Rights

Once Again, An Analysis Of A SCOTUS Decision Is Distorted By Emotion And Ignorance

/ Jack Marshall / 25 Comments

This is a problem. And I’m just talking now about the previous SCOTUS ruling that launched a freak-out yesterday. As you probably know by now, the leaked SCOTUS ruling rebuffing Roe v. Wade is no longer a leak.

The Supreme Court ruled 6-3 to strike down a restrictive “needs-based” concealed carry laws in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen.  Even though Justice Thomas’s majority opinion was tight and clear as well as consistent with SCOTUS precedent as well as, of course, the Bill of Rights, such worthies as President Biden claimed that, in the President’s words, the ruling contradicted “common sense and the Constitution.”

What are the odds that Joe read the opinion before declaring that? I’d say “none.” Making such a statement while carrying the presumed authority of President without knowing what the Court’s analysis was is completely unethical and an abuse of position.

David Harsanyi, writing at RealClearPolitics, accurately writes,

The modern left doesn’t even bother pretending they believe the Supreme Court has a responsibility to act as a separate branch of government and adjudicate the constitutionality of law. Rather than even ostensibly offering legal reasons for their ire, Democrats simply demand the Supreme Court uphold public sentiment (or, rather what they claim is public sentiment), even though SCOTUS exists to ignore those pressures. The fact that that attitude has congealed as the norm in one of our major political parties does not bode well for the future of the Republic.

It is particularly disheartening that the three liberal justices in their dissent stooped to fueling this distortion of the Court’s role. Their arguments were almost all irrelevant to the  constitutional issues and the Court’s previous rulings regarding the Second Amendment. Instead, Sotomayor, Breyer and Kagan took the low road of evoking recent shootings and incidents of gun violence as if current events should permit the limiting of explicit Constitutional rights. 

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Morning Ethics Warm-Up, 6/22/2022: Let’s Hit The Ground Running!

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

1. It’s a joke!!! That tweet is just the tip of the moronic iceberg for Republican Senate candidate in Missouri Eric Greitens. In a new fundraising video for his U.S. Senate campaign released this week, Greitens, a former Missouri governor who resigned before he could be impeached on multiple grounds including sexual assault, holds a pump-action shotgun and introduces himself as a Navy SEAL. (He is not a Seal: he resigned shortly before announcing his Senate run this year.) The video then shows him with a group of men in tactical gear hunting “RINOs”—Republicans who are not conservative enough for his tastes. He says, “Join the MAGA crew! Get a RINO hunting permit. There’s no bagging limit, no tagging limit, and it doesn’t expire until we save our country!”

And Sarah Palin was once accused of inciting murder by having little gun-sights on a campaign map!

Predictably, the irresponsible ad is being used by the mainstream news media and Democrats to characterize all conservatives and Republicans while hyping more anti-gun hysteria. Here’s CNN:

Some of history’s leading fascist movements used the strategy of armed volunteer militias intimidating, threatening and attacking political opponents. And the implications of Greitens’ ad are stunning: Line up behind the most extreme right-wing policies — and implicitly behind former President Donald Trump — or be hunted down by armed, jackbooted thugs.

Right. The implications of Greitens’ ad are that he’s a liar and an asshole, and that he is only slightly more fit to serve in the Senate than Herschel Walker, who defines the bottom of the bottom of the barrel… but presumably Missouri voters know that already. The ad and Greitens himself are metaphorical albatrosses around the GOP’s neck, but the party hung them there. He has been endorsed by several GOP luminaries, though so far, not by Trump.

2. Poll check: President Biden’s latest Civiqs approval rating hit 32%, with 56% disapproving of Joe. Again I ask: Who are those 32% that approve of Biden? What is it they approve of? What democracy can function if fully a third of the electorate have the IQs of flatworms and are happy to see the country rot?

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Ethics Hero: FINA (The International Swimming Federation)

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

Now do cycling, weightlifting, wrestling and running.

The world governing body for swimming voted to bar transgender women from the highest levels of women’s international competition, bringing expertise, authority and common sense to a debate that had been distorted by the Mad Left’s inexplicable commitment to radical transexual ideology.

FINA administers international competitions in water sports, and now definitively prohibits transgender women from competing unless they began medical treatments to suppress production of testosterone before going through one of the early stages of puberty, or by age 12, whichever occurred later. This is now one of the strictest rules against transgender participation in international sports, and with any luck and some courage elsewhere, it will have the necessary effect on other sports as well. Going through male puberty gives transgender women a massive physical advantage over most athletes born female, as the pool exploits of University of Pennsylvania’s unethical swimming champion Lia Thomas made obvious. Continue reading →

Censoring Expressive Speech By Bowing To Threats Is Unethical…Yes, Even When The Speech is John Hinckley’s

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

 Market Hotel agreed to host a concert on July 8th featuring the musical stylings of attempted Reagan assassin John Hinckley, Jr., who has been released  into the world on the theory that he was never technically guilty of a crime because he was insane at the time.  Hinckley called the show the beginning of his “Redemption Tour,” during which he will play his songs (are those bad rip-offs of Dylan dedicated to Jodie Foster on the program?) to promote, he says, rehabilitation for formerly incarcerated criminals and the mentally ill. Continue reading →

Wait, When Did Georgetown Law Center Take Over The Washington NFL Team?

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

Very puzzling. The Washington “Commanders” (previously the Redskins) are punishing an assistant coach because he dared to express an opinion on social media that his boss and employers don’t agree with, since it is not sufficiently in line with the George Floyd Freakout, The Great Stupid, and the Democratic Party’s show trial strategy to somehow stave off disaster for Joe and Company in the November mid-terms. In this, the NFL franchise is emulating it’s city’s most prominent law school, Georgetown Law Center, which only recently finished driving away a non-conforming law professor who dared to opine that limiting the pool of potential Supreme Court Justices by race and gender was not the wise way to find the best judge available.

To paraphrase Dana above, “What’s going on here?”

Nothing good, that’s for sure. Just another unethical effort by a business entity to strongarm employees into supporting one particular party and ideology, or at least to intimidate them sufficiently that they stifle their dissenting views. There is literally no possible justification for the Redsk…I mean “Commanders” actions. Continue reading →

Comment Of The Day: “Ethics Dunce, And That’s Not The Half Of It: ESPN Host Sarah Spain”

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

I confess: I was immediately drawn to Steve-O-in NJ’s comment because it gave me another opportunity to post my favorite ethics film clip of all, Sir Thomas More’s speech from “A Man For All Seasons.”

But Steve’s comment, on the post, “Ethics Dunce, And That’s Not The Half Of It: ESPN Host Sarah Spain,” is a worthy Comment of the Day on its own.

Here it is…

***

I have to laugh, because the same persons who want to come for the conservatives today were saying “First they came for the Muslims – and then we said, “not this time motherf***ers!” at the beginning of 2017.

These days it’s more like:

First they came for the Second Amendment, and I said nothing, because they said they were protecting schoolchildren.

Then they came for the Fourth Amendment – and I said nothing, because they said if you had nothing to hide, then you had nothing to fear.

Then they came for the Fifth Amendment – and I said nothing, because they were just streamlining the process to get bad people out of society.

Then they came for the First Amendment – and I said nothing, because they were just stopping the spread of disinformation and misinformation.

Then they came for me – and I was disarmed, cowed and silenced,with no protection, so I had no choice but to go quietly with them.

Note To Gov. DeSantis: The Tampa Bay Rays Are Not The Same As Disney

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

I defended Gov. Ron DeSantis’s cancellation of Disney’s long-standing special status with the state of Florida, because, ethically, partners shouldn’t publicly attack partners without consequences, and because Disney’s privilege of self-government was in great part a product of the company bolstering core American values and a family-friendly culture. No, I pointed out more than once, this was not a case of a corporation being singled out to be punished for a political position the state opposed, but a situation where special benefits could no longer be justified if Disney was no longer going to hold up its end of the original mutually-beneficial deal of yore, which could be reasonably seen as “You don’t meddle in our business, and we won’t meddle in yours.” Moreover, giving Disney special benefits that other theme parks in the state didn’t have could not be justified as fair and reasonable any longer.

It now appears that I may have been giving Gov. DeSantis more credit than he deserved, and that his slap at Disney was, at least in part, an example of a state government punishing a company for a political position it had every right to hold, state, and act upon. Yesterday we learned that DeSantis intends to veto a $35 million bill for Florida to pay for a Pasco County facility that would serve as for the Tampa Bay Rays’ spring training home. The reason is, apparently, the baseball team’s public message above.

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Early Evening Ethics Aggravations, 5/23/2022: Facts Don’t Matter, Words Don’t Matter, Aiming A Loaded Shotgun At A Black Jogger Doesn’t Matter…

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

Currently bugging me…

  • Walking Spuds just now before the rains come, I saw no fewer than five fellow Alexandrians, ranging in age from about 60 to 13, walking along on a lovely, cool day without appearing to look up once from their cell phone screens. I said “Hi!” to two of them, but they didn’t hear me because they had earbuds blocking out all auditory stimulation from the outside world. One was walking a dog trailing behind., but I could have replaced it with a rabid wolverine for al she would have noticed.
  • Right after I posted about Stacey Abrams’ ongoing con and the mainstream media’s immediate resort to the “Republicans pounce!” deflection, New York Times reporter Trip Gabriel tweeted, “Why did John Fetterman chase down a Black person with a shotgun?’ asks Barnette. The GOP use of this 2013 incident – which some PA Dems predicted would be used in the general to discourage Black turnout – has begun.” Barnette is recently defeated GOP Pennsylvania Senate hopeful Kathy Barnette, who raised the 2013 incident when Democratic Senate candidate John Fetterman detained an innocent African-American jogger with a loaded shotgun and pointed it at his chest. How rude of her! (That was criminal assault, by the way.) Instapundit asks, “Who Among Us Has Not Chased Down an Unarmed Black Jogger with a Shotgun?” and the National Review muses on how the mainstream media would handle a similar incident if the candidate in question were a conservative rather than an extreme progressive “Bernie Bro.”

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Princeton Tries To Get Away With What The University Of Central Florida Couldn’t: Forced Ideological Conformity

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

I had lots of quick reactions to this nauseating story:

  • It is comforting to know that Princeton has joined Yale and my alma mater as once-great colleges that are embarrassing alumni in their embrace of racial bias and progressive oppression.
  • It is also comforting to know that not all of the professors abused in this way are weenies who will grovel an apology to keep their jobs with  unethical institutions.
  • Colleges and universities have become a primary threat to democracy,and that is no longer an unreasonable suspicion. It is fact.
  • The news media keeps telling us that conservatives present an existential threat to democracy anyway.

Just last night, I posted [Item #2]on the recent decision by an arbitrator that an arbitrator has reinstated Prof. Charles Negy with full back pay after he was fired by the University of Central Florida for opining in two tweets that the “systemic racism” claim was less than persuasive and that there was abundant “back privilege” in American society conferring special benefits while suppressing legitimate criticism. The school’s clever scheme—well, not so clever, since it ultimately was tagged as the wrongful tactic it was—consisted of searching for some other pretense for firing the non-conforming prof, since using his opinions wouldn’t work. Now, less than 24 hours later, I learn that Princeton is attempting to do the same thing to one of its professors.

“Well, we’re not some podunk state university in Florida,” its leaders are apparently thinking. “We’re Princeton! We are wise, and we know best!”

 Classics Professor Professor Joshua Katz  properly found fault with some aspects of a proposed anti-racism program of benefits for minority faculty and has the audacity to publicize his objections. Can’t have that, so Princeton President Christopher Eisgruber has asked the university board to fire Katz. The sinister WrongThink purveyor questioned a proposal in a faculty letter to offer special benefits for “professors of color,” who somehow were deemed innately worthy of a summer salary and additional sabbatical time because a black drug addict and petty crook resisted arrest and ended up dead in part because of the brutality of bad Minnesota cop. I know I’m being repetitious, but this really is the cause and effect that launched The Great Stupid. It amazes me every time I think about it.

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Friday The 13th Ethics Nightcap, 5/13/2020: Kristol’s Integrity, Reiner’s Idiocy, Virginia Schools’ Incompetence

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

The first of several ethically dubious U.S wars began on this date in 1846, when President Polk asked for and received a declaration of war against Mexico. The U.S. wanted Mexico-owed territory: it’s pretty much as simple as that. In November of 1845, Polk sent  diplomat John Slidell to Mexico to seek boundary adjustments in return for the U.S. government’s settlement of the claims of U.S. citizens against Mexico, and also to buy California and New Mexico. When Mexico refused, the U.S. provoked a military response from the country when U.S. forces marched into the disputed territory at the Texas border, then used that as a pretense to fight. After two years of fighting, Mexico agreed to sell California and New Mexico after all, as well as to recognize the Rio Grande as the border with Texas.

1. Andrew Sullivan on Bill Kristol’s integrity deficit. George Will and Bill Kristol, once the King of Neocons and the proprietor of the conservative magazine “The Weekly Standard” are the two most prominent examples of Chablis Republicans who couldn’t bear an unmannerly low-class boor like Donald Trump bearing the conservative banner, so they abandoned all of the principles they spent their career advocating out of spite. Yes, I think that’s fair. In his substack newsletter, Andrew Sullivan correctly exposes the unethical stench of Kristol’s late-in-life conversion to wokeness, which he correctly diagnoses, along with Kristol’s character, thusly..

“[I]f you change your mind on an issue, at some point, explain why. What principles or ideas have you now abandoned? Which have you now embraced? What new facts have you learned? It’s a basic form of intellectual hygiene.

Which brings me to Bill Kristol…Now hugely popular among MSNBC Democrats, alert to racism and sexism and homophobia, Kristol has, these last few years, performed a spectacular ideological self-reinvention that makes J.D. Vance look like a man of unflinching consistency. And he has never even attempted to explain why…

Kristol is also now down with the “LGBTQIA+s”. He recently retweeted a critique of the Parental Rights bills across the country: “the pernicious intent of bills such as these: to stigmatize and shame gay and transgender people under the guise of protecting children from inappropriate conversations about sex.” Another Kristol retweet objected to the “grooming” meme: “Grooming is not acknowledging the existence of gay & transgender people to children.” Another retweet lamented that a Republican lost in Virginia because he favored marriage equality: “His sin was treating gays as humans worthy of equal respect and dignity… He wasn’t willing to be cruel to the Americans that Republican voters hate.”

Admirable in many ways. But again, is this the same Bill Kristol whose magazine, The Weekly Standard, was among the most fervent opponents of gay equality in America? In 1996, he published a piece arguing for a “reaffirmation by states of a sodomy law” if gay marriage advocates didn’t cut it out. The magazine sent out a letter on behalf of an anti-gay advertiser that raised the specter of “Radical Homosexuals infiltrating the United States Congress” with a plan to “indoctrinate a whole generation of American children with pro-homosexual propaganda.” …As I’ve said, it’s no sin, and even a virtue, to change your mind. But to have been so passionately on the extreme edge of one side of an issue he regarded as one of core morality, and then flip to the other side entirely — with absolutely no account of why — is not a mark of any halfway serious writer. To go from believing that gays need to be cured to Kristol’s current posture as defender of homos from Republican “hate” is amoral, unserious bullshit — both then and now…

The fake surety; the glibness; the ignorance; the opportunism…I guess there’s a kind of beauty to that. Once you get past the sickening, amoral, irresponsible unseriousness of it all.

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