Government & Politics

Anatomy Of A Canadian Ethics Train Wreck

/ Jack Marshall / 24 Comments

Ugh.

Alberta premier Danielle Smith was photographed with a man wearing the T-shirt you see above. It was circulated on social media. Immediately, she was criticized intensely, and predictably, Smith immediately groveled. Her spokesperson said, “The premier didn’t read his shirt and obviously doesn’t agree with its message. She has always been clear that she supports the LGBTQ+ community and will continue our work to make sure they feel safe in our province.”

What’s going on here?

1. The guy, whoever he is, is a jerk. That’s not a T-shirt, it’s a protest sign, and intentionally confrontational. I have always agreed with the maxim that a person’s IQ is inversely related to the number of words on his or her T-shirt. This is a prime example.

2. Further proving that the T-shirt wearer is someone to be avoided: the back of it read, “Good people disobey bad laws.” No, in fact good people obey all laws, or if they want to engage in civil disobedience, violate the “bad law,” accept the consequences, and see how many people agree with them. Asserting that it is good to break laws you happen to think are “bad” is a recipe for societal chaos.

3. The premier lied, and obviously so. How could she miss all those words, unless she can’t read? The guy’s a walking billboard; you can’t stand next to someone like that and not appear to be endorsing his message.

4. Whoever drafted that statement should be fired. What is it that Smith doesn’t agree with? Should straight people be ashamed? It’s not the message that is objectionable but the in-your-face gesture. It’s like “It’s OK to be white”—the shirt’s purpose is to annoy and start an argument.

5. What does a T-shirt have to do with “feeling safe”? Safe from words? Should non-LGBTQ individuals feel “unsafe” when they see Pride parades, signs and slogans?

Spain Demonstrates Why We Have The First Amendment, And Why The US Must Protect It

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

Spain’s Parliament, in its wisdom, has declared dwarf bullfighting illegal. Not because the bulls are treated cruelly, mind you: oh no, that part is fine. It’s the small bullfighters the legislators find intolerable. (That’s a group of them rehearsing above.)

Comic bullfighting shows in which individuals with achondroplasia, a form of dwarfism, fight with juvenile bulls are now illegal. A new law bans “shows or leisure activities” employing a disability “to provoke public mockery, ridicule or derision.” As a result, the performers who earned their living putting on such shows are now forbidden from plying their craft, and citizens willing to pay to watch them can no longer do so. This is also embarrassing: the same law directs that “people with disabilities will participate in public shows and recreational activities, including bullfighting, without discrimination.”

Spain’s law arises from a failure to distinguish “Ick” from ethics, the same problem that has led some states to try to ban drag shows. There is no question that the First Amendment in the Bill of Rights would absolutely prohibit a law such as the Spanish dwarf bullfighting ban, and we should be grateful for that. The ethical principles embodied in freedom of expression include autonomy as well as intrinsic fairness and the Golden Rule validity of allowing others to have the same right to make their living as they choose without others deciding that because they wouldn’t make the same choices, those choices shouldn’t be available to anyone.

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“Nah, Colleges Don’t Indoctrinate Students! It’s A Conspiracy Theory!” Brown Replies, “Hold My Beer!”

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

The Washington Examiner reports that 40% of Brown students now identify as LGTBQ+. The Brown Daily Herald’s 2023 Spring survey revealed that 38% of students, more than five times the national rate, no longer consider themselves “cis.” The gay and lesbian population has increased by 26% and the percentage of students identifying as bisexual has increased by…wait for it!… 232%. Just eleven years ago, in 2010, only 4% of Brown University students said they were not conventionally heterosexual. Now it’s 38%.

Commenting on this phenomenon at the Victory Girls blog, Lisa Carr writes in part,

The new “cool kids” now are changing their names every other day, along with changing their identities to anything contrary to their biological sex. Joe becomes Joelene who is dating Mary who wants to be known as “Mike”. Mary is nominated for Homecoming King while Joe is the Homecoming Queen; both in their gender-fluid and ambiguous outfits. And yes, they are probably still wearing those filthy, ugly masks because society told them to stay scared. (But alas, don’t be scared to cut off your genitalia.) This is the new cult. This is the trend we are seeing in colleges but I would argue that this seed is being planted as early as elementary school….This is no longer about loving and accepting all. This is about subtle conversion by suggestion.

Apparently a Brown professor, Dr. Lisa Littman, argued that campus culture and peer groups were pressuring students into such epiphanies regarding their true sexual identities, and got herself fired for it. Continue reading →

New York’s Governor Weighs In To Support “Pre-Crime”

/ Jack Marshall / 17 Comments

“Pre-crime,” nicely eviscerated in the Spielberg-Tom Cruise film “Minority Report,” is now a popular concept among anti-Second Amendment activists. New York Governor Kathy Hochul (or, more likely, a ghost-writer with her approval) has issued an op-ed in the New York Times with the emotion-based headline, “The Supreme Court Case That Has Me Worried, for Survivors and for My State.” Anyone capable of reading it with their critical thinking skills activated should be able to recognize Hochul’s arguments as the deceptive and manipulative tactics they are.

Here we go…

Hochul: “…I’m so concerned about the outcome of an upcoming Supreme Court case, United States v. Rahimi, which next year will decide whether to uphold a gun safety law that protects survivors of domestic violence.”

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The Des Moines Climate Change Propagandist Weatherman Is Quitting. He Should Have Been Fired.

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

Poor KCCI-TV meteorologist Chris Gloninger is quitting because viewer criticism of his slots hyping climate change propaganda while he was supposed to be giving local weather reports became too unbearable. Well good, except that he should have been fired first.

“I started just connecting the dots between extreme weather and climate change, and then the volume of pushback started to increase quite dramatically,” he said in his interview with The Associated Press.

Except that’s not his job. He is a meteorologist, not a climate scientist, and isn’t qualified to “connect” the dots. Weather isn’t climate, and while climate change activists find ways to connect virtually any kind of weather to the climate change doom watch, that is not what people tune into weather reports to hear. For me, it’s in the same category as NFL players using games to protest social policy.

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Ethics Dunces, Sociology Dunces, Law Enforcement Dunces…Whatever: The California Reparations Task Force

/ Jack Marshall / 18 Comments

Try a mind experiment: if California’s ridiculous and racist Reparations Task Force wanted to exacerbate racial tensions as much as humanly possible while also making African-Americans seem as toxic to society as a KKK Grand Dragon could imagine in a fever dream, what would it be doing differently that it is doing right now? We know that the group is already recommending that millions of dollars in taxpayer reparations for slavery be handed out to the state’s blacks, even though slavery never existed in the Golden State. But wait, there’s more!

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Falsely Describing Bad Research To Advocate Irresponsible Policies Is No Way To Serve On The Supreme Court, Justice Jackson…[Corrected And Expanded]

/ Jack Marshall / 23 Comments

UPDATE: A critical Ethics Alarms reader informed me that in his view the text of this post was too similar to that of its main source, The Daily Signal, in an article by Jay Greene. Although I linked to the piece and also credited Greene with a quote, upon reviewing the post I agree that it included too many substantially similar sentences and phrasings. I apologize to the Daily Signal, Jay, and Ethics Alarms readers. I was using several articles in preparing the piece (including one from another source that was also extremely close to the Signal article), and for whatever reason, did not notice that I had leaned so heavily on Green’s phrasing. It has happened before over the past 13 years, though not often, and never with the intention to deceive. Thus I have revised the post; in the future, if anyone feels that an Ethics Alarms article does not properly credit sources or seems insufficiently original, the favored response is to alert me, rather than to accuse me in obnoxious terms of “plagiarism.”

Fans of affirmative action reacted to Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson’s depressing defense of racial discrimination by praising her remarkably hypocritical dissent in the recent 6-3 decision by the Supreme Court declaring Harvard’s and the University of North Carolina’s admission policies unconstitutional. Those who believe that Justices should base their analyses on law rather than group loyalties were appropriately critical. Both, however missed some really ugly trees for the metaphorical forest, as Jackson injected false statistics into her dissent. They were, of course—we’re used to this phenomenon—uncritically accepted and used in subsequent media propaganda condemning the decision.

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote in part,

“Beyond campus, the diversity that UNC pursues for the betterment of its students and society is not a trendy slogan. It saves lives. For marginalized communities in North Carolina, it is critically important that UNC and other area institutions produce highly educated professionals of color. Research shows that Black physicians are more likely to accurately assess Black patients’ pain tolerance and treat them accordingly (including, for example, prescribing them appropriate amounts of pain medication). For high-risk Black newborns, having a Black physician more than doubles the likelihood that the baby will live, and not die.”

Wow! Racial discrimination saves lives! The problem, or rather problems, are that as Jay Greene of the Daily Signal points out, 1) the claim that survival rates for black newborns double when they have black physicians attending is based on a misleading analysis 2) Even if the results of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences study were as Justice Jackson claimed, they are unbelievable and 3) even if Jackson had described the results of the study accurately, and even if those results were credible, they still wouldn’t justify the use of racial preferences in medical school admissions.

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Comment Of The Day: “Flagrant Virtue-Signaling Of The Century: Ben & Jerry’s”

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

There are more than the usual reasons to publish JutGory’s overview of the absurdity riddling Ben & Jerry’s fatuous July 4th Tweet exhorting the U.S. to “return” “stolen indigenous land” to the Native American tribes. The most unusual one is that WordPress has temporarily (I hope!) lost its damn mind, and has replaced all commenter names on the recent posts with the Borg-like “[1].” As a result, readers are unable to tell who wrote Jut’s comment, for which we should all be grateful.

The main one is that the oft-heard demand that the United States should return the nation to “the Indians” is historically, legally, ethically and realistically batty and ignorant, and drives me nuts every time I hear or read it. Jut concisely explains why it’s nuts historically and legally. He does not go into the aspect of the matter than is usually ignored by shallow thinkers like whoever wrote the Ben & Jerry tweet, which is that if the U.S. hadn’t been in possession of its current mainland North American territory in the 1940s, Nazi Germany would have overrun it and probably the world, and reduced the happy, innocent hunter-gatherers there to either slaves or ashes. Tragic as the current status of the tribes is today, it is a lot better than that. Similarly Hawaii, where there is no question that the residents were robbed of their islands, would have been conquered by the Japanese. If Secretary Seward had not bought Alaska from the Russians, all of us, including the Native Americans, might have been blasted into the Stone Age (where, admittedly, the tribes would have been more confortable than the Europeans) by the Soviets.

I am not exactly saying that Native Americans should be grateful they were over-run, but rather that, as JutGory correctly points out, you can’t turn back the clock.

Here is [1]’s…sorry, JutGory’s Comment of the Day on the post, “Flagrant Virtue-Signaling Of The Century: Ben & Jerry’s”:

***

Just another example of Twitter’s inability to facilitate an exploration of subtle thoughts.

Does the US exist on “stolen land”?

Sort of.

Apparently, Manhattan was purchased from indigenous people, just not the ones who “owned” the land. That would make the US a good faith purchaser for value.

But, really, that was a fraud perpetrated on the Dutch, or maybe the English. But, we got it from England fair and square in the Treaty of Paris. All of the original states were stolen from England.

We bought the Louisiana Territory from Napoleon. That was another big portion of the US.

And, the Mexican-American War, contrived as it may have been, was settled legally.

Then, there was Texas.

A huge portion of the US was obtained legally from other thieves.

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From The Res Ipsa Loquitur Files…

/ Jack Marshall / 20 Comments

Can’t handle criticism, can’t take a joke, believes that effective rhetoric that counters their assertions should be silenced.

In short, PETA reveals itself as typical of progressive activists in 2023.

Ethics Quiz: The Cruel And Dishonest Grandfather

/ Jack Marshall / 24 Comments

This is a different sort of Ethics Quiz. Usually we consider whether particular conduct is ethical or unethical, but not in this instance. The conduct this Ethics Quiz examines is unethical by definition.

Ethics Alarms last looked at the nauseating saga of little Navy Joan Roberts [Biden] in January, here. She is the 5-year-old love child (or at least one of them) of President Biden’s wastrel son Hunter, of laptop and Burisma fame. That means she is also President Biden’s granddaughter. There is no way around it: that’s a fact, established by science, which we know Joe worships.

This week, the lawsuit and paternity dispute regarding Hunter, Navy Joan and her mother, Lunden Roberts were resolved in a settlement that involved Hunter agreeing to a new level of child support and Lunden agreeing not to legally change Navy’s last name to Biden. Everything about this case reveals new vistas in Hunter’s creepiness, but really, we knew that, and the fact that a Presidential offspring is an embarrassment is neither relevant to assessing the character of the father nor especially unusual. What is unusual is Joe Biden’s cruel treatment of a little girl who has done nothing to deserve it, and that does reflect on the President’s character.

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