I am often tempted to write one of those short, bullet point, stream-of-consciousness posts like some fool used to pay Larry King to write for his awful syndicated column, which included trenchant observations like, “For my money, there’s no better game show host than Bert Convy!” Such a post would take a lot less time, and I could cover more of the myriad ethics issues I encounter in my research every day that for one reason or another—the main one being I have to work for a living—never make it to the pages of Ethics Alarms. But it’s my birthday, dammit; I am one year closer to death, I miss my Dad (you too, Mom, but you picked a better day to die), and it’s pretty clear that I will have “epic underachiever” on my headstone where Jack Marshall, Sr’s reads “Silver Star,” so in lieu of any other celebration, I’m going to, just this once, use the bullet point format to note a bunch of the things I normally wouldn’t get around to writing about. Like:

• This story. Linda Walther Tirado wrote a highly-fictionalized version of her life in alleged dire poverty that went viral, then used the notoriety to raise over $60,000 (so far) on GoFundMe from good-hearted dupes who haven’t been paying close attention. In various twitter exchanges, she appears to be completely unapologetic about her fakery. She is a fick, I think, and I don’t have to “walk a mile in her shoes” to be able to judge her character as untrustworthy, dishonest and low. (Pointer: Instapundit)

• Some now banned commenters on the Atlanta homeless man story doubtless will regard my critique as more evidence that I hate poor people. You know, I have written over 4600 posts that have critiqued left, right and center. This has made some people angry, and prompted others to be obsessive about it, carrying on vendettas for years, in some cases. I’ve made mistakes and been wrong, unfair, excessively critical, mean and even negligent over the span of all those posts, but not often, and I have apologized openly and sincerely when my misdeeds have become apparent to me.  I know that lingering web-flaming goes with the territory, which is an ethicist willing to stick his neck out and discuss issues almost all others in the field  avoid like the plague, because making people angry and especially being wrong (you can’t give opinions without being wrong) is considered bad for business. I’m sure to some extent it is. Meanwhile, every time some commenter who wants to pedal an agenda rather than have a real debate runs out of slogans or platitudes, he or she searches for dirt on the web and deliver an “everyone thinks you’re an asshole, so I know I’m right” farewell. (These do not get posted, at least for long.) So those whom I have offended get their revenge, and there’s not a thing I can do about it, except keep doing what I do.

• Once again, a campus hate speech scandal implicating conservatives has been traced to a student-perpetrated hoax. On Nov. 14, Vassar’s administration sent a mass email to the campus  advising them that its Bias Incident Response Team had received  reports  of hateful  messages being scrawled and spray painted on student residences, with sentiments like “Avoid Being Bitches,” “Fuck Niggers,” and “Hey Tranny. Know Your Place.” “This is unacceptable and members of our community should be able to learn and work in environments that are free of hurtful expressions and behaviors,” the  dean of the College for Campus Life and Diversity wrote.

The graffiti was the work of a student member of Bias Incident Response Team itself, which, I think should be disbanded on the spot. I wrote about a similar though much worse incident at Oberlin just a few months ago and have nothing substantive to add except this: for those who accuse me of tilting to the side of conservatives, know that if I could find any example anywhere of a conservative group or individual trying to impugn the left by a false flag operation, I would love to write about it. This despicable tactic appears to exist solely in the arsenal of the Left, however, perhaps because it was a favorite of Saul Alinsky. In addition, the mainstream media generally gives minor coverage to these incidents or no coverage at all, marking them as “conservative media stories” and also hiding the progressive community’s dark side from itself. I find it difficult to respect or trust people who behave like this, or who refuse to expose and condemn those of their belief system who do.

• Ken White at Popehat picked up from my post about the conservative websites being fooled by the hoax concerning the far-left professor who supposedly used his retirement speech to tell all white males to commit suicide, since they were a plague on civilization. Ken and his readers, who are libertarians but who also have an entrenched dislike of conservatives, disagreed with my position that the satire was negligent and inadequately signaled on the site, choosing to blame the confirmation bias of the sites that were fooled…which almost included Ethics Alarms. I stopped arguing with the gang after a comment by a regular there asserting the ridiculous position that failure to understand any intended satire, no matter how ambiguous or inept, was per se the fault of the reader, never the author. I have to remind myself that it is impossible to argue rationally against an irrational position: if reason worked on such people, they wouldn’t proclaim such positions in the first place.

Anyway, since Ken’s post, I have encountered several real stories that are easily as ridiculous on their face as the one Ken and his fans (actually, I’m also a fan) seem to think The Daily Caller and its ilk were, in Ken’s words, “stupid or ideology-addled” to fall for. There is this jaw-dropping op-ed by a college professor in the Washington Post, for example, who picked now, of all times, to argue that Barack Obama should run for a third term. It was funnier than the The Diversity Chronicle attempt at satire, a note-perfect exaggeration of the academic community’s complete inability to see the Obama presidency for the disaster it is. Then there is this (which I still think has to be satire), a reportedly serious scientific theory that humans were the result of inter-species sex between a chimp and a pig. If someone can’t write satire sufficiently deftly to delineate their fiction from the equally outrageous things people say, write and publish in all seriousness, then they are being reckless, irresponsible, and incompetent to put their poor efforts on the web. Everyone isn’t as smart as Ken, especially, at least as his loyal readers believe, conservatives, and false information on the web does real damage.

• It is a constant source of disillusionment for me, and a constant catalyst for doubts about how I spend my time, that my most minor and trivial posts get five times the traffic of the ones I care most about, work hardest at, and that I think deserve serious attention. The current example is the post about the obnoxious in-flight note battle. I guess that’s why I’m going to eschew a well-earned Ethics Dunce for Jezebel news editor Erin Gloria Ryan, who reacted to news of actor Paul Walker’s death by tweeting her disappointment that death hadn’t claimed Wisconsin Governor and public union foe Scott Walker instead. This is the viciousness of Obama era punditry, and Ryan became the target of criticism, mostly from conservatives, since despicable and hateful rhetoric is only unethical when its directed at politicians you like. Since the critique came from people and places she, as a good progressive, wouldn’t dream of according respect or fairness, Ryan resorted to the “Can’t you take a joke?” excuse and an attack on her critics, tweeting, “Wow, conservatives are about as bad at jokes making fun of celebrity worship as they are at governing Wisconsin.” Right—her death-wish for a state governor was all about “celebrity worship” and had nothing to do with Walker’s successful attack on the corrupt public union-Democratic party alliance in Wisconsin. Shortly thereafter, she took down the offensive post and “apologized.” A change of heart in just 90 seconds! Could it be that some criticism was coming from her own team, indeed, her own employers?

• Which is not to say that the relatively trivial topics don’t generate valuable commentary and illumination: they do; that’s why I post them. In the case of the note war, for example, we have this observation, from zoebrain, that is both concise and true:

“While kindness is contagious, so is assholery.”

I agree wholeheartedly.