RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/04/progressive-virtue-signaling-jussie-smollett-morris-dees/

Virtue-signaling is now the refuge of scoundrels.

Since ancient times, it has always been scary when moral auditors audit their own. Or as the Roman satirist Juvenal put it of male guardians entrusted to shield chaste girls from randy males, Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? (“Who will watch the watchmen?”)

When humans sense that there’s neither an earthly nor divine deterrent between them and social acceptance, power, riches, or their appetites, what follows is a foregone conclusion.

Such exemption is precisely the problem with modern American progressivism. It currently enjoys almost a captive mainstream media. It assumes the lockstep approval of the university. The movies that come out of Hollywood pound progressive themes. Most foundations fund race, class, and gender agendas. Popular culture has defined cool and hip as left-wing. In sum, all the secular dispensators of moral approval are hard left.

The result is that progressive actors and institutions understand that even their bad behavior will be contextualized rather than audited. Such medieval-style exemption gives them a natural blank check to overreach and to act unethically, crudely, and even unlawfully — as they might not have if they had expected ramifications.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/sallypipes/2019/04/01/britains-version-of-medicare-for-all-is-collapsing/#1cbea0d736b8Nearly a quarter of a million British patients have been waiting more than six months to receive planned medical treatment from the National Health Service, according to a recent report from the Royal College of Surgeons. More than 36,000 have been in treatment queues for nine months or more.

Long waits for care are endemic to government-run, single-payer systems like the NHS. Yet some U.S. lawmakers want to import that model from across the pond. That would be a massive blunder.

Consider how long it takes to get care at the emergency room in Britain. Government data show that hospitals in England only saw 84.2% of patients within four hours in February. That’s well below the country’s goal of treating 95% of patients within four hours — a target the NHS hasn’t hit since 2015.

Now, instead of cutting wait times, the NHS is looking to scrap the goal.

https://amgreatness.com/2019/04/01/social-justice-is-at-odds-with-american-ideas-of-justice/

What is justice? This complicated question is the subject of much study by philosophers, lawyers, clergy, and laymen. It is often easier to determine the metes and bounds of justice from what it is not than to define what it is in the abstract. Unfair procedures, treating the rich differently from the poor, racial discrimination, or the infusion of bribery and perjury into criminal procedures strike almost everyone as forms of injustice. Likewise, light punishments for serious crimes or excessive punishments for minor ones all have the stench of injustice. In criminal matters, justice chiefly requires that the guilty are punished and the innocent go free.

Individualized Justice
This understanding stems from the traditions of western justice, particularly the Anglo-American variety, which places a premium on the rights of the individual and the importance of fair procedures. This is why our Constitution allows one the right to remain silent and prohibits the use of illegally-obtained evidence, while permitting the accused a defense counsel and a trial by jury. These procedures were the products of centuries of experimentation. They reflect the concern not only with justice but also the fear of the “run-amuck” majority, i.e., the mob.

Anglo-American justice fundamentally is an individual affair. The question it normally confronts is whether a particular person committed a particular offense. One’s station in life, his relative wealth, background, race, and the background of his relatives are supposed to be irrelevant. This is the origin of the expression, “Justice is blind.” Justice deliberately averts its gaze from one’s other social merits and demerits. It presupposes that otherwise good people can do very bad things and that otherwise bad people may not have done the bad thing they may be accused of having done.