Category Archives: morality

This Loss is No Loss

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Recall the fact of the tweet that the NBA’s Houston Rockets General Manager sent in support of the Hong Kong freedom protesters.  Recall further the NBA’s abject cowardice in deeply kowtowing to the People’s Republic of China in response to the latter’s projected upset over the tweet and the NBA’s impudence.  The kowtowing was rationalized from the league on down to individual players that they all had money at risk from the GM’s tweet—as if their personal pocketbooks could compare with the sacrifices of life and limb, in addition to economic loss, of those freedom protesters as they struggled for their basic freedoms.

That cowardice was only emphasized, not mitigated, by NBA commissioner Adam Silver’s refusal to tell his teams they had to limit what they said. That came lately.

Recall further, the hoo-raw over the picayune nature of the NBA’s kowtowing and the cynically fiscally-driven rationalizing in which the NBA engaged in defending its response to the PRC government—and its institutional abandonment of those Hong Kong freedom protesters.

Now some information is coming out regarding the cost of the NBA’s behavior—the cost to those pocketbooks the NBA has been so desperate to protect.

The loss “will be in the hundreds of millions,” NBA commissioner Adam Silver said on Saturday, the first time he’d used such a number to estimate the cost to the league’s China business. The hit amounted to “probably less than $400 million,” Silver said in response to speculation that the losses could reach $1 billion….

Silver added,

We were taken off the air in China for a period of time, and it caused our many business partners in China to feel it was therefore inappropriate to have ongoing relationships with us.

The NBA is still receiving only greatly reduced coverage in the People’s Republic of China.

This isn’t a cost, or a loss. It’s the beginning (and, sadly, probably the end) of the price the NBA should pay for abandoning our American principles, and with them the good people of Hong Kong, in favor of the good opinion of an American enemy.

He Said He’s Sorry

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…and that makes it all better.

Doug Hodge, ex-CEO of PIMCO, wrote an apologia­—I won’t call it an apology—for his participation in the Rick Singer-operated college admissions scandal in Sunday’s Wall Street Journal.

I have to wonder, though, just how sincere Hodge’s missive is, or whether he wrote it as part of his sentence—for how many hours of community service does this piece count? Or did he write it in return for the short jail term he got (nine whole months for a nearly one million of dollars fraud).

And: words of regret for the shame I have brought upon…my children, but not a syllable for the larger damage he’s done them: his statement, by his actions, that he had no confidence in their own abilities; his going-in assumption, demonstrated by those actions, that he considered them just not good enough to get into a good school without cheating.

No, it doesn’t make anything all better.

Gun Control

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Progressive-Democratic Party Presidential candidate Michael Bloomberg is a strong fan of gun control to the point of, ultimately, seizing all of our guns.  He’s even running a Super Bowl ad to that effect. Tim O’Brien, one of Bloomberg’s senior campaign advisors even says about the ad and its gun control subject,

This [gun question] is something that touches families. It most profoundly touches communities of color.

You bet it does. Gun control was something enormously expanded by the Democratic Party to disarm newly freed blacks so they could more easily be lynched by the Democratic Party’s KKK.

Now the Progressive-Democratic Party, and its leading politicians, want to continue that disarmament; they want to prevent blacks, and Hispanics in this 21st century, from being able to defend their families from thugs; they want to maintain gun free zones so people of any skin color or religion are unable to defend themselves.

No Room

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There’s no room for certain disfavored Democrats in Pete Buttigieg’s Progressive-Democrat Party; he made that clear in Sunday night’s townhall hosted by Fox News.

A pro-life Democrat named Kristen Day asked Buttigieg whether he wanted the support of “people like me….”

First Buttigieg showed his courage by weasel-wording an evasive answer that in Day’s view completely ignored half her question.

I am pro-choice, and I believe that a woman ought to be able to make that decision[.]

Day:

He didn’t answer the second part of my question, and the second part was: the Democratic platform contains language that basically says, “we don’t belong, we have no part in the party because it says abortion should be legal up to nine months, the government should pay for it.” In 1996 and several years after that there was language in the Democratic platform that said, “We understand that people have very differing views on this issue but we are a big tent party that includes everybody and therefore we welcome you—people like me—into the party so we can work on issues that we agree on.”

Buttigieg on being challenged over his evasiveness:

I support the position of my party—that this kind of medical care needs to be available to everyone, and I support the Roe v Wade framework that holds that early in pregnancy there are very few restrictions and late in pregnancy there are very few exceptions.

Buttigieg paraphrased: “Screw you, lady. I’m pro-abortion, and that’s the end of it. Medical care needs to be available to everyone but the babies involved; aborting babies is perfectly fine medical care.”

Disagreements and Lies

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Progressive-Democratic Party Presidential candidates and Senators Elizabeth Warren (D, MA) and Bernie Sanders (I, VT) disagree with each other on whether Sanders ever told Warren that a woman could not win an election for President. That disagreement came to the fore in Tuesday’s Progressive-Democrat primary debate, and became manifest in a post debate, still on the debate stage, spat between the two:

“I think you called me a liar on national TV,” Ms Warren said, according to audio released by CNN.
“What?” Mr Sanders responded.
“I think you called me a liar on national TV,” she repeated.
“You know, let’s not do it right now. If you want to have that discussion, we’ll have that discussion,” Mr Sanders said.
Ms. Warren responded: “Anytime.”
“You called me a liar,” Mr Sanders said.

The WSJ asked in the article at the link,

Do you think this spat will influence voters as Democrats move forward to the primaries?

It certainly should influence voters in the general election. What the exchange demonstrates is that it isn’t possible to disagree with a member of the Progressive-Democratic Party. The one who disagrees must be a liar or must be calling the one with whom he disagrees a liar.

In Progressive-Democrats’ ideology, disagreements can’t possibly be differences of interpretation, and they certainly can’t ever be matters of saying that one or the other is mistaken.

No. The one is must be a liar or must be calling the other a liar. That’s a deliberate, consciously done effort to suppress dissent, to stifle disagreement. It’s an attack on free speech.

And it’s what we can expect, nationally, should a Progressive-Democrat occupy the White House.