Government & Politics

“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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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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