Tag Archives: morality

Microaggression

Posted on by
1

It’s all the latest rage in the PC fascism that’s running amok in our United States these days.

There are these, for instance, from a list of allegedly microaggressive statements put out by Janet Napolitano, late of DHS and now President of the University of California system:

  • I believe the most qualified person should get the job.
  • Of course he’ll get tenure, even though he hasn’t published much—he’s Black!
  • Men and women have equal opportunities for achievement.
  • Gender plays no part in who we hire.
  • America is the land of opportunity.
  • Everyone can succeed in this society, if they work hard enough.
  • Affirmative action is racist.

The whole list goes on in this vein, but these are the ones most directly and deliberately aimed at the fabric of Americanism.

Of course it could be argued that the second on the list is, indeed, racist, but it’s a direct fallout of the last item on the list. Affirmative action isn’t only racist, though, it’s sexist, too, and by design: deliberately, race and gender are additional selection criteria, and for the explicitly racist and sexist purpose of achieving “diversity”–because, so the Liberals believe, blacks, minorities generally, and women simply are incapable of competing on their own–while simultaneously downplaying qualification, much less merit, in the selection.

Another problem with foolishness like this is that while many remarks are certainly rude, and polite people shouldn’t use them, courtesy is a thing that can come only from within the person; it cannot be imposed from without, and certainly not by diktat. That only leads to rule-following, or rule-breaking; the courtesy of the thing will have been wholly removed.

Lists like these are themselves plainly microaggressions.

Keep in mind, too, that the Napolitano of this list is also the Napolitano of the DHS lists that called American military veterans “right-wing extremists” and that cynically, if not cowardly, substituted “man-caused disaster” for “act of terrorism,” and on and on.

Now that’s microaggression of a hugely macro nature.

Paying Ransom

Posted on by
Reply

President Obama on Wednesday announced a new US government policy for dealing with Americans who are kidnapped abroad, and as always he stressed compassion for the hostages and their families.

Compassion? Where’s Obama’s compassion for the kidnap victim, who’s exposed to further kidnapping, since snatching him clearly pays off? Where’s Obama’s compassion for other Americans, now at increased risk or kidnapping themselves, by ransom paying that is nothing more than aiding and abetting the criminals/terrorists masqueraded as “compassion?”

…a government-wide review of US hostage policy, which has drawn criticism for inconsistency and lack of coordination. “The families of hostages have told us—and they’ve told me directly—about their frequent frustrations in dealing with their own government: How different departments and agencies aren’t always coordinated,” Mr. Obama said[.]

Those departments also don’t inform very much, if at all, the victim’s families of the status of efforts to get the victim back. The right answer, though, is not to reward the kidnappers for their efforts but to create consistency and coordination—and to summarily fire those bureaucrats who fail at this—and to pass information freely and on demand to the victims’ families. Certainly, many efforts are and should remain secret, but in those events, swear the families to secrecy—they need to be inside the loop, not outside of it.

A UN Group May Have Committed War Crimes

Posted on by
Reply

Joe Lauria’s article in Monday’s Wall Street Journal was headlined U.N.: Israel and Palestinian Groups May Have Committed War Crimes, but here’s the thing: the United Nations Human Rights Commission is accusing Israel of war crimes for defending itself against what its report is only willing to “strongly suggest” was the Palestinian Authority’s terrorist war against Israel.

Oh, wait: the UN doesn’t even address the Palestinian Authority in any serious sense—in only goes on about “Palestinian armed groups” as the ones committing the terrorism and the PA’s claimed inability to control its own territory. Never mind that the PA’s terror war was done explicitly under the auspices of the Hamas branch of the unity government that is the Palestinian Authority.

The UN did decry the toll,

In Gaza, the scale of the devastation was unprecedented. The death toll alone speaks volumes: 2,251 Palestinians were killed, including 1,462 Palestinian civilians with 299 women and 551 children.

Never mind that the vast majority of these civilian deaths were from Hamas shooting from residential buildings from which the civilian occupants were prevented from leaving—they were shields for the terrorists and bodies for the publicity.

The UN’s report also had this:

In the cases in which attacks were directed at military objectives located amidst or in close vicinity to civilians or civilian objects, mortars are not the most appropriate weapon. The imprecise nature of mortars makes it difficult for an attacking party using this weapon in an area in which there is a concentration of civilians to distinguish between civilians and civilian objects and the military objective of the attack, and to limit its effects as required by international humanitarian law. Therefore, the use of such weapons with wide area effects by Palestinian armed groups against targets located in Israeli towns and villages, and the possible indiscriminate effects, are likely to constitute a violation of the prohibition of indiscriminate attacks.

The UN, though, carefully omits the reason those military objectives were “located amidst or in close vicinity to civilians or civilian objects” in the first place. The PA were using those civilians as shields and as body count.

Even though the Israelis were at pains to warn the occupants of these putative “civilian objects” prior to a strike, the report’s “investigators” were careful to trot out their witnesses who said there were no warnings. Except for a slip of the tongue by a UNRWA “witness.”

The UN, in its report, also made light of its own UNHCR storing many of the PA’s weapons for it and that when caught the UNRWA turned those weapons over to the PA. The report does decry Israel, though, for warning the UNRWA (that tongue slip) of an impending strike against a PA (the report says “Hamas”) arsenal staged below a cluster of UNRWA buildings—and then carrying out the strike.

The UN’s report goes on in this vein.

The UNHRC is complicit after the fact in the Palestinian Authority’s terror war fought from Gaza last summer.

White Supremacy

Posted on by
Reply

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

Posted on by
Reply

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?