Category Archives: morality

White Supremacy

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Baynard Woods, writing for The Washington Post, had some thoughts on this.

[I]t is up to white people to rescue white people from our own worst selves, from the distorted monsters we have allowed ourselves to become. It is time to stop making excuses. We have to stop hiding from the truth of race—that this country, and the state of South Carolina in particular, were created on the idea of white supremacy. We’ll never overcome that history unless we acknowledge it.

Trouble is, the rest of us already have. It’s how we’ve made all the progress we’ve achieved.

Though some members of my family casually referred to African Americans as “bears,” we were not racist by the standards of a city that flew the Confederate battle flag above the state capitol. We did not use the N-word.

Never mind the mindset here, declining to speak it aloud with a particular term makes it all good. To the Liberal.

His piece went on in this vein.

Trouble is, like all (or so it seems) Liberals today, Woods is projecting his own and his fellow Liberals’ shortcomings onto the rest of us, as though we’re like him. It’s the Liberals, though, who are the party of the murderously racist KKK; it’s the Liberals, in their guise as nascent Progressives, who resegregated the Federal government after the Republicans had been steadily integrating it since the Civil War; it’s the Liberals who attack anyone who disagree with them as being racist; it’s the Liberals who demand racist- and sexist-based affirmative action.

The rest of us have moved on from that. It’s certainly true that, as Senator and Presidential candidate Lindsey Graham (R, SC) said, we have much work yet to do on racial equality, but as Graham also noted, we have made great progress, too.

Guys like Woods, who wallow in the past and assume the rest of us are, too, hold us back from faster progress and from completing the task.

Trust and Integrity

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Regarding the trade fast track authority bill that failed Friday’s House vote, Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D, CA) had been negotiating with Speaker John Boehner (R, OH) regarding the structure of the Trade Adjustment Assistance sub-bill that was a part of the fast track bill.

Over the course of the week she had helped negotiate a deal…designed to assuage Democrats’ concerns over how the workers’ assistance program would be funded.

Then Pelosi went onto the floor of the House and said this:

I will be voting today to slow down the fast track [measure], to get a better deal for the American people….

And she voted against the TAA that she’d agreed with Boehner.

With that performance, how can Boehner ever trust any other agreement Pelosi might say she accepts? How can Boehner, or any Republican, ever trust any other Pelosi commitment?

Cowardice

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A brief post about the movie Aloha. This is a movie I don’t intend to watch anytime soon because I don’t go to theaters to watch movies. I don’t need to see it, anyway, for this post; I’m commenting on the hoo-raw surrounding it.

One such is the bellyaching about the movie’s name. Not supposed to name a movie about a Hawaiian person “Aloha” because that word has special meaning to Hawaii’s special snowflakes. I guess that means no one better make a movie about a Texan and call it “Howdy.” Boy howdy.

Then there’s this:

Cameron Crowe has apologized for offending anyone over his casting of Emma Stone in a partially Asian, partially Hawaiian role in his film “Aloha.”

Never mind that Stone is, by all accounts, a fine actress. Never mind, either, that one of her character’s hang-ups was the lack of any outward sign of her Chinese/Hawaiian ethnicity; the character looked like a white girl. Like the actress who played her does. Mm, mm. Gotta whine about that, too. In response, Crowe’s being downright chicken. And in his cowardice, he’s throwing Stone under the Oahu Bus.

In the end, this is folks wasting their talent and energy looking for excuses to be offended. It isn’t pure cowardice, not by the whiners or by guys like Crowe; it’s worse than that. It’s insidious, it’s a running away from the truth of life.

Government Unions

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Elizabeth MacDonald had some thoughts in a three-parter for Fox Business.

Wouldn’t you like to have a job where you get paid to slack off, and no matter what, have a powerful authority to back you up, winning battles to preserve your salary, benefits, and your every demand if your boss tries to fire you?

It’s a fact of life for many government workers.

Here are some of the horror stories she’s discovered.

[F]ederal labor unions are winning fights against federal agencies who try to fire their union workers for letting mentally ill military veterans walk out the door of psychiatric units in Veterans Affairs hospitals, or for not catching things like a major rat infestation in a food factory. Instead, union lawyers are getting their members’ jobs, back-pay, and benefits reinstated, all at taxpayer expense.

Plainly, it’s not only the VA that doesn’t give a hoot about our veterans.

[D]espite the fact that cyber attacks on the government are on the rise, a federal union recently won a case that stopped Homeland Security and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement from immediately blocking workers’ personal email accounts on government computers, like Hotmail or Gmail. Such accounts are often loaded with computer viruses or malware.

Instead, the union is forcing these security agencies to first enter into protracted collective bargaining over the use of personal webmail accounts, putting the government at risk of cyber-attacks at a time when security experts note cyber criminals, terrorists and nation states like China are increasingly trying to break in.

Just last week Russian cyber thieves were blamed for the hack into the IRS, where tax return data for 104,000 individuals was stolen in order to get fraudulent tax refunds, now estimated at $50 million. Hackers broke into the IRS’s Internet service that lets taxpayers access their past tax returns.

On top of that, the People’s Republic of China, it’s only just been discovered, has hacked into OPM to steal the personal data of 4 million Federal employees.

Then there’s this naked threat from a Federal union.

“We are a force to be reckoned with and we are a force that will open up the biggest can of whoop ass on anyone” who votes against the interests of federal unions, J David Cox Sr, national president of the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE), recently said, adding, “every time the ‘fools’ in Congress try to hurt the federal workforce we get bigger. We get stronger, and we fight harder.”

RTWT. All three parts.

These are completely sufficient reasons to do two things. One is to generally shrink the physical and employee size of the Federal government along with its scope so as to make it far easier for We the People to monitor and control it. The other thing is to eliminate government unions. Their usefulness is long past, and they have become actively destructive of good government.

“Discrimination”

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The Supreme Court on Monday said a Muslim woman who applied to work at Abercrombie & Fitch Co can raise discrimination claims without proving the company intentionally avoided hiring her because she wore a head scarf for religious reasons.

So, I can cry discrimination on no better complaint than that I have one? I don’t even have to show that there’s a foundation for one?

Justice Clarence Thomas, in dissent, thought there ought to be a reason.

I agree with the Court that there are two—and only two—causes of action under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 as understood by our precedents: a disparate-treatment (or intentional-discrimination) claim and a disparate-impact claim. Our agreement ends there.   Unlike the majority, I adhere to what I had thought before today was an undisputed proposition: Mere application of a neutral policy cannot constitute “intentional discrimination.” Because the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) can prevail here only if Abercrombie engaged in intentional discrimination, and because Abercrombie’s application of its neutral Look Policy does not meet that description, I would affirm the judgment of the Tenth Circuit.

The majority should have listened better to Thomas.

The Supreme Court’s ruling can be seen here.