That was the President of the United States, not just a grown man but the democratically elected leader of our government, in response to the question posed by George Stephanopolos last night in the interview designed to calm American fears that Joe Biden is not capable of doing his job.
How diminishing, damning, desperate and depressing.
Nah, there’s no mainstream media bias! Once again, I am resolving to ding any commenter who comes here to argue that the news media is, as that damning headline and banner has the nerve to suggest by the “Support” button, “Independent Fact-based Journalism.”
The White House’s reliance on today’s pre-taped [!!!!], pitifully short (30 minutes? Seriously?) Biden interview with Democratic Party operative George Stephanopoulos to put everyone at ease is more flaming evidence that this administration is convinced that the public is too stupid to metaphorically come out of the rain. So what if Biden can get through a single, carefully planned interview with a friendly, indeed complicit, talking head? That interview last week was signature significance. A trustworthy, fit leaders doesn’t have a “bad night” like that, even once. Equating not having a “bad night” once with the significance of having one is so mild-meltingly stupid that it competes vigorously with the other ridiculous attempts to minimize the epic irresponsibility of Biden running for a second term in the White House. “So he babbled and froze and faded out and gaped like a grouper: He doesn’t always do that!” This is like arguing, “So he had a massive heart attack—he doesn’t always have heart attacks!” And the news media is actually running with this talking point like it isn’t the stupidest thing making making Kamala Harris Vice-President.
[UGH! I just saw this disgraceful “It isn’t what it is” piece. How can these hacks look themselves in the mirror?]
NOTICE of CORRECTION: For some reason, that link was mistakenly to the debate transcript. That wasn’t where it was supposed to go, though the transcript is also infuriating—check Biden’s worst answer, the one that ends with “we beat Medicare.” The transcript makes it seem like Biden’s answer was half-comprehensible, which it wasn’t. At all. But the linked article is to a Baltimore Sun column [“Biden’s debate performance a B-, not a bomb”] where the shameless tool of a gaslighter blames the whole disaster on Biden’s alleged “stutter.”
Incidentally, is anyone working today? I am, but it sure seem like I’m the only one….
Are there really so few genuine ethics dilemmas to discuss that Prof. Appiah, aka.”The Ethicist,” has to resort to answering dumb questions like this? An inquirer asks,
I’m in my 30s and have multiple motor and vocal tics that started in my early teens and have never gone away. As far as I can tell, I fit the diagnostic criteria for Tourette’s syndrome… Can I say I have Tourette’s without being formally diagnosed? I’m wary of doing so, given that self-diagnosis is looked down upon for medical issues generally and specifically in the case of Tourette’s; there has been a recent rash of people on social media falsely claiming to have it. But I feel that telling people that I have Tourette’s, which is a label many people recognize, would allow me to talk about my tics more freely and in so doing help counter the mild shame I have around them. It might even educate others on the range of severity with which Tourette’s can present, i.e., that it’s not always so noticeable. But I’m very concerned about seeming to co-opt a group’s struggles, and I don’t know if I need a formal diagnosis to be welcomed into groups for people with Tourette’s, either. What is your view?
As weird as things have gotten in the U.S., much weirder stuff goes on abroad, and I ignore most of it. This story, however, requires that attention be paid.
Mujahid, a 20-year-old from Muzaffarnagar, Uttar Pradesh–that’s India—claims a hospital staff performed a sex change operation on him without his consent. A man named Omprakash, the alleged victim claims, had been harassing him for years and deceived him into believing that he was suffering from a serious medical condition. He then offered to take him to Mansoorpur hospital, where he was sedated and then operated on. “He brought me here, and the next morning I had an operation. When I regained consciousness, I was told that I had been changed from a boy to a girl!” a sobbing Mujahid told NDTV reporters. “When I woke up, Omprakash told me that I am a woman now and that he would take me to Lucknow to marry me. He threatened to kill my father if I resisted.”
Yeah, definitely unethical, in my expert opinion.
If I had the time and inclination, I could locate dozens of trenchant quotes from Orwell and others making the same crucial point: fear is the enemy of liberty, and that aspiring dictators recognize that a population in fear of its safety will inevitably bargain away the freedoms and the autonomy of themselves and others. “I prefer dangerous freedom over peaceful slavery” was the way Thomas Jefferson put it, although usually in Latin. The idea behind America and its crucial unique rebellious character was that as a people we are worthy of democracy because we have the guts and fortitude to resist the siren song of peaceful security. Hence Ben Franklin’s much-quoted, “Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.” FDR, clever and cynical, inveighed against the dangers of fear (“We have nothing to fear but fear itself!”) even as he made brilliant use of fear to make himself the nearest thing to a dictator the U.S. has ever had.
The progressives who visit Ethics Alarms freaked out yesterday over a post in which I referenced the current mutated U.S. Left’s increasingly blatant drift toward totalitarianism…you know,
There was more traffic on that post than there has been on any post here not linked by some mega-site like “Instapundit.” The truth hurts. Ironically, I just stumbled upon an example of our now thoroughly corrupted scientific establishment wielding the tactic of fearmongering by the device of arguing that the public is denying the truth, with the truth being, “EVERYTHING IS TERRIBLE! THE WORST EVER! WE’RE DOOMED IF THE SMART PEOPLE DON’T RESCUE US! FAST!“
We knew, or should have, that the medical profession was not immune from the ethics rot brought upon us by the advent of The George Floyd Freakout, the 2016 Post-Election Ethics Train Wreck, The Great Stupid (and its DEI sub-cult) and the rest. Here is a throbbing example.
At the University of California, San Francisco, one of the nation’s most respected medical schools and teaching hospitals, medical students and doctors have been protesting the war in Gaza. Chants of “intifada, intifada, long live intifada!” could be heard by patients in their hospital rooms at the U.C.S.F. Medical Center. It doesn’t really matter what the chants were: they could bebeen “Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?” (one of my personal favorites.) Medical personnel should never promote political views in a hospital. Why isn’t that obvious?
I’ve been meaning to try this for some time, so “here goes nuthin.” These are the ethics-relevant headlines (with links) in today’s print version of the New York Times. If you tell me in the comments which ones you would like me to share in a special “gift” format that takes them out from behind the paywall (I can’t do that for all of them) I’ll go back and do that.
Here are the stories:
Stephen Colbert is really is beneath contempt. His late night show proudly promoted the guest appearance of Anthony Fauci last week, which is roughly the equivalent of cheering for the Sackler family. This is one of the subtle ways—not so subtle, really—that the media pimps for Democrats and the party’s agenda (“The Government knows best, proles!”) Colbert only has guests that align with the Axis; Nancy Pelosi was another recent guest, and the producers obviously have no interest in presenting anyone who isn’t fully part of the “team.” They also don’t have any interest in entertaining audience members who, having paid attention and having not been brainwashed, know the likes of Pelosi and Fauci for what they are.
Fauci, however, is a far more nauseating and unforgivable object of fawning idolatry than even Pelosi. He’s a certifiable, no-contest ethics villain: incompetent, irresponsible, dishonest, hypocritical, an abuser of power, position and influence, and the perfect poster boy for the fake “Trust the science!” mantra that the Left has weaponized for political gain.
Stories like this one remind me just how deep and complex the ethics void is becoming in our society and institutions. The hackneyed way of describing it would be “Why we can’t have nice things.” It is an ethics mess, rather than an ethics train wreck, just an icky, stinky, pile of unethical goo emanating from people and places that can’t be trusted.
Let’s pick our way through it. Get your gloves and Lysol, and put a clothespin on your nose…
In the stunning exchange above on May 22, Sen. Ted Cruz confronted one of Biden’s nominees to the Federal bench who placed a serial rapist who is a biological male (that is, all standard equipment included) in a women’s prison. She claimed, incredibly, that she always makes her decisions based on the facts of a case and the law, while repeatedly refusing to answer Cruz’s specific questions by repeating an obviously pre-programmed evasive answer (like the three university presidents who kept saying that whether anti-Semitic speech was acceptable on campus depended on “the context”), “I considered the facts presented to me, and I reached a decision…,” etc.
Cruz contended that the judge made ideological loyalty a higher priority than the fact or law, citing the fact that she deemed a 6’2″ serial rapist with a penis a “safe” inmate in a prison full of women.
Ethics Alarms 