I think we can safely stipulate that invasions of peaceful nations are unethical, no? Also…
1. Fatuous headline of the year: The New York Times has a headline on its front page that reads, “Russians Wake Up To Discover They Didn’t Really Know Putin.” The man was KGB. He has kept himself in power for 22 years. He has imprisoned some political opponents and had others murdered. He had Russia invade the Crimea once it was clear that Barack Obama was all talk. The Russian forces have been massing on the Ukraine border for weeks. How stupid does the Times think the Russians are? How stupid does it think its readers are?
2. What good is the U.N.? Wasn’t this kind of invasion exactly what the United Nations was created to prevent? President Trump was excoriated for reducing U.S. support for the U.N., and branding is as virtually useless except to bash the U.S. He was right, and this crisis proves it.
3. Speaking of useless...American demonstrations against Russia’s move on the Ukraine are the epitome of grandstanding and virtue signaling. Morons. If they are so concerned about foreign aggression, they should have elected a President who wasn’t weak, feckless and, like Obama, all talk. Have they started singing “Give Peace A Chance” yet? That might work.
4. Why wouldn’t China take Taiwan now? It knows that the Biden Administration has neither the fortitude nor the means to do anything about it.
Your topics, your takes. Me, I’ll be Zooming in New Jersey, with an all-Beatles legal ethics seminar featuring the great Mike Messer, until after noon.
The story, and the myth, of the siege of the Alamo may be my favorite chapter in American history. I bet the Alamo isn’t even taught in public schools outside of Texas, which raises too many other issues to tackle here. On February 24, the make-shift garrison of a couple hundred volunteers from all over the States (and some Mexicans too) found themselves surrounded and outnumbered by well-trained Mexican troops under the command of the ruthless dictator Gen. Santa Ana. The reason for the Texas patriots’ stand was to buy time for Sam Houston to organize an army, but it was quickly evident that this was a Thermopylae in the making, with the same likely result. Nonetheless, Alamo commander William Barrett Travis answered Santa Ana’s call for unconditional surrender with shot from the Alamo’s cannon. Later the same day Travis sent out several couriers carrying letters asking, indeed begging for reinforcements. Addressing one of his pleas to “The People of Texas and All Americans in the World,” Travis signed off with “Victory or Death” in a letter many Texans know by heart:
Fellow Citizens & compatriots-
I am besieged, by a thousand or more of the Mexicans under Santa Anna – I have sustained a continual Bombardment & cannonade for 24 hours & have not lost a man – The enemy has demanded a surrender at discretion, otherwise, the garrison are to be put to the sword, if the fort is taken – I have answered the demand with a cannon shot, & our flag still waves proudly from the walls – I shall never surrender or retreat. Then, I call on you in the name of Liberty, of patriotism & everything dear to the American character, to come to our aid, with all dispatch – The enemy is receiving reinforcements daily & will no doubt increase to three or four thousand in four or five days. If this call is neglected, I am determined to sustain myself as long as possible & die like a soldier who never forgets what is due to his own honor & that of his country – Victory or Death.
1.The MacKenzie Fierceton Saga. This weird ethics tale got lost in the shuffle last month, but it is ever-green. University of Pennsylvania student Mackenzie Fierceton saw her Rhodes Scholarship revoked and her master’s degree withheld after allegations surfaced that she was lying about her first-generation low-income status and life in foster care.
Fierceton graduated with a bachelor’s degree in political science at the UPenn in 2020, then became one of the 32 Rhodes Scholars chosen from more than 2,300 U.S. students. She was in the process of completing a clinical master’s degree in social work, also at the University of Pennsylvania. She was celebrated as a true up-from-her-bootstraps achiever, a foster kid who got the proverbial brass ring through native talent and hard work. But an anonymous tip was sent to officials at the University of Pennsylvania and Rhodes Trust claiming that Fierceton was “blatantly dishonest in the representation of her childhood.” The tip included photos of Fierceton skydiving, riding a horse and whitewater rafting. The university and Rhodes Trust then started their own investigation. It was discovered that Fierceton attended Whitfield, a private school in St. Louis charging tuition of nearly $30,000 a year. Her mother was a radiologist with a college degree. Other aspects of the student’s account of coming from an impoverished background and abusive parents did not check out either. (The story is far too complicated to cover here. The Chronicle of Higher Education has the whole mind-numbing tale in exquisite detail.
2. He really said this. Mitch McConnell, who infamously refused to let the Senate even consider Merrick Garland when President Obama nominated him for the Supreme Court in 2015, told reporters that he expects a confirmation process “Americans can be proud of,” in contrast to the ugly hell Democrats put Justice Kavanaugh through. “We believe a Supreme Court nominee ought to be respectfully treated, thoroughly vetted and then voted upon,” Mitch said. That has to set some kind of record for gall.
If this astounding tale is true, then public schools are even more dangerous than I thought they were. If it is false, some conservative provocateurs are getting awfully creative, not to mention bold. In either case, wouldn’t it be great if the U.S. had journalists it could trust to relay the news in an honest and objective fashion?
The Washington Times, New York Post, Fox News, and other conservative news outlets all are reporting that a lawsuit has been filed by Jessica Konen, a California mother, claiming that two teachers and a principal in the Spreckels Union School District manipulated her middle-school daughter into believing she was transgender beginning when she was in the sixth grade.
Starting in 2019, Konen says, teachers recruited her daughter, then 11, into a club for gender anxious students. They “planted” the idea that the student, identified in the lawsuit as “A.G.” was transgender and bisexual, even though shedid not understand then what those terms meant. They encouraged her ”to assume a new [male] name and use it at school, but warned her not to tell her mother because she “might not be supportive and that she couldn’t trust her,” Konen’s claim states.
The caravan of protesting truckers is, we hear, now on the way to Washington, D.C., after thoroughly disrupting Calgary, Canada, and perceptions of Justin Trudeau as a relatively harmless boob. He is now being seen as a harmful boob. D.C., meanwhile, has established itself as a locale where disruptive and even violent protesters are honored by a giant painted endorsement on a public street by order of the mayor when their alleged cause is sufficiently “woke,” and violent protesters from the other side of the ideological spectrum are charged with felonies and held in prison for many months.
This should be interesting, in the old Chinese saying sense.
I think in the end, the best complaint available is the double-standards being applied. When protests are ostensibly in favor of a left-liberal position, they are protected speech no matter how much lawlessness is involved. That same protest involving the same level of lawlessness is considered worthy of an emergency act invocation if the protest is not favored by left-liberals.
I get your point about the trucks blocking traffic Jack, and I don’t disagree. I have always believed that interfering in lawful commerce is illegal (and tortious as well) and should be prosecuted both criminally and by civil action when it happens. The First Amendment, and whatever the Canadian equivalent is (however weakly codified) does not protect actions that interfere with lawful commerce or disturb the peace to the point of mischief. Continue reading →
Fortunately, a smaller and smaller percentage of Americans pay attention to TV award shows like the Oscars, Tonys, Emmys and the rest. That’s just moral luck, though: it doesn’t diminish the unethical nature of what they are trying to do.
This coming Saturday night, on Feb 26, BET will broadcast the 53rd Annual NAACP Image Awards. Presenters will include Issa Rae, Kerry Washington, LL Cool J, Morgan Freeman, Questlove, Tiffany Haddish, Zendaya, and others. Special honors will go to Samuel L. Jackson (the NAACP Chairman’s Award) and Nikole Hannah-Jones (the Social Justice Impact Award). The winners of the non-televised awards have been announced already: every winner, like every nominee is black. Continue reading →
The assault on free expression as well as the speech-chilling practice of seeking to publicly crush those who do not observe the social justice dictates of progressives in power advanced ominously yesterday. Unsurprisingly, the episode at issue occurred at an Ivy League University, as our educational sectors have been among the trailblazers in speech and idea suppression. Unsurprising to me at least was that it involved Twitter. Just like in the Illya Shapiro controversy at Georgetown Law Center, a scholar didn’t use quite the words he should have (to be safe, and safety is everything these days) according to the Democrats’ Little Red Book. This time, however, the hammer fell harder. Continue reading →
Binghamton University (NY) Professor Ana Maria Candela’s Introduction to Sociology syllabus originally stated that white students had to wait for “non-white folks” to talk before speaking up or asking questions, according to the syllabus.
In another charming section, Candela’s syllabus also included a quote from Chinese dictator Mao Zedong: “No investigation, no right to speak,” which she interprets benignly to mean, “Don’t speak until you know something.” I question the wisdom of quoting a Communist despot extolling “investigation,” but OK. Candela’s rules on class participation, however, embraced “progressive stacking,” which conditions “students’ participation and speaking based on their race and gender.” Continue reading →
A relentless Times apologist–you know which one—chides me for leaving out this from his interview in the New Yorker, which is the context for the “version of the truth” gaffe, when Baquet said the quiet part out loud (if the Times-enabler hadn’t begun his complaint with “Um,” I might have let it go):
The system of “objectivity” (and I know that’s going to be a bad word) was designed to create a system—Wesley Lowery is right when he describes that—in which the organization’s job was to make sure that whatever your perspective was it didn’t get in the way of reporting the truth. I believe in that very strongly. That’s not the job of every institution. But the job of the New York Times should, in the end, be to come out with the best version of the truth, with your own political opinion held in check by editors and editing. Not everybody believes that, but I believe that. And I think that if you come to work for the New York Times—if you really want to work for the New York Times—you have to embrace that, because that’s what the New York Times is.
In fact, I intended to include that outrageous and insulting lie, but felt it would have just muddled the more important point of the post. (That, and the New Yorker site blocked my access unless I subscribed…) Continue reading →
Past time, in fact. Some Ethics Alarms readers don’t comprehend it either, but they aren’t editing the so-called “Newspaper of Record.”
Dean Baquet, who is soon retiring as the Times editor-in-chief, and not a moment too soon, dropped this verbal smoking gun during an interview in the New Yorker:
“The job of the New York Times should in the end be to come out with the best version of the truth.”
No, he can’t be forgiven a “speako” on the fly: major media interviews aren’t like that. Baquet had an opportunity to fix that quote, but he didn’t. He didn’t because his ethics alarms, such as they are, didn’t twitch. That’s really what the Times editor, and his paper, and the vast majority of its reporters and pundits really think. The “best version of the truth” is, naturally, the version that serves the interests of the Times and its allies, because they know best.
