U.S. Society

Comments of the Day: “A New York Times “Expert” Thinks It’s Wrong To Make Informed Judgments About Who Is Fit To Be An American…”

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

I’m featuring two Comments of the Day on the same post, the discussion of whether legal immigration to the U.S. should be more carefully limited by the culture and characteristics of the nation of origin, as the Trump immigration policies seem to be heading. The discussion among the commentariate has been excellent; indeed it was difficult narrowing the COTD field down to just two.

First up is the Comment of the Day by CEES VAN BARNEVELDT on the post, “A New York Times “Expert” Thinks It’s Wrong To Make Informed Judgments About Who Is Fit To Be An American…”

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The primary criteria for allowing immigration should be…

  • a) whether an immigrant would be able to become a good US citizen
  • b) whether the immigrant fills an economic and cultural need for the USA

Take for example Sergey Brin. He was born in 1973 in the Soviet Union, and immigrated with his parents to the USA in 1979, during the Cold War. He is one of the two founders of Google. I would say this his immigration is a success story on both criteria. The Soviet Union at the time was the main adversary (some say enemy) of the United States at the time.

This means that we need to be careful with solely looking at country of origin as a criteria for immigration eligibility. We may want to exclude immigration from certain countries, however allow immigration on humanitarian grounds for those who flee the country due to persecution (e.g. Christians from Iran, Jews from Nazi Germany), and seek asylum.

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“Psychology Today” (Again) Shows Why “Experts” Cannot Be Trusted

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

Why is a standard issue anti-gun screed with moldy “common sense gun control” talking points being featured in “Psychology Today” under the guise of a “How to prevent suicides” article? Oh, lots of reasons, such as..

  • Anti-gun fanatics will use every opportunity imaginable to repeat their cant;
  • The fact that their objective, to somehow void the Second Amendment, is impossible doesn’t dissuade them from wasting our time;
  • Like most of the print media in the sciences, “Psychology Today” has been captured by the doctrinaire Left and allowed what should be a non-partisan topic be polluted by progressive activism;
  • Too many academics, scholars and experts today have no regard for integrity, and believe that they must accomplish their ideological goals by any means necessary, and
  • To someone whose only tool is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

“Reducing Gun Violence, Particularly Gun Suicides: What we can learn from other countries when it comes to reducing gun deaths” announces its bias and how that bias has made its “expert” author stupid right in the headline. Other countries have nothing to offer us as far as gun policies are concerned. They do not have the same culture as the United States, nor do other nations enshrine individual liberty as securely as the United States. Other nations did not rely on guns and self-determination to the extent that the U.S. population has throughout its history, and other nations are far more submissive to government interference with their rights than Americans are.

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A New York Times “Expert” Thinks It’s Wrong To Make Informed Judgments About Who Is Fit To Be An American. She’s the One Who’s Wrong

/ Jack Marshall / 33 Comments

President Trump’s decision that the United States needs to distinguish between nations, societies and cultures as it provides opportunities to become American was overdo and ethical. However, the utopians of the American Left, surely humming the tune of “Imagine” as they gnash their teeth and curse the President to the skies, are still stuck in its disastrous multiculturalism delusion that began in the Sixties.

In “We Rejected This Practice 60 Years Ago. We Must Do So Again Today,” immigration law professor Amanda Frost extols the United States abolishing immigration restrictions based on nationality in 1965. President Lyndon B. Johnson declared that the legislation he was signing “corrects a cruel and enduring wrong” and makes Americans “truer to ourselves both as a country and as a people.” LBJ was also responsible for welfare and the increased expansion of socialism in the United States, laws that tried to make some states permanent second class members of the union, and other ideas that seemed good at the time but have proved to have unfortunate unanticipated consequences. It is ironic to look back on an immigration policy change that was supposed to make Americans “truer to themselves” that we now know makes the United States less American, stable and viable by the year.

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“Nah, There’s No Mainstream Media Bias!” Smoking Gun of the Month

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

How does anyone avoid hiding their heads under a bag when they insist that our U.S. media is anything but an ethics-free partisan propaganda machine that validates Trump’s “enemy of the people” analysis every day, and often every hour of the day?

For weeks leading up to Monday’s special election in Tennessee’s 7th Congressional District pitting Trump-backed Republican Matt Van Epps against Democrat State Rep. Aftyn Behn. to replace GOP Rep. Mark Green who resigned in July, the Axis media was sounding gleeful alarms that Republicans were facing another upset, that the House of Trump was doomed, that the metaphorical wheels were falling off because the President is a senile, blundering Nazi who is mean to all those virtuous and industrious illegal aliens, and everyone regrets not electing the babbling, cackling, incompetent the Democrats tried to inflict on the country after installing a demented puppet in the White House for four catastrophic years.

Sidney Wang had the perfect analysis of the legitimacy of that “narrative” decades before it began:

The media plot, and it was and is a plot, was a replay of what we have observed for a very long time now: journalists seeing their job as demoralizing Republicans and energizing Democrats with pipe dreams, lies, rigged polls, spin and calculated deception, all aimed at the majority of Americans who lack the political literacy and critical thinking skills to know shit from shinola, pardon my French.

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Why Are People Like This Teaching In Colleges…or Anyplace?

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

Like all holiday movies, “Planes, Trains and Automobiles” has ethics at the core of its metaphorical heart, though not to the extent of “It’s a Wonderful Life,” “White Christmas” or “Miracle on 34th Street,” the objects of the three Ethics Alarms holiday ethics companions. (Is there another film I should add to the series?) But it really takes effort—and pernicious bias—to claim that the John Hughes classic contains a “dangerous” pro-capitalist message, as SUNY Purchase College Professor Mtume Gant claimed on the insane leftist podcast “Millennials are Killing Capitalism” with host Jared Ware. 

The podcast describes itself as a “platform for communists, anti-imperialists, Black Liberation movements, ancoms, left libertarians, LBGTQ activists, feminists, immigration activists, and abolitionists to discuss radical politics, radical organizing and share their visions for a better world.” Great. And it has to dig so deep for topics that it stoops to searching for sinister messages in a formulaic holiday movie?

Steve Martin plays an up-tight ad exec whose asshole tendencies emerge regularly when he gets involved in holiday travel hell as most of us have. He is desperately trying to get home to spend Thanksgiving with his family because it’s what you do, that’s all: he’s also especially sentimental about it. But circumstances conspire to force him to battle his way from Manhattan to Chicago with a gregarious shower-ring salesman (John Candy) who is his emotional and intellectual opposite.

It’s “The Odd Couple” crossed with “A Christmas Carol,” as Martin learns the values of empathy, kindness and good will by the end of the movie, while Candy, who has no family, is embraced by Martin’s in the misty-eyed finale.

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The Illegal Immigrant Ethics Train Wreck Picks Up Steam! [Expanded]

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

I am officially designating the improvidently admitted legal immigrant ethics train wreck as merely an extension of the Illegal Immigrant Ethics Train Wreck, particularly since so many progressives refuse to acknowledge the distinction between legal and illegal in this matter. They also refuse to acknowledge that time marches on, and that policies that made sense in the past often do not make sense, or are not even responsible, today.

Item: One of my Trump Deranged Facebook friends whom have mentioned here several times, as part of one of his daily attacks on the President, cited as authority this section of a speech given by Ronald Reagan shortly before leaving office…

My friend was responding to the Trump Administration’s decision to pause immigration from 19 nations whose culture may not be wise to introduce into American society. The speech, however, cuts against the argument—pro-Somali as well as other immigrant groups uninterested in assimilation—he thinks he is making. Rep. Omar (D-Minn), quite properly excoriated by President Trump (though not in the measured terms he should have used), has said repeatedly that she regards herself as representing “her people,” Somalis first. Omar’s people, like the Congresswoman herself, generally have no intention of becoming Americans in the sense that President Reagan meant. They want to continue to embrace the toxic culture of their failed state but in a more prosperous and accommodating environment among, to be blunt, “suckers.”

Item: I recommend this useful and well-reasoned blog post. Key section:

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Ethics Quiz: This…

/ Jack Marshall / 24 Comments

Your Ethics Alarms Ethics Quiz of the Day:

Is this an appropriate—responsible, ethical— use of a minister’s position?

As a secondary question, is it ethical for him to announce to the congregation that his parents are not supportive of his son?

Obviously Unethical Plot of the Year: “Plan One From North Texas”

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

Gavin Rivers Weisenburg, 21, of Allen, and Tanner Christopher Thomas, 20, of Argyle, Texas were indicted this month by a federal grand jury in the Eastern District of Texas. It charged them with conspiracy to murder, maim, or kidnap in a foreign country, a charge you don’t see every day. Weisenberg and Thomas had been plotting for over a year to recruit and army and lead an invasion of the Island of Gonave, which lies off the coast of Haiti. It has about 870,000 residents.

The plan:  Weisenburg and Thomas would purchase a sailboat, firearms and ammunition, then recruit homeless people from the District of Columbia to make up their mercenary army. They would all sail to the island, stage a surprise invasion, and complete a coup d’etat.  After taking over the government, their army would murder all of the men on the island, leaving the women and children to be the duo’s sex slaves.

Wait, what?

The indictment states that Weisenburg and Thomas took “overt acts” to accomplish their dastardly plot.They learned the Haitian Creole language. They had begun recruiting. They had visited the island, which is how they determined that taking it over would be easy. Then they enrolled in various classes to acquire the necessary skills for the take-over.  Thomas, for example, enlisted in the U.S. Air Force to acquire military skills, and got himself transferred to Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland so he could sign up the homeless in D.C.

One must concede that the two men were creative, ambitious, able to think out of the box, and were not afraid to dream big and aspire to greatness. This is truly the American spirit! Unfortunately, they are also unethical, irresponsible sociopaths.

This may make a great movie, though.

The federal conspiracy to commit murder in a foreign country carries a sentence of life in federal prison. Their defense lawyer is going to argue that none of the things the two men actually did do in furtherance of the murderous plan was illegal.

Oh…they have also been charged with child pornography.

On the Shooting of the Two National Guard Members [Expanded]

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

As you doubtless know by now, two members of the West Virginia National Guard were shot in an ambush-style attack in Washington, D.C. before Thanksgiving. Army Spc. Sarah Beckstrom, 20, has died; the other victim,
Air Force Staff Sgt. Andrew Wolfe, 24, remains in critical condition. The shooter is Rahmanullah Lakanwal, an Afghan national.

He shouldn’t have been here. Simple as that.

It is mordantly entertaining to see the despicable Axis news media spin like dervishes to try to somehow blame the President and Republicans for what is 100% the result of progressive madness. The presence of the National Guard in D.C. can’t reasonably be blamed for violent attacks on them, but Democratic rhetoric irresponsibly describing their deployment as the equivalent of a hostile occupation or an autocratic fascist take-over can be held responsible, and should be.

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Thank Goodness For Experts, or “If You Can’t Figure Out This Is Wrongful Conduct By Yourself, You’re Not Trustworthy…”

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

The New York Times has a column by a wellness expert who reveals that Kipling Williams, emeritus professor of psychological sciences at Purdue University, has found that giving a loved one “the silent treatment” is cruel and constitutes punishment. So do a bunch of other experts quoted, but this guy has supposedly studied the effects of the silent treatment for over 30 years. That’s his big takeaway? Apparently so. As my old dead friend Scott Wheeler used to say (ironically, I lost contact with Scott because he engaged in conduct I could not forgive or forget so I cut him off, and he knew exactly why) “Who doesn’t know that?”

Slow day at the Times? From the article: “Some people think the silent treatment is a milder way of dealing with conflict, said Dr. Gail Saltz, clinical associate professor of psychiatry at the NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital. But it isn’t, she explained. ‘The silent treatment is a punishment,’ she said, ‘whether you are acknowledging that to yourself or not.’For the person who is being frozen out, it creates “anxiety and fear, and feelings of abandonment,” Dr. Saltz said, and it often causes a “cascade of self-doubt, self-blame and self-criticism.”

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