I typically would have featured my favorite meme ever in the warm-up–May 6 is the anniversary of the Hindenburg disaster (in 1937)—but I couldn’t wait.
It’s Friday, and time to discuss the ethics issues you choose after putting up with my choices all week. (That, by the way, is the honest and ethical use of “choice.”)
That idiocy above is courtesy of Occupy Democrats, who are responsible for many of the dumbest memes on the web, and a longtime friend who may be sliding into dementia based on the fact that she posted that to Facebook approvingly. In addition to serving as an integrity test for the woke and their knee-jerk allies, the leaked draft opinion portending a reversal of Roe v. Wade has also been a boon in that it has largely exposed the logical and ethical deficits of the pro-abortion position. Its advocates can’t really argue intelligently on the merits, or if they can, they’re not. What does the supposedly clever statement above have to do with abortion? No one is regulating sex. That’s a straw man. (The last few days have been an orgy of straw men.) The reversal of Roe means that there is no Constitutional right to kill the results of your own conduct when you are careless, reckless or unlucky. Moreover, there never was one: the “right” found in Roe was made up out of whole cloth at the peak of the sexual revolution and as women’s rights were a mounting cultural feve. A mediocre SCOTUS justice (the otherwise forgettable Harry Blackmun) wrote an unpersuasive, bootstrapping opinion that virtually no lawyer nor legal scholar respected, except that some liked the result.
Now the demoralized Roe fans are reduced to threats, fantasies, insults and dire predictions based on the fallacious reasoning that since the Court (may have) overturned this single, especially bad and still destructive opinion after 50 years, no established SCOTUS precedent is safe. Since Roe, there have been more than 63 million American lives ended in the womb, most of which would be still lives today had their mothers not availed themselves of the “right” to snuff them out for varying reasons. That rather material distinction, as Justice Alito clearly explains, takes Roe out of the usual class of stare decisus cases.
Since we last visited the freakout… Continue reading
Not for the first time, Senator Paul has demonstrated the integrity, guts and skill to not only expose a government villain but also to explicate some basic cultural values and truths in the process.
This time Paul’s oh-so-deserving target was Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, he of the deliberately porous Mexican border and the deceitful disrespect for enforcing the law, and the topic was the agency’s new and ominous “disinformation governance board.” The setting: a Senate hearing this week.
After the Homeland Security Secretary ducked Paul’s question about whether the Steele Dossier included “Russian disinformation,” Son of Ron said,
“Here’s my question: The FBI concludes that the Steele dossier was full of Russian disinformation. CNN propagated this disinformation gladly for years and years. The difference, I guess, between your opinion and our opinion is that as despicable as it is that CNN propagated this disinformation, I wouldn’t shut them down, I wouldn’t lecture them, I wouldn’t put it on a government website that CNN is wrong for propagating disinformation. The problem you have is you’re not even willing to admit — I mean, we can’t even have an agreement on what the FBI said was disinformation.”
When Mayorkas huminahumina-ed that his board would not be responsible for policing disinformation in general, but only “when there is a connectivity between disinformation and threats to security of the homeland,” Paul said,
Well, the Russians might be considered that. You mentioned the Russians the other day when you tried to pivot away from this being about censorship. Let’s just say … you’ve discovered tomorrow Russian disinformation that is going to hurt our national security, and CNN is broadcasting it, what are you going to do? Here’s the problem: We can’t even agree what disinformation is! You can’t even agree that it was disinformation that the Russians fed information to the Steele dossier. If you can’t agree to that, how are we ever going to come to an agreement on what is disinformation so you can police it on social media?”
May 5 isn’t much of a date in ethics history, though it does mark one of the weirdest episodes of WWII. The Fu-Go balloon bomb was a weapon launched by Japan in late 1944 as a creative (and cheap) way to bomb U.S. cities. The hydrogen balloons carried antipersonnel incendiary devices, it was designed as a cheap weapon that the jet stream over the Pacific Ocean was supposed to deliver in the U.S. with deadly effect. It didn’t work as well as that other surprise bombing attack. Although 10% of the 9000 Fu-Gos launched were predicted to cause death and destruction, only one did. On May 5, 1945, a pregnant woman and five children were killed when they discovered a balloon bomb in a forest in Southern Oregon. Archie Mitchell, a pastor, and his pregnant wife Elsie drove up to Gearhart Mountain with five of their Sunday school students to have a picnic. Elsie and the children were looking for a good place to spread their blankets when they discovered a strange, large balloon lying on the ground. When they tugged at it, there were two explosions: the children were were killed immediately, and Elsie died while Archie tried to extinguish the fire on her clothing. Another student survived the initial blast, but died later.
Success!
One of the sites I use to track down these historical ethics markers is History.com, and in this instance, not for the first time, its bias pollutes its writing. Here’s the last paragraph:
The explosive balloon found at Lakeview was a product of one of only a handful of Japanese attacks against the continental United States, which were conducted early in the war by Japanese submarines and later by high-altitude balloons carrying explosives or incendiaries. In comparison, three years earlier, on April 18, 1942, the first squadron of U.S. bombers dropped bombs on the Japanese cities of Tokyo, Kobe, and Nagoyo, surprising the Japanese military command, who believed their home islands to be out of reach of Allied air attacks. When the war ended on August 14, 1945, some 160,000 tons of conventional explosives and two atomic bombs had been dropped on Japan by the United States. Approximately 500,000 Japanese civilians were killed as a result of these bombing attacks.
Or, as a further “comparison,” the Japanese army murdered an estimated 200,000 (or more) Chinese civilians and raped 20,000-80,000 during the Rape of Nanking.
1. Those clever Satanists! In the wake of the OTHER SCOTUS decision recently discussed here (but I can’t find the post right now), where Boston was told that it couldn’t ban a Christian flag from flying over City Hall when the city routinely allowed any organization to have its flag displayed, The Satanic Temple in Massachusetts is requesting that Boston fly its flag:
I see no way Boston can refuse, and the inevitable result will be that the city will stop flying any flags other than the nation’s and the state’s.
I suppose it should be soothing to know that not only Yale and Harvard are Ivy League schools dedicated to ideological indoctrination, but that Dartmouth is a player too. I’m kind of a glass-half-empty kind of guy these days though.
The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education has had to step in to battle Dartmouth over heavy-handed censorship of its College Republicans group. In January, the school unilaterally canceled the student organization’s live in-person event featuring conservative journalist Andy Ngo, forcing it online based on unspecified “concerning information” from the Hanover police. Queried by FIRE, the Hanover police denied that such concerns came from them. Now Dartmouth has informed the College Republicans that they owe $3,600 in security-related charges for the Andy Ngo event, which only took place online.
Those Zoom police are expensive.
One of the really, really bad ideas that has taken toxic root in Woke World, which includes the Biden administration, is that penalties and punishments are mean, and that the consequences of deliberate wrongdoing should be minimal even when the miscreant isn’t “of color.”
This will not, as they say, turn out well.
Last November, Trevor Jacob, a former Olympic snowboarder turned Youtube entrepreneur, crashed his small propeller airplane into the mountains of California’s Los Padres National Forest after the propeller stopped spinning. The exact moment when his plane’s propeller seized was caught on camera, as was his jump out of the airplane with a parachute. He used a selfie stick to film his descent. Three weeks later, Jacob posted a YouTube video titled “I Crashed My Plane.” It got over 2 million views. The video features Jacob narrating his brave trek out of the forest and his eventual rescue. “I’m just so happy to be alive!” Jacob exclaims at one point.
When ethics fails, the law steps in. In teaching, like a whole range of human endeavors, just a modicum of functioning ethics alarms would make restrictive laws superfluous and even unneeded. But too many people in positions of authority, power, influence and with the opportunity to do harm don’t possess functioning ethics alarms.
And here we are.
Trafalgar Middle School (in Cape Coral, Fla.) art teacher Casey Scott is a proud pansexual. I don’t see why that’s something to be especially proud of, any more than being left-handed or being a Yankee fan, but OK. Casey says her students were curious about her sexual orientation. This was none of their business, and her response should have been along those lines, but no: she felt inspired to explain to them that she was pansexual during a lesson in March, and that she was sexually attracted to pots and pans. Or something. It doesn’t matter what being a pansexual is, she wasn’t hired to teach students about it. (Pansexuals are attracted to all categories of people regardless of their sex, gender identity or sexual orientation.)
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Controversial comic Dave Chappelle was attacked on-stage last night by a member of the audience as he was performing for a Netflix comedy festival at the Hollywood Bowl. Isaiah Lee, 23,was carrying a replica handgun with a knife blade inside, authorities said. Lee was wrestled to the ground by security as well as comedian Jamie Foxx, then arrested for assault with a deadly weapon.
Chappelle is considered a political correctness villain because of his jokes about transexuals as well as other segments of the LGTBQ collective. The obvious reaction would be to blame his attack on Will Smith’s Academy Awards broadcast assault on Chris Rock for making a joke Smith (or his wife) didn’t find amusing. (Indeed Rock, who was also on last night’s program with Chappelle, reportedly quipped, “Was that Will Smith?”).
After that unprecedented episode at the Oscars, many comedians expressed concern that Smith had placed a virtual target on their backs. (The Oscars didn’t help by allowing Smith to go back to his seat and later collect a statuette as the audience stood and cheered.)
However, the cultural permission to resort to violence and intimidation as a response to to words, opinions and even jokes that seem to counter what those with superior sensibilities and values (or so they assume) want to hear arrived well before “the Slap.” It was given when the Left’s antifa began advocating “punching Nazis,” leftist students on campuses threatened violence to goad universities into shutting down (and up) conservative speakers, and Rep. Maxine Waters, among others, encouraged opponents of the Trump administration to harass conservatives and members of his administration when they and their families appeared in public.
As discussed here many times, the abortion issue is an ethics conflict, meaning that there are legitimate and important interests at stake on both sides of the controversy. One way advocates or activists signal their lack of qualifications, intellect and integrity to discuss the issue is by denying or ignoring one interest or the other. That’s proving a benefit of the current freak-out over the leaked draft of what might be a total reversal of Roe v. Wade (and Casey, but that’s intrinsic in overturning Roe). People are revealing who and what they really are–phonies, idiots, liars, demagogues, hypocrites, opportunists, irresponsible fools, or nascent totalitarians.
The depressing, indeed frightening aspect of the freakout is the degree to which it demonstrates that most Americans (and a shocking number of the people whose job it is to inform and guide them through complex issues) are so ignorant of the basic civic facts about what the Supreme Court is. Thus the Dobbs leak freakout is to a great extent another indictment of our public school system, its teachers and administrators, and education in America generally. It should, but won’t, make the point to school boards and legislators that before students are instructed in the complexities of gender dysphoria and critical race theory, the priority should be instructing them in the essentials of the Constitution so they can function as citizens.
Comic Dave Smith reveals a great truth: Integrity is the irreplaceable ingredient of trust. Somehow the Democrats and progressives have completely abandoned integrity for opportunism and expediency.
1. See? The Washington Post still has it’s uses! Virtually every article about yesterday’s leak of the Alito draft of a potential SCOTUS ruling reversing Roe v, Wade (including mine last night) states that no previous Supreme Court decision had leaked to the press before it was released. Experts who the public has good reason to trust also have made the same claim: Neal Katyal, for example, the former acting solicitor general, tweeted that this was “the first major leak from the Supreme Court ever.” He called it the equivalent of the Pentagon Papers. It turns out that a previous SCOTUS landmark decision was leaked. Interestingly, as the Washington Post revealed, it was…Roe v. Wade!
From The original Roe v. Wade decision also was leaked to the press:
The Supreme Court clerk who leaked the story, Larry Hammond… clerked for Justice Lewis Powell. …Hammond confided in an acquaintance he knew from the University of Texas School of Law that the Roe ruling was forthcoming. The acquaintance, a Time staff reporter named David Beckwith, was given the information “on background” and was supposed to write about it only once the opinion came down from the court. A slight delay in the ruling, however, resulted in an article that appeared in the issue of the magazine that hit newsstands a few hours before the opinion was read on Jan. 22, 1973…
Chief Justice Warren Burger was livid….There are obvious and profound consequences if litigants and the public are tipped off to the result in a case before it has been formally announced and adopted. Burger sent a frantic “eyes only” letter to all the justices demanding that the leaker be identified and punished. Burger even threatened to subject law clerks to lie-detector tests if no one was forthcoming. Hammond [told Powell]…what happened and offer[ed] his resignation. Powell would not hear of it and called Burger to tell him that Hammond had been double-crossed.
…Burger showed mercy to Hammond and gracefully accepted his apology… Hammond survived as Powell’s clerk and even served an additional term for the justice before leaving the court to join the Watergate Special Prosecution Force. The story of Hammond’s close call became legend to other clerks on the court at the time and has been passed down as a cautionary tale over time.
Amazing! Admittedly there’s a big distinction from a clerk’s indiscretion resulting in a decision being made public a few hours early and a deliberate leak a month before the the final opinion will be announced, but still, that was a leak, and the leaker wasn’t even punished!
2. The law school rot connection. Several commentators have made an alert if frightening observation that there is a connection between the almost unprecedented leak and the unlawyerly conduct of law students, law faculty and administrators at such institutions ar Harvard Law, Yale Law and Georgetown Law Center. Bari Weiss, the New York Times self-exile who writes at substack notes in “The Shocking Supreme Court Leak”:
How did we go from that ethos to a world in which—leaving the possibility of some kind of Russian or Chinese hack, or a more banal security breach, or someone pulling the draft from the garbage—one or more clerks are undermining the institution itself?…[I]t captures, in a single act, what I believe is the most important story of our moment: the story of how American institutions became a casualty in the culture war. The story of how no institution is immune. Not our universities, not our medical schools, not legacy media, not technology behemoths, not the federal bureaucracy. Not even the highest court in the land.
…I called up one of the smartest professors I know at one of the top law schools in the country… Here’s how he put it: “To me, the leak is not surprising because many of the people we’ve been graduating from schools like Yale are the kind of people who would do such a thing….They think that everything is violence. And so everything is permitted.”
He went on: “I’m sure this person sees themselves as a whistleblower. What they don’t understand is that, by leaking this, they violate the trust that is necessary to maintain the institution.”
Ethics Alarms 