Ugh.
I wouldn’t expect the individual who thought this…
…was a reasonable or ethical way to behave at the White House or to thank President Biden for inviting her and other LGBTQ activists to attend a political suck-up event would be revealed as a smart, articulate, ethical force in civic discourse. That three-minute babble-fest above, however, is special. I’m not even certain what the transsexual’s intention was. I can determine what it communicated, however:
I decided to restrict yesterday’s installment to the national divisions theme, and realized this morning that there are all sorts of random items hanging around that deserve some consideration.
Such as…
1. The angry banned commenter who has been leaving comment on various posts like a suspended junior high school student drawing penises on the school basketball court as revenge just wrote this in a comment you’ll never see: “Your blog is basically a torrent of hate speech.” No further analysis from me is necessary, I presume. I occasionally have regrets about banning commenters. This jerk I regret allowing to comment in the first place.
2. Speaking of fractured thought processes, an occasional commenter here wrote a Facebook post criticizing the fact that a male “identifying” as female won the “Miss San Francisco” title. Me, I wouldn’t care if an inanimate carbon rod got the crown, but one of my friend’s critics, a Woke World Warrior, wrote (and later too down) this response: “What impact does this have on your life?” I immediately flagged it as an exquisite expression of dead ethics alarms and the absence of comprehension of the principles of ethics generally. What a wonderful world we would build if we all only cared about conduct that affected us directly and personally! And that is the flaw in the logic behind the question.
3. Here’s an ancient but still common baseball rationalization that drives me crazy, but that isn’t used sufficiently in the real world to justify inclusion on the list. When a home plate umpire makes an obviously wrong strike call, a baseball “color” announcer, usually an ex-player, will say, “He’s been calling that pitch a strike all day. That’s all hitter and players want, consistency. It’s his strike zone today, and as long as it doesn’t change, nobody can complain.” That’s idiotic. It’s like saying, “Yeah, that cop always tickets pedestrians for chewing gum, but as long as he’s consistent about it, it’s OK.” The umpires’ job is to enforce the strike zone in the rule book, which is very specific. They don’t have the authority to decide what is “their” strike zone.
This was the day, in 1858, that Abraham Lincoln, just-nominated as the Republican Illinois candidate for the U.S. Senate, addressed the state Republican Convention in Springfield and, speaking to more than 1,000 delegates, crafted a warning for the nation adapted from the New Testament: “A house divided against itself cannot stand.” It’s ironic, or perhaps appropriate, that the anniversary of the prophetic speech occurs as “Juneteenth,” the federal holiday designed to pander to African-Americans in the aftermath of the George Floyd Freakout makes this a long weekend. Juneteenth is a divisive holiday, based on race alone.
As A.M. Golden asked two years ago at the end of his guest column here, “Any thoughts on how easily America is going to transition into two Independence Days, one for whites, one for blacks?” My thought, based on the two years since: It is likely to transition into a permanently racially-conflicted and divided society, which is apparently just what progressives and Democrats want, only relived by further divisions. I fully expect, for example, for the next push by the increasingly bold and insatiable LGBTQ lobby is for a national holiday honoring the Stonewall riots that began on June 28, 1969. That one, like the federal holiday arriving on June 19, will also be celebrated by only one segment of the public while the others metaphorically scratch their collective heads, or, in the case of weenies, celebrate just to appear sufficiently woke.
I wonder what Abe would say about the dangers of today’s divided house?
1. On the topic of divided houses: NPR host Teran Powell used Flag Day to trash the American Flag and to discuss her anxiety when “surrounded by excessive American Flags.”
“For example, I’m Black American, and over the past few years, I’ve continued to analyze what the American Flag means to me,” Powell said. “Especially considering the growth in extremism in the post-Trump-presidency and those extremists using the American Flag against people of color to say they’re the real Americans.” Then she an anecdote about seeing American flags in Illinois when she was traveling with a friend, saying, “And both of us were like, ‘Yeah, we need to hurry up and leave. And I thought about it like, ‘why did we feel like that?”
Oh, I can answer that one. You feel like that because you live and anti-American, anti-white racist bubble, because you have swallowed Black Lives Matter propaganda whole, facts don’t matter to you because you like the benefits of being a perpetual victim. If NPR wasn’t practicing “diversity,” another bit of George Floyd reparations, I greatly doubt that any radio host who says “like” in consecutive sentences would have a job in radio.
Then, as supporting authority—don’t expect NPR to put on anyone who might say, “That’s bullshit, you know,”—Marquette University philosophy professor Grant Silva got the floor to agree with Powell, though more articulately:
“I also get a little bit anxious around the excessive imagery of the flag in part because in my experience, patriotism quickly slips into nationalism. Especially the simplistic version of patriotism, the flag waving, my country love it or leave it kind of attitude. That is just a hop, skip and a jump away from becoming nationalism.As much as I would like to see the flag displayed in a proud manner, it all too quickly takes on the stakes that, as a non-white person, can mean a lot, right? It can mean a sense of inclusion or exclusion. A sense of belonging or the ascription of perpetual foreigner, perpetual outsider status; that that flag is not for me unless I’m willing to abide by the assimilatory paradigm that some of these individuals that you’re talking about tend to put forward.
Oh nooooooooooooo! Not the assimilatory paradigm! Then he compared the experience of seeing American flags to how he felt when he saw “Immigrant Hunting License” stickers for sale.
We pay taxes to support junk like this. We allow people who reason like Silva to teach the next generation.
2. A racial ethics train wreck that started rolling five years ago has finally ground to a halt. As described here at Ethics Alarms, it all began after police were called to a Philadelphia Starbucks after two African American men refused to leave the coffee store after they were told that they could not use the rest room and needed to buy something in order to stay there. The men were waiting to meet a companion to have a meeting. The store management then summoned the police. Activists turned the incident into a racial grievance, and called for a boycott of Starbucks.The self-consciously Social Justice Warrior-friendly corporation immediately groveled an apology, and even though the store’s staff were following company policy, it promised heads would roll. The company also announced that anyone could use the bathroom in its stores, which became a disaster, but that’s another story.
Shannon Phillips, who worked for Starbucks for 13 years, was the regional director responsible for overseeing 100 stores in Delaware, Maryland, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania. Various white employees were suspended or fired as Starbucks set out to prove to the black community that it was determined to fight racism…by engaging in it. Soon after the Philadelphia incident happened, was ordered to place a white 15 year veteran manager on administrative leave for alleged racial discrimination. When Phillips protested, insisting that the man had done nothing to justify punishment, she was fired. Meanwhile, the district manager of the store where the incident occurred was black, yet he wasn’t reprimanded or disciplined. Phillips sued Starbucks for racial discrimination, claiming she was fired because of the color of her skin.
This week, a federal jury agreed, awarding her $25 million in punitive damages and $600,000 in compensatory damages.
On Mediaite this morning–that’s the useful if still left-biased news media headline aggregator–there are 38 main stories and 17 of them involve Donald Trump. Quite a few also involve ethics issues, unless you consider the man’s very existence in our world an ethics issue, I have to deal with sorting this out every single day: if I give the constant tsunami of ethics issues raised by this persistent celebrity from Hell the attention and analysis they require, the blog ends up being as much about politics as ethics. Worse, the Trump Deranged apparently can’t process the concept that people can be unethical themselves and still have a right to be treated fairly, so any post delving into that situation, which has been an ongoing ethics scandal since at least 2016 (The 2016 Post-Election Ethics Train Wreck) is immediately attacked as “supporting” Trump. This, in turn, leads to a repetitive scenario like the one we saw twice this week, with two new and prolific single issue commenters flogging their hatred of the man refusing to move on to other topics, getting antagonistic, and forcing me to ban them.
Of course, non-Trump ethics news hasn’t been great lately either. Yesterday, I had to decide if this story—“Penn State professor arrested for having sex with dog”—was worthy of a post. I decided against it, even though I had a great line to use: “His horrified colleagues finally learned what he really meant when he told them, “I’ll be in the lab…”
Over to you, Clarence…
Earlier this week, I discussed the frightening and discouraging phenomenon of American professions becoming so politicized that they no longer can be trusted to serve public interests objectively and competently. If a profession cannot be trusted, then it is no longer a profession. Laura Hollis’s point in “Death of the Professions” is worth repeating:
The landscape of professional America should be a stalwart bastion of standards and commitment to truth. Instead, it is increasingly pockmarked by the impact craters of contemporary culture: the erosion of standards, the denial of truth, the capitulation to political pressure, and ideological lockstep borne of fear.
The previous post discussed this phenomenon in the context of the legal profession and its legal ethics extension, but arguably the partisan pollution of the medical profession has been worse. It has become a full participant in the newly-recognized Transsexual Promotion Ethics Train Wreck even as it is running down children: so much for “Do no harm.”
Re-watching “The Silence of the Lambs” last week, I was reminded that once the few clinics performing sex-change surgeries would apply stringent standards to applicants. “Buffalo Bill,” the serial killer in the film (and novel) was turned down for such surgery multiple times. Today, apparently, the radical procedures are no longer considered potentially harmful because the medical profession has bought into the deceptive, benign sounding cover-phrase, “gender affirming treatment.”
In the video above, Rep. Dan Crenshaw (R-Texas) pressed expert witnesses yesterday about the scientific justification for sex-change treatments of children and the authority for claims of the potential long-term benefits of these usually irreversible procedures. His Subcommittee on Health has convened to take up a number of proposals concerning health care access and research support, and Crenshaw wants to ensure that taxpayer money is not used to fund sex-change surgery on kids. “This is taxpayer money, and when 70% of taxpayers opposed these barbaric treatments on minors, then taxpayers should not fund it,” he said.
—Entrepreneur and Twitter savior Elon Musk, responding to the Biden Administration’s totalitarian rhetoric in its latest pander to the LGBTQ lobby.
The White House released a tweet from the Biden-Harris administration that stated, “To the LGBTQI+ Community – the Biden-Harris Administration has your back.” The video accompanying the tweet states, “these are our kids,” and “not somebody else’s kids; they’re all our kids.”
The death of “Unabomber” Ted Kaczynski once again reminded me that his “manifesto” about how technology was progressively making life unbearable was, yes, crazy, but he had a valid point. [You may consider today’s post a second installment to this one, from 2017]. I have long believed that the up-tick in seemingly random mass shootings is the predictable result of those who inject technology into our lives just because they can, selfishly making just getting through the day brain-killingly complex for people somewhere in the lower third of the intelligence scale, and a lot of people who are better off than that too. At some point, the anger and frustration reaches the point where you want to grab a rifle, find a tower, and start shooting.
This is essentially what happens to Sweeney Todd in the Sondheim musical of the same name, as he explains in the show’s first act finale why serial killing is logical:
We all deserve to die
Tell you why, Mrs. Lovett
Tell you why
Because the lives of the wicked should be made brief
For the rest of us, death will be a relief
We all deserve to die!
I began reflecting on both Ted and Sweeney when I tried to register for the Massachusetts Bar before they suspended me for non-payment of my 2023 annual dues. You have to do it online, and one reason I was late was that I hate the Mass. Board of Bar Overseers website, which always breaks down.
First, the site makes you log in. It wouldn’t let me, even though the password was correct and supposedly filled in automatically. The BBO can’t be bothered to have the feature that lets you see the letters and numbers so only little black dots appear. I had to ask to “reset” my password. Since I couldn’t see the figures, it took two tries to match the the thing, and then I was transferred to a page informing me that I could not move on to filling out my dues sheet until I had completed a “demographic survey.” I’m tempted to put it up: you wouldn’t believe it. If you didn’t type in a date in the right format (I eventually realized that tiny print AFTER each question told you what was acceptable) the question would register as “incomplete” when you selected “Done” at the end. The survey asked me to choose my “preferred” race and ethnicity from umpteen options and also asked which “sex or gender” I “identified” as. (In the comments section, I wrote that who or what I chose to have sex with, or not, and how, was none of the BBO’s business whatsoever.) The survey form was clumsy as well as insulting, it kept flagging reasons a response wouldn’t be accepted, and it took so long to load when it finally passed muster that I thought the program had broken down.
I’m going to try out this new category after frequent protests here when Ethics Alarms designates someone an Ethics Hero for doing his or her job.
In a now viral moment, CBS News Miami reporter Samantha Rivera stiff-armed a fan who attempted to muscle into her shot during in a live broadcast after Game 2 of the Stanley Cup Finals. And she never stopped smiling or talking.
That’s my idea of feminism in action, and exactly what any professional should do. Finish the job, deal with unexpected challenges, persevere, and don’t be a weenie.
The main thrust of the news coverage of the incident is that Rivera has received death threats on social media for—what, exactly? Keeping an asshole from getting his drunken face on TV? I don’t get it, but concentrating on the social media reaction is giving undue importance to moral luck. Rivera’s sterling conduct was in the ethics books as soon as she did it.
Parents should show that clip to their daughters…heck, show it to sons, too.
__________
Pointer: Other Bill
Gallup’s’ latest survey results are affirmatively strange, but then the topic is strange: American attitudes towards transgender issues. I believe the survey intersects with the one EA discussed yesterday, indicating that conservative self-identification was ticking up. It would have been stunning it it didn’t tick up, considering that the political and social Left has thrown all caution and moderation to the four winds and is openly advocating the most extreme and viscerally (as well as ethically) disgusting policies and beliefs imaginable, from 9 month abortions to legalizing theft. The unexpected Woke World obsession with transsexual “transitioning” is another example, though most Americans haven’t thought about it very carefully or thoroughly yet as Gallup’s polling makes clear.
The above survey, for example, is bizarre. I don’t see what morality has to do with an adult individual’s decision regarding transsexual surgery, non-surgical treatment, or “identification,” unless one is a Christian Scientist who opposes medical intervention, or someone who still subscribes to ancient religious taboos on all non-conforming sexuality and relationships. Obviously most American aren’t in either group. Those polled, and apparently those doing the polling, were seemingly using “moral” as a synonym for “ethical,” because most American are no longer taught what ethics is. They don’t know what “moral” means either.
In a superb and spot-on essay, “Death of the Professions,” Laura Hollis writes,
The landscape of professional America should be a stalwart bastion of standards and commitment to truth. Instead, it is increasingly pockmarked by the impact craters of contemporary culture: the erosion of standards, the denial of truth, the capitulation to political pressure, and ideological lockstep borne of fear.
Ethics Alarms has tracked this accelerating phenomenon for quite a while now. Journalists and educators have been the most prominent examples, but may more are in almost as dire condition ethically: doctors, lawyers, historians, psychiatrists, and many others. I’m not including the ethics rot in pretend “professions” like acting, where, not untypically, a presenter in last night’s Tony Awards referred to Florida governor Ron DeSantis as a KKK “Grand Wizard” and got a huge ovation from the glitterati. (Morons.)
One would think that at least ethicists would be immune from this destructive malady, and, in so thinking, you would be dead wrong. I belong to an association of legal ethicists, and I estimate that at least 75% of them, probably more are Trump Deranged. Yesterday the groups’ listserv was alive with horror at the fact that Aileen M. Cannon, the federal judge assigned to the Justice Department’s criminal case against Trump, was appointed by Trump. This meant to many of my colleagues that she was unfit to preside, obviously biased, and had to be replaced. One of my favorite<cough!>participants wrote in part, “Unless I am wrong on the history, Judge Cannon is the first judge in the history of our country to be in a position to incarcerate the person who gave her her job….The fact that [Trump] appointed her is grounds for recusal. It creates an appearance of impropriety. That’s basic ethics.”
Most (again, not all) of the cyber-assembled dutifully accepted this as reasonable. It is worth recalling that the same group assailed Trump’s similarly silly complaint that a judge of Hispanic descent was unable to rule fairly on Trump’s illegal immigration policies, and my own belief that a judge in an undisclosed same sex domestic relationship should have recused himself in the case examining the Constitutionality of California’s same-sex marriage restrictions. Nobody mentioned the obvious hypocrisy, except me (they don’t like me very much), as I wrote in partial response that if a judge appointed by Trump was unethical to preside over Trump’s trial, it must also be “basic ethics” that “a judge who was appointed and confirmed by members of a party that has been openly trying to use questionable means to remove a President from first his office and later any position of political influence should not be permitted to decide whether that same individual can be in a position to take the White House from that party.”
Ethics Alarms 