United Kingdom

Ethics Observations on Negative Commentary On The U.S. That A Critic Is Ethically Estopped From Making…

/ Jack Marshall / 17 Comments

…or, “Shut the hell up!”

Ann Althouse today pulled the following quote from “Happy birthday USA. But is America’s revolution unravelling? When the USA turned 200, the nation came together as one. Fifty years on, what are the chances of the same thing happening under Donald Trump? A special series from The Sunday Times Magazine is dedicated to the 250th anniversary of the USA”:

“And beneath the bluster, Trump’s limited view of the American Revolution is very familiar… it reflects, like so much else about him, the mainstream culture of the Cold War era, when museums and films did indeed tell a relentlessly upbeat story of American accomplishment — in vivid contrast to the plodding drudgery of communism. The leftist radicals of the 1960s and 1970s dissented noisily from this cozy view, but the majority accepted it unquestioningly. Since then a more extreme view has taken root: those who see the revolution not as the start of an unfinished project but as a fixed source of authority, a 250-year-old set of final answers. But as the US blows out its birthday candles, does it still have the capacity it once had for political renewal, while retaining its founding principles? It is always easier to start revolutions than to end them. This is why so many Americans have believed theirs was superior to others: it had been brought to an elegant conclusion by the constitution of 1787. Americans, it seemed, had escaped the spirals of radicalism and authoritarianism that beset France, or Latin American republics….”

I’m going to take a bit of time off from having to fend off insults, protests and rationalizations from the alleged legal ethicists who are furious at me for raising this issue to point out why I couldn’t be less interested in a Brit’s critique of the U.S.

Althouse summed up one excellent reason concisely with her sole comment on the article: “That’s the London Times. The view from the losing side.” That losing side has seen its empire collapse, its culture overwhelmed and destroyed by unrestrained immigration, the right of free speech trampled, its women brutalized, and its economy disastrously mismanaged while the country stands as a cautionary tale regarding the false promise of socialism. Its Prime Minister just resigned, the sixth leader of the government since the beginning of 2016: a seventh will arrive before the year ends. Meanwhile, its revered royal family is riddled with scandals and embarrassments, for King Charles’ pedophile brother to the obnoxious expats grifting off of their titles in the U.S.

Where does this rotting country get off criticizing us?

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The UK’s Frightening Warning On Cultural Pollution From Assimilation-Adverse Immigrants

/ Jack Marshall / 45 Comments

There are some cultures and some immigrants, refugees and illegal aliens that a nation has good reason to avoid letting into its territory. Islamic culture and Muslims are a blazing example. Europe and the UK are learning this hard lesson—that cultural diversity is only a boon if a nation’s traditional culture is nurtured and protected—too late. It remains to be seen if the U.S. will.

The flashing neon sign that the Mad Left will pooh-pooh, shrug off, deny or refuse to acknowledge? This:

Nearly 70 dog breeds in the UK could be banned under proposed new legislation on the sham theory that they are “unhealthy.” A new 10-point checklist of “extreme” physical characteristics will decide which dogs will suffer from health problems due to certain physical characteristics. The excuses for banning the breeds include “mottled coloration,” “excessive” skin folds (like English bulldogs), “fat faces” (like pit bulls and mastiffs), “temperament,” bulging outward-turning eyes (pugs), drooping eyelids, being low to the ground (like Queen Elizabeth’s Corgis) and more.

Don’t kid yourself and believe that this assault on freedom and family has anything to do with canine health. This an assault on dogs by Muslims, who believe that dogs are “unclean,” as Nerdeen Kiswani, a Palestinian Muslim New Yorker and activist, said in a recent social media post. This led Representative Randy Fine (R-Fla.) to reply, “If they force us to choose, the choice between dogs and Muslims is not a difficult one.” In response to that, Congressional Democrats are demanding that Fine be censured, because, after all, tearing down American culture is part of the current party’s mission.

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The UK’s New Bereavement Policy Makes No Sense Ethically, But Then When Has Abortion Made Any Ethical Sense?

/ Jack Marshall / 16 Comments

Ok, explain this: In the UK abortion is generally permitted up to 24 weeks of pregnancy, with some exceptions for special circumstances. Now the UK has extended its bereavement laws for miscarriages, which currently is two paid weeks off if the unborn child was 24 weeks old, to a week of paid bereavement for an unborn baby who is less than 24 weeks old.

Got that? A mother can kill the gestating embryo if it’s less than 24 weeks because that child is not viewed by the law as a human being worthy of protection, but if a child of the same age dies of other causes, it’s human enough to warrant bereavement benefits. Actually, I’m not sure if a mother who kills her child legally can still claim bereavement benefits. I don’t see why not.

Musician and broadcaster Myleene Klass, an activist who led an awareness movement in Great Britain, has said, “You’re not ill, you’ve lost a child, there’s a death in the family.” Why is it a death in the family when the child dies in a miscarriage, but just a matter of “choice” when the death is engineered by the mother herself?

“It’s a taboo,” she added. “Nobody wants to talk about dead babies – but you have to actually say it as it is. To lose a child is harrowing, it’s traumatic.” Well, it’s harrowing when the child dies of natural causes. When the cause of death is an abortion, it isn’t a child at all. Or something.

If there were any honesty and integrity in the abortion debate, the pro abortion movement would be recognized as not having an ethical leg to stand on.

Tales of the Great Stupid Across The Pond: Idiocy Test For the United Kingdom [Corrected]

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

The BBC tells us, “Commonwealth leaders have agreed the ‘time has come’ for a conversation about reparations for the slave trade, despite the UK’s desire to keep the subject off the agenda at a two-day summit in Samoa.”

Great! Has the “time come” for everyone to paint themselves blue, speak in squeaky voices, and to run naked in the streets singing show tunes? I bet the Commonewealth, made up of former members of the British empire, would love to have poor, declining Great Britain transfer millions to all the “victims” of the nation’s imperial and colonial ways. The UK would be permanently crippled, but right is right.

England banned the slave trade in 1809, more than 200 years ago. Ah, but evil is forever! Besides, just imagine every all the other things Great Britain had to own up to. I think it should be forced to pay reparations to all descendants of slaves in the U.S., and all the people in the world, especially Native Americans, permanently wounded by our awful country. After all, the “1609 Project” says the United States was founded on slavery. But that’s just the beginning. The American music industry should get reparations as compensation for the “British invasion” in the Sixties. At least for Herman’s Hermits….

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More Big Brother “Whack-A-Mole”: The Woke Censors Come For Jeeves And Bertie

/ Jack Marshall / 19 Comments

The good news is, as we are periodically reminded, this isn’t the U.K. (Thank-you, George, Tom, John, Paul and Ben!). The bad news is that the totalitarian virus embedded in The Great Stupid is contagious, and far greater threat to civilization than any pandemic. Great Britain has reached a level of unethical literary censorship—for the greater good, to eradicate “WrongThink,” you know—that would have been unimaginable just a few years ago.

I thought the effort by British publishers to re-write the works of Roald Dahl and Ian Fleming was just a temporary outbreak, and that the miscreants had received so much ridicule and criticism that the madness had been contained. As is so often the case, I was tragically wrong. Now these ethics villains have come for…I can’t believe I am writing this…P.G. Wodehouse.

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Comment Of The Day: “Sunday Ethics Warm-Up, 12/30/2018: A Petition, A Career-Killing Joke, And Priestley’s Play” [Item #4]

/ Jack Marshall / 21 Comments

P.M.Lawrence, who comments from Australia, often flagging what he views as American biases and misconceptions, jumps ahead in the line of waiting Comments of the Day with this brief note. It raises an issue that I have thought about often in the past, and argued about with friends and others. What is the ethical obligation of Americans to use foreign spellings of proper names when writing about places and things for domestic readers? The particular example at hand was my using “Labor Party” to label the British organization which calls itself “the Labour Party.”

I’ll have a rebuttal after P.M.s Comment on the post, Sunday Ethics Warm-Up, 12/30/2018: A Petition, A Career-Killing Joke, And Priestley’s Play , and am very interested in what others think.

A minor point: the original spelling of proper names should be used out of respect, even if that is different from your own usage of the words involved. Just as it would be wrong to write “National Inquirer”, so also it is wrong to write “Labor” when writing of the (British) “Labour Party” – even though it is right to write “Australian Labor Party”, for the very same reasons. It gets trickier with groups like our Australian DLP (“Democratic Labour Party”) that have chopped and changed over time; I incline towards using whichever spelling was in place at the time of the reference being cited.

This is all part of the Rectification of Names.

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Ethics Hero: Lord Michael Bates

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

Lord Michael Bates, Britain’s international development minister, was set to answer questions before the British House of Lords on yesterday, but arrived to the session a few minutes late for his scheduled Q and A session. When it concluded, Lord Bates rushed  up to the lectern,  and said,

“It’s been my privilege to answer questions from this despatch box on behalf of the government. I’ve always believed we should rise to the highest possible standards of courtesy and respect in responding on behalf of the government to the legitimate questions of the legislature. I’m thoroughly ashamed of not being in my place and therefore I shall be offering my resignation to the prime minister with immediate effect.”

With that, he walked out of the chamber .

Bravo. Promptness and punctuality demonstrates respect for one’s colleagues and professional duties, and holding oneself to the highest standards of conduct is the epitome of ethical public service.

Afterwards, a spokesman for the Prime Minister said:

“With typical sincerity, Lord Bates today offered to tender his resignation, but his resignation was refused as it was judged this was unnecessary.As a hard-working and diligent minister, it is typical of his approach that he takes his responsibilities to Parliament so seriously. He has received support from across the House and we are pleased he has decided to continue in his important roles at the Department for International Development and HM Treasury.”

Dear Lord Bates: please come to America and run for Congress, They need you. We need you.

 

Comment of the Day: “Esquire’s Ridiculous Book List Smear”

/ Jack Marshall / 72 Comments

rowling

My position on British celebrities who attack our elected officials via snotty tweets and interviews is simple: I’ll give a damn what you think  when your own country gets rid of the hereditary monarchy and stops sinking ever deeper into socialism, economic decay and international irrelevance. Spout off after the number of artists and performers moving to the U.S. is offset significantly by U.S. artists moving in the other direction.  Great Britain has become the Beach Boys of nations; still croaking the same old tunes, but a depressing shadow of what it once was.

Besides that, it is rude. If there is one nation that deserves Great Britain’s lasting respect, it is this one.

Steve-O-in-NJ scored another Comment of the Day with his discussion of one of the British anti-U.S. tweeters most loved by the Angry Left, “Harry Potter” creator J.K. Rowling. Here it is, in reaction to “Esquire’s Ridiculous Book List Smear”:

Fantasy author J.K. Rowling took it upon herself to troll Vice President Pence and criticize the President, sneering at those fans who have chosen to make contrary opinions known, even condescendingly saying you can lead someone to books about the rise and fall of an autocrat, but not make them understand.

I have to say I am particularly unimpressed by that latter statement, and the attitude it conveys – an attitude that this author is smarter than anyone who disagrees with her, and, more to the point, that she had some profound lesson about human nature to teach the world in the lengthy prose of seven books that were, while they were fun, popular, and very profitable, ultimately only fantasy novels. Their primary purpose, like all novels, is and was to entertain.

Oh, Ms. Rowling drops a profound-sounding thought here and there between the fantastic creatures, faux-Latin spells, potboiler plots, and hairbreadth escapes: that those who seek power often seek it to abuse it, that what you do is more important than who your father was, that being powerful is less important than how you use what power you have, and of course, that racism is bad.

However, none of these are particularly original thoughts. JKR didn’t come up with any of these herself. She might have packaged them up nicely, but no one changes their approach to life because some principle came from the mouth of a plucky young hero or a wise, traditional- looking wizard. Continue reading →

The Prince, The Sex Offender, and the Ethics of Friendship

/ Jack Marshall / 44 Comments

Prince Andrew with one of his friend's victims in 2001

The ethics of friendship is complicated.

President Bush claimed to be friends with Vladimir Putin. F.D.R. once said that Josef Stalin was his friend. President Obama was famously friendly with dubious characters like Rev. Wright and William Ayres.

History is full of heroes and near-heroes who had infamous friends, though the extent of the often friendship is difficult to know. Sammy Davis, Jr. and Elvis were supposedly buddies with Richard Nixon. Bill and Hillary Clinton were close friends with Dick Morris. Wyatt Earp was a life-long friend of “Doc” Holliday; Andrew Jackson may have been friends with pirate Jean Lafitte, who helped him win the Battle of New Orleans. We simultaneously celebrate loyal friends, and yet we also judge people by the company they keep. Should we condemn individuals who have friends with serious character flaws or a history of unsavory acts? Or should we admire them for sticking with their friends when everyone else is turning against them? Continue reading →