Category Archives: culture

Should be Easy

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The Supreme Court has agreed to hear a Biden administration suit against Tennessee over whether that State can restrict medical treatments for transgender minors.

[T]he court said it would hear the Biden administration’s challenge to a Tennessee law that bans gender-transition care, such as medications that can delay the onset of puberty and hormones that can cause physical changes such as the development of facial hair or breasts.

Leave aside the question of whether there is such a thing as “transgender minors.” There is, but they’re exceedingly rare, and those cases are easily identified by physiological factors like stunted development of physical sexual characteristics that are consistent with the child’s DNA-determined sex, or excessive development of physical sexual characteristics that are contrary to the child’s DNA-determined sex.

The Court’s ruling in the Tennessee case should be a short, sweet one-pager: Yes, the State can restrict medical treatments for transgender minors.

What would be nearly as bad as ruling against Tennessee would be the Court expanding on that simple Yes by writing limits—minimum or maximum—to the State’s authority to restrict. Limits on the authority to restrict are themselves political decisions that must be left to the political branches of our Federal government—Congress and the President, or Congress overriding a veto—and to the State governments individually.

A Thought on the Alitos

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News personality Lauren Windsor had a thought regarding Justice Samual Alito and his wife and some flag-flying. A number of letter-writers in The Wall Street Journal‘s Letters section had thoughts regarding Windsor’s hit piece.

I have my own thought, beginning from this remark by one of the letter-writers who (also) decried Windsor’s piece:

Justice Alito is being blamed for Mrs Alito’s flag flying.

Along with all the other criticisms of Windsor’s dishonesty stands this: she deeply insults Ms Alito, along with women generally, by suggesting that the wife is necessarily subordinate to the husband and that the wife is nothing more than the little woman, who needn’t worry her pretty little head about things that are in the man’s realm of responsibility.

What bigoted, sexist garbage Windsor has spewed.

Lies of Teachers Union Managers

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This one comes from the Chicago Teachers Union President Stacy Davis Gates. She told WBBM‘s Political Editor, Craig Dellimore, in their Sunday interview,

Conservatives don’t even want Black children to be able to read. Remember, these same conservatives are the conservatives who probably would have been championing Black codes, you know, during reconstruction or thereafter. So, forgive me again if conservatives pushing back on educating immigrant children, Black children, children who live in poverty, doesn’t make my anxiety go up. That’s what they’re supposed to say. That is literally a part of the oath that they take to be right wing.

Not so much. Pushing for alternatives to public schools—voucher schools, charter schools, pods, homeschooling—is what Conservatives do explicitly to make it possible for black children, other minority children, all children trapped in failing public schools to learn to read and to learn to do arithmetic.

Conservatives championed Black codes during Reconstruction? Apparently, Davis Gates is a product of her public school American history: she’s utterly ignorant. It was the Democratic Party that was creating Black codes during Reconstruction—and that created the Ku Klux Klan to prey on freed Blacks and their White supporters—and it was Party that pushed for gun control laws aimed at keeping those same Blacks and White supporters unarmed and helpless against the KKK.

Now Party is adamantly opposed to those alternative schools, and Davis Gates is right there with them, doing her best to keep black children, other minority children, all children from learning much of anything by keeping them trapped in those public schools.

Davis Gates is just one more example of the intrinsic dishonesty of teachers unions and of the failure of public schools, including in Chicago.

That’s Not All

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Amid the press coverage of a variety of recent video clips showing Progressive-Democrat President Joe Biden’s apparent physical and mental decline—standing motionless in the middle of a number of dignitaries swaying and bobbing to some music, wandering off in the middle of a parachute team demonstration, being taken by the wrist and led off the stage—there comes Biden’s Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre’s full throated and angry denunciation of the video clips as cheap fakes and deep fakes.

Among the press’ snark corps commentary ridiculing Jean-Pierre’s claim there were a few suggestions that were more serious.

The least among the more serious is Guy Benson’s unsubstantiated denial:

But it’s literal misinformation to pretend the videos themselves are fake. They are not.

Based on what evidence, Benson?

Some more serious questions include these:

Senator Mike Lee (R, UT):

Wait, exactly which videos we’ve all seen—of Biden freezing or looking lost—are deepfakes?

Stephen L Miller:

A reporter needs to genuinely ask her what she thinks a deep fake is[.]

This line of questioning badly lacking, however, which is all too typical of today’s cute sound bite-driven media. A reporter—a myriad of reporters—also need to ask (to get back to Benson’s failure from the right) for the specific data that shows the videos to be deep fakes, or cheap fakes, or in any way altered other than—perhaps—being clipped out of longer videos showing more of Biden’s behavior both before and after the clips in question.

Maybe the lack of calls for hard evidence—and Benson’s evidence-free claim—is of a piece with what passes for today’s journalism: sound bites don’t have room for facts.

Journalist Complaining about Violation of Journalistic Ethics

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This is rich. Here’s David Brooks, complaining about a journalist penetrating a private gathering hosted by a historical society and attended by some Supreme Court Justices:

It’s a complete breach of any—the basic form of journalistic ethics. And I was, frankly, stunned that all of us in our business just reported on it, just like straight up.

I’ve addressed this concept of ethics in journalism—rather the lack of ethics in journalism—before. I’m addressing it again here, now that the highly esteemed (at least in some circles) Brooks has brought the matter up.

Today’s journalists news writers and opinion personalities think it’s jake to base their pieces entirely on “anonymous sources,” leaving readers and listeners no means of assessing for themselves the accuracy of the claims made or the credibility of the unidentified claimers.

Today’s news writers and opinion personalities think it entirely appropriate to treat their anonymous sources as though they actually exist, and subsequently that they are truthful solely because the writer and personality say so. Never mind that such a source, if it exists, is likely violating his terms of employment if not his oath of office by leaking, and so is empirically dishonest at the outset. Alternatively, an anonymous source, if it exists, is hiding behind anonymity out of cowardice, and cowards will always and only say what he believes will be personally beneficial with his leaks.

Some writers and personalities think it sufficient to address those points by claiming the source is a whistleblower. They consciously choose to not provide any evidence that the source has exhausted all of his whistleblower avenues of objection before he chose to become a leaker. Again, we’re supposed to believe the writer/personality solely on the basis of his smiling face and congenial rhetoric.

Finally, and of overarching importance, journalism used to have a standard that required two on-the-record sources to corroborate the claims of anonymous sources.

Today’s writers and personalities have long since walked away from that standard. On top of that, today’s writers and personalities, and their Editors-in-Chief, refuse today to identify the standard of journalistic integrity they use in its stead.

“Journalistic ethics.” A canonical oxymoron.