Category Archives: morality

Dominic Green Asked

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In his lede, Green asked

Which is worse, a young Englishman bleeding out in handcuffs while police ignore his cries for help, or the vice president of the United States expressing his opinion about it?

What JD Vance, the supposedly miscreant Vice President, said was this:

Henry Nowak died the same way a civilization dies, abandoned, handcuffed by authorities who neither trusted nor cared for him, and accused of hate crimes he did not commit.

Prime Minister Keir Starmer, through his spokesman (apparently because Starmer is too timid to speak for himself on this),:

accus[ed] unnamed foreigners of “trying to interfere in our democracy and seeking to stir up division on our streets….”

How does Green’s question even exist? Given the naked bigotry demonstrated by the British police and by the government that created that police department, there can be no question of relative morality here. The one is an accurate commentary; the other is naked, state-sanctioned, and this time murderous, bigotry.

Nor was Vance’s statement in any way an interference in British democracy. There was no push for the British to do anything differently, only an objection to what that government has chosen to allow on its streets. If there was any pressure from Vance’s remarks, it was only because his words struck hard into what passes for a conscience in that government’s collective mind.

There’s a hint on the whole interfere in our democracy matter, though:

The administration-adjacent Elon Musk, whose X website outflanks Britain’s speech laws, told his 28.5 million followers to share the Nowak footage “to everyone you know,” so that all can see how the police “cravenly kowtowed to his murderer.”

Outflanks Britain’s speech laws. Maybe the nation that increasingly restricts what is permissible speech and that increasingly shrivels religious freedom is becoming less and less a democracy in the first place.

A Time for Choosing

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New York’s Congressional 10th District is a microcosm of the choices we face. The Progressive-Democratic Party primary features two far Left candidates. One is Dan Goldman, who is a virulent Never Trumper, to the point his Congressional votes are based on that rather than on any real policy objections, and an increasingly strident anti-Israel politician, to the point of working with ex-President Joe Biden (D) to deny Israel’s access to some of the weapons needed to defend itself against Hamas.

The other is  Brad Lander, former New York City Comptroller and an open, enthusiastic supporter of Progressive-Democrat Mayor Zohan Mamdani. Lander shares Mamdani’s naked antipathy for Israel and is openly antisemitic.

The choices come down to this. Progressive-Democrats must choose between a Never Trumper and anti-Israel politician and a candidate who, far beyond being merely anti-Israel, is both antisemitic and pro-Palestinian, the latter with no distinction between Palestinian civilians and the Palestinian terrorists epitomized by Hamas.

After primary season, we Americans in general must choose between a Republican party whose small-government positions are eroding but still leaning that way and a Progressive-Democratic Party that is rapidly strengthening its big, intrusive government ideology; is increasingly incapable of working with Trump or anything Republican; and that is, in this context, increasingly opposed to the only Middle East democracy and staunch US ally while actively strengthening its antisemitic bigotry.

How Dare They?

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The Supreme Court overruled a district court three judge panel and allowed Alabama to proceed with a prior Congressional district map that’s skewed 6-1 toward Republican House representatives instead of that lower court’s mandated newly created map that skewed 5-2 for Republicans. This ruling came in the aftermath of the Court’s prior Callais ruling that held that racial gerrymandering was no longer allowed.

Progressive-Democrats are in their usual uproar.

Liberal Justice Sonia Sotomayor, joined by Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson, dissented.

“Before the Court are two paths. Down one lies an orderly election. … Down the other lies a chaotic election, held under a never-before-used congressional map that intentionally discriminates against Black Alabamians.”
The President Barack Obama-appointed justice also wrote that the high-court’s conservative majority “chooses the second path and disregards both democratic values and the rule of law.”

And

In a public statement, [Progressive-Democrat Congresswoman Terri Sewell (AL)] called it a decision allowing Alabama to use its “racist congressional map” for the midterms, expressing frustration over the reversal of prior efforts to create additional majority-minority districts.

My irony meter is pegged, and my hypocrisy warning light is flashing. There’s nothing more racist than demanding some Americans be segregated into a separate voting district, explicitly as Sotomayor, et al., and Sewell are demanding for the protection of those singled-out Americans. How hypocritical that the politician is objecting to the possibility of losing a Congressional seat that belongs to her.

How dare those impudent Justices insist on acting on what our Constitution and the Voting Rights Act actually say instead of what those Progressive-Democrats and their subordinate activist Justices want them to say?

Misbehavior of a Federal District Judge

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A short while ago as such things are measured, a Federal district judge was given a private reprimand for having sex in her chambers with a local police department senior-level cop. Many folks, experts as well as my august self, consider that wholly inadequate.

The judge has since been identified as Northern District of Georgia judge Eleanor Louise Ross, and the (still individually unidentified) senior-level cop as a member of the Atlanta Police Department. Furthermore, her relationship with the cop has been identified as an extramarital one, lasting for two, or so, years, and the relationship included repeated sexual encounters in her judicial chambers, generally within earshot of her clerks and other staff.

That private reprimand, though, is all she got, because she’s sorry, and she apologized, so it’s all good.

Pfft.

The article outlined a number of more serious outcomes for her misbehaviors, leading off with impeachment. That, though, would take a majority of the House voting to impeach and a two-thirds majority of the Senate to convict in order to get her off the bench. The article acknowledged the unlikeliness of that outcome, but without suggesting why. I claim the reason is this: even were impeachment a serious possibility, there aren’t enough Progressive-Democrats in the Senate willing to convict one of their own, the Obama appointee who is Ross.

The article also outlined a number of alternative consequences, but while potentially financially expensive in terms of opportunity cost, they would leave her on the bench. The worst realized outcome of all these would be this:

Recusal motions are the sharpest instrument available. …
The Justice Department has already moved to disqualify Ross from a high-profile voter-roll case, citing both the misconduct findings and her attendance at Fani Willis’s 2024 primary victory party. If that pattern continues, she could find herself a judge in title only.

Judge in title only. That actually is nice work for anyone who can get it. Ross’ pay in 2025, just for being a Federal judge, was nearly a quarter of a million dollars. That puts her income higher than 96% of the rest of us working stiffs.  Nice work, indeed, especially for someone whose word—professional or personal—is worthless.

British Abject Surrender

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The lede carries the surrender.

The British Museum postponed a public lecture scheduled for Wednesday on the Iron Age kingdoms of Israel and Judah less than 24 hours before it was due to start. The reason, the museum said, was security concerns. A “significant proportion” of the registered attendees were “individuals intending to deliberately disrupt the event.” The lecture, to be given by Paul Collins, who runs the museum’s Middle East department, was planned as a highlight of Britain’s first ever Jewish Culture Month.

“Security” concerns over “disruption.” Sure. Dominic Green’s subheadline understates the case:

Canceling events over “security concerns” gives bullies and frauds exactly what they want.

It’s far worse than that. These are people who should know better. They’re not only telling bigots they can have whatever they want, these…personages…are broadcasting to the world at large that what Brits have to say to those who threaten them is…”please don’t hurt us.”

Green had this near the end of his piece:

Rather than hunker down before the bigots and behind managerial waffle, Messrs Cullinan and Osborne [museum director and chairman, respectively] should seize the chance to redeem the museum from its self-inflicted disgrace and show the world what it stands for.

Sadly, they’ve already demonstrated plainly and for all to see exactly what the museum does not stand for.

Nor is the museum’s cowardice a one-off. Green listed some other examples of Brit surrender, also.

  • Bournemouth exhibition on the local Jewish community’s history canceled altogether
  • Edinburgh Festival canceled two Jewish comedians over “safety concerns.”

The inaugural Jewish Culture Month was created to counter this kind of criminal intimidation and institutional weakness. The museum’s lecture was intended to “highlight” the Month in its first major event. All the event highlighted, though, was timidity in the face of threats.

Beyond that, the British people continually and repeatedly elect governments infamous for looking the other way as their girls are groomed for the sex trade and then used in it; governments that insist that defending oneself against assault is itself a crime; governments that won’t even defend the nation’s own borders against illegal alien inflows, a particular infidelity to those few who were owed so much in times past.

These are not the people whose army stood tall against a vastly numerically superior Zulu army at Rorke’s Drift and won, nor are they the people whose army and air force stood tall against Germany’s Nazi armies and air forces, ultimately contributing critically to the Allied defeat of Nazi Germany.

Today’s Brits are utterly betraying their own Winston Churchill’s injunction to Never give in—never, never, never, never, in nothing great or small, large or petty, never give in except to convictions of honour and good sense. Further betrayal of their own, Churchill’s speech to the House of Commons in 1940:

[W]we shall not flag or fail. We shall go on to the end. …we shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be. …we shall never surrender.

These are not the people of a special relationship.

Today’s Brit meekness is as disgusting as it is dismaying.