Category Archives: ethics

The Lady [sic] Demonstrates Her Critics’ Point

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University of California, Berkeley’s, Associate Director for its Center for Equity, Gender & Leadership Genevieve Macfarlane Smith succeeded in this with her letter in The Wall Street Journal‘s Letters section last Thursday. Smith began by complaining

Lawrence Krauss writes, “I have a hard time understanding how people can be so hurt by the use of some words and names.”

Then she proceeded to make Krauss’ point for him.

Take “illegal alien”: This term brands a person “illegal” and implies they’re not human but “alien.” Beyond dehumanizing, the term is imprecise: It implies criminality, but lacking immigration documents is a civil, not criminal, offense.

Of course, “illegal alien” does none of that. The term brands no one as illegal; the individual involved has made himself illegal by entering our nation illegally.

Nor does the term imply criminality. As Smith actually concedes, “lacking immigration documents—” being an illegal alien—is a civil offense: it’s simply illegal, with no implication of felonious or civil illegality.

Nor does the term imply that the illegal alien is in any way not human. Here are the American Heritage Dictionary‘s definitions of “alien:”

adj.
1. Owing political allegiance to another country or government; foreign: alien residents.
2. Belonging to, characteristic of, or constituting another and very different place, society, or person; strange.
3. Dissimilar, inconsistent, or opposed, as in nature: emotions alien to her temperament.
n.
Law
1. An unnaturalized foreign resident of a country. Also called noncitizen.
2. A person from another and very different family, people, or place.
3. A person who is not included in a group; an outsider.

There’s nothing in there about the illegal alien being not human.

Smith then asked,

Still agree with Mr Krauss that reflection on language is a “waste of time” or “silly”?

Yep. Smith was making Krauss’ case. Unsatisfied, though, she dug a bit deeper.

Mr Krauss discusses efforts to replace “master/slave” from computer code with “primary/secondary.” … This type of language can signal that black people aren’t welcome.

I’ve worked in the tech industry for years. No one, not a single minority colleague, felt unwelcome from such terms. We all understood the context; we were software engineers and managers, not…social engineers. And context matters. More than Smith seems to understand.

Perhaps if Smith and her cohorts weren’t so desperate to change the ordinary meaning of the words of our American English language in order to support their quest for offense, her victims, the ones she’s pretending to want to protect (apparently because she considers them incapable of protecting themselves) would experience considerably less angst.

Taxing the Rich

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Washington State is at it.

Washington state multibillionaires would pay a wealth tax under a proposal that got a public hearing before the Senate Ways and Means Committee.
Senate Bill 5426 would impose a 1% tax on intangible financial property such as stocks, and bonds, futures contracts, and publicly traded options. The first $1 billion of assessed wealth would be exempt from the tax, which “equals one percent multiplied by a resident’s taxable worldwide wealth.”

Leave aside questions of the legitimacy of taxing an American citizen’s foreign-held wealth, intangible or otherwise. The bill’s sponsor, State Senator Sam Hunt (D, Olympia) has given the larger game away.

This is a great attempt to bring fairness to our tax structure which is pretty upside down with the lower income paying 17% of their income in taxes and the upper 1% paying 1% or less[.]

That is pretty upside down.

Another solution would be to lower the tax rates on those with the lower income. However, that would involve lowering tax rates rather than increasing them, and lowering tax rates is completely inconceivable to Progressive-Democrats.

Update: Some have interpreted my “lower the tax rates on those with the lower income to mean lowering income tax rates. Washington has no income tax, only sales taxes (State and local), business taxes, and property taxes. Sales and property taxes are highly regressive and hit the lower income folks the hardest, the former directly through taking a far higher per centage of their income and the latter through driving up the cost of housing, whether owning or renting.

Lowering business taxes (eliminating them, I say) would foster job growth, which would benefit the lower- and no-income folks the most.

Biden-Harris Administration’s Level of Preparedness for its Afghanistan Withdrawal

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How prepared was Biden-Harris? What is an outcome of that level of preparedness?

…a news outlet said it obtained leaked notes from the White House Situation Room that showed “just how unprepared” it was to evacuate Afghan nationals who assisted Americans during the conflict.

Per AXIOS, the news outlet in question:

  • Hours before the Taliban seized control of Afghanistan’s capital on August 15, 2021, senior Biden administration officials were still discussing and assigning basic actions involved in a mass civilian evacuation.
  • …they’d just decided they needed to notify local Afghan staff “to begin to register their interest in relocation to the United States….”
  • …they were still determining which countries could serve as transit points for evacuees.

Biden-Harris, though, is disputing all of that. The Spokesperson for his National Security Council, Emily Horne, insists,

While we’re not going to comment on leaked internal documents, cherry-picked notes from one meeting do not reflect the months of work that were already underway[.]

Wow. I’m not sure I’d want to insist that the debacle of Biden-Harris’…departure…from Afghanistan was carried out in accordance with carefully developed, long-time prior planning.

If that’s the quality of Biden-Harris planning, it’s no wonder that Russian President Vladimir Putin is just weeks away from invading and conquering Ukraine, and People’s Republic of China’s President Xi Jinping isn’t far behind in his plan to invade and conquer the Republic of China. Those Presidents are playing chess while our President is playing Chutes and Ladders.

Lindsey Graham is Mistaken

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Senator Lindsey Graham (R, SC) is a supporter of President Joe Biden’s (D) Supreme Court nominee—so long as the selection is South Carolina US District Judge Michelle Childs. It’s typical for a Senator to support nominations for high office when those nominations come from the Senator’s State.

It’s also useful, all other things being equal, for Senators of either Party to support the nominations of a President of either party on the theory that a President should be able to have his own team in place (my argument here, not Graham’s).

Graham’s rationale, though, is badly mistaken, and the mistake of his rationale impacts that “team” concept, as well.

Graham supports Biden’s impending nomination of a black woman for Supreme Court Justice (which, in Biden’s own and often repeated terms, puts actual qualification for the Court deeply secondary, if that’s a consideration at all) centers on this:

Put me in the camp of making sure the court and other institutions look like America.

And, as paraphrased by Just the News:

Graham added that Republicans have made a “real effort” to “recruit women and people of color to make the party look more like America.”

Looking like America, though, is a political matter. Political questions are entirely appropriate for political parties, political questions are entirely appropriate to the political branches of our government, where we American citizens can, and do, choose who will represent us—achieving tautologically a representation reflective of America.

However, it is not the role or purpose of our courts, epitomized by our Supreme Court, to “look like America.” Our courts—most especially our Supreme Court, which is the court of last resort for most cases—must reflect, must act within, must apply as they are written, the clauses of our Constitution, our Constitution as a whole, and the statutes before them in specific cases. Looking like America is irrelevant to that duty.

Nor are our courts—most especially the Supreme Court—part of the President’s team. Our courts consist of judges and Justices possessed of lifetime appointments. That’s by design, explicitly to inure those folks from politics, per se, to separate them from, among other things, this or that political team.

What looks like America, from the independent courts’ perspective, already is embodied in our Constitution and its clauses and in those statutes. It would be wrong for our courts to attempt to adjust that perspective, and it would be wrong for politicians to attempt to alter the courts so as to adjust that perspective.

Germany “Helps”

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Germany has offered to ship to Ukraine 5,000 helmets and says it will “transfer” a field hospital (typically with 50-100 beds) to Ukraine in February. Ukraine had asked Germany, with its military establishment of more than 260,000,

to provide at least 100,000 helmets and protective gear….

5,000 helmets and a field hospital for an active duty establishment of more than 400,000 that’s backed up by a reserve establishment of 250,000. Kyiv Mayor Vitali Klitschko was generous to call the helmet offer a joke. What kind of support will Germany send next, pillows? he wondered.

German law also prevents Germany from shipping weapons into a war zone or a region that might become a war zone. German Chancellor Olaf Scholz further has excused his government’s behavior by claiming lethal aid would only fuel the situation, and he’d rather find a “diplomatic” solution.

Of course, Scholz knows better. What would—what is—fueling the situation is leaving Ukraine dangerously weak in front of the Red Army, encouraging Putin to invade and conquer. The only “diplomatic” solution resulting is Ukraine’s defeat and occupation.

If Germany were serious about helping Ukraine, it would alter its law to allow arms shipments—directly from Germany or (for instance) via transfer of German-originated arms from Estonia’s establishment—into the nation that’s about to be overrun by Russia. It would correct its “thinking” on the matter and recognize that a well-armed and strong Ukraine is what makes a diplomatic solution possible.

No, Klitschko understated the matter. The German “offer” is insulting, and Scholz’ excuse-making is illustrative just how deeply is Germany kowtowing to Russia.