Category Archives: Uncategorized

The Guardian Angels: High Noon in Brooklyn

Posted on by under Uncategorized

Diligent readers of this blog know that I’m a big fan of Curtis Sliwa and his much-maligned organization, the Guardian Angels. So, depressing as the recent rash of anti-Semitic attacks in the NYC metro area has been, I was pleased to encounter this item online (ht: Chris Santo):

The Guardian Angels, a private, unarmed crime-prevention group, said it would start patrolling New York City’s Brooklyn borough on Sunday following a series of anti-Semitic attacks.

Curtis Sliwa, who founded the organization in 1979 in New York City, said the patrols would start at noon in the Crown Heights neighborhood and expand to Williamsburg and Borough Park later in the day.

There’s a lot of bad blood between the Guardian Angels and the NYPD, and between the Angels and the press, or at least the left-leaning press. A huge heap of horseshit has been written about the “vigilante” character of the Guardian Angels, or going to the other extreme, about its hapless ineffectiveness as a crime fighting organization. It all seems pointless to me. I don’t get the hostility. Continue reading →

Missing the Corpses for the Case

Posted on by under Uncategorized

The New York Times reports on the “disturbing” case of Navy SEAL Eddie Gallagher:

On this episode of “The Weekly,” members of SEAL Team 7 tell Navy investigators that Gallagher was a reckless leader with a disturbing hunger for violence. They say they spent much of their time protecting Iraqi civilians from their battle-crazed chief instead of going after ISIS. And never-before-released video from the SEALs’ deployment shows Gallagher kneeling beside a defenseless ISIS captive moments before Gallagher plunged his knife into the prisoner’s neck.

The problem is, Gallagher was acquitted of the most “disturbing” charges made against him.  But don’t shelve your outrage too quickly. There is something outrage-worthy here. To see this, it may be worth our while to stand back a bit and see the battlefield corpses for the legal case. Continue reading →

Are Equal Rights Anti-Semitic?

Posted on by under Uncategorized

Considering how frequently the “anti-Semitism” card is used against the campaign for equal rights for Palestinians, I thought it’d be useful to reproduce an ordinary donation letter I got the other day from the U.S. Campaign for Palestinian Rights (USCPR), an organization blacklisted by the Israeli Strategic Affairs Ministry. If these demands are your idea of “anti-Semitism” (not that I necessarily agree with them all), maybe it’s your conception of that concept that needs revision, not the demands of USCPR or its allies.  The idea of a “racist campaign for equal rights” is a contradiction in terms. The only question worth asking in this context is which party is guilty of the contradiction involved.

Continue reading →

Just Say Yes: Tulsi Gabbard on Impeachment

Posted on by under Uncategorized

Well, my fan-boy crusade for Tulsi Gabbard’s presidential campaign has come to grief on the shoals of her abstention on impeachment last night. Her decision to abstain strikes me as a serious mistake: it had no clear legal or constitutional justification, and simply managed to alienate the base that’s supported her so far. I get the rationale, but it seems a bridge too far to a political right that’s essentially lost its way and lost its mind. I still have great respect and admiration for Gabbard, and still intend to post the fourth installment of my series on “Tulsi Gabbard vs. Liberal McCarthyism” (haven’t changed my mind on that, and don’t agree with the accusations of “cowardice” that have been leveled against her for this decision),* but the fan-boy crush, alas, has ended. Continue reading →

He Could Do No Other

Posted on by under Uncategorized

In case you hadn’t figured this out, I’m grading final papers–tonight’s harvest being applied ethics. After spending the day making fun of my applied ethics students on Facebook, I turn at last to the final paper of the evening, a dense, single-spaced essay written by a transfer student. The author starts by telling me that while he found my course very interesting, applied ethics just isn’t his thing–and then proceeds to write a sophisticated, cogent, but totally off-topic paper on the problem of evil, written from “a Protestant Christian worldview.”

Image result for sayings of martin luther

Now what?

That Zola Commercial

Posted on by under Uncategorized

Here it is:

As you’ve probably gathered, the Hallmark Channel pulled this ad because the couple’s kissing–at their own wedding–supposedly violated Hallmark’s “policies on PDA.” Apart from the obvious hypocrisy and disingenuousness involved in invoking this excuse–what channel runs an ad that violates its own policies?–surely the question has to arise: why would any company adopt so idiotic a policy in the first place? Are articulable reasons involved, or just inarticulate fears? Continue reading →