United States

“Fuck the EU”

/ Jack Marshall / 30 Comments
Victoria Nuland, meet Earl Butz.

Victoria Nuland, meet Earl Butz.

In today’s news, Victoria Nuland,  Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs and the top American diplomat in Europe, is heard in a viral Youtube video saying “Fuck the EU,” meaning the European Union, meaning the United States’ allies in Europe, meaning the constituency it is her job to get along with,and not insult like a middle schooler.

A U.S. government competent in international diplomacy, serious about international affairs, and familiar with the concepts of damage control and accountability would sack the unfortunate Ms. Nuland immediately. Waiting until she becomes completely useless and the gaffe escalates into a serious international rift with substantive consequences would be incompetent, lazy and stupid. But this, remember, is the Barack Obama Amateur Diplomacy Era. Nuland has apologized for saying “Fuck the EU,” and that, for now, is the best the European Union will get, because the President Obama and his subordinates (fish-rots-head-down) doesn’t acknowledge the ethical principle of accountability, nor professionalism and competence, as far as I can see.

In its actions, if not its words, the administration has been saying “fuck the rest of the world” with some regularity.  Obama’s nominee for Ambassador of Argentina revealed in last week’s confirmation hearings that he has never been there, nor does he speak Spanish. Unlike the many other countries’ languages that our ambassadors assigned to them can’t understand, it really isn’t hard to find qualified diplomats who speak Spanish. Noah Bryson Mamet, however, wasn’t nominated to head the embassy in a major South American nation because he has a clue of how to do that job. He bundled $500,000 for Barack Obama’s presidential campaign, you see, and no fewer than 23 such “bundlers” have received ambassador posts as their pay-off. Continue reading →

Translation For Norwegians: “Oh, Please. We’re The United States Of America. Why Should We Care About Sweden…er, Norway? Whatever.”

/ Jack Marshall / 41 Comments
I hear he really likes fish, though, and roots for the Vikings.

I hear he really likes fish, though, and roots for the Vikings.

Stipulated: Ambassador to Norway is not the most vital foreign relations post the Obama Administration has to fill. Also stipulated: if one assumes that the quality of U.S. appointee naturally diminishes down the line from the most important diplomatic position to the least, and the top position is filled with the likes of John Kerry, one might assume that Norwegians would be relieved that the post of U.S. Ambassador to Norway wasn’t being filled by a used lawn chair. The final stipulation is that there is nothing unique or unusual about a U.S. President filling a high diplomatic post with someone manifestly unqualified for the job by anything other than the size of their contributions to his re-election. This is not only a case of “everybody does it,” but also “everybody has been doing it shamelessly for about 200 years.”

With all of that stated and understood, it is still impossible to avoid the ethical conclusions that…

  • The performance of President Obama’s selection as Ambassador to Norway in his Senate confirmation hearing was a disgrace and an embarrassment, even by the prior low standards of past appointees.
  • Appointing such an obviously unqualified, and indeed lazy and uninterested, U.S. ambassador to any locale with more human occupants than Sesame Street is irresponsible.
  • Doing so is an insult to Norway, and, by extension, its population, friends, and neighbors, which..
  • Makes the government of the United States look arrogant and  foolish, which…

Ethics Quote Of The Week:

/ Jack Marshall / 23 Comments

“Voters are significantly more conservative than nonvoters on redistributive issues and have been in every election since 1972. Voters may be more liberal than nonvoters on social issues, but on redistributive issues, they are not. These redistributive issues define a fundamental relationship between citizens and the state . . . and are central to ongoing conflicts about the scope of government. It is on these issues that voters offer a biased voice of the preferences of the electorate.”

—– Political scientists, Jan E. Leighley of American University and Jonathan Nagler of New York University in their new book, “Who Votes Now? Demographics, Issues, Inequality, and Turnout in the United States.”(Quoted by Dan Balz in the Washington Post)

idiot-votersA better example of the warped and unethical thought habits of the Left it would be hard to find.

So the results of an election based on who actually has the initiative, knowledge, civic responsibility and sense to vote are now called “bias,” are they? Talk about academics wearing their own biases tattooed on their foreheads: naturally any conservative consensus is illegitimate, right boys? Continue reading →

Ethics Quotes of the Day: On Liberty, Freedom, and Democracy

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

“

“Hurrah for the flag of the free!
May it wave as our standard forever,
The gem of the land and the sea,
The banner of the right.

“Let despots remember the day
When our fathers with mighty endeavor
Proclaimed as they marched to the fray
That by their might and by their right
It waves forever.”

—–John Phillip Sousa, “The Stars and Stripes Forever”

“Democracy is like sex. When it is good, it is very very good. And when its is bad, it is still pretty good.“

—–Anonymous.

“The real democratic American idea is, not that every man shall be on a level with every other man, but that every man shall have liberty to be what God made him, without hindrance.”

—-Henry Ward Beecher, American preacher

“Democracy is moral before it is political.”

—- Louis Brandeis, Supreme Court Justice

“The experience of democracy is like the experience of life itself-always changing, infinite in its variety, sometimes turbulent and all the more valuable for having been tested by adversity.”

—-  Jimmy  Carter

“A constitutional democracy like ours is perhaps the most difficult of man’s social arrangements to manage successfully. Our scheme of society is more dependent than any other form of government on knowledge and wisdom and self-discipline for the achievement of its aims. For our democracy implies the reign of reason on the most extensive scale. The Founders of this Nation were not imbued with the modern cynicism that the only thing that history teaches is that it teaches nothing. They acted on the conviction that the experience of man sheds a good deal of light on his nature. It sheds a good deal of light not merely on the need for effective power if a society is to be at once cohesive and civilized, but also on the need for limitations on the power of governors over the governed.”

—- Felix Frankfurter, Supreme Court Justice

“In contrast to totalitarianism, democracy can face and live with the truth about itself.”

—-Sidney Hook, American philosopher and historian

“America’s experiment with government of the people, by the people, and for the people depends not only on constitutional structure and organization but also on the commitment, person to person, that we make to each other.”

—-Robert Hutchins Continue reading →

The Importance of American Culture

/ Jack Marshall / Leave a comment

Pericles delivering his famous funeral oration

By necessity, Ethics Alarms often ventures into the realm of culture, because ethics defines a culture as surely as culture determines ethical standards. This, unfortunately, make politics unavoidable as well, because politics are the means by which laws, primary tools of culture as well as the products of it, get made.

In The New Criterion, Roger Kimball has written a thoughtful essay about the current stakes in America as our culture evolves. He discusses politics and Pericles, and makes his own orientation (classic conservative) clear, and proudly clear at that. It is also an essay with great relevance to ethics. I recommend it highly. Here are some excerpts. The link to the whole article is at the end. Continue reading →

Ethics Dunce: Laurie Penny

/ Jack Marshall / 22 Comments

Laurie Penny, in an alternate universe America where we don't bother about trivial things, like saving pompous, ungrateful British journalists.

Laurie Penny was the woman saved from being flattened by a New York cab this week by none other than Ryan Gosling, the dashing actor and and celebrity heart-throb who has already been honored here for his willingness to come to the rescue of others in peril. He pulled her back as the British journalist was about to step off the curb in Manhattan without looking, right in the path of a speeding vehicle.

The celebrity and gossip media went bonkers over this, as you might imagine. After all, a typical headline for this crude segment of the media is that Tia Tequila got a new tattoo or that a Kardashian broke a nail. Let’s see…what’s today’s buzz? Ex-child star Amanda Bynes was bailed out if jail following her DUI arrest, and Heidi Klum filed for divorce. But the attention being paid to Gosling’s good deed just annoys Penny, and, she says, is proof that America is trivial and misguided. In a piece authored for the gossip site Gawker, entitled, “Ryan Gosling Saved Me From a Speeding Car But There’s War In the Middle East So Everyone Calm Down,” Penny exposes herself as the kind of person Gosling might live to regret rescuing. Continue reading →