U.S. Society

Ethics Reflections On The “Shocking” Times/Siena Poll [Expanded…and Expanded Again]

/ Jack Marshall / 17 Comments

Yes, The Horror! New polls by The New York Times and Siena College imply that if the 2024 election were held today between the two most likely candidates of the two major parties, President Biden would lose to Donald Trump by margins of 3 to 10 percentage points among registered voters in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada and Pennsylvania, five of the so-called “swing states,” with Biden only leading in Michigan. That projects Trump winning at least 300 electoral votes.

Says the Times about its own poll,

Discontent pulsates throughout the Times/Siena poll, with a majority of voters saying Mr. Biden’s policies have personally hurt them. The survey also reveals the extent to which the multiracial and multigenerational coalition that elected Mr. Biden is fraying. Demographic groups that backed Mr. Biden by landslide margins in 2020 are now far more closely contested, as two-thirds of the electorate sees the country moving in the wrong direction. Voters under 30 favor Mr. Biden by only a single percentage point, his lead among Hispanic voters is down to single digits and his advantage in urban areas is half of Mr. Trump’s edge in rural regions. And while women still favored Mr. Biden, men preferred Mr. Trump by twice as large a margin, reversing the gender advantage that had fueled so many Democratic gains in recent years. Black voters — long a bulwark for Democrats and for Mr. Biden — are now registering 22 percent support in these states for Mr. Trump, a level unseen in presidential politics for a Republican in modern times.

Well all righty then! What, if anything, can we glean from this, beginning with the understanding that it’s just a poll, we can’t trust polls or pollsters, and we can’t trust the New York Times or the news media? This poll could have been deliberately manipulated to push Democrats into dumping Biden, or to gull Republicans into nominating Trump, or to scare Democrats out of their deluded back-patting, or to make the GOP foolishly confident. Or the poll itself is just wrong, even today, never mind where things could go by November of 2024. Granted. But let’s suppose it is relatively accurate, arguendo, as lawyers like to say. Then what?

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Ethics Dunce, Unethical Quote, Irresponsible Ex-President OF The Month, (And OMG What A Smug, Insufferable Ass!): Barack Obama

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

I was prepared to add this nauseating story to Part 2 of the previous post, “Hamas-Israel Ethics Train Wreck Update: Tells, Hypocrites, Liars And A Jumbo” because it came to my attention after Part I was up, and because it made my head explode. Then Obama’s drivil kept me up last night, and upon re-reading Obama’s fatuous, pandering, intellectually indefensible, and, of course, being The Light-Bringer, self-aggrandizing contribution to policy debate pollution and the accelerating ethical deterioration of the Democratic Party, I realized only a stand-alone article would do.

Being interviewed on a podcast (with the retch-response inducing cutesie title “Pod Save America”) run by his adoring ex-staffers —to be fair, maybe all the bowing and misty-eyed mooning disoriented him—the ex-President, currently moving up fast on the rail as the most wildly over-praised President of all, decided to open his trap and pronounce:

“I look at this, and I think back, ‘What could I have done during my presidency to move this forward, as hard as I tried?’ But there’s a part of me that’s still saying, ‘Well, was there something else I could have done?’”

As usual for this narcissist, everything is about him, isn’t it? After all, he’s Barack Obama, and surely he could have resolved a hopeless blood feud on the Palestinian side and a stubborn insistence on survival on the Israeli side that the opposing parties involved have been unable to fix since 1948! It’s all his fault really, Barack acknowledges. He just didn’t focus enough of his super-powers on that problem while he was busy making deals with Iran giving them more money to spread terrorism and a guaranteed future nuclear bomb to wipe Israel out after he’s retired or dead, when it didn’t matter. To him, anyway.

Then Obama sagely noted that “this is century-old stuff that’s coming to the fore.” (Actually, efforts to exterminate Jews are a lot older than a century) and, the New York Times tells us, “blamed social media for amplifying the divisions and reducing a thorny international dispute to what he viewed as sloganeering.”

Yeah, all those tweets and Facebook posts have made the Palestinians want to destroy Israel even more than they’ve declared in their multitudinous “Death to Israel” statements over the past eight decades or so. Good point.

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Hamas-Israel Ethics Train Wreck Update: Tells, Hypocrites, Liars And A Jumbo (Part I)

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

My head has been exploding all week from the stunning statements emanating from academia, journalism, “the Squad” and a sickening number of alleged progressives and Democrats calling for a “cease fire” in the war, which is code for “make Israel wait for the next terrorist attack by the murderous regime next door that has vowed to wipe it out.”

In fact, it is a good time to review the rhetorical tells coming from these people and groups as they show the filthy underside of a metaphorical rock. Just as I will not trust or respect anyone who frames the abortion issue as a matter of “choice,” or the gun policy debate as one of “common sense gun control,” any commentator, activist, reporter or politician (or Facebook friend) who uses these terms has outed themselves as historically ignorant, irresponsible, and quite possibly anti-Semitic, or at least a willing dupe of anti-Semites:

  • “Two state solution.” Unbelievable. Biden has endorsed this mirage again. The Palestinians have had the “two state solution” within their grasp several times since 1948, and rejected it. Israel, not being suicidal or insane, requires an effective declaration that any such “solution” involves an official acknowledgement that Israel has a right to exist where it exists, and will not be the target of another genocidal attack. Framing the “two-state solution” as a reasonable “compromise” is nothing more than a device  to make both adversaries seem equally responsible for the endless conflict and violence. One is. The other is not.
  • “Occupation” and “occupied Palestine/Gaza.” There is no occupation. There are no Israeli soldiers in Gaza.
  • “Settlers” and “Colonization” These terms assume a fact not resolved. Israel claims the land it effectively won in the 7 Days War, though the U.N., over-stocked as it is with nations that wanted Israel to lose that war, claims that the nation keeping the West Bank and the Golan Heights is illegal. Turning over more land to people who vowed to wipe it out does not appeal to Israel, so it permits citizens  to move there. (Good.)
  • “Apartheid state.” Israel is not apartheid. Law abiding Muslims and Christians as well as non-Semitic races live there, work there, and vote there.
  • “Resistance” means “terrorism.”
  • “Indiscriminate bombing.” Hamas uses Gaza civilians as shields, stores weapons and hides leaders in hospitals, and thus makes “discriminate bombing” impossible as well as foolish. Nor are Gazans devoid of responsibility for their own plight. They support and installed a terrorist government, and endorse its mission and methods. They are not “innocent.” Their children are, but their parents are the ones who placed their children in mortal peril. Israel has no ethical or moral duty to sacrifice its own well-being to remedy Palestinian cultural poison.

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10 Ethics Takeaways From Wapo’s “Students Hated ‘To Kill A Mockingbird.’ Their teachers Tried To Dump It”

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

Subhead: “Four progressive teachers in Washington’s Mukilteo School District wanted to protect students from a book they saw as outdated and harmful. The blowback was fierce.”

To begin with, read it all, and to the extent you can stand it, the comments. I included some trenchant quotes below, however.

Now the takeaways:

1. If there is a more vivid and depressing illustration of how far public education, teacher competence and race relations have declined since, oh, let’s say 2008, I don’t know what it could be.

2. The episode was triggered, a black student told the Post, when a white teen read “nigger” while reading “Mockingbird” to the class. The student disobeyed the teacher’s instructions to skip the slur, and “the kid looked at every Black person — there’s three Black people in that class — and smiled.” Well: a) Asking a student to read a passage of any book to the class when she feels part of the text must be skipped is incompetent. b) Of all the passages to have a student read from “Mockingbird,” choosing one that includes “nigger” smacks of deliberate sabotage. c) Presumed facial expression racism? At this rate, we should be back to “separate but equal” in no time.

3. “Freeman-Miller wondered: Did the school really have to teach Harper Lee’s classic but polarizing novel, as was mandatory for all freshmen?” There is no reason for any novel to be regarded as “polarizing,” except to those who regard literature as indoctrination tools. The educational process is to read the novel, discuss its literary merit, its context, its cultural significance, the ideas it communicates, and it why it works (or not) for a particular reader.

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Ethical Quote Of The Week: Richard Fernandez

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

“One of the most poorly informed debates in the media coverage of war, is the concept of ‘proportionality’. The average person understands it as a kind of transaction. If X kills N citizens of Y, then Y can fairly retaliate by killing N*(1+i) citizens of X, i being a penalty….”

—Conservative commentator Richard Fernandez, tweeting as “wretchedthecat”

Bingo.

This central logical and historical fallacy is central to the pacifist’s unethical delusion. Fernandez explains,

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From The Res Ipsa Loquitur Files…

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

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

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

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…

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The Unmasking Continues: So A Big Chunk Of The American Left Hates Christians AND Jews Now?

/ Jack Marshall / 31 Comments

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.

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Pre-Halloween Ethics Tricks And Treats, 10/29/23

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

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.

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