Category Archives: morality

Foolishness

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It seems a bunch of Army and Navy cadets flashed the “OK” sign—thumb and index finger touching in a circle with the remaining fingers extended—at last weekend’s Army-Navy football game. Now

West Point and Annapolis officials are trying to determine the motives

of those cadets.

Nonsense, and it’s…sad…to see otherwise intelligent Academy officials falling for the Left’s artificial hue and cry and wasting time looking into this. They’re just throwing their cadets under the bus by taking this idiocy seriously.

Only lately has the gesture been given

a different significance for some people around 2017, according to the Anti-Defamation League, when it began to be used to signify white power.

This is nothing but a cynical effort to change the meaning of an innocent, well-meaning, gesture for deliberately divisive meaning. The OK sign has no history of any other meaning, and it has no connection to any other meaning. The distortion is dishonestly created.

No. The gesture means “OK,” and nothing else. That it might also be used in a bar room prankish game is neither here nor there.

It’s important that all of us not surrender any part of the lexicon to the manipulations and bastardizations of the Left.

It’s important to not surrender this gesture to a motley collection of snowflakes, virtue-signalers, and segregationist identity politickers.

Flash the OK sign whenever and wherever you wish to indicate approval.

Gimme, Gimme, Gimme

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That’s what French unions are demanding with their strikes against French President Emmanuel Macron’s and French Prime Minister Édouard Philippe’s plans to streamline, standardize, and otherwise reduce the cost to French taxpayers of France’s byzantine pension system.

Never mind that the pension system consists of 42 different pension plans or that French civil servants insist that they are, somehow, special and so should have special perquisites unavailable to petty private sector workers.

Trains, subways, and buses were still severely curtailed on Friday, and hundreds of domestic and regional flights were canceled. There were no demonstrations on Friday, but unions have warned the strike could last days and become one of the biggest in France in over two decades.

And

Civil servants, in particular, fear they may lose advantages they have over private-sector employees.

To hell with their fellow citizens attempting to get to and from their own work, to and from their own necessary errands, to and from their own entertainments.  The unions want theirs, and no one else matters.

All the government wants to do is to

extend the number of years needed to collect a full pension and create a universal plan that would do away with the so-called special regimes enjoyed by French civil servants, including rail workers.

Currently, full retirement occurs after 43 years of work or age 62; the latter being the youngest full-retirement age in the OECD.

“Screw you,” say the unions, exemplified by Catherine Perret, Confederal Secretary of the CGT trade union:

We won’t let go[.]

This is the naked, if strictly legal, extortion of union strikes made national.  The US has Taft-Hartley, in which the government can order the end to a strike for a significant period during which serious negotiations could occur.  France, not so much; its unions are amok.

YGTBSM

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Congressman Al Green (D, TX) is upset that, of all of the law professor witnesses testifying at Wednesday’s Jerry Nadler-run (D, NY) Judiciary Committee impeachment hearing, not one of them was “a person of color.” In his upset, he actually said this on the House floor before the Committee began its round of the Progressive-Democrats’ inquisition:

It hurts my heart, Mr Speaker, to see the Judiciary Committee hearing experts on the topic of impeachment—one of the seminal issues of this Congress—hearing experts…and not one person of color among the experts.
What subliminal message are we sending to the world when we have experts but not one person of color? Are we saying that there are no people of color who are experts on this topic of impeachment?

Because, for this man, the most important characteristic, the defining characteristic of anyone is the color of his skin.  What subliminal message are we sending to the world when we insist we cannot have a collection of experts unless some of them are “persons of color?”

Apparently Green does not believe in Martin Luther King’s dream: that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.

The racism is strong and stench-ridden in this Congressman.

Head in the Sand?

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Volkswagen is building cars in Xinjiang, People’s Republic of China.  You know Xinjiang, the “semi-autonomous” region of the PRC that’s home to tens millions of Muslims and to President Xi Jinping’s “reeducation” camps, Mao-ist internment camps for millions of those Muslims, a people of whom Xi disapproves.

VW thinks all of that is jake.

Speaking with DW on Tuesday, the company said its 2012 decision to open the Urumqi facility was “based purely on economics.” VW says it expects “further economic growth in the region over the coming years.”

Sure. Because economics isn’t just important (such considerations are), it’s all that matters (because principles, apparently, are for academics and parlor small talk).  And: economic growth in the region for whom?  The camp inmates?  Volkswagen?

Never mind the likelihood that Volkswagen’s facility uses forced labor.

We do not assume any of our employees are forced laborers.

Well, alrighty, then. A forced labor force is assumed away, so it doesn’t exist.  It’s all good.

Nuclear Disarmament

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Pope Francis wants it—completely, totally, for any purpose, even deterrence (assuming, for now, that this can be done verifiably and verifiably maintained).  The Pope thinks an arms race involving nuclear weapons adds to the danger of their existence, never minding the race, at least on the US’ part, is for self-defense and the defense of our friends and allies—the very purpose of NATO stationing nuclear weapons in Europe, for instance.

The Pope, though, avoided addressing how a non-nuclear nation with a small conventional military establishment would defend itself against an aggressively acquisitive non-nuclear nation with a large military establishment.  Like, say, the Soviet Union against the nations of Europe, individually or collectively. Or like, perhaps, the People’s Republic of China against the Republic of Korea or Japan—or us.

He appears unconcerned that this might lead to a conventional arms race and conventional military building-up race, a race whose deterrence exists only in the ability to conduct a follow-on mobilization race to the frontier—sort of like what turned out to be the first steps of European wars in the latter half of the 19th century and of two global wars in the first half of the 20th.

Of course, in the case of the PRC, the Pope already has abjectly surrendered control of the Catholic Church and of Catholicism—the Universal Church and universal religion—to the PRC government inside the PRC.

Maybe he expects the rest of us to meekly surrender politically, like he has done religiously.

No, I’m not going to turn the other cheek to conquerors and slavers. Not even St Augustine suggested that, for all that he decried preemption.