Comment Of The Day: “Unethical Quote Of The Month: President Joe Biden’s Howard University Class of 2023 Commencement Address”

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

Perhaps you could tell: I was disgusted by President Biden’s speech at Howard. Was it more destructive demagoguery than his “Soul of the Nation” speech last fall? At such unethical depths, comparisons don’t matter. Is it worse to try to turn half the nation against the other half, or to poison the minds of young college graduates by using the authority of the Presidency to convince them that their own country is a dark and dangerous place with large segments of the public determined to harm them because of the color of their skin?

For those sufficiently independent-minded, Biden’s speech was not just hypocrisy, but stunningly thinly-veiled hypocrisy. Ann Althouse focused on one example, Biden referring to SCOTUS Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson as “one bright woman.” The blogging retired law professor wrote,

“Isn’t that a microaggression? It’s my subjective experience — disagree with me if you want — that “bright” is a patronizing word. It’s used for children, and when it’s used on an adult, it’s looking down on the person as if they are something like a child. It expresses vague surprise that the person stands out and can do reasonably difficult tasks, but it sets them apart as not able to do the most sophisticated things that the speaker imagines himself to be doing. Older men in superior positions have said it through the years about younger associates and, especially, women. And I think it’s what a racist would say about a capable black person.”

The routinely perceptive and incisive Mrs. Q. picks up on the same vibes in her Comment of the Day on the post, “Unethical Quote Of The Month: President Joe Biden’s Howard University Class of 2023 Commencement Address”:

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Where to begin…

Who was Biden’s mentor? An Exalted Cyclops who recruited at least 150 members into his chapter of the KKK.

What did Biden tell a digital audience on a black man’s podcast?
That if they had trouble deciding if they were for him or Trump, then they “weren’t black.” Last I checked an old white guy mentored by a formerly virulent white supremacist should be last person to tell blacks if they were in fact black.

Who said this about Obama?
“I mean, you got the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy. I mean, that’s a storybook, man.” That was Biden.

Who said this during his campaign?
“…poor kids are just as bright and just as talented as white kids.” That was Biden.

And who said this gem?
” You cannot go to a 7-11 or a Dunkin’ Donuts unless you have a slight Indian accent. I’m not joking.” Biden of course!

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Unethical Quote Of The Month: President Joe Biden’s Howard University Class of 2023 Commencement Address

/ Jack Marshall / 21 Comments

The Gettysburg Address it surely wasn’t. In 1863, President Lincoln concisely and brilliantly laid out a grand plan for what should unify the United States of America. Yesterday, President Biden deliberately set out to divide the nation along the racial divide already made larger by the cynical efforts and policies of the Obama administration. President Obama, however, avoided directly stoking hostility between the races except when he was speaking off the cuff, as in his irresponsible comments on the Trayvon Martin-George Zimmerman Ethics Train Wreck. Biden is far more direct and open about it. His party has decided that stoking black fear of white citizens and anger toward the United States itself as a purveyor of “white supremacy” is its best strategy for keeping power—that, and hammering away at the Big Lie that the purpose of abortion restrictions is to make women second-class citizens.

After all, as the late Harry Reid would surely point out, Biden’s 2022 “Soul of the Nation” speech pushing the same theme that Republicans and conservatives are racists and terrorists “worked.” What should have been an electoral rejection of disastrous progressive policies turned into a relative victory: Democrats held control of the Senate and just barely lost the House. It was predictable that the soulless and mercenary political consultants advising the party would urge it to follow the same playbook for 2024….prime hate, anger, distrust, bias, bigotry and fear, all while accusing the opposition of being agents of …hate, anger, distrust, bias, bigotry and fear. If that course damages the nation, well, you gotta crack some eggs to make an omelette.

So thus it was that President Biden spoke in front of a Howard graduating class assembled by racial discrimination and the principles of apartheid to tell them that they, their family, their communities and their race were in increasing peril because of ‘white supremacy.” After typical Biden babble, the President kicked off another dose of race-based suspicion by saying, “When it comes to race in America, hope doesn’t travel alone. It’s shadowed by fear, by violence, and by hate.” The speech went downhill from there. Most commencement speeches are exultant in tone, cheering on a rising generation to take advantage of the open and promising road ahead of them. Not this one. Here are some quotes:

But after the election and the re-election of the first Black American President, I had hoped that the fear of violence and hate was significantly losing ground.

Of course, Obama’s election and re-election proved conclusively that racial bigotry in the U.S. had diminished spectacularly.

But in 2017, in Charlottesville, Virginia, crazed neo-Nazis with angry faces came out of the fields with — literally with torches, carrying Nazi banners from the woods and the fields chanting the same antisemitic bile heard across Europe in the ‘30s. Something that I never thought I would ever see in America. Accompanied by Klansmen and white supremacists, emerging from dark rooms and remote fields and the anonymity of the Internet, confronting decent Americans of all backgrounds standing in their way, into the bright light of day. And a young woman objecting to their presence was killed.

I wonder what hack wrote that purple prose. The demonstration, which had been granted a legal permit, was triggered by the home state of Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson beginning to airbrush the history of the United States by removing statues of heroic Confederate officers in grand Soviet fashion. Torchlight marches are not the sole genre of the Far Right; as with most political demonstrations, many groups and interests joined the march, and many traveled from far away to participate. Even so, the number of marchers was estimated in the hundreds, not thousands.  It was also a single demonstration aimed at a matter of special emotional and historical resonance at the time.

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See? Someone Is “Doing Something” About Gun Violence!

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

The gun you see below…

…. was duly taken from its owner for illegal use: shooting fish (though not in a barrel, which is even more unethical). A Finney County Game Warden seized the 9 mm handgun because it was “being used to take fish in Garden City,” Kansas game wardens said.

You would expect officials in Finney County to be protective of fish, wouldn’t you?

The wardens issued written violations, reminding citizens that “firearms are not a legal means to take fish.”

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A Ripley From Canada: Barking Is Banned At A Dog Park

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

This would also qualify as an Ethics Alarms res ipsa loquitur file item, but the EA category reserved for conduct so astoundingly stupid that it beggars belief is the right place for this one.

Imagine: according to a new sign posted on the gate to the long-standing dog park at the corner of Jean-Talon Street and Provencher Boulevard in Montreal’s Saint-Leonard borough…

…. “it is forbidden to let your dog bark, whine, or howl.” Violators —well, the owners of the violators—could be fined between $500 and $2,000.

Will Canadians put up with this? The totalitarian virus seems to have gained a stronger foothold in Canadian culture than in the U.S., and thank heaven for that. However, the City of Toronto installed similar no-barking signs at dog park in March but had to remove them after a strong negative reaction from the public. The difference is that at this point no local U.S. government would dare put up such a sign in a dog park. I offered the hypothetical to the owners of some of Spuds’s pals, and the reaction to the idea bordered on violent.

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Oh-Oh…Apparently Ethics Alarms Spreads “Misinformation”

/ Jack Marshall / 35 Comments

A “misinformation expert” was given a platform by a TV news staff apparently managed by armadillos to pass on the fascinating in formation that opinions and statements that includes these phrases are likely to be passing along “misinformation”:

  • “Let that sink in”
  • “The media won’t report this”
  • “Make this go viral”
  • “Do your own research”
  • “There are no coincidences”

Oh-oh…Ethics Alarms definitely uses two of these or their equivalents (especially the second one). As for the others, I see nothing wrong or misleading about suggesting that readers circulate an article, and I don’t see anything sinister about suggesting that people do their own research. The last is just a stupid thing to say or believe to be literally true.

Here’s the clip:

I’m trying to find out who this fake “expert” is, where she came from and who was so irresponsible as to give her sufficient credentials that allowed her to claim to be an “expert.” Meanwhile, the TV station that put this garbage on the air needs to have its license pulled for pure incompetence.

It is pretty clear what this woman is doing, isn’t it? Her mission is to convince the public that challenging the narratives of the mainstream media is automatically sinister and seeks to create “misinformation.” This is a misinformation expert spreading the falshood that the news media fairly and competently reports facts and events without delay, spin or distortion, that anyone who tries to challenge these propaganda agents’ primacy is obviously spreading lies, and that the public should trust and completely rely upon a news media that has repeatedly lied, buried stories and actively manipulated what information the public gets to read, see and hear. (The bit about coincidences I take as a slap at the religious Right.)

Let that sink in.

“Dear Inquirer: Your Boyfriend Just Informed You That He’s An Unethical, Insecure Jerkwad. Thank Him, And Run For Your Life!”

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

That is how I would answer a question that came into the New York Times’ “The Ethicist” advice column this week. Maybe this is why nobody asks me to apply when the long-time feature is looking for new ethicist. But boy, I don’t think I’ve ever read a letter to Kwame Anthony Appiah that demanded such an obvious response.

Name Withheld, who sends an awful lot of questions to “The Ethicist,” explained that her former live-in boyfriend adopted a dog while they were together. When they parted amicably, they agreed that she would take the pet (she is a veterinarian, after all) and he would have visiting rights. Now she is in a new relationship and thinks this guy may be “the One.” But he objects to her old beau coming by occasionally to see the dog.

“I am at a loss about what to do,” she says. ” I don’t want to upset him by letting my ex have time with the dog. I also feel so guilty about not letting my ex have time with her….My partner says that people he has known have gone through similar things and says they all agree it is unusual to keep my ex involved in my dog’s life.”

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Comment of the Day: “More Weird Tales From The Great Stupid: Oh Yeah, This Will Work Out Well…”

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

Unlike so many of us here so often, Jim Hodgson is writing about a topic in which he has directly relevant experience as he explains some of the issues involved in the Los Angeles (nutso-cuckoo) proposal to have non-law enforcement personnel regulate traffic violations. His Comment of the Day is lengthy but ethically delicious and nutritious, so I am going to be uncharacteristically brief in my introduction. Here is Jim’s Comment of the Day on the post, “More Weird Tales From The Great Stupid: Oh Yeah, This Will Work Out Well…”:

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There’s a lot to be unpacked on this topic. I have never found the term “pretextual stops” accurate for typical traffic stops, even when there is an enforcement emphasis on interdiction of illegal drugs or firearms. Officers are trained to be alert for signs of criminal activity and to investigate accordingly. When suspicion rises to the level of “reasonable suspicion,” officers are authorized (and expected) to detain people to determine whether or not there is criminal activity.

If reasonable suspicion becomes confirmed to the point of “probable cause” to believe that a felony crime is being or has been committed, then arrest is authorized. In my state and every state with whose laws I am knowledgeable, the traffic code is separate from the criminal code (except for overlap in areas like vehicular assault, vehicular homicide and perhaps habitual drunk driving) and are instead considered a regulatory function.

A legal traffic stop will begin when an officer witnesses a traffic violation and either initiates the stop or communicates with another officer who does so. If there is no actual traffic violation then there is no valid basis for a stop, making it a Fourth Amendment violation. If the traffic stop is factually valid, and the officer subsequently sees evidence of crime in plain view, or develops reasonable suspicion based on what he or she perceives with the five senses, the traffic stop can move into the territory of a “Terry stop,” justifying further inquiry, leading to a decision of whether or not there is probable cause for arrest.

Officers are trained to always cite or charge the violator with the original violation that precipitated the traffic stop, whether or not the extended detention results in an arrest. (In the litigious world we live in, officers are growing less and less prone to issue mere verbal warnings for traffic violations, due to frequent subsequent claims that, “If I had actually broken the law, the officer would have written me a ticket!”) This traffic stop process applies whether the violator is merely a bad or careless driver, a drug trafficker, gun runner, a burglar carrying a trunk load of stolen loot or a kindly-looking guy with a dead body in the back floorboard.

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Morning Ethics Warm-Up, 5/13/22: Everything Is Seemingly Spinning Out Of Control!

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment

Today is the anniversary of one of the United States’ more unethical international adventures, and one of its more successful ones.

Mexico had threatened to declare war after the U.S. took Texas into the union, but that wasn’t going to happen, and the U.S., under expansionist President James K. Polk, was hungry for more Mexican territories. In November of 1845, Polk sent the diplomat John Slidell to Mexico to bargain for boundary adjustments in return for the U.S. government’s settlement of the claims of U.S. citizens against Mexico. He also offered to buy California and New Mexico.

When the offers were rejected, Polk ordered the U.S. army to advance to the mouth of the Rio Grande, the river that Texas, and now the U.S., claimed as its southern boundary. Mexico had maintained that the boundary was the Nueces River to the northeast of the Rio Grande, so in the absence of a treaty or agreement, Polk was challenging Mexico to start a war. It worked: when Mexico sent troops across the Rio Grande to defend against what it regarded as a U.S. invasion, Polk could declare the Mexican advance to be an invasion of U.S. soil, and on May 13, 1846, Congress declared war on Mexico. The war created widespread resistance and dissent that foreshadowed citizen protests over the Vietnam war, but in the end, the United States got the land it had offered to buy without paying for it, and more.

1. And speaking of the Mexican border, the spin, propaganda and distortions being presented by the news media is staggering, or would be if we weren’t so accustomed to our so-called journalists campaigning for open borders. On local news in Norther Virginia this morning, we were told that “migrants” (they are illegal immigrants) were involved in a “humanitarian crisis” (it’s a law enforcement crisis) and that all the people trying to break our laws were doing was “escaping poverty” and seeking a “better life” for their children. How could any one with a heart oppose such a thing? Then can the interviews with “good immigrants” explaining their “dreams.” No mention of criminals, disease or fentanyl entered the conversation, of course.

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Push-Up Ethics

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

I don’t know why this took so long…

The Washington Post reports that there is a movement afoot to stop allowing young women to substitute so-called “girls’ push-ups” (with the knees on the floor) for the actual toes-on-the-ground exercise while males are still required to do the real thing. The American College of Sports Medicine (ACSM), which provides guidelines for exercise testing by fitness and medical professionals, still uses the modified push-up to assess women’s upper-body strength in its latest exercise testing textbook, published in 2021. Male strength is measured in part using the full push-up.

But Melanie Adams, a professor of exercise science at Keene State College in New Hampshire, told the Post that based on a 2022 study of female college students and push-ups that she led, the assumption that women could only do the weenie version was unwarranted. Some female college students could perform more than 20 full push-ups in succession, a total many men can’t match. Because the root exercise builds strong, important muscles in the upper-body and core, however, starting boys on real push-ups while girls are told to use the inferior version gives males a head start on superior strength that women will have a hard time overcoming.

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Comment Of The Day: “Comment Of The Day: “Ethics And The Death Of Jordan Neely”

/ Jack Marshall / 18 Comments

Further discussion of the Jordan Neely case is appropriate, as Daniel Penny, the US Marine veteran who apparently killed Neely, a homeless and mentally-disturbed man, while trying to protect passengers on a New York City subway train earlier this month, has been charged with second-degree manslaughter.

I expected that, and while the pressure being placed on authorities by race-hucksters trying to make this tragedy into George Floyd II probably played a part, I think Penny had to be charged. He used excessive force to engage in a defensible act of civic responsibility, and a man died. That’s manslaughter. “We believe that the conviction should be for murder because that was intentional,” said Neely family attorney Lennon Edwards said today. Right: it must have been intentional, because all white people are looking for excises to kill blacks. I can forgive the family for being angry, bitter, and legally ignorant, but Edwards’s statement is unforgivable.

Then there is the news media spin, with outlets like the Associated Press describing Neely as a “homeless street artist” to make him sound like he was restrained for painting portraits of subway riders without their consent. He was screaming at them and threatening them, and had harmed strangers before. The news media is already doing its Kyle Rittenhouse act on Penny. They want him to be tarred as a racist and murderer.

Here is Null Pointer’s Comment of the Day on Humble Talent’s Comment of the Day on the post, “Ethics And The Death Of Jordan Neely”:

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In order to live in a civilized society, citizens must agree to abide by a the rules of a social contract. No defecating in the streets. No fornicating in public. No random acts of aggression or violence. Things like that. Over the last few decades, a portion of the citizenry has decided to unilaterally rewrite the underlying rules of the social contract without any buy-in from the rest of the citizenry. What they don’t seem to understand is that this buy-in is necessary. If the vast majority of the citizenry does not agree on a new social contract, and the old contract is destroyed, then the civilization is destroyed. It reverts to fragmented tribal groups who refuse to cooperate with one another.

The attempt to normalize random acts of violence and aggression will never be agreed to by the majority of the citizenry. Safety is one of the base blocks in Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. If civilization cannot offer a baseline level of safety to its citizenry, then there is no reason to buy into it. The entire reason people form civilizations is to obtain a baseline level of safety. If a civilization does not offer a baseline level of safety, then what reason is there for people to subvert their own desires, customs, culture and beliefs to a larger group? Especially when that larger group also demands a large portion of the fruits of individual’s labor to be handed over to them to support that civilization.

The civilization saboteurs can keep kicking the pillars out from under the civilization, but they will not be able to stop the collapse that occurs as a result. More riots may not have the effect they are hoping for.