Tag Archives: morality

Negotiations with Russia

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Boris Johnson, in his Monday Wall Street Journal op-ed, is on the right track regarding the idea of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy negotiating with Russian President Vladimir Putin an end to the barbarian’s invasion. Negotiations now would be both fruitless and pointless, Johnson writes, because they would require Ukraine to surrender Ukrainian territory and they would idiotically rely on the barbarian’s trustworthiness in keeping any agreement. Negotiations now would be ill-timed, as well: the time for negotiating can only be after the barbarian has been driven entirely from Ukrainian territory and Ukraine having won, totally and decisively, the war the barbarian began.

Johnson had this, too, though:

If Mr Putin were to use a weapon of mass destruction [one of the barbarian chieftain’s many threats], he would be tendering Russia’s resignation from the club of civilized nations….

With this characterization, Johnson is being…generous. Russia hasn’t been a civilized nation, at the least, since the mass starvation the Russians—the people as well as the government—inflicted on Ukrainians and on the Stockholm Syndrome-afflicted Belarussians during the kulak collectivization atrocities of the 1930s. The barbarian has demonstrated—in rivers of blood—the continuing depths of its depravity with the atrocities inflicted by the products of Russian society on Ukrainians in the present barbarian war. Atrocities Johnson describes so genteelly:

captives tortured, women raped, schools and kindergartens deliberately targeted.

He omitted the hospitals deliberately targeted, the vast lines of refugees from besieged cities that the barbarian had agreed to allow to evacuate—and then targeted for mass murder once they were so conveniently lined up on the agreed roads leading away from the city.

Those finally arrived at post-victory negotiations? [A] peaceful, orderly and lasting relationship, and friendship, between Ukraine and Russia, as Johnson so naively described them?

Keep in mind two things as you contemplate such a negotiation. The “soldiers” inflicting those atrocities today—the rapes, the tortures, the child butcheries, the attacks on hospitals, the attacks on infrastructure necessary for civilian survival during the coming winter—are the products of Russian society. Most of these armed thugs may well be from the lower tiers of that society, but who taught them to be the way they are? The rest of that society, who either condone the atrocities or actively order them, all the way up to the chieftain sitting on his throne in the Kremlin.

The other thing is the impossibility of Ukrainian friendship with a polity—barbaric or civilized—that is bent on the utter destruction of Ukraine.

No. The only outcome for the present situation is the utter, decisive defeat of the barbarian, with his being driven entirely from Ukrainian territory. The only possibility for any future relationship between Ukraine and Russia is Ukrainian eternal vigilance against the next wave of barbarians from the east. For that wave will surely come.

He Chose

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Alec Baldwin claims that he’s blameless when he fired his pistol, which shot led to the shooting death of Halyna Hutchins and the wounding of Joel Souza on the set of his movie, Rust. He’s suing a number of movie production personnel in his effort to duck his own responsibility.

Baldwin’s claim is that the movie production team’s armorer, Hannah Gutierrez-Reed; assistant director, David Halls; an assistant armorer, Seth Kenney; and the team’s prop master, Sarah Zachry, are the only ones responsible for the shooting. Baldwin’s lawyer, Luke Nikas, enumerated what he claims is the fatal chain of events.

Gutierrez-Reed failed to check the bullets or the gun carefully, Halls failed to check the gun carefully and yet announced the gun was safe before handing it to Baldwin, and Zachry failed to disclose that Gutierrez-Reed had been acting recklessly off set.

Leave aside the irrelevance of Gutierrez-Reed’s alleged off-set behavior; that’s just smoke Nikas is blowing to distract from his larger, and utterly cynical, omission of the final link in the chain and the primary and proximate cause of the shooting.

Baldwin—any handler of a firearm, but especially the final handler, intending actually to use the firearm, whether in a real situation or in a movie scene—has a responsibility personally to check the firearm for its safety status, including—especially including—whether the firearm is loaded and, if so, with live rounds. The user doing that final check obviates all of the mistakes anyone earlier in the firearm’s chain of custody might have made.

It’s likely enough that one or more of the persons in Nikas’ abridged chain of events made their own safety check mistakes. That, though, does not at all absolve Baldwin of his own responsibility to do his own, personal, check of the pistol in his hand as soon as he accepted it.

He had the final responsibility, a Critical Item responsibility, to check his pistol as soon as he took possession of it. Baldwin chose to not exercise his responsibility.

Progressive-Democrat Contempt

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Recall the brutal murder of Keaira Bennefield in New York, who was murdered, allegedly by her estranged husband after he was released from jail, where he’d been detained—briefly—for the crime of…beating Ms Bennefield. Bennefield’s mother, in the aftermath of this failure of justice, said Hochul “should be charged for the crime. She’s also responsible for the crime.”  New York’s Progressive-Democratic Governor Kathy Hochul contemptuously dismissed the elder woman:

All I can say that is a grieving mother. I understand the anguish she’s going through. She doesn’t understand how this could have happened to her beloved daughter leaving her children—her grandchildren without their mom…. The system failed and I will just simply say—I’m not going to argue with the facts with a woman who is in such pain.

Because of course the woman can’t possibly understand the gravity of the New York system favoring criminals over victims. The woman can’t possibly understand the politics that created the system. Being a woman, she can only be irrationally overcome with grief and not at all thinking clearly during her grief.

This is the Progressive-Democratic Party.

Racism in School Admission Selection Criteria

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The advocates for Harvard and the Federal government in defending Harvard’s and the University of North Carolina’s racist selection criteria—all in the name of diversity and equity, understand—both said that they saw no end to their use of race in their selection criteria. Our Progressive-Democratic Party President Joe Biden, through his Solicitor General, doesn’t even see a need to end racism in admission selection criteria.

Seth Waxman, Harvard’s advocate, admitted that the school is trying hard to get to a race-neutral future but sees no end in sight for preferences.

Sure they’re trying to put an end to it. Or to something.

Waxman went further, rationalizing

Harvard’s use of race by saying it is merely one of many “tips” that the school uses in making judgments about whom to admit—like whether a student is the child of an alumnus, or an athlete. …”just as being, you know, an oboe player in a year” when the school orchestra needs an oboe player “will be the tip.”

Chief Justice John Roberts commented on the disgusting nature of that:

We did not fight a Civil War about oboe players. We did fight a Civil War to eliminate racial discrimination.

Biden was even more explicit:

Elizabeth Prelogar, the US Solicitor General…said using race the way the schools do could continue as long as their interest in diversity is “compelling.”

This disdain for the ability of some groups of Americans to compete, and so to maintain the need explicitly to protect those groups, is straight out of the philosophy of Roger Taney, and it’s shameful.

Racial Discrimination and College Admission

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Racial discrimination—racism—is enthusiastically practiced in a broad number of American colleges and universities, including in particular Harvard University and the University of North Carolina, whose racial discrimination in admission has been hauled before the Supreme Court.

Edward Blum, Founder and President of Students for Fair Admissions, made a sound argument against those two schools’ racism in admissions in his Sunday Wall Street Journal op-ed.

The common element in each lawsuit is the claim that both schools racially gerrymander their freshman classes by illegally raising the bar for certain racial and ethnic groups and lowering the bar for others.

I say the matter is broader than that, though. Racial discrimination everywhere and always is an immoral discrimination. The immorality doesn’t make it illegal, but it should inform Americans considering whether two support these two institutions in any form. It’s also wholly illegal under the 14th Amendment of our Constitution, which states in pertinent part

…nor shall any State…deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

UNC is a public institution, and so is plainly bound by our Constitution. Harvard is a private institution, but stands in blatant violation of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. It’s also plainly a public accommodation within the spirit of Title II of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and so still cannot discriminate on the basis of race.