Government & Politics

Ethics Quote Of The Week: “George The Atheist”

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

“I’m not doing this. Enough is enough. Leave me alone. Period. I’m not doing this. Fine me if you want. I don’t care. Catch the car thieves and check-washers first.”

—-New York Times commenter “George the Atheist” responding to an article about New York City’s new mandatory food waste composting law.

God bless George. This is classic American civil disobedience, and nothing demands it more than useless and futile anti-climate change virtue signalling burdening citizens who have real problems to worry about. Big Brother thinks it is entitled to just keep piling more and more obligations, expenses duties, routines and annoyances on citizens, and will keep doing so, ratcheting up the basic burdens and expense of daily life in the process, until sufficient numbers of people stand their ground, say “No,” and reverse this toxic trend.

Sadly, there aren’t enough Georges in Democratic-run cities and states, not nearly enough. This is why one has to avoid piles of human fecal matter in San Francisco, and watch shop-lifers operate without fear in most major cities, and why so many woke school boards continue to program ideological indoctrination in the public schools. It’s also why I still see young people, not just elders who might (but probably don’t) have a valid reason other than being fearful Democrats, wearing masks while riding bicycles, jogging alone and driving solo in their own car. Most people—even most Americans, who live in an embedded (but weakening) culture that emphasizes suspicion of authority and reverence for personal liberty—are inclined to just knuckle under to the abuse of power, because they lack the integrity, courage and certitude to say “No.” They are weenies. Those who wield power rely on them.

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Pointer: Althouse

 

 

The “Axis Of Unethical Conduct” Really And Truly Does Want The Government To Block Speech, And Can No Longer Credibly Claim That It Doesn’t

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

The “Axis” is, in Ethics Alarms parlance, “the resistance,” or those who believe that the existential threat of Donald Trump justifies suspending laws, traditions, fairness, standards and the Constitution; Democrats, who believe that their path to permanent power must be achieved by any means necessary, and the news media, which has become the propaganda arm of both entities and an active participant in the restriction and control of political speech.

All three groups were horrified yesterday when Judge Terry Doughty, Chief U.S. district judge of the United States District Court for the Western District of Louisiana, delivered a sweeping ruling in Missouri v. Biden in which he issued an against what he called “the most massive attack against free speech in United States’ history.”

Doughty declared that “in their attempts to suppress alleged disinformation, the Federal Government, and particularly the Defendants named here, are alleged to have blatantly ignored the First Amendment’s right to free speech.” He restricted the Biden administration from communicating with social media platforms regarding their decisions on which content should appear online, explaining that “Plaintiffs allege that Defendants, through public pressure campaigns, private meetings, and other forms of direct communication, regarding what Defendants described as ‘disinformation,’ ‘misinformation,’ and ‘malinformation,’ have colluded with and/or coerced social-media platforms to suppress disfavored speakers, viewpoints, and content on social-media platforms.”

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Ethics Zugzwang And High School Theater

/ Jack Marshall / 16 Comments

I have no idea what can be done about this now, but it is among the saddest consequences of the culture wars and The Great Stupid, and, as is so often the case, the casualties are children….which means that in the long-term, the casualty will be American society itself.

Ethics Alarms has periodically chronicled the sagas of high school theatrical productions halted or distorted by various politics- or ideology-based complaints and protests, but I never focused on what a tightening strangle-hold on cultural education this phenomenon represents. The New York Times examined the problem here, and though the Times slant seeks to blame it all on conservatives (you know, those meanies who also want to “ban books”), the description of the problem is accurate and gloomy. A sample:

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Ethics Quotes For The Fourth: On Liberty, Freedom, and Democracy [Part II]

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

US-original-Declaration-1776

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.–That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, –That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.”

—-The Declaration of Independence

“It is my living sentiment, and by the blessing of God it shall be my dying sentiment, independence now and independence forever. “

—-Daniel Webster, U.S. politician and orator

“Liberty is the soul’s right to breathe, and when it cannot take a long breath, laws are girdled too tight.”

—-Henry Ward Beecher, abolitionist.

“Without an unfettered press, without liberty of speech, all of the outward forms and structures of free institutions are a sham, a pretense – the sheerest mockery. If the press is not free; if speech is not independent and untrammeled; if the mind is shackled or made impotent through fear, it makes no difference under what form of government you live, you are a subject and not a citizen.”

—- Senator William Borah (R-ID), 1917

 “If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.”

—-George Orwell
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Regarding “Woke”

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

I’ve been meaning to deal with this major example of progressive rhetorical legerdemain for some time, and like so many of my aspirations, it had fallen prey to my short attention span and disorganization. Today AM Golden, in reviewing “Old Indy” or whatever the movie is called, asserted that it wasn’t “woke” but said the meaning of that word was elusive.

It really isn’t. “Woke” began in ebonics (the politically-correct term for careless and defiant bad English embraced by the urban African-American community is apparently now “African-American Vernacular English” or AAVE, yet another example of the Left’s “it isn’t what it is” addiction. AAVE is just poor grammar that makes the speaker sound uneducated) and described someone who had seen the light (Hallelujah!) about racial injustice and how the United States is intrinsically racist. Rev. Wright, Barack Obama’s mentor, was preaching “wokeness” when he told his congregation “God damn America!”

Gradually white progressives appropriated the term and made it more general, so that while Black Lives Matter could claim the mantle of “wokeness” for a while (until its real nature as a Marxist, manipulative scam started dawning on sufficient numbers of observers), “woke” came to mean the enlightened realization that the entire progressive agenda, from abortion on demand to reparations to trans-athletes clobbering biological females in sports to income redistribution to crippling the economy while pretending we are preventing a climate change Armageddon to letting illegal immigrants swarm across our borders without consequences to declaring shop-lifting a non-crime to eliminating voter identity requirements to making “hate speech” a crime.…I can go on like this forever, but I’ll stop now…are all “on the right side of history” and undebatable, correct, good and virtuous, and anyone who dissents is, well,

…what Joe said.

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Joy Reid, Harvard, Althouse, And Affirmative Action

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

Straining to engage in her trademark “cruel neutrality,” esteemed blogger Ann Althouse stepped up to defend MSNBC’s Joy Reid and stepped in it, as the idiom goes, in the process. Ann defended Reid, claiming that she never said or implied that she was admitted to Harvard because of affirmative action.

“I think Ramaswamy is distorting (or, less likely, not hearing and understanding),” Ann wrote in part. “…She says she got high grades and test scores in high school, but she wouldn’t have thought to try for Harvard if Harvard hadn’t come out to her small, majority-black town and recruited. She was strongly encouraged to apply. The Supreme Court hasn’t changed the power of schools to recruit in places like hers. Reid never says her scores and grades wouldn’t have been enough if she were not black.”

Uncharacteristically, Althouse didn’t do her homework. In the MSNBC segment, Reid was basically regurgitating her blog post saying the same things, and that was headlined, “I got into Harvard because of affirmative action. Some of my classmates got in for their wealth.”

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“Curmie’s Conjectures”: Another Case from Yale, This One with a Twist

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

by Curmie

I had a post about half-written, talking about the fact that SCOTUS justices are nominated and confirmed (or not) primarily for their adherence to certain political principles rather than for their integrity, judgment, legal expertise, or temperament. 

‘Twas not ever thus.  In my lifetime, five SCOTUS Justices were confirmed by a voice vote and three others received all 100% of the votes. Another seven received at least 80% of the votes.  But of the current members of SCOTUS, only Chief Justice Roberts received majority support from Senators of both parties… and that was by a single vote.  Justice Thomas, who’s been around the longest, is the only currently-serving member of the Supreme Court to have been confirmed by a Senate controlled by the party not in the White House at the time.

This, I was about to argue, makes the process depressingly predictable: liberals over here, conservatives over there, with Roberts as the closest thing to an unreliable vote for “his side.”  I was getting around to talking about the allegations against Justice Alito: did he really do something wrong, or is furor mostly partisan in nature?  Answer to both questions: yes. 

But then, despite the predictable split in the two Affirmative Action cases, we also see Gorsuch writing a scathing dissent on Arizona v. Navajo Nation, Barrett and Kavanaugh voting with the liberal bloc on Moore v. Harper, and Jack saying pretty much what I would have said about the Alito case.  I may want to return to the general outline of my half-written essay at some point in the future… but the timing isn’t right, now.

So let me go off in a different direction and talk about a faculty member dismissed from an elite university for her political statements.  The headline on the FIRE article begins “Yale shreds faculty rights to rid itself of professor…”  Certainly we’ve seen a fair amount of that kind of fare here on Ethics Alarms.  What’s different is what follows in that title: “…who called Trump mentally unstable.”  Well, that sure goes against the whole “universities are cesspools of Woke indoctrination” mantra, doesn’t it?

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“They’re Here!!!” How Do People Get This Way, And Why Do They Now Think It’s To Their Benefit To Display Their Malady?

/ Jack Marshall / 36 Comments

I usually keep a watchful eye on advice columns, especially “The Ethicist,” Carolyn Hax and a few others, but have been a bit lax of late. Thus I missed this astounding letter sent to “Ask Amy,” which was bought to my attention by loyal reader and frequent commenter Jeff.

Hold on to your heads or erect signs nearby warning others that they are in a potential head-explosion zone…

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The Merchant Checkout Scam

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

Well, I feel like an idiot.

PetsMart asks me to contribute a few bucks to dog rescue organizations when I check out. Oh sure, why not? 7-11 has a jar where you can drop change to help Jerry’s Kids, or what ever that organization goes by these days. Hell, I’ll throw in some coins, at least when the jar hasn’t been stolen. These “oh, by the way, as long as you’re here” fundraising asks are so common—“Would you like to ’round up’ today, sir?”—and routine that I usually accede to them, and most of the time, don’t really know what I have contributed to.

That ends now.

Haggen, with 2,200 stores in 34 states and one of the grocery store chains owned by Albertsons Companies, including Safeway, Shaw’s, Vons, and Randalls, asks customers during checkout to donate to a pool of organizations promoting “diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives.” How many customers know what they are supporting? How many think DEI is just the acronym for the latest dread disease, like “COPD”? How many think about what they are giving money to when they are solicited in the middle of a basic transaction that one is seeking to complete as quickly as possible?

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Ethics Observations On The Left’s Unethical Three Freakout Day

/ Jack Marshall / 16 Comments

Yesterday’s clean and persuasive Supreme Court decision finally striking down racial discrimination in university admissions after decades of pretending it wasn’t the Consitutional offense it was was followed by two more sound Constitution-based decisions that were as important as they were necessary. All three were quickly attacked as “partisan” and “extreme” when they were neither, except to those who find the boundaries imposed by our nation’s traditional democratic principles overly obstructive to their schemes.

Finally ruling on a lawsuit brought by six state governments, the Supreme Court rejected President Biden’s insane $430 billion student loan forgiveness plan as illegal because it was never authorized by Congress. In a cynical, Harry Reid-ish strategem to buy the 2022 mid-term elections, Biden had announced a $430 billion gift to mostly middle-class and wealthy citizens who were unable or unwilling to do what millions of Americans in their exact situation had done: paying back money they owed for a benefit they had received. In many ways it was progressive irresponsible government at its worst. The Constitution gives Congress, not the the White House,the power to determine how federal funds are spent. As Illya Somin wrote yesterday, “If the administration had won, Biden and future presidents would have been empowered to use vague statutes to usurp Congress’ constitutional control over the federal budget. Moreover, because of the context for this case, it also would have allowed the president to abuse emergency powers for partisan ends.”

The “partisan” accusation was especially dishonest (Vox: “The Supreme Court’s lawless, completely partisan student loans decision, explained”) since that famous right-wing partisan Nancy Pelosi had endorsed the position of the SCOTUS majority just two years ago, saying, “People think that the President of the United States has the power for debt forgiveness. He does not. He can postpone. He can delay. But he does not have that power. That has to be an act of Congress.” Chief Justice Roberts included her statement in his opinion for the majority, but facts don’t matter. The increasingly unhinged progressive mob, aided and abetted by the mainstream media, pronounced the decision the product of an “extreme” conservative majority running amuck.

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