I’m almost afraid to see what you come up with today…
U.S. Society
From The Res Ipsa Loquitur Files…
I know, I know...this might have been staged. Maybe it was. Maybe it wasn’t staged, but just a single group of assholes after other trick-or-treaters used the communal candy basket as it was designed to be used. Maybe this video has no larger significance at all.
I hope it doesn’t.
But I suspect it does.
ADDED: I see that Ann Althouse also posted this video. Her focus is a bit different. She writes,
Why are we doing handouts anyway? To show what human beings are like? If you answer the door and dispense the handout personally, you can maintain a system of one portion per person, and you might even get a smile or a thank you. If you put out a big bowl of multiple portions because you don’t want to monitor the process and impose single portions, then people will serve their own interests and take all they want. You knew that. The kids who took it all also knew that if they didn’t take it all, the next group of kids would take it all. It’s a state of nature without supervision and enforcement. Don’t pretend you trusted people and you had some sort of admirable “hope” that now I’m supposed to feel bad got crushed. No, you lazy bastard. Answer the damned door next time. Or have the courage to turn off the porch light and huddle in a back room and celebrate the end of the holiday you no longer believe in.
Well, in the past, I have known people who did this (put out baskets of candy to be used with the honor system) not because they were lazy or didn’t want to participate in Halloween, but because they were not going to be home, or had mobility issues for one reason or another. Ann just assumes that the natural tendency is to act badly and just take it all. I don’t.
But she lives in uber-progressive Madison, Wisconsin, so there’s that…
Got It: Hating White People Is OK
This explains a lot.
Last night, watching a World Series I wasn’t really all that interested in out of obligation to The Game, I was, because I’m an incurable optimist and sap akin to Pollyanna and and Shirley Temple, startled by the ad above that popped up between innings. Titled “Hate Rises,” its primary message was to “stand up to Jewish hate,” which is certainly currently relevant, since college campuses and Democratic cities are roiling with anti-Semitism and violence threatening Jews because the nation of Israel isn’t willing to let bygones be bygones after the Palestinian terrorist government slaughtered 40 infants, among other acts of savagery.
But I noticed that when the final message quickly scrawled through “all” hate, one kind of bigotry and hateful vilification was omitted. Stand Up To JEWISH/MUSLIM/BLACK/ASIAN/HISPANIC/LGBTQ Hate the ad concluded. Well, that about covers it! Wait a minute…
The Unmasking Continues: So A Big Chunk Of The American Left Hates Christians AND Jews Now?
I did not see this coming, but perhaps I should have. After all, they have been telling us that they hate whites, males, and Americans for years.
This has been an ugly month for Democrats and progressives, if anyone is paying attention and not soaked with denial. America’s campuses, after decades of indoctrination, are erupting with open anti-Semitism, and the Left’s captive media has spread terrorist propaganda. The Associated Press told its reporters not to call Hamas killers “terrorists” after they massacred civilians, raped women, and took a couple hundred hostages from Israel on October 7. The Voice of America issued instructions to avoid calling Hamas “terrorists.” On October 12, Yale’s campus newspaper censored what it called “unsubstantiated claims that Hamas raped women and beheaded men” from a pro-Israel article by a student. (Yale professor Nicholas Christakis asked, “Are the hostage-taking, murder of children in their beds, burning of people alive, and parading of nude captive women in the street also ‘unsubstantiated’?”)
After Cornell students posted messages to university websites sewing sentiments like “If i see a pig male jew i will stab you and slit your throat,” “eliminate jewish living from cornell campus,” and an especially ominous, “gonna shoot up 104 west,” the kosher dining hall on campus, the school boldly advised Jewish students to avoid that dining hall.
Silly me: I thought this Babylon Bee story was satire.
Pre-Halloween Ethics Tricks And Treats, 10/29/23
Things are piling up again on the metaphorical Ethics Alarms runway, so let’s get into it, shall we?
1. Speaking of runways, will you feel better about your family dying in an airplane crash if you know a DEI hire in the control tower was at fault? Sure you will! The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) is placing a more diverse diverse workforce over the most qualified workforce even as the air traffic control system has been showing alarming holes, problems and failures including staffing shortages, mistakes, technological challenges and close call incidents. The Mountain States Legal Foundation sued on behalf of plaintiff Andrew Brigida and over 2,000 other air traffic controller applicants who had test scores invalidated as part of President Barack Obama’s 2015 FAA diversity policy—what matters is how many minorities an agency has, you see, not how well it does its job. The lawsuit became class-action certified in 2022, and is headed to litigation. “Obviously we are talking about a line of work where merit and the need for skill are a matter of life and death,” Mountain States Legal Foundation General Counsel William Trachman. “No one cares about the race of the air traffic controller guiding in their flight.”
Wanna bet?
2. The ethics foul buried in the misleadingly-titled essay, “Climate Change Is Keeping Therapists Up at Night”: the news media, politicians and educators are trying to terrify children and gullible adults into accepting extreme progressive and Marxist policies. Causing clinical anxiety is just collateral damage to the activists. We’ve seen this before in the ’50s through the 80’s, when the “ban the bomb,” unilateral disarmament, “Better Red than Dead” and “Imagine” crowd was convincing children that they were going to die in order to advance the cause of pacifism.
Serious Question: Has Vice-President Harris Not Read The Bill of Rights, Or Does She Just Want The Government To Ignore It?
This would be an “Incompetent Elected Official” post, except a) we already know Kamala Harris is incompetent, and b) her penchant for talking nonsense, gibberish or idiocy long ago reached Julie Principle proportions. But other Democrats, notably Hillary Clinton, have appealed to ignorance, emotion and hysteria by doing what Harris did yesterday as part of the wholly predictable Democratic Party/progressive/mainstream media attack on gun rights after a mass shooting tragedy. This one, as you probably know already, was in Maine, and unusually deadly, so the gun-grabbing fanatics and the “Do something!” crazies were really licking their chops.
On stage with Australia’s Prime Minister at an event yesterday, Harris blathered, “Gun violence has terrorized and traumatized so many of our communities in this country. And let us be clear, it does not have to be this way, as our friends in Australia have demonstrated.”
As usual, Harris required a translator. It doesn’t have to be “this way” in Australia? Have our communities been terrified there? How has Australia demonstrated what is possible or desirable in the United States? It hasn’t, of course: it hasn’t even demonstrated that it is possible to eliminate mass shootings in Australia, where the National Firearms Agreement of 1996 made semiautomatic weapons and shotguns illegal and mandated the confiscation of close to 650,000 firearms. The NFA requires Australians to wait 28 days before they purchase a gun to allow extensive background checks. Applicants must obtain a license and a permit, be over 18 years old, provide documentation that the weapon will be stored securely and complete firearms safety training. They must also provide a “justifiable reason” for owning the gun, and self-defense doesn’t qualify. A requirement less stringent than this was just struck down as unconstitutional in New York.
So: When Does The Supreme Court Get Its Apology From The Dobbs Hysterics?
Statistics based on research by the Guttmacher Institute seem to indicate that legal abortions increased slightly in the United States in the first six months of 2023 compared with 2020. The assumption is that states with more permissive abortion laws absorbed patients traveling from states with more restrictive laws, and access to abortion pills increased.
Thus the feminist and progressive narrative that Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision last year created a “Handmaiden’s Tale” hellscape where women were compelled to give birth to children they did not want was, as those inclined to be rational realized, inflammatory propaganda designed to support unhinged attacks on the six Justices in the Dobbs majority. The lie also proved to be a useful Democratic Party election weapon.
As Justice Alito stated clearly in his opinion, the ruling over-turning Roe v. Wade was not a pro- or anti-abortion ruling, but a necessary decision to uphold core Constitutional principles while striking down a badly reasoned precedent. The Constitution does not include a right to abortion, and the Founders would have been horrified at the very thought. Nor is abortion a proper matter for a national law, other than a Constitutional amendment.
Friday Open Forum! Find Me Some Good News, Please…
My sister traditionally ends our phone conversation by suddenly blurting out—lately the impetus has been the prospect of a Presidential contest between Biden and Trump—“Everything’s going to Hell!” and hanging up. I am constitutionally disinclined to be that pessimistic (unlike some who comment here of late), but boy, I sure could use some good news beyond the ACLU deigning to protest a judge muzzling a major political candidate that her pals disapprove of.
Here’s my latest Ethics Alarms worry: increasingly, my story sources are demanding paywall fees. Most of the formerly free bloggers have moved to substack and subscription newsletters. The New York Post, CBS, NBC and others hit me with a block asking for ad-blockers to be disabled, then don’t remove the block until I’ve disabled the ad-blocker and refreshed three times or more. CNN has joined the group that make it difficult to copy text. Now The Blaze is going full subscription. I pay for the digital versions of the Washington Post and New York Times, but as we all know by now (I hope), they can’t be trusted.
I can only be Scarlet O’Hara for so long, but I guess I’ll worry about that tomorrow…
Enough bitching from me: Over to you, Clarence…
The Rest Of The Story, Or At Least Some Of It: Rep. Bowman Pleads Guilty
In the midst of more pressing matters like the House not being able to elect a Speaker, the Hamas attack and so many Democrats revealing their dark anti-Semitic side, it is understandable that “Squad” member Jamaal Bowman’s law-breaking to disrupt a House vote on the budget and his subsequent ridiculous lies to minimize his responsibility might have been pushed to the back of our brains. (You can review this clown show here, in the first seven posts listed). But justice has, sort of, prevailed.
Bowman was booked, fingerprinted, photographed and processed by the U.S. Capitol Police today, after D.C. prosecutors charged the Democrat with setting off a false fire alarm in the Cannon Office Building adjacent to the Capitol, a misdemeanor.
Bowman has agreed to plead guilty to the single false fire alarm charge. He will pay the maximum fine of $1,000, and all charges will be dropped in three months provided that Bowman provides a formal apology to the Capitol Police along with the fine. The New York Times says this is the standard policy with such charges.
“I’m thankful for the quick resolution from the District of Columbia attorney general’s office on this issue,” Bowman said in a statement yesterday responding to the charge. “I am responsible for activating a fire alarm, I will be paying the fine issued and look forward to these charges being ultimately dropped.” His statement did not address the fact that by pleading guilty, he is admitting that his act was intentional, despite saying repeatedly at the time that he thought the obvious fire alarm apparatus would open the doors of the building, which are always locked on weekends, and that included signs clearly explaining the situation. But Bowman is still lying: in his statement he said that he was “grateful” that the Capitol Police general counsel’s office “agreed I did not obstruct nor intend to obstruct any House vote or proceedings.” There was no such statement by authorities indicating that. Obstructing House business is a felony, and no determination has been made public about whether charges will be brought for that. Gabriel Shoglow-Rubenstein, a spokesman for the D.C. attorney general’s office which announced the charges, said, “Congressman Bowman was treated like anyone else who violates the law in the District of Columbia,” Mr. Shoglow-Rubenstein said in a statement. “Based on the evidence presented by Capitol Police, we charged the only crime that we have jurisdiction to prosecute.”
The D.C. attorney general’s office—Full disclosure: I have done a yearly ethics training for the office for more than a decade—does not handle obstruction charges.
Hamas-Israel War Ethics Train Wreck Update: The Left’s Mask Falls Away…Part 2: Ugly Faces [Expanded]
It serves me right: in planning a second part on this topic, I never suspected that the Left’s embrace of anti-Semitism, fact-free excuses for Hamas, and rationalizations against Israel defending itself would metastasize the way it has. I can’t possibly cover all the significant examples now; there are too many. But I’ll do the best I can with some recent low-lights…
- This is what indoctrination in woke victim mentality has wrought: a Harvard Harris Poll shows that a slight majority of 18-24-year-olds, just under half 25-34-year-olds, believe that Hamas’s terror attack is justified. 51% of the rising generation told the pollsters that the the October 7 attacks on civilians, children, babies and hostages “can be justified by the grievances of Palestinians.”
- Say what you will about Trump (or Nikki Haley), we can be confident of how he would have reacted to this: United Nations Secretary-General, António Guterres, said that “it is important to also recognize the attacks by Hamas did not happen in a vacuum,” as he referenced “56 years of suffocating occupation” for the Palestinian people. Israel has demanded his removal. New York Sun got it right, saying,
“The speech today by the secretary general of the United Nations, António Guterres, blaming Israel for the attack on it by Hamas is one of the most shocking moments in the history of the world body. It absolutely infuriated Israel, its diplomats, and the Jewish community world wide. It is hard to imagine that the UN, already a deeply corrupted institution obsessed with Israel, can continue with business as usual. We grasp that there was a certain diplomatic subtlety to the way Mr. Guterres couched his libel — a blood libel, at that. There is no justification for the October 7 attack by Hamas, he said, and then justified it by claiming it “did not happen in a vacuum.” As our Benny Avni reports, he enumerated hardships inflicted on Palestinian Arabs. His remarks smacked of attempts by enemies of the Jews to suggest that the Jews deserved the Holocaust.”
The US should withhold any payments or funding for the United Nations until he resigns or is replaced. Continue reading
Ethics Alarms 