Category Archives: ethics

The Fruits of Timidity

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Rebel forces in eastern Ukraine on Tuesday announced that they plan to hold a referendum calling for the creation of a new state known as Malorossiya, which translates as “Little Russia.”

In a statement published on the rebel-aligned Donetsk News Agency, rebel leader Alexander Zakharchenko said that the new state would aspire to include not only the areas under insurgent control, but also the rest of Ukraine.

This wouldn’t be occurring now, had our government and those of Europe hadn’t been so meek in the face of Russian aggression in the two eastern oblasts and then without a whimper accepting Russian partition of Ukraine and occupation of Crimea.

Maybe now, the lot of us will stop bleating about the Minsk accord and remind Russia of its obligations under the Budapest Memorandum.  Maybe now the lot of us will start selling/leasing/granting Ukraine the weapons and supplies it needs to defend itself and to take back from Russia the three oblasts.

Election Fraud vs Election Hacking

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Certainly these are different from each other in method and often (but not always) in purpose, but is there an important difference were these successful in altering our election outcomes or in raising doubt about those outcomes?

I didn’t think so.

Why, then, are so many who should know better so obstructive of the Federal effort to understand the method and extent of election fraud?

There were nearly 150,000 attempts to penetrate the voter-registration system on Election Day 2016, State Election Commission says

That’s the subhead of Sunday’s Wall Street Journal piece on US Election Hacking Efforts. Illinois was hit as badly:

…hackers were hitting the State Board of Elections “5 times per second, 24 hours per day” from late June until Aug 12, 2016…. Hackers ultimately accessed approximately 90,000 voter records, the State Board of Elections said.

Accessed, not simply trying to, as was the case in South Carolina, the state with those 150,000 hack attempts.  In all, at least 21 states (I say “at least;” the WSJ just cited the 21) were targeted, and the intelligence community’s consensus is that the Russians were behind most of the attempts.

That should give an idea of the extent of the hacking at/into our election system.  Isn’t election fraud—another version of influencing or altering our election outcomes at least as serious?  Domestic defrauding of our elections, in some senses, would be even worse; it would be a betrayal by our own.

But so many governors refuse to cooperate with Federal efforts to characterize election fraud.

Go figure.

Leaks

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Investigators are re-examining conversations detected by US intelligence agencies in spring 2015 that captured Russian government officials discussing associates of Donald Trump, according to current and former US officials, a move prompted by revelations that the president’s eldest son met with a Russian lawyer last year.

Emphasis added.

Why is Special Counsel Robert Mueller allowing these leaks?  Is he not interested in running an honest investigation?

On Whose Side Is He?

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Senator Rand Paul (R, KY) has said he will not vote for the latest Senate effort at beginning the repeal and replace process of Obamacare.  He claims he can’t tell the difference between this offer and the Obamacare that exists because, in part, it leaves some of the Obamacare taxes in place.

Never mind that a critical difference between the offer and Obamacare is that the offer does repeal some of the Obamacare taxes.

The offer isn’t a perfect bill, but it represents progress, and it’s not a final answer—and I know of no one, other than a few Senators, perhaps, who are arguing that it is; that there will be, can be, no possibility of coming back next year to make more progress and coming back in the next Congress to make yet more in each of those two years.

Furthermore, there aren’t enough votes to get all of the Obamacare taxes passed in this bill.  And, at least some Obamacare taxes must be repealed in order to be able to effect significant tax code reform.

Finally, the only politically possible alternative to passing a bill that repeals only some of the Obamacare taxes is to preserve the status quo and all of the Obamacare taxes.

Paul knows all of this, of course; he’s just virtue signaling.

I have to ask, then: on whose side is he?

The Left

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…doesn’t like us very much.  And, by “us” I don’t mean Conservatives, I mean the United States in particular and Western Civilization in general.

Here are a couple of examples.  Recall President Donald Trump’s speech in Poland last week wherein he touted the successes of Western Civilization and the United States’ role in that and further said that we would never give in to the forces arrayed against us.

Our adversaries, however, are doomed because we will never forget who we are.  And if we don’t forget who are, we just can’t be beaten.  Americans will never forget.  The nations of Europe will never forget.  We are the fastest and the greatest community.  There is nothing like our community of nations.  The world has never known anything like our community of nations.

And

[W]e value the dignity of every human life, protect the rights of every person, and share the hope of every soul to live in freedom.  That is who we are.  Those are the priceless ties that bind us together as nations, as allies, and as a civilization.

And

Our citizens did not win freedom together, did not survive horrors together, did not face down evil together, only to lose our freedom to a lack of pride and confidence in our values.  We did not and we will not.  We will never back down.

But these are bigoted remarks, the Left says.

According to Salon, these are “white nationalist” remarks, and

Trump was fairly begging to be labeled a fascist with his speech painting the purity of white civilization as under threat from racialized foreigners….

Here’s Brad Woodhouse, former Communications Director for the Democratic National Committee:

Western civilization and Christian Values are dog whistles to white nationalists[.]

Malcolm Nance, author and commentator from the Left on terrorism [starts around 5:05]:

That speech was the ultimate fulfillment of Usama bin Laden’s ideology of the belief that there would be a clash of civilizations between what he views as his crazy version of Islam and the West.

Never mind that that clash, that war for our survival, has been inflicted on us for years.

And from the tabloid New York Times:

In Warsaw, Mr Trump boldly stated, “The fundamental question of our time is whether the West has the will to survive.” In saying that, he demonstrated his administration’s born-again commitment to preserve America’s post-Cold War Western alliances, though at the price of redefining the very meaning of “the West.”

In the heady days of the Cold War, “the West” referred to the so-called free world—a liberal democratic order. Today it has been replaced by a cultural, rather than political, notion. But unlike in the 19th century, when a “white man’s burden” took pride of place, today what dominates are the “white man’s fears.”

Sure.  Because an American President who happens to be a white US citizen said these things and is following an American President who happened to be a black US citizen and who retreated the US from the world, taking to global extent his own view that “there comes a time when you’ve made enough.”

In a side note, the NYT in particular, also chose to “misunderstand” along a different dimension, too:

What stands out most in Mr Trump’s speech is not its oft-quoted illiberalism but its stark pessimism about the future of the West.  …he appears preoccupied by the fear of defeat. What he promised his listeners was not the West’s “victory” but that the West shall never be broken.

Because “we will never surrender” was Churchill’s pessimistic fear of defeat and not his optimism of ultimate victory, so it is with “never be broken.”  Apparently these guys skipped over an earlier part of Trump’s speech (they didn’t bother to listen to it live):

…we know that these forces [adversaries and enemies], too, are doomed to fail if we want them to fail.  And we do, indeed, want them to fail.  They are doomed not only because our alliance is strong, our countries are resilient, and our power is unmatched.  Through all of that, you have to say everything is true.  Our adversaries, however, are doomed because we will never forget who we are.  And if we don’t forget who are, we just can’t be beaten.  Americans will never forget.  The nations of Europe will never forget.  We are the fastest and the greatest community.  There is nothing like our community of nations.  The world has never known anything like our community of nations.

Yeah, that’s pessimism, all right.  [/aside]

It’s racist bigotry to manufacture a racism beef where there is none present, and it’s a particularly dishonest bigotry (redundancy deliberate) to manufacture a bigotry beef purely for personal attention.

It’s almost like they hate themselves so much they have to relieve the pressure by projecting.