Tag Archives: responsibilities

This is Why

Posted on by
Reply

…we can’t have nice schools.

Students at the University of New Hampshire [boycotted] final exams after a student uploaded a picture of another white student in what appears to be a bedtime facial mask, implying it’s “blackface.”

The university caved in to the students’ demands, and postponed the exams.

The right answer would have been to hold the finals as scheduled, let the pupils who skipped them—for whatever reason—receive failing grades on the exams, with attendant consequences for their course grade for the semester and for their graduation.

This should have been a teaching opportunity.  It isn’t civil disobedience unless the disobeyers suffer the consequences of the disobedience; that’s the only way civil disobedience can point up the absurdity of the thing being protested.  Absent those consequences, all that occurs is a toddler’s temper tantrum.  Or a riot.

But University of New Hampshire management (they don’t deserve to be called leadership) was too timid to do the right thing.  Instead, they’ve surrendered the university to the rabble.  In consequence, all this moment taught was that cry-baby temper tantrums get rewarded.

On top of this, the “outrage” was carefully manufactured.

Twenty-one-year-old Eric Buchwald, whose picture was posted without his permission, claims he didn’t depict blackface and it was just a picture of a clay facial mask he’s been using for the last few weeks.
…
A woman who owns the Instagram account that caused the scandal confirmed to NH1 News that Buchwald wasn’t aware his picture was being used; she said it was taken months ago.

A wasted major teaching opportunity combined with the overt racism of manufacturing a racist beef where it’s obvious none exists—a school doesn’t get much more useless than this.

Hysteria

Posted on by
Reply

FBI Director James Comey was fired by President Donald Trump, and the Left is waxing hysterical over it.  Never mind that Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein (only just confirmed after another example of Progressive-Democratic Party obstructionism in the Senate) laid out the case for Comey’s inability to function as the FBI’s leader.  Rosenstein’s memo can be read here as part of the document chain culminating in Trump’s letter to Comey.  Via Richard Fernandez:

Keith Ellison tweeted “we are witnessing a Consitutional [sic] crisis unfold before our very eyes.”

No.  A Constitutional crisis occurred when President Andrew Jackson ignored the Supreme Court with is “Indian Relocation Project.”  A Constitutional crisis occurred when Franklin Roosevelt rounded up vast numbers of Americans of heritages of which he disapproved and moved them onto “reservations.”  A Constitutional crisis occurred in President Richard Nixon’s Saturday Night Massacre.  A President firing an Executive Branch official in whom he’s lost confidence is ordinary business.

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D, NY):

Were these investigations getting too close to home for the president?

America depends on you [Rosenstein] to restore faith in our criminal justice system, which is going to be badly shattered after the administration’s actions today.

And (via the link just above):

Other Democrats attributed sinister motives to Comey’s firing, with two Senators, Bob Casey of Pennsylvania and Patrick Leahy of Vermont, describing it in press statements as “Nixonian.” Another Democratic senator, Ed Markey of Massachusetts, said the firing “is disturbingly reminiscent of the Saturday Night Massacre during the Watergate scandal and the national turmoil that it caused,” later adding “We are careening ever closer to a Constitutional crisis.”

And

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi said the firing “raises the ghosts of some of the worst Executive Branch abuses”

The shrillness of those three remarks speaks for itself.

These squawks come on the relative heels of some other comments by Progressive-Democrats.  Schumer on the occasion of Comey’s October 2016 reopening of the FBI’s investigation of then-Democratic Party Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton’s email escapades:

I do not have confidence in [Comey] any longer[.]

And Pelosi:

Maybe he’s not in the right job[.]

Senator Dianne Feinstein (D, CA), then Vice Chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, on the same occasion:

The FBI has a history of extreme caution near Election Day so as not to influence the results. Today’s break from that tradition is appalling.

Harry Reid (D, NV), ex-Senate Majority/Minority Leader, in December after the election results had settled in:

I think he should be investigated by the Senate. I think he should be investigated by other agencies in the government, including the security agencies[.]

In a non-Nixonian comparison, Slate (same link) cited Reid as making this one:

Reid went as far as to call Comey the “new J Edgar Hoover,” saying he had the information of Russian involvement in the election and kept it from the American public.

This is sad because this manufactured hysteria is all the Progressive-Democratic Party has left.  It’s unfortunate, too, because with this being all the Party has left, Progressive-Democrats cannot function as an effective party in the two-party system our Republic needs.

YGTBSM

Posted on by
Reply

…again.  Grant High School history teacher David Lickey wrote an essay and distributed it to the school’s students and teachers.  In it, he wrote

“I find assertions of rape culture dubious,” and “The very wording of ‘rape culture’ seems to me a bit hysterical.”

And

“Rape culture” is a theoretical construct that is ill defined. What exactly is “rape culture?” I don’t see it in my life or the lives of any of the men and women I have known. I have never met a person who believes rape is anything other than a heinous crime.

His boss, Principal Carol Campbell, was upset at his effrontery.  Grant’s essay, it seems,

included some statements that run counter to the way we approach this important subject. The perspective of the teacher does not reflect nor support our approach to educating students on sexual assault. A strong contradictory argument should be accompanied by counter arguments from credible sources.

And

We are working with students and some staff members to organize listening sessions and opportunities for adults and students to get support. It is our primary goal to ensure Grant is a safe place for all.

At least the “all” who comport themselves with the approved viewpoint.  Because fragile snowflakes need to be protected from the heat of disagreement.

Do Big Things Quietly

Posted on by
Reply

Which is not the same as doing them secretively.  Just don’t bruit about any wonderfulness about you for doing them.  Let the little things you do do your talking for you.

Morally, do the little things quietly (but not secretively), also; let your efforts speak for themselves.  I’m writing here, though, about practical politics, and two examples illustrate the matter: Obamacare and efforts at managing climate change.

Recall that Obamacare was an effort to redo a sixth of our economy in Government’s name, for our own good: a big thing.  It also was highly controversial, the Democrats made a big deal out of how wonderful they were for doing this.  And it was, and is, universally hated.  Except for the Republicans’ efforts here.  Undoing Obamacare is as big a deal as doing it, and the Republicans are making a big deal out of how wonderful they are for working to undo it.  And their efforts are not at all popular, either.

Notice: both parties spent/are spending as much, if not more, energy on their virtue signaling as they did/are on the actual effort.  The outcomes were disasters for the Democrats in Congress, the White House, and in state and local governments.

Look, too, at climate change.  Dawn Wilson, a purchaser and customer relations manager (currently between jobs) in Roseville, MI, had some thoughts.

Of Clinton having a campaign office here—only to skip visiting the struggling working-class manufacturing town and send in Hollywood surrogates Ted Danson and his wife Mary Steenburgen, who scolded voters about climate change—she is sardonic:

Your message and your optics are everything when you are trying to persuade people to buy something from you or vote for you. Does this look like somewhere that needs to be schooled on climate change?

Never mind that what mattered to the folks in Rosemont, and everywhere else in the US throughout the failed Obama recovery, was the immediacy of their economic well-being, whether they would be able to keep their job—Wilson was fired after 17 years in her job—or having lost their job, whether they would be able to get another.  After all, at the time of the election campaigns throughout last year, the average time out of work, for those who hadn’t given up altogether, still was measured in severals of months, not the few weeks that’s typical of a normal recovery.

Yet the Democrats made lots of noise about their importance to preventing future climate problem of questionable likelihood and of no immediacy in the minds of voters, and made little noise at all—and so no effort at all, at least perceptually, about solving that today problem of voters.

As the Washington Examiner put it,

For the Clinton campaign to send Hollywood liberals here in the closing days of the race to preach about climate change was tone deaf on a Guinness record-level.

Like a shoe maker says: just do it.

Handling Classified

Posted on by
Reply

FBI Director James Comey had this about Huma Abedin and her role in the ex-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton (D) classified email scandal:

Somehow, her [Clinton’s] emails were being forwarded to Anthony Weiner, including classified information.  His then-spouse, Huma Abedin, appears to have had a regular practice of forwarding emails to him for him to print out for her, so she could deliver them to the secretary of state.

Comey justified his lack of action with this:

We didn’t have any indication that she had a sense of what she was doing was in violation of the law[.]

There is, however, no requirement for mens rea under the relevant law; if nothing else Abedin’s actions fit the law’s gross negligence felony charactistic.

With such a bold, declarative statement about what Abedin was doing, then, I have to wonder why there’s been no indictment and subsequent prosecution.

Probably for the same reason he declined to bring a case against Clinton after having said her actions were excessively careless: it’s not politically expedient.