A genuine, respected and dear friend re-posted this on Facebook:
Dr. Kristina Rizzotto created that thing; she is apparently a professional musician, so her doctorate isn’t in philosophy, public policy, law, or, clearly, linguistics. Shut up and play, Kristina.
Like Popeye, that was all I could stands ‘cuz I can’t stands no more, and I finally posted, after a good ten minutes of self-wrestling, this in response:
“Ugh. I don’t even want to wade into this, but come on. DEI is not the equivalent of three ethical virtues in a vacuum, and sure, diversity is nice; not not necessary or necessarily beneficial: the NBA doesn’t seek out white and Asian players to make it more “diverse,” because diversity doesn’t win basketball games. “Equity” means fairness, but the nation is built on equality of opportunity, not guaranteed equality of results, which is what “equity” means in the context of DEI. “Inclusion” is also nice, if it means the absence of deliberate arbitrary exclusion. If it means inclusion for the sake of inclusion, who said that’s virtuous or sensible? Who made that rule?
“Dr. Kristina is ducking the issue with intellectual dishonesty. Inclusion should be based on merit. Excluding anyone who would qualify for inclusion on merit, based on their sex, ethnicity, skin color, sexual orientation or physical characteristics is per se bias and illegal discrimination, and playing word games to deceive the inattentive and gullible into thinking otherwise is unconscionable. Similarly, black lives matter, but Black Lives Matter is a racist movement and a scam organization. Do better, Dr.”
I feel constrained to post this after someone suggested that in the Bret Stephens essay I was bestowing Ethics Hero status on the Axis media’s top propaganda mouthpiece. The op-ed by professional illegal immigration romanticizer Isabel Castro (above) is a far more representative piece in a genre the Times is particularly fond of: demanding sympathy for individuals facing deportation entirely because of their own choices and conduct.
The title is a hoot: “How the ICE Raids Are Warping Los Angeles.” It is like a Chicago paper during the Prohibition and Capone’s zenith publishing a column called “How the FBI is Warping Chicago.” A sample..
I did not see this coming. Has any New York Times pundit ever written anything regarding Donald Trump that wasn’t pure venom? Has there ever been a Times opinion piece that said, “Wow! President Trump handled this problem perfectly”? If so, I must have missed it.
True, if any one of the Axis-biased Times stable of progressives, Democrats and the Trump Deranged were capable of such a composition, it would have to have been Stephens. Along with David Brooks he is one of the token sort-of conservatives on the staff usually displaying symptoms of the Stockholm Syndrome. Brooks is beyond hope now, but Stephens is at least unpredictable. He’s a weird sort of conservative, having opined once that the Second Amendment should be repealed, and he takes part in annoying transcribed anti-Trump snark-fests with Gail Collins, which reads a bit like what the old “Point-Counterpoint” would have been like if Shauna Alexander and James J. Kilpatrick were secretly boinking each other. (Gotta get THAT image out of my brain, quick.) Still, I am pledged to give credit where credit is due.
Today Stephens’ name was under a column headlined, “Trump’s Courageous and Correct Decision.” It begins,
The Democratic Party seems hellbent on self-destruction, but the Axis media burying, under-reporting and generally spinning its worse transgressions may slow the process a bit. This week, there was a scantly reported act by the party that cannot be defended—-if you have a defense to propose, please send it in—but it came in a week so saturated with consequential news both ethical and otherwise that I’ll wager most Americans missed it.
Senate Democrats refused to participate in the first Congressional hearing regarding the cover-up of former President Joe Biden’s mental decline while in the White House, the question of whether his “autopen executive orders” and appointments were valid, and the potential Constitutional breaches these represent. Senators Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) and Peter Welch (D-Vt.) attended the first Senate Judiciary Committee meeting on the topic this week. Then almost immediately Durbin, the ranking Democratic member, walked out in protest with Welch behind him, with a lame and cynical whataboutist call for the committee to investigate President Donald Trump’s deployment of the National Guard to respond to illegal immigration enforcement rioting in Los Angeles. (The courts took care of that one, Dick, despite the attempts of your party’s captive judiciary.)
Then Durbin blathered, “The Republican majority on this committee has not held a single oversight hearing despite numerous critical challenges facing the nation that are under our jurisdiction.” Desperately, he cited the assassination of a state lawmaker in Minnesota, now pretty authoritatively proven to be the act of a lone wacko, and last week’s handcuffing of Sen. Alex Padilla at a DHS press conference, when the grandstanding jerk was properly treated according to Secret Service protocols. “Apparently, armchair diagnosing former President Biden is more important than the issues of grave concern, which I have mentioned,” Durbin said.
[From your host:I held this excellent guest column submission for about a week, waiting for a propitious time to post it. JD Vance’s adventure on the platform, which I discussed here, was exactly the context I was waiting for.And it gives me an0ther chance to feature Bing….JM]
Anyone who doubts the uniqueness of the American Revolution need only to look to France several years later when revolutionaries stormed the Bastille and set up a Republic. As revolutions were wont to do, those who replaced the guys in charge eventually demanded that everyone follow their ideas in lockstep. Those who did not were accused of lacking sufficient revolutionary fervor and risked literally losing their heads. The self-righteous Jacobins who forced this pure ideology eventually devoured themselves as, again, revolutionaries are wont to do, until the head Jacobin, Robespierre, eventually lost his own head and disenchantment led to the installation of Napoleon as Top Dog.
That should have happened in the United States, too. Despite the passions of the Federalists and the Jeffersonian anti-Federalists, though some nasty words were printed and spoken aloud, no one was murdered for his lack of purity (unless you count Alexander Hamilton, which I don’t because that was less an ideological battle than a personal grudge).
Ever since talented-but-socially-awkward Elon Musk bought Twitter, turned it into X and antagonized all those people who bought his so-called climate-friendly vehicles, those same Tesla owners have flocked to every other faddish social media that promises 24/7 Trump/Musk hate in addition to freedom from having to be exposed to the opinions of those who disagree with them.
It was one of our illustrious commentators here (I do not remember which one. I apologize. It’s been three years and I’ve slept since then) who suggested that many of the Hollywood types would realize their mistake when they exchange 80,000 followers for 80. That person was right.
I have belonged to Facebook for years. I’ve tried Instagram but find it unwieldy and boring. I couldn’t help it, however, when one of my favorite performers made the Grand Announcement that he was headed over to the new Post.News in 2022, which promised conversations “moderated for civility”. It took ten days to get me onboarded and I found the place to be overwhelmingly progressive….and small.
Don’t get me wrong, there was a huge influx of members. Then nothing. Some of them even proposed that members try to make a positive platform there by building a community not based on complaining about the platform they’d just left. I heavily curated what I followed and then began contributing content on a daily basis: I recommended books on history that I’d read myself. I amassed over 30 followers over the next 18 months; the favorite performer barely broke 100.
Ultimately, though, it was not a sustainable platform. It folded. Once again, members were looking for places to hide from the world, including Favorite Performer, and were pulled into Bluesky. This time, I didn’t take the plunge.
A federal appeals court on June 19 extended its block of a Judge Breyer’s flamingly partisan order that directed President Trump to return control of California’s National Guard to Gov. Gavin Newsom, who was obviously determined to let pro-open border crazies harass ICE agents and riot across Los Angeles.
The three-judge panel for the U.S. Court of Appeals in the 9th Circuit issued a unanimous order, and one of the three judges was a Biden appointee! The roughly 4,000 National Guard troops can now stay in Los Angeles, to protect federal property and U.S. immigration agents, while preventing a replay of George Floyd Madness that the Mad Left would dearly love to see. Could a “Undovument Migrants’ Lives Matter” group be far behind?
As I have mentioned here before, I usually sample broadcast news by simultaneously watching CNN, Fox News, BBC America and MSNBC on the DirecTV “News Mix” channel, never staying with any of them for more than a few minutes because they all are unethical, biased, and untrustworthy and it drives me CRAZY!
Just now, I saw Wolf Blitzer (has anyone ever parlayed a cool name into such a long, undeserved TV career despite persistent mediocrity?) interview an “expert,” clearly another Trump-hating law professor. She opined that President Trump “might” be violating the Constitution ( “KING! FASCIST!”) by directing ICE to again focus their illegal immigrant raids on restaurants, farms and hotels. It’s a likely violation of the Tenth Amendment, she opined. “The Tenth Amendment reserves the policing power to the states.”
That’s funny, I thought. I don’t recall the Tenth Amendment saying anything about police, and indeed, it doesn’t. What it says is that “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.”
Like the Second Amendment, the Tenth was not the Founders’ most shining hour in terms of clear, unambiguous language. The Tenth continues to be a rich and never-ending target for the Supreme Court controversies, but SCOTUS did rule, in McCulloch v. Maryland, that there is a principle of implied powers where the federal government (Congress or the Executive) can exercise powers not explicitly listed in the Constitution if they are necessary and proper for carrying out its enumerated powers. Obviously the ability to enforce federal law would fall under that category, but okay ICE foes, take your best shot and see what SCOTUS says.
However, what the “expert” implied was that the Tenth explicitly included policing as one of the powers reserved to the state. Wolf, either as a deceitful accomplice or as an ignorant boob (I’m guessing the latter to give him the benefit of the doubt) just sat there nodding. Thus any viewer who wasn’t moved to check the Bill of Rights (I’m guessing that’s 99.9% of CNN’s audience) was left with the false impression that President Trump is being a dictator again by directing a Federal Agency.
Let’s see: fake news, misinformation, partisan spin, deceit. Take your pick. No wonder the Axis was able to gull thousands of citizens into wasting time on “No Kings” day.
Rep. Hank Johnson, the Democratic Congressman who famously expressed the fear that “Guam might tip over” because of all the U.S. military equipment on the island, filed his ‘‘Transparency and Responsibility in Upholding Standards in the Judiciary Act’ (or the ‘‘TRUST Act’’ to its friends). The bill aims to deal with a serious ethics problem in the judiciary, one of many.
Under the Judicial Conduct & Disability Act, the law that supposedly governs judicial discipline, investigations into misconduct are terminated when a judge retires, resigns, or dies. How convenient! The mere departure of a judge from the bench is enough to halt any inquiry into alleged abuses of their office, misconduct, even crimes. This system shields bad judges from accountability
With life tenure and unchecked power, judges have lots of opportunity to engage in outrageous behavior, and many do. Berating and demeaning (or sexually harassing) law clerks, forcing them to watch pornography, firing clerks on a whim, and judged concealing serious cognitive decline are among the offenses that have resulted in zero consequences for judges in recent years: all a judge needs to do to keep his or her pension and reputation is to quit. If they are not senile, they can often nab high-paying jobs with law firms.
This would be an Unethical Quote of the Week if there were any reason to believe what the New York Times says about President Trump, and if the Times didn’t make equally unethical quotes every day.
“…The political right, including President Trump, deserves substantial blame. Yes, he has led a government crackdown against antisemitism on college campuses, and that crackdown has caused colleges to become more serious about addressing the problem. But Mr. Trump has also used the subject as a pretext for his broader campaign against the independence of higher education. The combination risks turning antisemitism into yet another partisan issue, encouraging opponents to dismiss it as one of his invented realities.
Even worse, Mr. Trump had made it normal to hate, by using bigoted language about a range of groups, including immigrants, women and trans Americans. Since he entered the political scene, attacks on Asian, Black, Latino and L.G.B.T. Americans have spiked, according to the F.B.I. While he claims to deplore antisemitism, his actions tell a different story. He has dined with a Holocaust denier, and his Republican Party has nominated antisemites for elected offices, including governor of North Carolina. Mr. Trump himself praised as “very fine people” the attendees of a 2017 march in Charlottesville, Va., that featured the chant “Jews will not replace us.” On Jan. 6, 2021, at least one rioter attacking the Capitol screamed that he was looking for “the big Jew,” referring to Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, Mr. Schumer has said.”
It gives me great pleasure to know that Times boot-licker ” “A Friend,” the long-banned EA commenter who has set a nearly unbreakable record for unauthorized posts here, most bleating about how unfair I am to the noble Times, will be desperately searching for a way to rationalize that verbal offal without having to admit, “Okay, the Times editors are partisan hacks.”
The military parade planned today in my sort-of current hometown city, Washington, D.C., creates no valid basis for criticism…well, except for the Trump Deranged, the foes of the U.S. military, the pacifists (aka.”the deluded”) and in general the same people who find expressions of American patriotism distasteful because they detest the United States, its core values (not socialist or communist) and those who are and have been prepared to defend it.
My father, were he alive and not 105 years old which is what he would have been today if he hadn’t died in 2009, would have gone to see the parade, and not been particularly diplomatic with anyone who protested or criticize it. Dad was U.S. Army through and through (he was also a Boy Scout and family man through and through). He would get up and march all by himself at Fourth of July concerts on the Mall when they played a Sousa march. He would hang out at the W.W.II Memorial wearing his medals, so visiting school groups could see, meet and talk to “a real Second World War Army veteran.”
Yes, Jack Marshall, Sr. would have loved seeing, and, if possible, being a part of President Trump’s grand parade today to celebrate the 250th anniversary of the U.S. Army. Making veterans young and old feel proud and appreciated by their country, its Capital and its President is, all by itself, justification for a parade.
Even if this were not the Army’s birthday, Flag Day alone would justify a parade today. The nation has some apologetic grovelling to do after the many examples of disrespect and slander over the decades by such despicable creeps as Colin Kaepernick and his pack of kneelers.
Best of all, from my perspective, is the fact that this is, absurdly, another Pride Month, which features parades and other “Look at us! Aren’t we great?” exercises of narcissism based on how one happens to have sex and whom with. In contrast, veterans really have done something worth celebrating and honoring, and they stand for values and ethics: those who cheer Pride parades and virtue-signalling are ethically estopped from saying a single discouraging word about today’s parade.
Nevertheless,
Your Ethics Alarms Ethics Quiz of this July 14th is…
Is it responsible and prudent for President Trump to be holding this parade today?
Ethics Alarms 