Well, that may be a bit over-stated, though not in the parlance of the Democratic Party and its propaganda agents in the news media. What Gallup really found, in its annual survey of U.S. values and beliefs, is that social conservatism is on the rise, and has reached its highest level in a decade, since 2012. Gee…what…a…surprise…
Gallup, being, as much as it tries to fight it, also infected with partisan bias, doubletalks its explanation for charts like these:
No, you idiots, the Boston Red Sox did not demote a major league pitcher because he said “something publicly that goes against what the Leftist elites want you to believe.” This totally manufactured “gotcha!” story, initially pushed by the only intermittently reliable New York Post (meaning it isn’t reliable at all, which made it easy for the pro-Biden censors to hide the Hunter Biden laptop story) was flogged to death by P.J. Media’s Robert Spencer. Its gist: Matt Dermody, who started Boston’s final game last week in a series against the Cleveland Indi–sorry, Guardians, was demoted after the game “because he has dared to depart from our insane society’s wholehearted worship of sexual deviance.”
I venture to conclude that Spencer didn’t watch the game. You see, I did. You had to be watching from the National Anthem, because Dermody was only around for three innings, and even that was touch-and-go. I also was aware of a controversy in “Red Sox Nation” over Dermody being brought up from the minor leagues to start that game, but it had nothing to do with his social media comments in 2021. Oh, the usual suspects like the Boston Globe tried to assail the team for even signing a pitcher who wouldn’t wave a rainbow flag, but the real problem with the move was that it made no sense as a baseball tactic. The Red Sox have been in a protracted slump, they had fallen into last place in the hyper-competitive American League East, and they needed a win to stay above .500 and to win the series, which was tied 1-1. Cleveland is a weaker team than the Sox (though they are in second place in the pathetic AL Central), but the Sox still needed a competent performance from whomever they started.
Dermody, it was obvious from the moment the announcement was made that he was being brought up from Worchester, wasn’t likely to provide it. He is a 31-year-old retread who had been forgettable in four brief stints with the Blue Jays and Cubs and hadn’t even been getting batters out in the minors. Every Red Sox fan, as well as a Red Sox beat writer who has been my friend for 20 years, thought the decision to use him was asinine….and it had nothing, nada, zilch to do with his views regarding gays.
The Equal Protection Project (EqualProtect.org) of the Legal Insurrection Foundation asked the Missouri Attorney General to investigate a “business boot camp” at Missouri State University that specifically excluded white males. The story began getting media coverage—mostly from conservative news media, of course, since the rest regards this as “good” discrimination as an extension of the DEI fad. Caught red- or at least pink-handed, MSU cried “Never mind!” and announced that future business boot camps would be open to everyone, even evil white males. However, the school’s oxymoronically-named president Clif Smart really and truly said this:
“Frankly, I still don’t think we did anything wrong … given that we have multiple cohorts of this going on and this was just one cohort that was limited. We won’t do that. We’ll do a better job on the marketing and information (and) dissemination side and review the process to make sure that everyone has a chance to participate, but we’re not going to exclude people.”
Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, said this during an interview on the “Lex Fridman Podcast”about his discovered wisdom about the difficulty of censoring social media:
“So misinformation, I think, has been a really tricky one because there are things that are obviously false, right, or they may be factual but may not be harmful. So are you gonna censor someone for just being wrong? If there’s no kind of harm implication of what they’re doing? There’s a bunch of real issues and challenges there. Just take some of the stuff around COVID earlier in the pandemic where there were real health implications, but there hadn’t been time to fully vet a bunch of the scientific assumptions. Unfortunately, I think a lot of the kind of establishment on that kind of waffled on a bunch of facts and asked for a bunch of things to be censored that, in retrospect, ended up being more debatable or true. And that stuff is really tough, right? It really undermines trust,”
Oh for God’s sake….Observations:
For the record, I am royally sick of this topic already, and it’s just starting, with more than a year to go. I’m sick of Trump, I’m sick of the Democrats’ “destroy the village to save it” obsession with stopping Trump without just winning elections fairly and squarely, and I’m sick of the hypocrisy on all sides, and I’m really sick of reading obnoxious comments in moderation from single-minded ignoramuses who won’t even try to examine all sides of a complex issue, probably because they aren’t capable of it.
Sure, I’ll double down. I wrote on Friday that the decision to indict Trump was wildly irresponsible (if you didn’t discern that from my comparison to cloning dinosaurs, maybe you need to find another blog to hang out at) and was a utilitarian botch of existential proportions, and the tsunami is already developing, as that tweet above from a generally perceptive conservative Twitter wag indicates. Also predictably, gloating Democrats are tossing more of the afore-mentioned jet fuel on the fire, like this asshole:
Yecchhh. But let’s dig in…
1. The last post on this matter has surpassed the number of comments that allow normal people to read them all, so I’ll be overlapping a bit. For example, Alan Dershowitz also framed the indictment as I did, writing in Newsweek that it was “The Most Dangerous Indictment in History,” and saying in part,
This moment portends a massive change in the norms of this nation that all Americans who care about the neutral rule of law should pay close attention to, for it raises the specter of the partisan weaponization of the criminal justice system—not just by the Democrats targeting Trump but by Republicans who will certainly retaliate when they regain control of the criminal charging process.
That is how a large proportion of the public will regard it, and the evidence is irrelevant. Dershowitz also reminded me of Big Lie #6, “Trump’s Defiance Of Norms Is A Threat To Democracy.”
Remember? Democrats are hoping you won’t, but throughout the Trump Presidency, the accusation from the “resistance”/Democratic Party/mainstream media alliance (The Axis of Unethical Conduct) was that Trump was undermining democracy by not following unwritten “norms”—you know, like not using impeachment as a partisan tactic, not attempting to de-legitimatize the President, his election, and the Supreme Court, not weaponizing a health emergency to justify loosening election integrity measures, not intentionally violating the Constitution with Executive Orders like the one requiring Federal workers to be vaccinated, not giving a national speech declaring anyone who opposes his policies of being fascists and dangers to democracy…wait, I’m sorry! Those were some of the norms Democrats chose to defy; I get confused sometimes. My point is that the hypocrisy is staggering. There is a reason no former President or current major Presidential constender has ever been arrested or indicted by the rival party: it reeks of Third World dictatorships, and almost guarantees dangerous national division. This is why Gerald Ford pardoned Richard Nixon.
The recent post about the parole prospects of one of Manson’s remote-control murderers wasn’t the only one to spark several Comment of the Day-worthy responses. The ethics quiz about the ethics professor’s sting to catch cheaters also was a catalyst for outstanding feedback.
Here is Sarah B’s Comment of the Day on Michael R‘s COTD on Parts 1 and 2 of “The Philosophy Prof’s “Animal House” Ethics Quiz.”
***
First, let it be stated that I am in NO way agreeing that cheating is a good thing. However, there is an addendum to make on this wonderful comment.
Professors sometimes make it impossible not to cheat. I am thinking back to my undergraduate years in chemical engineering. We would have a 17-18 hour average class-load each semester and if you couldn’t keep up, you tended to get a lot of scorn from the faculty. Four years was the expectation, not five, though many people went the five route to stay somewhat sane. Each of the 3 hour classes would give 20-40 hour of homework a week. Lab write-ups would require at least 20 hours too.
We routinely made fun of students in other colleges who complained about having to write a forty-page paper for their midterm or final. We turned in 5-8 of those a week, all covered in detailed calculations. Homework was worth as much or more than the tests. So…most of us made deals with our fellow students. “I’ll do problems 1 and 2 from Dr. A, 3 and 4 from Dr. B, 5-7 of Dr. C’s, and 10-12 of Dr. D’s. I’ll write up the first third of the P Chem lab report, the second third for the O Chem lab report, and final third of the Units Ops lab report. Sunday night, we’ll get together and each of us will trade answers and copy work.”
“War Is Peace. Freedom Is Slavery. Ignorance Is Strength.” The frighteningly Orwellian progressive movement and its Democratic Party facilitators have emulated Big Brother in their conviction that if you repeat an obvious lie often enough (and the news media helps out by at least looking the other way), enough lazy, careless citizens will accept whatever you say. Thus biological men have no advantage over women in athletic contests, the Southern border is secure, the economy is great, hiring people because of their color isn’t racial discrimination and a fetus isn’t a human life. On the Ethics Alarms Rationalization List, this is #64. Yoo’s Rationalization or “It isn’t what it is,” named after the Bush Administration lawyer who explained that waterboarding wasn’t torture. Totalitarian regimes depend on #64, which is why its emergence as a Democratic Party staple is especially ominous.
China, speaking of totalitarian regimes, has developed a culture in which “It isn’t what it is” has become the proverbial hammer for authorities who see every controversy as a nail. At the cafeteria of the Jiangxi Vocational Technical College of Industry Trade in Nanchang, China, a student found a desiccated rat’s head in his bowl of rice and memorialized the unordered meal item on his cell phone. When he confronted the cafeteria staff, however, he was assured that it wasn’t a rat’s head, but a duck’s neck. (That’s apparently considered just yummy in China. They even charged the student extra. I’m kidding…)
I’d include a photo, but it’s too disgusting; trust me, the head belonged to a rat. It has fur, it has little rat teeth. The nauseated student’s video quickly spread on Chinese social media, but the school stuck to its duck head story, because “It isn’t what it is” only works if you repeat your lie with gusto, and forever. Last week, the Jiangxi Vocational Technical College put out an official statement that the thing was duck, not rat, and the local food supervision bureau also confirmed that it was a duck neck. School officials warned students not to discuss the incident online anymore, or they would face serious consequences.
Yecchh.
This hacky, dishonest attack ad undermines the one major advantage Gov. DeSantis should have over Donald Trump in their approaching battle for the GOP nomination: DeSantis doesn’t behave like he’s 10 years old. Allowing this photo to appear in the ad is particularly irresponsible…
…as it is a bad fake. If a candidate will allow fake photos to be used to mislead the public, what else will he lie about? This one is particularly stupid, because it shouldn’t be hard to legitimately criticize Donald Trump on myriad issues; creating false images to trigger junior high “Ew!” reactions is wildly unprofessional. Why is DeSantis relying on people who think this is legitimate advocacy?
1. I banned a troll today. The relatively new commenter kept pretending not to understand my point introducing the Open Forum, which was that for the Biden Administration’s now indisputably partisan and politicized Justice Department to indict its Democratic President’s chief rival for essentially the same conduct that Biden engaged in was “throwing jet fuel” on what is already a highly combustible political division in the country, and thus reckless and irresponsible. The now-banned commenter kept pointing to technical distinctions and differences in details between Biden’s misappropriation of classified documents and Trump’s, which misses the ethics point, either deliberately (trolling) or stupidly.
I remember former Interior Secretary James Watt well: he was the most embarrassing Reagan appointee, a far right religious fanatic who was incapable of knowing when to keep his faith out his duties, or when to shut up. When he accused the Beach Boys of being poor representatives of the U.S. in the July 4th celebration on the Mall and recommended Wayne Newton as a replacement, I realized he was the kind of reactionary extremist that gave conservatives a bad name, and that he was so estranged from the U.S. culture that he wouldn’t last. He didn’t.
But the New York Times obituary demonstrates how even wackos in the throes of paranoia about progressives can prove prophetic, and how the current extremist Left—like the Times—can’t perceive the problems with their own obsessions.
Ann’s readers manage to touch on anything else I could say. You’ll enjoy their analysis.
Ethics Alarms 