses. It is a purely political move, and not even a smart one even from that cynical perspective.

Making the visit as futile as it is reckless is the undeniable fact that the Israeli government is not going to back away from its pledge to crush Hamas, with all the carnage in Gaza that objective implies. So Joe is putting himself in harm’s way, risking the horror of a Kamala Harris Presidency, to be able to tell Donald Trump that “at least he tried” in the debates? Oh, good plan.

Moron.

President Bush’s surprise 2003 Thanksgiving appearance in Iraq was also irresponsible grandstanding, but at least he was showing symbolic support for the U.S. troops he sent into harm’s way. Biden has no such justification for taking this risk. All I can conclude is that the internal polling at the White House regarding Joe’s popularity is so bad that Biden aides decided to appeal to his macho fantasies and convince our addled POTUS that the trip makes sense. And at least Bush didn’t announce the trip in advance, as Biden has. Brilliant.

The Israeli visit shows warped values, priorities and logic at the very top of our government. I would say that at least it’s useful information, but we already knew that about Joe and his party.

ProPublica (aka. Progressives) Believe That Foster Parents Should Not Be Able To Legally Intervene To Stop Birth Parents From Regaining Custody Of Children Removed From Their Care. I Don’t.

/ Jack Marshall / 17 Comments

I’ll go farther than that. I don’t believe that parents who have had children removed from their care for neglect and being unfit parents should ever be allowed to regain custody, if the original removal was justified.

To consider and discuss the ethical issue, read this article, ProPublica’s “When Foster Parents Don’t Want to Give Back the Baby: In many states, adoption lawyers are pushing a new legal strategy that forces biological parents to compete for custody of their children.” It’s too long and detailed for me to summarize fairly, and make no mistake, it’s an excellent overview of the ethical dilemmas and conflicts involved even if the author’s bias is clear.

The author focuses on a particular conflict between birth parents and foster parents in Colorado while also revealing the different approaches taken by various states. I learned a lot: for example, having adopted our son Grant as an infant in Russia in 1995, I exhaled a long “whew!” after reading this:

“…It has become harder and harder to adopt a child, especially an infant, in the United States. Adoptions from abroad plummeted from 23,000 in 2004 to 1,500 last year, largely owing to stricter policies in Asia and elsewhere, and to a 2008 Hague Convention treaty designed to encourage adoptions within the country of origin and to reduce child trafficking. Domestically, as the stigma of single motherhood continues to wane, fewer young moms are voluntarily giving up their babies, and private adoption has, as a result, turned into an expensive waiting game. Fostering to adopt is now Plan C, but it, too, can be a long process, because the law requires that nearly all birth parents be given a chance before their rights are terminated. Intervening has emerged as a way for aspiring adopters to move things along and have more of a say in whether the birth family should be reunified.”

The article attempts to focus on what the author apparently believes is an especially sympathetic couple (above) trying to regain custody of a child placed in a foster home:

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Comment Of The Day: “Abortion Confusion Ethics: What Should We Call This?”

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

This story, which I was hoping would spark more discussion here than it has so far, would be an excellent starting point for a question in a presidential candidates debate, or indeed any debate regarding the proper status of abortion in the law and our societal ethics. Right now, the negligent killing of two fertilized eggs that a married couple regarded, with considerable justification, as “their babies” is treated with less seriousness than if someone had murdered the family’s puppy. What is a fertilized egg, a zygote, a fetus, an embryo, and a newborn baby? It can’t possibly be that their true nature as human beings (or not) with the right to be protected (or not) under the law is magically altered according to what the mother chooses to believe, or what a legislature decrees…can it?

Here is James Hodgson’s Comment of the Day on the post, “Abortion Confusion Ethics: What Should We Call This?”:

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Negligent homicide by the staff, and strict financial liability for the corporation, are evident here, in my view. I know this sounds harsh to some, but so is the killing of an unborn child.

Over the past decade, my wife and I caught several errors in prescription fulfillment in our own meager regimes of pharmaceuticals. This happened at three of our previous insurance-preferred pharmacies. It is also reported anecdotally by a number of people I know.

Fortunately for us, we detected the errors before taking any wrongly prescribed drugs, and we learned to double-check everything, every time. (These errors also gave us more motivation to improve our nutrition and fitness in order to escape prescription drugs altogether.)

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Comment Of The Day: “Ethics Quiz: The Consequences For Endorsing Terrorism”

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

I am way, WAY behind in posting deserving Comments of the Day, and I apologize to all, both the authors of these excellent posts and EA readers who have not had the opportunity to read them. I’m going to try to post them in chronological order, oldest first, but don’t hold me to that: I have a sinking feeling that this COTD by Sarah B. came after one or more that I intended to post last week. Her comment (I hope I’m not misgendering her!) is actually one of many superb ones on this Ethics Quiz, including those by Michael R, Curmie, and Chris Marschner, among others. I highly recommend reading the entire exchange.

Now here is Sarah B.’s Comment of the Day on the post, “Ethics Quiz: The Consequences For Endorsing Terrorism”:

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Actions have consequences. Speech has consequences. We can talk all we like about the Freedom of Speech (or Religion or Right to Assemble, etc), but while the government cannot punish us for our speech, our fellow citizens can and will make judgements about us despite that.

There needs to be some determination of how to decide what to do with adults who proclaim stupid things in an institute of learning while respecting the value of free speech. I propose that for professors, lecturers, administrators, and those in positions of power,they required to give a two hour session on their position, open to all. The first 45 or so minutes would be reserved for what they have to say, with the remaining time being devoted to questions A moderator (or perhaps two of opposing positions) should be present to step in when the speaker does not answer a question. Ex. “Why do you believe that is is fair to intentionally target and behead young children and the elderly non-combatants?” “Well, Israel doesn’t belong there so it doesn’t matter.” Moderators can point out that this is not an answer and require a real answer to the tough questions before continuing. On the other hand, “Does this mean you deny the Moon Landing?” would be thrown out by the moderator as completely stupid. Of course, anyone, teacher or student, who tries the heckler’s veto or shouts down another person should be immediately escorted out. Professors who support the heckler’s veto should be immediately terminated.

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