Tag Archives: ethics

Tawdry

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The campaign to reelect Progressive-Democrat President Joe Biden has a Mothers’ Day message:

Happy Mother’s Day. At the Biden campaign, we are asking Americans to do the moms in their lives a favor. Stop Trump.

And

The stakes of this election are high for all Americans, but especially moms across our country who will suffer under a second Trump term.

And irony of ironies,

On Mother’s Day, a reminder: Donald Trump stands only for himself and not mothers across America and their families.

Because Mothers’ Day isn’t about celebrating America’s mothers. It’s about what’s good for a particular son of a mother.

Deliberate Insult?

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Amid the hoo-raw over Hamas claiming to agree to a sham deal for a cease fire and Israel sending tanks into Rafah to secure the Gaza side of the border crossing there despite Progressive-Democrat President Joe Biden’s order not to and his already withholding weapons shipments to Israel, there’s this tidbit:

An Israeli delegation, Hamas officials, mediators from Qatar, and the head of the Central Intelligence Agency arrived in Cairo for discussions on a cease-fire proposal from the militant group. CIA Director William Burns arrived there from Qatar….

Leave aside the WSJ‘s dishonesty in claiming Hamas terrorists are a militant group. Biden sent an underling from an agency that has no authority to conclude any sort of international agreement, nor any sort of agreement between nations and a terrorist network entity. The CIA has no such capacity in its portfolio, not even the Director. Biden has sent his SecState to prior such discussions, and he’s sent his SecDef to prior such discussions. These two do have authority to conclude diplomatic or military agreements. Biden chose, this time though, to send his head spy instead.

So: a calculated insult by Biden aimed at the man for whom he has such blatant and public disdain—Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu—or just another example of Biden’s oblivious incompetence?

(Aside: one outcome of the IDF’s seizing the Gaza side of the border crossing could be one of making safer and easier the entry into the Gaza Strip of humanitarian aid, done by isolating the terrorists from the entry point. Of course, the press and the Biden administration don’t want to mention that part.)

Deadlines

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Columbia’s management team gave terrorist supporters a deadline to clear their campus “encampment,” and when the campers ignored the deadline, managers issued them a new deadline. When the terrorist supporters seized and occupied a school building, managers gave them a deadline by which to clear out. And then another.

Terrorist supporters seized a Rhode Island School of Design building, and that school’s managers have issued a deadline. As seems typical of school management teams, the design school’s administrators have yet to announce consequences for demonstrators if they do not comply with the 8 am deadline.

And at MIT:

Anti-Israel agitators at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology took back their campus encampment after it was initially cleared by police.
…
Protesters at MIT were given a Monday afternoon deadline to voluntarily leave or face suspension. Many cleared out of the area, according to the school spokesperson. Dozens of protesters remained at the encampment through the night.
No arrests had been made as of Monday night, according to the MIT spokesperson.

This sort of thing is all too common, and it’s not unique to today’s school disruptions. As far back as Vietnam War college and university protests, disrupters would occupy school buildings, and school managers would issue deadlines to clear out after deadlines to clear out.

In all those cases, it became necessary, ultimately, for campus and local police, augmented in some cases by State police, to go in and forcibly root out the occupiers.

Enough. It’s time—long past time—for school managers to learn what should by now be the obvious lesson. Deadlines are useless except to the occupiers; all the deadlines do is demonstrate the timidity of school managers.

The correct answer to all of these test questions is to send the campus and local police right in immediately after the campers have encamped and the occupiers have occupied, and root them out. And apply suitable corrective action: expelling the students participating, firing professors (tenured or not) participating, and charging those who’ve committed crimes—vandalism, for instance, is rampant among occupiers—with the relevant charges, and then taking them to trial—no settlements, no plea bargains.

Doublespeak

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MIT’s President Sally Kornbluth, the school’s Provost, Chancellor, and all six academic deans say they’re doing away with the DEI commitment the school had been requiring of prospective employees as a hiring criterion. Through a university “spokesperson,” they told the New York Post,

Requests for a statement on diversity will no longer be part of applications for any faculty positions at MIT[.]

Kornbluth expanded on that.

…compelled statements impinge on freedom of expression…they don’t work.

And more of her expansion:

We can build an inclusive environment in many ways….

There’s the doublespeak with which we’re so used to coming from the mouths of the Left. Kornbluth and her MIT management team will continue their DEI hiring criteria; they just won’t be up front about them regarding loyalty pledges.

Adult-Run Universities

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Ben Sasse, President of the University of Florida, had an opinion piece in Friday’s Wall Street Journal that is, in the main, spot on. The thrust of his article was that, with adults in charge of our colleges and universities, and with those adults holding misbehaving students responsible for their behavior, actual idea-centric debate and education can occur.

The thrust of Sasse’s complete remarks are spot on, but I do have a couple of disagreements.

Pro-Hamas agitators have fought police, barricaded themselves in university buildings, shut down classes, forced commencement cancellations, and physically impeded Jewish students from attending lectures.

Pro-Hamas terrorist-supporting agitators have…. The seeming redundancy is necessary to clarify who and what these…persons…are.

Second, these terrorist supporters and the student populations who have consciously decided to go along with the agitation have not shut down any classes or forced any commencement cancelations. The cowardice of college and university management teams and of far too many “professors” has done that with their craven decisions.

It’s also the cowardice of those teams and “professors” that has facilitated those terrorist-supporting agitators’ and their student accomplices’ clashes with police, building occupations, and obstruction of Jewish and all other students’ attempts to attend the classes and lectures for which they’re paying more than a few pretty pennies.