Try a mind experiment: if California’s ridiculous and racist Reparations Task Force wanted to exacerbate racial tensions as much as humanly possible while also making African-Americans seem as toxic to society as a KKK Grand Dragon could imagine in a fever dream, what would it be doing differently that it is doing right now? We know that the group is already recommending that millions of dollars in taxpayer reparations for slavery be handed out to the state’s blacks, even though slavery never existed in the Golden State. But wait, there’s more!
U.S. Society
I’m Baaaaack! (Here’s What Happened…)
For now, this will have to be just a quick note and an apology. Shortly before noon on Friday, I was writing a course summary for a monthly professionalism program I’ll be doing for lawyers next year when, literally out of a clear blue sky, lightening struck so near to our home in Alexandria that the house shook. Scared the hell out of me.
The crash was accompanied by a loud “snap” sound, and my computer screen went black. The internet modem also went dead: it was fried, and had to be replaced. I couldn’t start my PC (my laptop died a while ago, and I’ve been saving up to replace that). Comcast arrived to replace the modem Saturday afternoon, but the computer took longer: a part was damaged by the strike, and my son just installed the replacement. Fortunately, I didn’t lose any data.
This is the first time I’ve been online since Friday, and I obviously have a lot of catching up to do. I’m just thrilled I can get even a non-substantive post up today, so only one day was missed entirely.
Finally:
- Many thanks to commenter E2. She knows my sister, and my sister passed along my disaster to her while relaying my request that she let everyone know that I wasn’t dead.
- I’m so sorry.
- Live every day to its fullest, because if a bolt of lightning can come out of a clear blue sky and fry my computer…well, you know the rest.
- Thanks to everyone who added quality content here while I was frozen out. (Did any banned commenters take advantage of the sheriff being out of town? I guess I’ll find out soon enough.
Flagrant Virtue-Signaling Of The Century: Ben & Jerry’s
This tweet is so astoundingly transparent and stupid that it isn’t even worth boycotting the ice cream over, though apparently some people are.
It is a core tenet at Ethics Alarms that demands, plans, assertions and proposals that are impossible to realize are not ethical, but are instead incompetent, irresponsible, intellectually dishonest and a waste of everybody’s time, as well as conduct that makes already stupid people dumber yet. “Imagine” is the universal anthem for such statements.
Assuming that the authors of that tweet are not literally morons—and who knows, really—the thing is simply a cry for applause from Woke World. Oh, aren’t these people wonderful! They want to remedy injustice!
To be fair, the suggestion that the U.S. return all of its land to the Native American tribes is only a bit more absurd than slavery reparations, or as Rationalization #22 puts it, “There are worse things.”
Ethics Zugzwang And High School Theater
I have no idea what can be done about this now, but it is among the saddest consequences of the culture wars and The Great Stupid, and, as is so often the case, the casualties are children….which means that in the long-term, the casualty will be American society itself.
Ethics Alarms has periodically chronicled the sagas of high school theatrical productions halted or distorted by various politics- or ideology-based complaints and protests, but I never focused on what a tightening strangle-hold on cultural education this phenomenon represents. The New York Times examined the problem here, and though the Times slant seeks to blame it all on conservatives (you know, those meanies who also want to “ban books”), the description of the problem is accurate and gloomy. A sample:
Now THIS Is Woke, (Or) “Bias Makes You Stupid, And Vice Versa”
This is a woman whom the government of San Francisco deem qualified to render competent, objective service regarding the appropriateness and extent of reparations for slavery the black residents of San Francisco should receive.
Nikcole Cunningham serves on the ultra-woke City By The Bay’s 15-person African American Reparations Advisory Committee. This is what she had to say about straight white men:
“Straight white men are abusive. Straight white men are serial killers,” Cunningham told the news outlet. “They have the most — I watch these shows — the most serial killers. Straight white men are the ones who are shooting up schools, right? So they are a danger to society (not all of them)…They’re not [supporting reparations.]So if anything, they pose more of a harm than support and help. And then you got to remember their ancestors.. are the ones who were standing out here in their Sunday best watching black people hang and burn. So until white people come to grips with their ancestry too and make amends with them, to say, I want to be the change..“white supremacy is ingrained in the DNA in this country and definitely in this city.”
Ethics Quotes For The Fourth: On Liberty, Freedom, and Democracy [Part I]
““Hurrah for the flag of the free!
May it wave as our standard forever,
The gem of the land and the sea,
The banner of the right.
“Let despots remember the day
When our fathers with mighty endeavor
Proclaimed as they marched to the fray
That by their might and by their right
It waves forever.”
—–John Phillip Sousa, “The Stars and Stripes Forever”
“Democracy is like sex. When it is good, it is very very good. And when its is bad, it is still pretty good.”
—–Anonymous.
“The real democratic American idea is, not that every man shall be on a level with every other man, but that every man shall have liberty to be what God made him, without hindrance.”
—-Henry Ward Beecher, American preacher
“Democracy is moral before it is political.”
—- Louis Brandeis, Supreme Court Justice
“The experience of democracy is like the experience of life itself-always changing, infinite in its variety, sometimes turbulent and all the more valuable for having been tested by adversity.”
—- Jimmy Carter
“A constitutional democracy like ours is perhaps the most difficult of man’s social arrangements to manage successfully. Our scheme of society is more dependent than any other form of government on knowledge and wisdom and self-discipline for the achievement of its aims. For our democracy implies the reign of reason on the most extensive scale. The Founders of this Nation were not imbued with the modern cynicism that the only thing that history teaches is that it teaches nothing. They acted on the conviction that the experience of man sheds a good deal of light on his nature. It sheds a good deal of light not merely on the need for effective power if a society is to be at once cohesive and civilized, but also on the need for limitations on the power of governors over the governed.”
—- Felix Frankfurter, Supreme Court Justice
“In contrast to totalitarianism, democracy can face and live with the truth about itself.”
—-Sidney Hook, American philosopher and historian
“America’s experiment with government of the people, by the people, and for the people depends not only on constitutional structure and organization but also on the commitment, person to person, that we make to each other.”
—-Robert Hutchins Continue reading
Joy Reid, Harvard, Althouse, And Affirmative Action
Straining to engage in her trademark “cruel neutrality,” esteemed blogger Ann Althouse stepped up to defend MSNBC’s Joy Reid and stepped in it, as the idiom goes, in the process. Ann defended Reid, claiming that she never said or implied that she was admitted to Harvard because of affirmative action.
“I think Ramaswamy is distorting (or, less likely, not hearing and understanding),” Ann wrote in part. “…She says she got high grades and test scores in high school, but she wouldn’t have thought to try for Harvard if Harvard hadn’t come out to her small, majority-black town and recruited. She was strongly encouraged to apply. The Supreme Court hasn’t changed the power of schools to recruit in places like hers. Reid never says her scores and grades wouldn’t have been enough if she were not black.”
Uncharacteristically, Althouse didn’t do her homework. In the MSNBC segment, Reid was basically regurgitating her blog post saying the same things, and that was headlined, “I got into Harvard because of affirmative action. Some of my classmates got in for their wealth.”
Monday Ethics Catch-Up, 7/3/2023: More SCOTUS Ethics Alarms
July 3 is a major date in U.S. history, slammed as it is between the epic significance of July 2 and 4 in the birth of our nation, and representing the crucial final day in the battle of Gettysburg, which in retrospect we can see as the critical moment when that nation was preserved as one.
Pickett’s Charge and the too little noted role of Gen. George Armstrong Custer have many ethics lessons to teach: the annually re-posted Ethics Alarms essay on those topics are here.
1. Get woke, go broke, and make someone else pay the price…Disney has been taking multiple hits as a result of its current mouse-eared masters determination to take sides in the culture wars, a one way ratchet that as Bud Light and Target (among others) have discovered, there is no way to backtrack or repent. Now it appears that its latest summer blockbuster attempt, “Indiana Jones and the Graying Temples of Doom” or whatever the misbegotten project is being called, is having approximately the same level of audience interest as, say, a sequel to “Body Heat” featuring the now 200 pound Kathleen Turner. When the most positive movie reviews say, “It really isn’t as bad as everyone expected,” you know there’s a problem. So how is Disney fixing the problem? By gutting the other businesses it owns! ESPN and National Geographic are the latest victims. Meanwhile, there are no signs that Walt’s wounded cultural icon is retreating to the neutral position it should have maintained all along.
2. Gaslighting from the Times (again). The more I think about the Times headline, “With Supreme Court Decision, College Admissions Could Become More Subjective,” the worse it seems. Is the Times telling us that using the color of an applicant’s skin as a determinant was being “objective”? Is it implying that anyone is arguing that deciding among many more qualified applicants than Harvard can hold (that’s why God made Yale!) is possible without considerable subjectivity? This is one more example of how the SCOTUS decision is being distorted in order to mislead the 99% of American who either won’t read the decision or won’t understand it if they do. It’s really a pretty simple ruling. Colleges can make their choices on the basis of many subjective judgments, but U.S. law and the Constitution forbid discriminating on the basis of race.
Soledad O’Brien’s Unethical, Useful Affirmative Action Tweet, And Related Matters…[Updated]
Gee, it’s nice to have the smug, biased, poisonous Soledad O’Brien to kick around again. The unethical broadcast journalist of color who left her news show-hosting role with CNN in 2013 to cash in with podcasting and other syndicated ventures that spared the general American public by keeping her toxic influence limited, sent that outrageous tweet above in response to an Asian American women’s expressed satisfaction that college applicants who looked like her could no longer be legally handicapped when they apply to educational institutions.
It’s reassuring to know O’Brien hasn’t changed; after all, so little seems reliable or permanent any more. Her offensive and obnoxious tweet also neatly illustrates one important side benefit of the Supreme Court’s opinion last week striking down racially biased admissions policies, aka “affirmative action,” at Harvard and the University of North Carolina. The reactions to the ruling during the Woke World freakout are revealing so much about so many of its ethics dunces and villains. We should all be grateful.
On The Trail Of The Great Stupid…
These signs were allegedly posted yesterday in response to the Supreme Court’s hay trick yesterday. If genuine—and who knows?—‘s staff the owner of the establishment is a medical miracle, apparently living without a brain. As simultaneous virtue-signaling and IQ 80 signaling, this is special. Let’s see: the Supreme Court did not rule that businesses can discriminate. How will the store’s staff identify “Trump supporters”? How often does a church walk in a store to buy anything? Do churches even fly flags? I’ve never seen one.
Bias makes you stupid, but it can’t make someone this stupid unless he or she is well on the way already.
Ethics Alarms 