You’re up, ’cause I’m down….
Open Forum, December Dawns Opinion Party Edition
You’re up, ’cause I’m down….
U.S. Society
It’s Called Sacrificing Individual Rights For “The Greater Good.” Jefferson Would Hate It, And So Should Any Ethical American
Yet this is what progressives and Democrats increasingly argue for to solve problems.
Exhibit #1: David Brooks
It hard to believe that David Brooks was once considered to be a conservative. Spend enough time in the New York Times culture, apparently, at least if your character, principles and integrity are as weak as David’s seem to be, and you will emerge from your chrysalis as a new, collectivist, proto-totalitarian.
Here’s Brooks on PBS talking about what he’d like to see installed to address gun violence:
President Biden spoke about red flagging, that you would find somebody you think is potentially dangerous, and we would be able to — authorities would be able to go in and take guns away.
That would take a gigantic cultural shift in this country, a revamping of the way we think about privacy, a revamping of the way we think about the role government plays in protecting the common good. I think it’d be something I think would be good not only for — to head off shootings, but good to live in a society where we cared more intimately about each other.
And I would be willing to give up certain privacies for that to happen. But, for many Americans, that would just be a massive cultural shift to regard community and regard our common good more frankly, in a European style. I think it would benefit our society in a whole range of areas, but it’s hard to see that kind of culture change to a society that’s been pretty individualistic for a long, long time.
Observe what “conservative” pundit Brooks is advocating here. The government decides someone is “dangerous” and can then take away Second Amendment rights. What would stop the government from taking other rights away that it might believe are “dangerous” in the hands of someone it fears? This is pre-crime. This is open-ended government control over individual liberty based on subjective standards. And David Brooks says he’d “be willing to give up certain privacies for that to happen,” because he knows that he would probably not be a target of such government oppression. After all, he’s now on the “right’ side.
The United States, he says, is “pretty individualistic,” meaning too individualistic, by European standards. Yet the United States of America was created expressly to reject the limitations on individualism placed on its citizens by European cultures and governments.
Morning Ethics Warm-Up, 12/1/22: Getting December Off To An Unethical Start…[Corrected]
I’m preparing the annual Ethics Alarms Christmas music post, and thus thinking about holiday songs and performances. I think my top three performances in this realm of all time would be, first, Judy Garland’s rendition of “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” in “Meet Me in St. Louis,” then Bing Crosby’s recording of “Do You Hear What I Hear?,” and Harry’s contribution to the Christmas canon above. I had a long drive last week and listened to the Sirius “Christmas Traditions” station. It’s depressing—I know I’ve mentioned this before—everyone you hear is dead. That can’t be a good thing for getting people into the Christmas spirit. I started playing a game: how many songs with dead singers would play before a currently living singer would show up? Fourteen songs went by, and then jazz artist Nancy Wilson popped up. Oooh! I was pretty sure she was still alive! Nope. I checked; Nancy checked out in 2018. The one living singer who has been played repeatedly so far is Johnny Mathis. He’s 87.
Hang in there, Johnny.
1. It’s really kind of amazing…these people flagrantly display their double standards and cynicism, and pay no price for it. Integrity? What integrity? House Democrats just picked a new leader in the House, with Speaker Nancy Pelosi stpping down (finally!) at the end of this term. Rep. Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) is the new power. Apparently the fact that he has been an outspoken “election denier” in the past (at least that’s what Democrats call it when Republicans question an election’s legitimacy) and Jeffries has been tapped immediately after the party made “election denial” a litmus test for fascism going into the midterm elections doesn’t bother anyone at all. Jeffries repeatedly denied the results of the 2016 presidential election, claiming that it was illegitimate and stolen.
“The more we learn about 2016 election the more ILLEGITIMATE it becomes,” Jeffries tweeted in 2018, referencing Trump defeating Hillary Clinton. “America deserves to know whether we have a FAKE President in the Oval Office.” In 2020, he called out Trump, saying, “history will never accept you as a legitimate President.” That the Republican Party couldn’t wipe the metaphorical floor with these liars and incompetents last month shows its rank incompetence. No wonder Democrats don’t even try to hide their hypocrisy.
ABC Is Upset That Twitter Is Ending Its “Covid 19 Misinformation” Censorship Policy. ABC Should Shut Up And Address Its Own Misinformation
The report from ABC News is rife with significance and illumination. Sayeth the network, a bulwark of the biased mainstream media propaganda machine, in its headline, “Twitter ends enforcement of COVID misinformation policy: Twitter is no longer enforcing its policy against misinformation about COVID-19.”
If one had to choose a single topic about which it is ridiculous and hypocritical for the news media to complain about alleged “misinformation,” I can’t imagine a more perfect one than the pandemic. The ABC story is unintentionally hilarious in its resolute refusal to acknowledge reality, thus qualifying as misinformation, disinformation, or perhaps just “typical unethical journalism deception” itself. ABC’s self-own is also useful, as it provides one more example, as if more were necessary, of how desperately the Axis of Evil (you know by now, I hope: “the resistance”/ Democratic Party/ mainstream media” anti-democracy team) needs to see Elon Musks mission to rescue free speech and the dissemination of non-conforming opinions and embargoed information fail.
Some highlights:
More Evidence Of Ethics Rot In The Legal Profession
The combination of The Great Stupid washing over the land, woke indoctrination and bullying, and the politicization of everything has perhaps taken its greatest toll on the trustworthiness of the professions. One after another has succumbed to ethics rot to an extent that one would have been unimaginable. The legal profession has been especially ravaged.
A depressing and horrifying op-ed in the Wall Street Journal told the first-hand account of how the writer was fired from her law firm, Hogan Lovells, for daring to express an opinion that was not deemed compliant with current progressive cant. She wrote in part,
After the Supreme Court issued its Dobbs decision overturning Roe v. Wade in June, global law firm Hogan Lovells organized an online conference call for female employees. As a retired equity partner still actively serving clients, I was invited to participate in what was billed as a “safe space” for women at the firm to discuss the decision. It might have been a safe space for some, but it wasn’t safe for me.
Everyone else who spoke on the call was unanimous in her anger and outrage about Dobbs. I spoke up to offer a different view. I noted that many jurists and commentators believed Roe had been wrongly decided. I said that the court was right to remand the issue to the states. I added that I thought abortion-rights advocates had brought much of the pushback against Roe on themselves by pushing for extreme policies. I referred to numerous reports of disproportionately high rates of abortion in the black community, which some have called a form of genocide. I said I thought this was tragic.
The outrage was immediate. The next speaker called me a racist and demanded that I leave the meeting. Other participants said they “lost their ability to breathe” on hearing my comments. After more of the same, I hung up.
Someone made a formal complaint to the firm. Later that day, Hogan Lovells suspended my contracts, cut off my contact with clients, removed me from email and document systems, and emailed all U.S. personnel saying that a forum participant had made “anti-Black comments” and was suspended pending an investigation. The firm also released a statement to the legal website Above the Law bemoaning the devastating impact my views had on participants in the forum—most of whom were lawyers participating in a call convened expressly for the purpose of discussing a controversial legal and political topic. Someone leaked my name to the press.
Best of Ethics Award 2022, The Ethics Hero of the Year: Elon Musk
I know that it’s relatively easy to be bold, principled and even reckless when you have billions of dollars to play with, but that should not diminish the admiration due to Elon Musk for sinking 40 billion dollars into what might be a quixotic effort to bolster freedom of public discourse and information online by reforming one of the worst partisan offenders in that crucial area.
As with the mainstream media’s abandonment of democratic principles to become a progressive/Democratic Party propaganda tool, the major social media platforms have engaged in outright censorship based on viewpoint discrimination, and, like the mainstream media, have dismissed complaints about bias as “conspiracy theories.” In addition to opening up Twitter to all viewpoints, Musk has also vowed to publish Twitter records demonstrating exactly how biased its previous content vetting process was. Wonderful.
As I’m sure he predicted when he threw down this gauntlet, the attacks on him have come from all angles and directions. The Biden administration darkly warned that it would be “watching” him closely—nah, no intimidation attempt there! Glenn Greewald writes of the media’s attacks,
Where Did That Post Go?
I just took down the post showing how David Portnoy was unethically slimed by the New York Times. When I tried to add the link to his video (which I did not feel was necessary to make the point, but several readers asked for it), WordPress went rogue and eliminated the headline, even though it showed on my draft. (The mysterious “draft that doesn’t match what appears when the draft is published” problem is always a nightmare.) I tried everything to fix it—new version, re-editing, copying, going back to the original version. After way too long spent on a minor post, I decided to hell with it. You can check out what I regarded as res ipsa loquitur here, at Instapundit.
A few comments went away with the post; I’m sorry, except for Steve Witherspoon: his comment prompted me to do whatever I did that made WordPress turn on me. I blame him.
More Tales Of The Great Stupid: Legal Jaywalking
Guess why California just legalized jaywalking. Go ahead, guess. You know why.
The misleadingly titled “Freedom to Walk Act”—gee, would the old Twitter regime ban a “Red State” that a called a law that? Because we al have the freedom to walk, except where we know it’s not permitted. Are Californians free to trespass now? I think not—decriminalized jaywalking, which used to carry a fine, as long as the jaywalker isn’t deemed to be putting themselves or others in danger. It goes into effect January 1. Think about what such a law means: violating clearly indicated pedestrian rules that everyone is taught in childhood is now legal. So what are those rules, then? When a rule isn’t enforced, it isn’t a rule. It’s unethical to violate rules, but then California has such shattered and malfunctioning ethics alarms that it’s foolish to expect the government or the public to understand that.
Oh, right, that question: give up? Here’s the answer: the bill’s author, state Assemblyman Phil Ting (D-San Francisco—I bet you could have guessed where such a law’s author came from too, right?) says jaywalking laws “are arbitrarily enforced and tickets are disproportionately given to people of color and in low-income communities.” Of course that was the rationale. That’s the reason petty theft is legal now in Ting’s city, and why shoplifting is OK. If there’s a law that “criminal of color” violate in numbers disproportionate to their demographic percentages, the easy solution is to just eliminate the law! By this logic, Chicago needs to make murder legal.
Holiday Craziness Ethics Kick-Off, 11/28/2022: Poop In A Pringles Can Ethics
I finally figured out how I can resuscitate the Ethics Alarms Awards after a five year drought. What made them impossible beginning in 2017, after eight years of announcing the Best and Worst of ethics every year, was their sheer size and the time it took to assemble them, essentially keeping me from effectively covering developing ethics events and issues in order to review old ones. I usually couldn’t get the job finished until February. Starting today, I’ll be posting at least one award each day through mid-January, 2023. Then I’ll gather them up for two summary posts. Nominations are encouraged: if you want a review of the categories—and I will always consider news ones, the 2016 Worst in Ethics awards are here, here, here; the “Best” categories can be recalled here and here.
1. I might as well get started: Here’s the Ethics Alarms 2022 Asshole of the Year.Yes, it has to be Donald Trump, though it was a closer race than I expected. The dinner with “Ye” and the ridiculous Nick Fuentes, plus Trump’s changing stories about how the dinner came to pass, locked the honor up, but the threats directed at Gov. DeSantis after Trump’s obsession with his 2020 loss helped cost the GOP the Senate had already made him the presumptive champ in this category—again. What really clinched it was that Mediaite’s Trump-Deranged, blatantly biased reporter Tommy Christopher reported today that Trump asked Kanje “Ye” West to be his running mate in 2024. I don’t believe anything Christopher writes, but I still found myself wondering if the story could possibly be true. Trump is that big an asshole. Runner-up: Liz Cheney.
2. The ethics value missing here: proportion. A real headline today: “Alcohol-fueled family game of Monopoly turns violent as furniture is overturned, gunfire erupts — and man goes to jail on assault with a deadly weapon charge” Continue reading
Comment Of The Day: On The State of Feminism (Open Forum, 11/25/22)
Another Comment of the Day from CD-VAPatriot, who has to cope with the increasingly annoying glitch at WordPress that cases in to spam certain commenters’ posts for no apparent reason.
Ethics Alarms 
I think it all depends on one’s definition of “feminism.” I used to think the term simply meant that women were overall equal to men in terms of career opportunities, earning potential, deciding whether or not they wanted to get married and/or have kids, etc.. These days it seems that a lot of women I know feel that being a feminist means that “women are the SAME as men”. Well, forgive me for being a traitor to my gender (which yes I have been called) but I believe that there ARE significant differences between the sexes. Oh, and I’m also apparently a traitor and a woman-hater for being pro-life. (Who knew?)
As the female half of a boring old married, heterosexual couple who has been trying to get pregnant for over a decade, I really don’t think my hubby and I fit the “norm” anymore. We’ve noticed that in just the last decade, our friends and the couples we’ve met during that time have significantly changed their overall outlook quite a bit. Fewer couples are getting married: “who, like, needs a stupid piece of paper or like, some rando God to decide if our love is like, legit?”
Continue reading →