Res ipsa loquitur and signature significance, all in a family Christmas card.
Wow.
Rep. Massie posted that heart-warming Christmas scene just four days after the Michigan school shooting, which came to pass because another family was so gun happy that it deliberately put a semi-automatic in the hands of a 15-year-old and allowed him to return to class after clear signs that he had murder on his mind.
Merry Christmas!
I don’t have space on the blog to detail all of what’s wrong with that photo, but here’s a brief summary:
Stockholm Syndrome liberal David Brooks, once the alleged conservative pundit in the Times far-left array, was in one of his “pox on both your houses” moods as he condemned what he claimed were equally unethical (my word, not his) arguments coming from the pro-and anti-abortion camps. “Many conservatives focus on the fetus to the exclusion of all else, ” he wrote. “A lot of the progressive commentary, on the other hand, won’t recognize the fetus at all.” False equivalency, David (and you know it). Since the fetus is the party that’s killed in an abortion, many conservatives and anti-abortion activists take the completely defensible and classic Kantian position that “deference to women who become pregnant in terrible circumstances” doesn’t and can’t justify taking a human life. On the other side of the divide, however, refusing to acknowledge the existence of a life at all is to deliberately rig the debate. And it isn’t “a lot” of the progressive commentary that tries to do this; it’s virtually all of it.
With rights come responsibilities. I have never been able to understand why law enforcement has been so reluctant to hold the owners and purchasers of guns that are used in crimes criminally responsible when those weapons fall into the wrong hands. Maybe this case will finally be a tipping point, one that should have tipped long ago, and perhaps in other areas of parental negligence other than gun crimes.
Jennifer and James Crumbley, the parents of Ethan Crumbley, the 15-year-old accused of murdering four students at a high school in Michigan (we are supposed to say that, but there is no question, and no doubt, that he’s guilty) have been charged with four counts each of involuntary manslaughter. The prosecutor laid out the reasons in a detailed statement. It seems awfully persuasive to me.
Among the facts cited in Oakland County, Michigan’s prosecutor Karen McDonald: Continue reading →
Why does Ethics Alarms rate Professor Goodwin an Ethics Villain rather than the more common, and usually forgivable, status of Ethics Dunce? It is because in her op-ed for the New York Times,“I Was Raped by My Father. An Abortion Saved My Life,” she deliberately misrepresents the law and ethics of the abortion issue while using her status as a law professor to mislead readers. She also presents an argument that is purely an appeal to emotion, though as a scholar and teacher she is professionally obligated not to advance a position without basing it in reason and fact.
There is nothing unethical or inappropriate about Goodwin advancing a pro-abortion position if she does so honestly. She is obviously committed on the issue as the founding director of the U.C.I. Law Center for Biotechnology and Global Health Policy and its Reproductive Justice Initiative, and the author of “Policing the Womb: Invisible Women and the Criminalization of Motherhood.” Terrific: make your case, Professor! I have an open mind; I look forward to reading it. You obviously have the skill, background, experience and erudition to be enlightening and persuasive on the topic.
But Goodwin doesn’t make a legal case, an ethical case, a moral case or even a logical one in her op-ed. Doing any of those require acknowledging counter arguments and rebutting them with facts and analysis. Instead, her essay goes straight for the heartstrings and viscera, bypassing the brain entirely.
Goodwin was raped by her father when she was 12, you see. How horrible. She courts our sympathy, and, not inappropriately, receives it. However, she never makes the case that a young woman’s (or girl’s) misfortunes, however severe, justify taking the life of another human being.
Yikes. There are several items below—in fact, all of them— that I would like to devote whole posts to, but far more in my In-Box that I have to devote whole posts to. For some reason, the ethics issues dam has burst in the last few days.
1. There should be no controversy over this: it is wrong, unfair, and absurd for Lia, formerly “Will,” Thomas to compete as a female swimmer in collegiate competitions. Here is the transitioned, now female, former University of Pennsylvania’s men’s swim team star (for three years). His “after” photo is on the left. Oddly, his various treatments and operations have left him a better swimmer as a side effect! Well, that’s not quite right, but she’s dominating the women’s meets, as against Columbia University last month when she won a pair of gold medals in the 200 free and 100 free with margins of 5.4 seconds and 1.3 seconds.
That photo on the left is virtually the only shot of Lia now: I can’t find any full body shots since she transitioned into a championship competitor. Hmmmmm...
If female swimmers who haven’t had the boost of going through male puberty don’t have the guts to protest this, then they deserve what happens. That goes for the female athletes in every other sport as well, and their parents, and their coaches, and the feminist weenies who are allowing women’s sports to be destroyed by their unwillingness to appear “unwoke.”
No question, excluding trans, ex-males from gender-segregated sporting events is a hardship for the new women. I’m sympathetic. I am. But it makes no sense ethically or logically to allow the special problems of a tiny minority to harm the vast majority of female athletes.
I’d make this an ethics quiz, but I think it’s too potentially important to treat as a jump ball. This is the kind of extreme mess that threatens free speech, especially when on entire political party is searching for an excuse to ban “hate speech,” once they have defined it just well enough to constrain political opponents.
In Cullman City, Alabama, the school board’s president’s son, who attends the school district’s high school, posted a video to SnapChat in which he could be seen and heard chanting “White power!” and “Kill all the niggers!” The video has been widely circulated among students. The parent of a black student who saw the video has demanded the resignation of Amy Carter (no, not THAT Amy Carter; don’t be silly), the school board’s president. The parent is also demanding that the school take action against the student. “Cullman City Schools would clearly punish our son if he made a video threatening the white students of Cullman High School,” she wrote in an email. “My son is one of a handful of black children in the school. Tell me how he wouldn’t be threatened by KILL ALL THE Ns?! Explain to me how this is not a threat.”
Well, I can answer that last part. Under First Amendment case law, the “true threats” doctrine holds that allegedly threatening speech cannot be punished unless the government can prove that the speaker meant to communicate a serious expression of an intent to commit an act of unlawful violence to a particular individual. A chant on a video posted on social media that mentions no specific student will not qualify as an actionable threat. Her previous question is tougher. The school and the town itself has a reputation for racial hostility toward blacks. The mother of the black student says her son has repeatedly been subjected to racist remarks during his four years as a student in the district. I see good reason for the video to be unsettling in that context.
On the other hand, I’m getting awfully tired of the “they wouldn’t treat a black adult/child this way if he/she did X” argument, which is almost never challenged even when it’s bigoted nonsense, as in the race-based attacks on the Rittenhouse verdict. It’s more presumed racism, and a cheat, a device to avoid making a solid argument.
Above is a comic I never heard of (but one with a regular platform), grandstanding over the Ritterhouse verdict as she reveals that she either has no idea what the facts are in the case, or is deliberately hate-mongering by sending lies into the public consciousness. She tells us that she takes her responsibility to “tell people what they need to know” seriously, and then tells them what isn’t true. “It’s not OK”, she says with great emotion. “For a man to garb a rifle, travel across state lines, and shoot three people and walk free.” In fact, it’s not “OK” for anyone to deliberately misstate the key facts of a controversial episode to the many ignoramuses who may be listening and are likely to be misled.
Rittenhouse did not “grab a rifle” and cross state lines. The law says that it is “OK” for someone—regardless of their race— to defend themselves with deadly force if they reasonably believe his life is at stake. Then she goes on to outright racism, claiming that whites have “always” escaped consequences when they engage in murder. She calls the judge and jury racist, for participating in a trial that acquitted a white man for shooting three other white men.
She seemed like an excellent introduction to this list of similarly dishonest, ignorant or hateful people showing their lack of fairness and critical thinking skills as they descended into hysteria and ugly rhetoric…because so many on the Left are receptive to it. This is not about a difference of legitimate opinion when Americans of note or in positions of influence and responsibility engage in inflammatory declarations based on a false description of what occurred.
Certainly the news media, even more than usual, played its “enemy of the people” role to the hilt, but its flagrant false reporting on the Jacob Blake shooting was four months ago. There is no excuse for anyone with integrity and responsibility still talking about the Kenosha police shooting “an unarmed black man” or representing Blake as anything other than a dangerous outlaw who was engaged in a crime, and justly shot. Because there was no racism or police brutality involved, the protests and riots supposedly prompted by the episode were contrived and based on incompetent (or intentionally incendiary) reporting. The subsequent narrative, that Rittenhouse was opposing “racial justice” and thus a “white supremacist” because he (foolishly, recklessly) sought to mitigate the destruction caused by an ongoing riot (triggered by an incident that only was “racist” in the overheated minds of the reporters and race-hucksters) cannot be defended.
The fools and dunces whose statements are noted below are shooting off their mouths (or social media accounts) in defiance of reality. As Bari Weiss points out in her substackessay (Pointer: John Paul),
To acknowledge the facts of what happened that night is not political. It is simply to acknowledge reality. It is to say that facts are still facts and that lies are lies. It is to insist that mob justice is not justice. It is to say that media consensus is not the equivalent of due process.
And, I would add, it is to say that just because politicians, celebrities, pundits and your Facebook pals are taking a position that literally makes no sense and is based on extreme bias and fantasy is not justification for following the parade.
Below is an incomplete list of the “Facts Don’t Matter” mob. Not surprisingly, I didn’t particularly respect any of these people even before they beclowned themselves in this ethics train wreck. Even so, there are serious problems in the culture (and the educational system) when so many default to gullibility, confusion, miserable logic and emotion. The unethical reaction to the Rittenhouse verdict is, perhaps, more significant than the verdict itself.
In the tricky practice of ethics train wreck taxonomy, placing the Rittenhouse trial in the proper category is a challenge. Is the Tale of the Gun-toting Teen its own media bias and activist -fueled social and legal disaster, or is it just an extension of another?
I lean toward assigning this fiasco to the latter category, making it just one more extension of the Trayvon Martin-George Zimmerman Ethics Train Wreck, which eventually begat the George Floyd Freakout, which in turn led to the contrived outrage over the police shooting of Jacob Blake that spat out Rittenhouse’s unhelpful improvisation. After all, Martin, Floyd and Blake all were episodes that had nothing to do with race but that were hyped into divisive racial controversies and trials by irresponsible demagogues, protesters, politicians and reporters.
What I especially like about attributing all of this societal wreckage into a single ethics train wreck is that it demonstrates just how disastrous President Obama’s inflammatory comments equating Martin to “his son” were—as Ethics Alarms pointed out at the time. Maybe if the blame is squarely placed at the metaphorical fish head, Presidents will stop shooting off their mouths like that. (President Biden, do recall, falsely called Rittenhouse a white supremacist.)
This is all prelude to pointing out what a projectile vomit debacle yesterday’s closing arguments were. Both the prosecution and the defense stomped all over proper criminal trial practice and professional ethics.
Just kidding! Presidents often try to stretch the already rubber boundaries of what the Constitution and even the law requires, only to get slapped down by the courts. This kind of thing was only grounds for impeachment (according to the Trump Deranged, the mainstream media pundits and Democrats) when Donald Trump did it.
But President Trump never tried anything as egregiously dictatorial as the vaccine mandate.
Tell us again who is “a threat to democracy.”
A three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit, issued a rulingat the end of this week upholding a stay of the mandate after temporarily halting the mandate last weekend in response to lawsuits filed by and legal groups. The Washington Post, telegraphing its bias as usual, calls them “Republican-aligned businesses and legal groups.” Since the mandate was wildly excessive and pretty clearly illegal, the question is why “Democratic–aligned” organizations don’t also oppose it. I guess that’s nor really much of a question.
The Post also emphasizes that the panel consisted of judges appointed by Reagan or Trump, because in Progressivese, that means the ruling is partisan. No, it really isn’t. It’s just right, as any fair reading of the opinion by Judge Kurt D. Engelhardt and joined by Judges Edith H. Jones and Stuart Kyle Duncan will reveal. Of course, none of your metaphorically screaming Facebook friends will read it.
You will, though, right? It’s pretty thorough and damning, as well as bit nasty, which any administration trying something like this deserves. (It’s better than an impeachment!)
Of course, his comment does embody the warped logic of hate crime laws, which we now should recognize as one of the early victories of those who want race and color to confer special advantages in society. I think the word Jose was looking for wasn’t hate but anger, as fury, at least as explained repeatedly by the profilers on “Criminal Minds” when they encountered a death by overkill, is the approved diagnosis with death’s like Garcia’s. I will assume that anyone who tries to stab me to death one, two, three or five times doesn’t like me very much. And frankly, those extra stabs after I’m dead won’t bother me at all. Hey, go crazy, man! It’s your time and energy you’re wasting!
A Minnesota community is confused.
What a surprise.
The city council in the Minnesota city of International Falls voted unanimously last week to prohibit dressing its sort-of famous statue of Smokey the Bear in seasonal attire during teh year as the local tradition has been for decades. Smokey will no longer don earmuffs in the winter, or fishing gear in the summer, or the wags responsible will face fines. No, the iconic anthropomorphic bear cannot sport any garb other than his traditional blue jeans, belt, buckle and “campaign” hat, with his shovel in hand.
Ethics Alarms 