Tag Archives: morality

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.

Europe’s Immigration Problem

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A European Union proposal to resettle tens of thousands of refugees from Syria and Eritrea across Europe met with strong resistance from some governments, raising doubt about its prospects.

At the same time, another EU plan for dealing with its refugee crisis—a naval operation in the Mediterranean Sea to destroy the vessels that smuggling gangs use to transport migrants—came in for criticism from United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon.

Never mind that both of these approaches are counterproductive, although not in the way that “some government” or Ban seem to think.

Rewarding these refugees for fleeing, desperate though their plight might be, does exactly nothing to solve their problem—or the problem of their fellows and future refugees in northern Africa. Instead, it only allows the problem to grow worse, and it makes the growing flood an even greater humanitarian problem and an even greater problem for the nations of Europe.

Ban made manifest the general misunderstanding of national responsibilities in this regard.

I encourage EU member states to show compassion as they consider this important proposal to share their resettlement responsibilities. This can enable the European Union to address the dramatically increasing flows of people while setting an example for other regions of the world facing similar challenges[.]

No nation, including no European nation, has a “resettlement” responsibility here. No nation is obligated to allow people—or peoples—who are not citizens to cross its border and enter without permission. And no nation has any obligation to grant that permission—such an obligation would destroy the very concept of borders. Which in turn would destroy the very concept of private property and of ownership, whether private or national.

The effort, money, energy, and other resources committed to “resettlement” (reservations? The US has some experience with the failure of that sort of thing) or to sinking boats (which won’t stem the flow in the slightest; boats like the ones refugees or their African coyotes are using are easy to cobble together) would be better spent, would be more morally spent, working the problems in the refugees’ home countries so there would be far fewer refugees in the first place.

Of course political solutions are preferable, but even with its high up front cost (while potentially being far cheaper in the long run), an included option for working the problems at the source is military intervention. Just War Theory allows for humanitarian military intervention; all that’s necessary is for the intervening country(s) to do it like they mean it.

Besides that, there’s a utilitarian reason to intervene rather than merely to absorb refugees. The refugees are not looking for a place in which to better their lives; they’re looking for a place in which to stay alive. The countries from which the refugees are flooding will only become the more violent as time passes and peaceable people leave. And those countries will become increasing threats to the peace and safety of the European nations just across the Med.

Local Charity

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There doesn’t seem to be such a concept at PS 120 in Flushing, NY. The grade school held a carnival for its kindergarten through fifth grade classes, around 900 of its students were allowed to go—and an additional 100 were kept cooped up in the school’s auditorium, instead, with the shouts of fun from the carnival just outside plainly audible to them.

The price of attendance was $10, and those 100 were poor students whose parents couldn’t afford the $10; not having paid, those kids were barred from the carnival. Contributing to the thing is the fact that many of those parents are Chinese immigrants who, perhaps, missed the fact that a fee was charged. Let’s discount that, though; there did seem to be adequate notice of the fee.

The rationale for singling out some kids and denying them their fun at the carnival? Principle Joan Monroe, according to Frank Chow, president of the parents association, said,

It’s not fair to the kids’ parents who paid.

The purpose of the fund-raising carnival? Pre-K, kindergarten, and fifth-grade moving-up parties—it’s all for partying. The carnival made two-three thousand dollars in profit, which will make for some pretty rich grade school parties. The money isn’t even going toward school supplies, school equipment, or its physical plant, apparently. Just partying, with no lasting results.

Not fair to the ones who paid? Will the kids whose parents didn’t contribute to the graduation party money be barred from those graduation parties, too?

Never mind that $1,000 of those profits would have covered the kids whose parents didn’t, regardless of the reason, pay.

Fairness depends on how the payments and the purpose of the monies were advertised. And it would have been an interesting experiment: how much money would have been collected with a different purpose presented? Could all the kids have attended on the funds raised?

This is the sort of thing local charity is about.