Rain rain go away; come back another day; Jackie wants to GET THE %$#^&@!!! Christmas tree up and start the annual 10 hour HELL of decorating it!
1. Is Facebook blocking Ethics Alarms? Several readers have reported that their efforts to share posts have been foiled. I can’t post links to it; my last several tries on two different posts have gleaned an error message. No one has shared a post to Facebook anywhere for nine days, which is very unusual. The last Ethics Alarms post with any shares was the “Kiss the Girl” post, which had quite a few.
I also have no idea what to do if Facebook is blocking the blog, and not much motivation to do it. Increasingly I am finding that my Facebook friends are making me lose respect for them with their constant virtue-signaling to the Left and refusal to accept any contrary opinions without stooping to personal insults. The “Facebook community” standards are incompatible with ethics commentary? I’m not surprised, and it can bite me.
I have literally never written anything that would justify social media censorship, assuming fair, responsible and free speech-respecting social media.
2. “The best people.” Ryan Zinke is finally leaving the Cabinet, and the President will be looking for a new Interior Secretary. The former Montana congressman and Navy Seal had an ethically tone-deaf and politically controversial tenure, facing nearly 20 federal investigations ― one of which his agency’s inspector general recently referred to the Justice Department for possible criminal violations. Like Trump himself, Zinke was incapable of recognizing that when you embark on a controversial policy mission, you have to stay squeaky clean, or the news media bring you down. This is simply stupid, arrogant and self-destructive. Zinke should have been fired months ago.
3. Hooray!The NFL isn’t as criminal as it used to be! I guess that’s something. It was reported that “only” 36 incidents occurred in 2018 that ended in the arrest of an NFL player, down (so far) from 49 last year, and 80 a decade ago.
I guarantee that you can count the parallel incidents in Major League Baseball on one hand, every year.
4. Obamacare was declared unconstitutional in federal court, whatever that means. I don’t know at this point whether the decision has a prayer of surviving. I do know that the legislation is and was a fiasco, and that this is what one gets when a party decides to rush major legislation through while by-passing the other party, a President repeatedly lies about it to get public support based on misinformation, and the bill is voted on with few, if any, legislators actually reading the law.
I also continue to marvel at the number of otherwise intelligent Americans who continue to idolize President Obama, who is responsible for this mess and claims it as his “signature achievement”—all while the same Americans rail about President Trump’s “lies.” He has not made a single misstatement in the past two years that has been a fraction as consequential as Obama’s lie about the Affordable Care Act.
5. Poll update: Here are the results of the poll on demanding refunds for a professional stage performance. I’d love to know the reasoning of the single voter who thinks a refund is obligatory when an understudy has to perform. Such a rule would have curtailed, if not prevented, the careers of such famous last-minute understudies as Shirley Maclaine and Lanie Kazan. My favorite understudy story is that of Jane Curtin, who was a hat-check girl at Second City. One of the female performers was ill, and Curtin talked management into letting her go on in her place, after she swore that she knew all of the routines by heart. She never checked another hat.
6. Unethical legal filings, Harvey Weinstein Ethics Train Wreck division. (Pointer: Pennagain) In a lawsuit filed this week against Weinstein, an actress claims he forced her to perform oral sex on her, masturbated in front of her and on her, and threatened to end her career if she didn’t submit. The suit also claims that Weinstein said “I slept with Jennifer Lawrence and look where she is; she has just won an Oscar.”
Lawrence quicky issued a statement on Friday denying that they had a sexual relationship.
Nice: an alleged Weinstein victim feels that it is necessary to sully Lawrence’s reputation while seeking her own compensation. This is a high-profile matter: whatever is in the court filings can be guaranteed to be made public. What possible justification would there be to exploit Lawrence in the filing? Weinstein’s statement about Lawrence is hearsay, and even if he said it, that doesn’t make it true or likely to be true. Moreover, what he said isn’t incriminating even if it is true. It’s not illegal to have sex with Jennifer Lawrence. All that detail in the complaint can do is hurt Lawrence.
7. When all else fails, try the truth. Katelyn Caralle reports in the Washington Examiner:
Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., said Friday that she is not a person of color, despite her previous claims to Native American ancestry.
“I’m not a person of color. And I haven’t lived your life or experienced anything like the subtle prejudice, or more overt harm, that you may have experienced just because of the color of your skin,” Warren said at Morgan State, a historically black college in Baltimore, Md, according to the Washington Post.
In other news, Bill Clinton announced that he did have sex with that woman, Hillary said that she did send classified material over her home-brewed server, and O.J. admitted that he killed Nicole. President Trump agrees that the crowd at his inauguration wasn’t all that big. Oh! I nearly forgot! Barack Obama says, “Okay, you won’t be able to keep your health care plan.”
Ethics Alarms 
7. This has only been reported in the Washington Examiner? MSNBC? CNN? Anyone? Beuhler?
But I guess the significance of her statement depends on what your meaning of “person of color” is. Maybe it’s not newsworthy?
It may be a nothingburger. She may say, “But I did stay at a Holiday Inn last night and my grandmother was a Cherokee.”
White is a color.
Neither Black nor White are considered colors.
Still, some pigments/non-colors are more equal than others, am I right?
Here’s a great take down of Fauxcahantas in The Boston Herald:
https://www.bostonherald.com/2018/12/15/carr-white-lies-catch-up-to-warren/
Is anyone else even reporting this story?
Thanks OB, that there article is a humdinger!
And we must be reminded that the Yin-n-Yang of existence expects an available niche to be exploited.
Lieawatha-Fauxchahonta vacating her laughably constructed cultural appropriation, intended solely to enhance her career prospects, has allowed the positively Mensan Alexandria Two State Solution Ocasio-Cortez to claim Jewish Heritage.
Ben Shapiro ain’t buyin’ it.
I, in possession of verifiable Jewish roots, ain’t neither!
She doesn’t need it anymore. She was a minority hire when she needed it. Now that she is a powerful senator, she doesn’t need the minority status to get ahead. Now, she just wants everyone to forget that she told Penn and Harvard that she was Cherokee, that both schools touted her as a minority hire, and that she was listed as Native American by Harvard even years after she received tenure.
You would think there would be some kind of repercussions for being a real life example of the movie Soul Man, but she is a Democrat.
https://www.bostonherald.com/2018/10/16/liz-warren-a-minority-hire-really-university-should-have-verified/
https://www.scribd.com/document/387670129/Elizabeth-Warren-Harvard-registrar-memo
I shared an Ethics Alarms post the other week (The comment of the day regarding civil rights and the 2nd amendment) I was taken down by Facebook within 24 hours with a statement that it was in breach of their community standards. I requested a review but nothing came of it. I actually took the time to look at their linked community standards page and it in no way breached anything listed. I am unsure if it was somehow flagged due to the picture of guns in the thumbnail or if one of my vapidly anti gun “friends” posted a complaint. Either way I found it quite disheartening since an interesting discussion had started in the posts comment area.
Were the comments removed as well? If so, that means that other people’s posts were being included in the circle of censorship and that is scary for everyone. If not, the comments that stood wouldn’t have a reference point.
The comments appear to have been removed, I asked one of the commenters what it looked like on his end and he says it is gone from his activity list.
7-Kinda puts the Fordham Law Review AND the Harvard Law School on the Hot Seat.
Nope, can’t find Ethics Alarms on Facebook, only a few mentions, one of which notes it has been blocked.
-Jut
1. I can’t locate EA on Facebook, which I seldom access anymore. It seems to me that someone could launch an interesting shareholders’ suit against media or social networking sites that are excluding customers, and presumably revenue.
Brilliant, LS. And maybe a class action as well.
I barely access facebook anymore either. I sent a friend request to Jack but alas…it hangs in the ether
What??? Never saw it! Try again!
I think you have friend requests turned off, won’t even let me re-request.
I didn’t know you COULD turn them off!
Well, Facebook SAYS my setting is that I can accept friend requests from “everybody.”
Maybe my end. The option to friend request is grayed out. But only for you. It’s a conspiracy.
I KNEW IT!!!!
Can I be your friend? I, not on any social media site, just in real life?
This is a REAL friend request, and only readers of this blog (and the NSA) know about it.
Absolutely. I prefer the real kind.
I had Facebook block sharing a post. Took screen captures of the error messages, then complained; about two hours later was able to share the post. No explanation or message from Facebook about any of it. This was in a *private* message to a colleague who is also an ethics professor. Absolutely mystifying. Jack, pm or email me if you’d like copies of the screen captures.
I can’t find you on Facebook, either.
Jack, can you make room here to post all references to Facebook problems so everyone can see what’s going on and share ways to help EA get through to those who want or, more necessarily, need to see it?
Good idea.
#4) This only amuses me (as the Left will end up winning this fiasco because of how deeply ingrained the ACA already is…and we’re on the short track to getting fully socialized medical care anyway) because of all the times the Leftists have crowed victory when some out of the way judge in Hawaii halts the President’s perfectly constitutional actions. Now they get to cry with shrill temper tantrums now that a judge in Texas has attacked their sacred cow.
as much as I hate it, the progressives have chosen to live by the irrelevant judge.
The Right should make sure they die by the same method, to show them it is a two way street.
It’s hard to disagree with this sentiment. I don’t want to wreck American governance, but the Democrats are hell bent on doing so. A tiny part of me wants to see Republicans shop for judges to stop every single little thing they hate about Democrat policies.
But really, someone has to take the high road, and the Democrats, despite their rhetoric have not been for DECADES, nor plan on ever again being, that party.
“…someone has to take the high road…”
I fear that ship has sailed post 2016. Either the modified Golden Rule is applied, or we are truly lost (and the concentration camps are not far behind) When SJW rules are applied to the SJW, they inevitably protest at how unfair it is. Good. Showing them how their actions can hurt them personally is the only way to persuade them to stop. If they will not operate with respect, then they can operate in fear. The result is the same.
It may be objectively unethical, but in war, ethics no longer matter. And make no mistake, progressives have declared war, genocide, and a host of other atrocities.
I am afraid that this is increasingly the view of the Right. Progressives made this a blood sport. The high road leads to the gas chambers, to extend a metaphor.
“I’d love to know the reasoning of the single voter who thinks a refund is obligatory when an understudy has to perform.”
Maybe that voter voted for ALL the options?