Category Archives: culture

An Example of the Immorality of Moral Equivalence

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In President Barack Obama’s speech before the UN earlier this week, he had this to say:

This group [ISIL, Obama’s term for ISIS] has terrorized all who they come across in Iraq and Syria. Mothers, sisters and daughters have been subjected to rape as a weapon of war. Innocent children have been gunned down. Bodies have been dumped in mass graves. Religious minorities have been starved to death. In the most horrific crimes imaginable, innocent human beings have been beheaded, with videos of the atrocity distributed to shock the conscience of the world.

Then he said this in juxtaposition:

I realize that America’s critics will be quick to point out that at times we too have failed to live up to our ideals; that America has plenty of problems within our own borders. This is true. In a summer marked by instability in the Middle East and Eastern Europe, I know the world also took notice of the small American city of Ferguson, Missouri—where a young man was killed, and a community was divided. So yes, we have our own racial and ethnic tensions.

Because the shooting of one young man by a policeman, with the facts and circumstances of this not yet known, is equivalent to the butchery of ISIS’ terrorists.

Yeah.

DoJ Doing a Racial Bias Study of Police Departments?

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That’s rich.

[T]he Justice Department has enlisted a team of criminal justice researchers to study racial bias in law enforcement in five American cities and recommend strategies to address the problem national[.]

Notice that: not researchers, not social science researchers, not social science of conflict researchers, not social science of culture researchers, not urban social science researchers, not…. Criminal justice researchers specifically. AG Eric Holder already has made up his mind on this one.

This study will be overseen by a DoJ led by a man who insists that

in things racial we have always been and continue to be, in too many ways, essentially a nation of cowards.

This study will be overseen by a DoJ led by a man who

dismissed voter intimidation case against two members of New Black Panthers, whose victims were white, even after those two had conceded the case by refusing to answer it.

This study will be overseen by a DoJ that’s openly racist in its civil rights enforcement.

A DoJ with its mind already made up on race expects to be trusted with a study of racial bias in police forces around the nation. This is, indeed, (trigger alert) chutzpah.

They Need to Make up Their Minds

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The Minnesota Vikings issued a statement early Wednesday saying that running back Adrian Peterson must remain away from all team activities until his felony child abuse case is settled.

The move was an about-face for the team, which reinstated Peterson to the active roster Monday after deactivating him following the All-Pro running back’s indictment Friday.

Peterson has an initial hearing scheduled for October 8 in Montgomery County, Texas on a charge of reckless or negligent injury to a child. He is accused of beating his four-year-old son with a wooden switch, leaving bruises and other wounds that were visible days later. Peterson told police that he was merely inflicting discipline and had not intended to hurt the boy.

He spanked his son with a switch. So were my brothers and I by our parents. Charles Barkley has said, without too much exaggeration,

Whipping—we do that all the time. Every black parent in the South is going to be in jail under those circumstances[.]

This pasty white blogger grew up in the Midwest, and spankings with switches, paddles, whatever fell to hand, were commonplace. We weren’t harmed, except in our pride. And we learned discipline. “Beating?” Bruises “and other wounds that were visible days later?” Based on what evidence? Besides rumors reprinted in newspapers, I mean?

The Vikings’ statement continued:

We want to be clear; we have a strong stance regarding the protection and welfare of children, and we want to be sure we get this right. At the same time, we want to express our support for Adrian and acknowledge his seven-plus years of outstanding commitment to this organization and this community.

This is hypocritical. They’re not supporting a man who’s losing a significant part of his career—even great running backs only have careers of 10 years or less. Sitting him down until his case is “resolved” will cost him this year, and the trial and appeals can go on for two or three years before the matter is “resolved.”

Pick a response and stay with it; quit the bouncing back and forth. But as the Vikings choose their final answer, they need to keep in mind a quintessentially American principle: in the end, of what is Peterson guilty? Not of what is he accused, what has he actually done? When was his trial? All the evidence isn’t available, only that subset of it that a press anxious for stories to peddle chooses to make available.

There’s also this minor contractual obligation:

Under the collective bargaining agreement, a team can only deactivate a player for non-injury reasons for a maximum of four games. The same limit applies if [a team] were to suspend [a player] for conduct detrimental to the team.

Rules, and Rules

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In a northern California grade school, there’s a dress code. And there can be no exceptions to the rule.

A young girl was told by her school that she couldn’t wear a T-shirt to pay tribute to the lives lost on Sept 11, 2001.

School leaders say they have a good reason for banning the sixth-grader’s Sept 11 memorial T-shirt on Thursday. When her stepfather tried to get permission, school administrators say it violated their dress code.

District Senior Director for Community Relations Trent Allen said that students were only allowed to deviate from the uniform on free dress days, and 9/11 isn’t one of those days.

It’s very much an important part of the academic process, but need to enforce dress code policy. If you start making exceptions it is hard to draw the line.

Emphasis added to that last. Because there’s a hint there regarding the bureaucratic nature of rules.

Democracy People’s Republic of China Style

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And democracy Hong Kong style.

The PRC’s view of elections in its satrapy is that only candidates acceptable to the Communist Party of China can stand for office in Hong Kong. Indeed, the Deputy Secretary General of the National People’s Congress’ Standing Committee, Li Fei, has said out loud that openly nominating candidates would create a “chaotic society.” He went further:

[R]ights come from laws, they don’t come from the sky. Many Hong Kong people have wasted a lot of time discussing things that are not appropriate and aren’t discussing things that are appropriate.

The contrast between freedom and tyranny could hardly be made more starkly clear.

Pursuant to Li’s remarks,

The…Standing Committee ruled that all candidates for chief executive must receive more than half of the votes from a special nominating body before going before voters.

And

[T]he 1,200-member nominating committee would select two or three candidates. After one is selected through universal suffrage, the chief executive-elect “will have to be appointed by the Central People’s Government.”

The good citizens of Hong Kong, though, have been holding massive demonstrations during the current run-up to the elections for governing positions there, demanding that actual democracy break out (as agreed by the PRC when the UK gave up Hong Kong to them at the end of the last century). These citizens demur from the PRC’s despotism.

Democracy, freedom, are messy and chaotic at times. That’s the price, and the strength, of free men working their way along a path of their own choosing, rather than suffering the order of government telling them what their path must be. The noisiness and seeming chaos are in the nature of every man being free, of every man having his say, of every man acting in his own time according to his own needs and wishes. It is a sign of a healthy society.

My suggestion, in the hubris associated with my position on the outside looking in: the citizenry should agree on a couple of candidates for the relevant posts—most particularly, for Chief Executive—and then, en masse, write those names in, and thereby elect one of them to each of those relevant posts. The citizens then should demand the PRC recognize that man as the Hong Kong Chief Executive and those men as the elects for those relevant posts.

Of course, such a prior arrangement is not different from what the Standing Committee has done, but as a one-time event to make an important statement and to make the PRC’s behavior internationally public, perhaps an exception can be made. After all, when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is the citizens of Hong Kong’s right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.

In such an event, extraordinary measures become necessary.