Go into the light! All are welcome! All are welcome!
Unethical Quote (And Tweet) Of The Month: Georgetown Law Professor Neal Katyal
Wow. I already have my Georgetown Law Center diploma hanging a foot off the floor and with its front to the wall. Now what?
Katyal is a partner at the law firm of Hogan Lovells and serves as the Paul and Patricia Saunders Professor of National Security Law at Georgetown University Law Center. He is supposed to be a Constitutional Law expert. How could he write that? The two opinions are not even slightly related, other than the fact that they both are Supreme Court cases and concern issues that Katyal’s allies and pals are adamant about. In the assumed opinion not yet released knocking down Roe v. Wade, the court is correcting its own error, and rejecting the contrived and much derided opinion that abortion is a right. It is not “ending” a constitutional right, because that right never existed in the first place. Today’s opinion striking down a New York law that asserted government’s power to decide when a law-abiding citizen “needed” to carry a gun in public did not create a new right. Unlike the imaginary right to choose to kill unborn humans, the right to bear arms is in the Bill of Rights. Continue reading
PM Ethics Pie, 6/23/2022: Guns, Mostly
On this date in 1972, the eventual ethics train wreck known as Title IX was passed. Its stated purpose was to prohibit sexual desecration on federally funded campuses, but since most of that discrimination was against women, the law was eventually weaponized to be an anti-male measure, notably by the Obama administration and its pressure on schools to employ a presumed guilty approach to student accusations of sexual harassment and assault. Title IX or something like it was clearly needed, but the law stands as a useful example of how, when a failure of ethics makes it necessary for law to step in, the law too often mucks things up.
1. Pop Ethics Quiz!
That’s a fantastic duo-costume at a cos-play convention: Peter Pan and his shadow! But is it offensive? Isn’t that “blackface”? If not, why not? Of course it isn’t supposed to evoke minstrel shows or be denigrating to blacks, but neither was Laurence Olivier’s make-up to play Othello on film. Define the rule for me. Continue reading
I Lost On This Issue, But I Was Right
The New York Times tells us today, “Psychosis, Addiction, Chronic Vomiting: As Weed Becomes More Potent, Teens Are Getting Sick.”
Gee.
Who could have predicted such a thing?
Some of the more intense discussions on Ethics Alarms, primarily with libertarians, arose from the unshakable position here that the government’s capitulation to marijuana legalization efforts would accomplish nothing but short and long-term damage to vulnerable populations, the young, and the nation generally. I saw the writing on the cultural wall long ago, when arrogant elites in entertainment, politics, journalism and other spheres declared pot “cool,” and my college associates began seeking to sit around bleary-eyed and moronic to actually having interesting discussions and doing things.
Failures Of Proportion Make Failed Leadership Inevitable
I am torn: this post screamed out for a Major Clipton introduction though the head-exploding tweet above by President Biden’s Chief of Staff (or head puppeteer) arguably needs no introduction. I think I’ll settle on both: we haven’t heard from the major for a while…
Proportion is an important ethical value that we don’t talk about enough. That idiotic tweet demonstrates a disastrous ethics flaw—not the only one, heaven knows–that underlies so much of the ongoing tragedy that is the progressive movement currently being inflicted on the nation by Biden and the Democrats.
Inflation is reaching crisis levels, harming virtually all Americans not candidates for a reboot of “Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous.” The national debt has reached and exceeded and then exceeded more any rational level that a responsible country should tolerate. Yet the White House wants a victory lap because two women instead of the traditional one will have their signatures on the currency. Continue reading
Tales From The Great Stupid, Law Enforcement Division: “Forget it, Jack, It’s Chicagoland…”
The Chicago Police Department is establishing a new policy prohibiting its officers from chasing runaway suspects…not in cars, but on foot—you know, like NYPD Danny Reagan does just about every episode of “Blue Bloods.” Now suspects can run away from police, and the cops just have to stand there. Or as blogger Ed Driscoll deftly put it, now the police will have to say, “Stop! Or I’ll…have to tell you to stop again!
The policy also encourages cops to “consider alternatives” to pursuing someone who “is visibly armed with a firearm.” Yelling mean names sometimes works, I hear. Officers may give chase if they believe a person is committing or is about to commit a felony, a Class A misdemeanor like domestic battery, or a serious traffic offense that could risk injuring others, such as drunken driving or street racing. However, chasing a suspect because he or she runs away and appears to have a reason for doing so is out.
Comment Of The Day: “Protest Ethics: From The Self-Immolation School Of Outrage, But Even Dumber”
Let this be a lesson to me: even what seems to be an obvious case of someone applying emotion, bias and ignorance when informed consideration is called for should not be dismissed out of hand without, well, informed consideration.
This Comment of the Day by Sarah B. was a consensus smash hit with Ethics Alarms commentariat, because she is experienced and knowledgeable on the topic, and educated us all.
Here is her comment on “Protest Ethics: From The Self-Immolation School Of Outrage, But Even Dumber”…
***
I was an engineer at a refinery. Now as a woman, my boss’s boss thought that I was incompetent (and was known to say that women should be in a home making her man happy instead of in an engineering department) and spent an inordinate amount of time trying to teach me mostly stuff I already knew. However, one day, his lecture was on the financials of the refining world and it rocked my whole world view. I’ll share it to emphasize the stupidity of this man and his protest.
Ethics Dunce: Dave Chappelle
I hate to call comic Dave Chappelle a weenie and a political correctness panderer, so instead I’ll settle for Ethics Dunce. He badly miscalculated here.
Duke Ellington School of the Arts in Washington D.C. had planned to rename its performance theater —I once co-wrote directed a show there!—after alumnus Dave Chappelle for his “ongoing commitment and service to the school.” Chappell, fresh off of his controversial Netflix concert that was attacked for its jokes about transsexual activism, appeared at the school in November and faced a barrage of criticism from predictably oriented students. He challenged opponents of his work and his advocates to compete to raise the most money for Duke Ellington, promising to abide by the winning group’s wishes regarding the performing space’s new name.
Well, his fans out-raised the pro-trans mob, but nonetheless, at the dedication of the newly-named theater this week, Chappelle announced that he would refuse the honor, and declared that the theater would be henceforward called “the Theater for Artistic Freedom and Expression.”
Morning Ethics Warm-Up, 6/22/2022: Let’s Hit The Ground Running!
1. It’s a joke!!! That tweet is just the tip of the moronic iceberg for Republican Senate candidate in Missouri Eric Greitens. In a new fundraising video for his U.S. Senate campaign released this week, Greitens, a former Missouri governor who resigned before he could be impeached on multiple grounds including sexual assault, holds a pump-action shotgun and introduces himself as a Navy SEAL. (He is not a Seal: he resigned shortly before announcing his Senate run this year.) The video then shows him with a group of men in tactical gear hunting “RINOs”—Republicans who are not conservative enough for his tastes. He says, “Join the MAGA crew! Get a RINO hunting permit. There’s no bagging limit, no tagging limit, and it doesn’t expire until we save our country!”
And Sarah Palin was once accused of inciting murder by having little gun-sights on a campaign map!
Predictably, the irresponsible ad is being used by the mainstream news media and Democrats to characterize all conservatives and Republicans while hyping more anti-gun hysteria. Here’s CNN:
Some of history’s leading fascist movements used the strategy of armed volunteer militias intimidating, threatening and attacking political opponents. And the implications of Greitens’ ad are stunning: Line up behind the most extreme right-wing policies — and implicitly behind former President Donald Trump — or be hunted down by armed, jackbooted thugs.
Right. The implications of Greitens’ ad are that he’s a liar and an asshole, and that he is only slightly more fit to serve in the Senate than Herschel Walker, who defines the bottom of the bottom of the barrel… but presumably Missouri voters know that already. The ad and Greitens himself are metaphorical albatrosses around the GOP’s neck, but the party hung them there. He has been endorsed by several GOP luminaries, though so far, not by Trump.
2. Poll check: President Biden’s latest Civiqs approval rating hit 32%, with 56% disapproving of Joe. Again I ask: Who are those 32% that approve of Biden? What is it they approve of? What democracy can function if fully a third of the electorate have the IQs of flatworms and are happy to see the country rot?
Protest Ethics: From The Self-Immolation School Of Outrage, But Even Dumber
I can’t assign this to The Great Stupid files, but it’s still astoundingly stupid.
Ren Gladu, owner of Ren’s Mobile Gas Station in the college town of Amherst, Massachusetts (Hampshire College, Amherst and UMass are nearby), announced that he will stop selling gas to protest high gas prices.
“I don’t want to be part of it anymore,” Ren Gladu, owner of Ren’s Mobile, told the Daily Hampshire Gazette. “This is the biggest ripoff that ever has happened to people in my lifetime.”
Gradu decided he would not charge customers any higher than $4.75 earlier this month, and when ExxonMobil increased the price per gallon by 20 cents for two consecutive days, Gradu put up signs that read “Out of Gas.”
“Dealing with Mobil, they don’t think through their pricing policies anymore,” Gradu stated. “I’ve served their product, but I refuse to do it anymore, because they’re only getting richer.”
Mobil hasn’t thought through its pricing policies? Won’t one of those well-educated college students drop by and explain supply and demand to this poor guy? They might also try to explain that he needs to stop listening to people like Joe Biden, Bernie Sanders and Rep. Ocasio-Cortez as they try to spin their party out of its self-inflicted inflation disaster.
Ethics Alarms 