Tag Archives: ethics

Teaching Opportunity Successfully Avoided

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Because safe spaces are more important than education spaces.

A Virginia school district has “temporarily” banned the classics, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain and To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee, after a parent complained that her high school-aged son was traumatized by racial slurs used in the books.

Would a trigger warning have helped this snowflake masquerading as a Mom to do her job as a parent?  Probably not:

I keep hearing, “This is a classic, this is a classic[.]”  …  I understand this is a literature classic.  But at some point, I feel that children will not—or do not—truly get the classic part—the literature part, which I’m not disputing.  This is great literature.  But there are racial slurs in there and offensive wording that you can’t get past that.

No, the children can’t.  Not when their parents won’t let them learn how to do so.  And: I read Huck Finn in junior high and Mockingbird as a high school sophomore.  The slurs, aside from being part of the stories—they were, after all, tales of their times, another aspect of this teaching opportunity away from which this school, this “parent,” slunk away—they were minor incidents in the tales.

And: if these minor parts of the tales really are that important to today’s youth, to today’s infantile parents, then how better to teach these children how to deal with the slurs, the racism, the ugliness that still exists, for all the progress we’ve made since those days when I read this stuff without a hazmat suit to protect me, than to do it in a controlled environment where such words can be put in the contexts of their times and then in the context of our times?

The alternative, after all, is that these children will eventually leave their safe space homes and their safe space schools and encounter such behaviors out in the world without having had a chance to learn how to deal with them.  Then these children will learn how badly cheated they’ve been by those whom they thought they could trust because those homes and schools were not even close to safe because of “safe” space shielding.

Obstruction

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With full control of Congress and the White House, Republicans have anticipated being able to repeal the law using a special budget maneuver that would allow them to get around a filibuster by Democrats in the Senate.

Yes and no.  The budget maneuver is reconciliation, and it’s usable only on budget matters.  That means that Obamacare will be defunded pretty straightforwardly, but the law itself still will be on the books—for a future Progressive-Democratic Party-controlled Congress to re-fund using the same budget reconciliation maneuver.  The law itself needs to be fully repealed, too; defunding it can only be a stop-gap measure.

Eight honest Progressive-Democrats are going to have to find the moral courage to step up and support actual repeal.

And there’s this.

[T]o replace it, they likely would need the support from eight Democrats and all 52 Republicans in the Senate (if Republican John Kennedy wins a December 10 runoff in Louisiana) to reach the 60 votes needed to clear the chamber’s procedural hurdles.

That procedural hurdle is the filibuster.  For this, too, eight honest Progressive-Democrats are going to have to find the moral courage to step up and support replacement with legitimate health insurance market paradigms.

Fat chance, but the fight needs to be carried out loudly, with no room for Senate Progressive-Democrats to hide behind their excuses and their crocodile tears over Americans being too stupid to take care of themselves and so need these Know Betters to do for them.

Senate Minority Whip Richard Durbin, a Democrat from Illinois, predicts Republicans will have difficulty passing a replacement health law.

Yup.  Look for continuation of Progressive-Democrats’ past six years of obstructionism into the next two or more years.

Nominations for HHS and CMMS

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President-Elect Donald Trump has nominated Congressman Tom Price (R, GA) to be Secretary of Health and Human Services and Seema Verma to be Administrator of HHS’ Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.  The two are well positioned and experienced to spearhead the effort to repeal Obamacare and replace it with a health insurance environment that actually will provide low-cost, broad-ranging health insurance in a competitive market.

Senate Democrats already are digging in their heels, though.

The incoming Senate minority leader, Chuck Schumer of New York, said he’s urging his Democratic colleagues to give Mr Price “a thorough, thorough vetting,” and said Mr Price’s Medicare proposals are tantamount to privatizing the program.

Here comes another Democrat effort at Borking a nominee.

And about that bit concerning privatizing Medicare: Schumer and his colleagues loudly object to that (recall their dishonesty about pushing Grandma off a cliff), but they also very carefully decline to say either what is so bad about Americans exercising their own judgment concerning their money and their health care (instead of Democrats’ judgment) or what a Democrat solution would look like—except to continue throwing money at the problem even though their prior 40 years of throwing money at it has produced nothing but wasted dollars.

Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?

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Michigan elects its appellate court judges from each of four geographical districts, centered on Detroit, Troy, Grand Rapids, and Lansing.  Now the State’s government is playing games with that process.  Judge Donald Owens, of the Lansing district, intends to resign just before his term expires.

A Michigan appeals court judge is resigning four hours before his term expires on 1 January, allowing Governor Rick Snyder to pick a replacement.

No special election will occur; this will not be a particularly temporary appointment.  The appointed judge will serve until the next general election in the State.

The move might be convenient to Conservatism (Snyder is a Republican, which makes him conservative relative to the State he governs), this time, but only this time, this short-term time.  The move sets an ugly example, however.  We can argue the merits of elected judges vs nominated and legislatively confirmed or rejected judges, but the Michigan law is quite clear in its intent.  This move is nothing more than a naked attempt to circumvent Michigan’s law, the will of Michigan citizens as expressed by their elected representatives having passed this law, and the will of Michigan citizens as expressed by their election of their judges.

Foolishness

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This time regarding the Iran nuclear weapons deal, exemplified by this excerpt from a Wall Street Journal article concerning the Obama administration’s efforts to strengthen that deal during these last two months of overt lameduckness.

The picture they [Obama officials] plan to articulate for Mr Trump’s team is stark: if the agreement falls apart, and the US is blamed for its collapse, Iran would resume its nuclear program more aggressively. In that case, the US risks alienating Europe, as well as China and Russia, and limiting its ability to use sanctions again to contain Iran. Military action against Tehran’s nuclear facilities, these officials argue, could be the only alternative.

If the deal falls apart, Iran surely will accelerate its nuclear weapons development program.  But this is a program that Iran has never stopped, nor even held in abeyance, the deal notwithstanding.  Iran is aggressively pursuing development of missiles capable of delivering nuclear warheads against Israel and Europe, and Iran already has been caught—twice—with more heavy water than the deal permits.  Honest mistakes, that water.  Sure.

The US risks alienating Russia and the PRC?  They already are alienated from us, and have been for some time: see Georgia, Ukraine, Kaliningrad, the East China Sea, the South China Sea, the two nations’ cyber attacks against us, and on and on.

Limiting our ability to use sanctions again?  That was lost when the guy who sits in the Secretary of State’s chair, John “Motorboat Skipper” Kerry, with President Barack Obama’s (D) backing, browbeat France into accepting a much weaker deal than even the French wanted.  It was lost, too, when the Obama administration lifted so many of our sanctions and agreed to the lifting of UN sanctions.

Military action is the only alternative left?  To the extent that’s true (and it isn’t; alternatives remain, even if many of them have been made harder to use by this administration), it is so strictly as the outcome of the Obama administration’s foolishness.