Year: 2019

The Complete El Paso Shooter’s Manifesto, With Ethics Commentary, PART I

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

The “manifesto” follows; some of my my observations precede it, the bulk of them, after, in Part II.

1. The fact that the news media went to such lengths to avoid making the manifesto easily accessible to the public is as alarming as the manifesto itself. This is elite and powerful institutions accountable to no one deliberately manipulating information for their own agenda and political motives. It doesn’t matter if they,”mean well,” and are emulating New Zealand’s measure, unconstitutional and thus unacceptable here, to censor the Christ Chruch shooter’s manifesto as a means of not spreading hate, or hare speech, or bad thoughts, or “giving the shooter what he wants.” It’s wrong, it’s un-American, it’s an abuse of power, and like so much else wafting over from the Left, reeks of totalitarianism. I know I mentioned this before, but, frankly, I’m angry: How dare the Washington Post wrap its reporting in “Democracy Dies in Darkness” and then turn off the lights when it suits their purposes?

2. The link turned up on the Drudge Report, which I suppose is why Powerline thought it could say that it was easily found online. Drudge is a muckraking, untrustworthy link-farm mostly followed by conservatives: I don’t consider it any more of a news site than Fark.com. Upon reflection, yes, I should have thought of it, but I shouldn’t have had to. Every published report that purported to interpret or analyze the El Paso manifesto had an ethiacl obligation to link to it or publish the whole thing.

Google was complicit in making it difficult to find. I googled “text of El Paso shooter manifesto,” “pdf of shooter manifesto,” and every conceivable combination, searched and scanned the results, and still found nothing. That would not happen if Google were not deliberately helping to hide it—if you want to use the term “conspiring,” be my guest.

Jerry Goedken (thanks, Jerry) revealed that the magic Google term is “drudgereport link to el paso manifesto.” Ah! So you have to know where it is to search for it! Seems logical.

Are we scared yet?

3. No, I’m not using the crazy’s name. That IS easily accessible, and his name is irrelevant. What matters is that what he wrote, which is essential for anyone who wants to try to understand what happened in El Paso, and why, and not to be at the mercy of contrived propaganda from the Left, the “resistance” and the news media,  must be available. The rationalizations for burying it are disingenuous and absurd, particularly the idiocy that it might inspire others or inflame hatred. There are equally inflammatory screeds and posts on social media every day. There are blog posts and columns in major newspapers and websites that are more inflammatory; there are screaming talking heads on CNN and MSNBC and Fox every day who are as hateful and incendiary.

4. Why is this rant being hidden? I think it is so the President of the United States can be falsely implicated in a slaughter for partisan political gain—that is, to foment hate, but the good kind–you know, against our elected leader. Those, like Beto O’Rourke, who are shouting to the skies that the shooter was virtually doing Trump’s bidding would not dare to make such a claim if they thought their audience read the manifesto.

5. Here’s the bottom line: There is no way a reasonable, objective, fair analyst could conclude that the El Paso shooter was in any way motivated by the President, his rhetoric, or his policy positions. Any pundit or journalist that claims otherwise is biased to the point of delusion, or lying. As I will explicate later, the rhetoric of Elizabeth Warren, Rep. Ocasio-Cortez and other hard Left progressives are arguably more directly consistent with the shooter’s beliefs than anything Donald Trump has ever advocated. I assume that the shooter’s own direct rejection of the thesis being throttled into the public by the mews media will be denied as some kind of loyal attempt to protect his white nationalist hero, or similar garbage. It’s classic conspiracy thinking: when the manifesto can be twisted to support a grand narrative, the writer is lucid and convincing; when it contradicts the narrative, well, what do you expect? He’s nuts, and why would you trust a murderer?

He writes below:

In general, I support the Christchurch shooter and his manifesto…My ideology has not changed for several years. My opinions on automation, immigration, and the rest  predate Trump and his campaign for President. I [am] putting this here because some people will blame the  President or certain presidential candidates for the attack. This is not the case. I know that the media  will probably call me a white supremacist anyway and blame Trump’s rhetoric. The media is infamous for fake news. Their reaction to this attack will likely just confirm that.

The last two sentences are 100% accurate, and the sanest thing in his statement.

Here is the manifesto, which I formatted to allow for easier reading, another task journalists were obligated to do: Continue reading →

Ethics Alarms Needs A Link To Or Copy Of The El Paso Shooter’s Manifesto, Since The News Media Is Unethical [UPDATED!]

/ Jack Marshall / 23 Comments

Please put either into the comments to this post, and I’ll follow this with both the document itself and an analysis.

[UPDATE: the link is on Drudge. See below.]

The ethics issue is obvious: reporters, pundits and journalists are telling us what the thing says, and, for the most part, how it shows that the President somehow inspired the shooter. I don’t trust these people; I trust myself. This isn’t the Unabomber’s screed, it is reportedly just four pages long. We should be allowed to make our own analysis.

The final straw was this post on the conservative PowerLine blog, in which John Mirengoff quotes from reporter Byron York’s assessment that it’s

“hard to make that case looking at the manifesto in its entirety…Crusius [the killer] worried about many things, if the manifesto is any indication. He certainly worried about immigration, but also about automation. About job losses. About a universal basic income. Oil drilling. Urban sprawl. Watersheds. Plastic waste. Paper waste. A blue Texas. College debt. Recycling. Healthcare. Sustainability. And more. Large portions of the manifesto simply could not be more un-Trumpian.”

Both the Powerline post and York’s article have the same headline: “Has anyone actually read the El Paso killer’s manifesto?”, and, incredibly, neither includes a link to the manifesto or the text itself! York is a hypocrite, taking other reporters to task for, he says, distorting the screed to impugn the President, yet he gives his readers no way to check his assertions. Mirengoff is even worse. He preens by writing that he has not read the manifesto—after questioning the integrity and honesty of those who have!–and says, “I don’t do evil mass murderers the honor of reading their deranged writings.”

Then don’t write posts about it, you ass.

He concludes, “Most news outlets have declined to link to the manifesto. I will decline, as well. However, it can be found without difficulty on the internet.” Oh, bite me. I just spent 30 minutes searching without success, and I’m trying to do my job.

The Washington Post, meanwhile–you know, the “Democracy Dies in Darkness” paper?–also won’t provide a link.

UPDATE: Got it!

Morning Ethics Warm-Up, 8/10/19: Insomnia Edition

/ Jack Marshall / 32 Comments

Jeez, what time is it?

This stuff  kept me awake, gave me nightmares, or made me wish I was dreaming. Started this post before 5 am…

1. Idiotic meme of the week:

A lawyer friend whom I can vouch for having a brain actually posted this thing, apparently approvingly. In zombie movies, the equivalent is when a previously normal friend suddenly bites off your nose. Jules Suzdaltsev is hard left progressive journalist whose background is in film and psychology, and would be a fine example for teaching purposes of what someone sounds like who is so far on one side of the ideological spectrum that he is incapable of finding the center. He’s an ideologue and a Leftist incapable of objective analysis or non-compliant thought, who was steeped for seven years in the  rarefied politics of San Francisco, and who tweets deliberate misrepresentations like “There have been more MASS SHOOTINGS in 2019 than there have been DAYS in 2019” and such cliched “resistance” bile like “Hey do you guys remember when the generation that grew up breathing lead fumes ended up voting for this guy as President?”

The scary thing is not Suzdaltsev—he’s a professional left-wing echo chamber provocateur, and good luck to him, glad he has a career. The scary thing is that lawyers, trained in critical thought, can reach the point where they find extremist agitprop persuasive. Society relies on educated, trained professionals to steer us clear of such rot, not to embrace it. The 2016 Post Election Ethics Train Wreck has seen one professional group after another abandon this duty for mob-pleasing expediency.

And how can someone post a statement that Bernie and Warren are barely left-of-center as anything but satire?

2. Jeffrey Epstein committed suicide, hanging himself in his cell. This was gross incompetence by the New York City jail, as well as federal authorities. If there ever was a prisoner who was a candidate for suicide (or murder), Epstein was it. He needed to be on a round-the-clock suicide watch. Epstein was allowed to cheat the justice system and his victims. He is now officially innocent of the crimes he was charged with.

Aside from all that, good. The world is better place without him in it. Continue reading →

When Your Friends Insist That There Is No Mainstream Media Partisan Bias, Ask Them To Explain This…

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

The won’t and can’t, but they’ll deny that there’s bias anyway. Like Joe Biden, they choose “truth” over facts.

In an infamous 2017 editorial, New York Times Editorial Page Editor James Bennet wrote, “In 2011, when Jared Lee Loughner opened fire in a supermarket parking lot, grievously wounding Representative Gabby Giffords and killing six people, including a 9-year-old girl, the link to political incitement was clear. Before the shooting, Sarah Palin’s political action committee circulated a map of targeted electoral districts that put Ms. Giffords and 19 other Democrats under stylized cross hairs.”

Not only was this false, the theory had been thoroughly dsiproven years before. Palin’s map had nothing to do with violence. “20 House Democrats from districts we carried in 2008 voted for the health care bill,” the caption said. “IT’S TIME TO TAKE A STAND.”

It was a call to defeat Affordable Care Act supporters, not to shoot them. The theory, pushed by the Times’ Paul Krugman among other left-wing pundits after the Tucson shooting,  that Palin’s unremarkable advocacy inspired the attack, was unmoored to facts or logic. Loughner’s motives were vague, and he was insane, politically liberal,  and unlikely to have been following Palin’s website. Linking Palin to the tragedy (others blamed Rush Limbaugh) was just the kind of dishonest cognitive dissonance game we are seeing now, with Democrats and the news media blaming President Trump for recent shootings.

On the theory that the Times crossed the line from opinion to malice when it intentionally publicized a false,  six-year old smear, Palin sued the Times for libel. This week a federal appeals court revived the lawsuit, which had been thrown out by a lower court on First Amendment grounds. Continue reading →

Amnesty International Forfeits The Right To Be Taken Seriously Thanks To It’s Anti-American Hackery

/ Jack Marshall / 19 Comments

I swear, I thought this was the Babylon Bee:

Not that it is the first time this organization has allowed its political agenda to distort its stated mission, but this is especially outrageous.  Here’s another highlight:

“Depending on the traveler’s gender identity, race, country of origin, ethnic background, or sexual orientation, they may be at higher risk of being targeted with gun violence, and should plan accordingly.”

Read the whole thing: Amnesty International doesn’t like the Second Amendment.

Now we can firmly deposit another once-respectable  organization in the dark box containing teh sullied reputations of once beneficial non-profits that have disgraced themselves by being co-opted by partisan politics and/or anti-American agendas. Keeping Amnesty International company will be the ACLU, the Southern Poverty Law Center, the Nobel Peace Prize, the American Bar Association,  the NAACP, and the United Nations, among other lesser lights.

It is increasingly clear to me that under the category of trust, the most crucial ethical value is integrity. Tragically, that appears to be the single value organizations today seem most incapable of maintaining.

From The Ethics Alarms “FUNNY!..But Unethical” Files: The McDonald’s Japan Promotional Cups

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

Last year, Land O Lakes finally changed its famous Indian Girl logo so you could no longer do the “boobs trick”  by folding the package just right and making a little flap of the butter package that young Elizabeth Warren or whatever her name was holding that when raised would show her oddly shaded knees as something less pedestrian. Why they would bother papering paper over one of the longest-running and most famous  commercial artist gags ever after decades, I don’t know.  In its day, the gag was considered obscene, but by 2018 it was Americana. I had an uncle who kept one of the risque  package cut-outs in his wallet.

There are others, of course. I once got an office supply catalogue in the mail that had a back page with a color image of a man using an office product on one side and an image of a woman using a different product on the other that when held up to the light so both illustrations were visible at once,  produced a composition showing him looking up her skirt. I have been told that commercial artists are prone to such gags, being frequently frozen at the emotional age of 12.

Now some similarly juvenile artists have made a McDonald’s promotion in Japan into another obscene practical joke, this time by modern standards. On each side of two plastic cups, which the stores are handing out in a summer promotion, innocent appearing cartoon drawings of cute young children, a boy and a girl, are visible in  various chaste poses. However, when the drink is gone, one one can see both images at once, and the resulting spectacle is this..

or  this…

I’m sure its just a coincidence.

I wonder how my uncle would have managed to fit those in his wallet? He would have found a way, knowing him.

_______________________________________

Source: Mashable

Ethics Observations On A Massacre Averted

/ Jack Marshall / 33 Comments

Another day, another psycho tries to mow down strangers! In Springfield, Missouri, a man appearing to be in his 20s  pulled up to a Walmart, and put on body armor. He walked into the store and began pushing a cart around the store, recording himself on his cell phone.  An alert store manager saw a threat and triggered a fire alarm; the Springfield police  responded within three minutes of the call. Police say that the man had tactical weapons  and more than 100 rounds of ammunition When the would-be shooter left through an emergency exit an off-duty firefighter carrying a legally concealed weapon held the man at gunpoint until police arrived. Observations:

  • It won’t be, but this should be regarded as another mass shooting. Only moral luck made it different from El Paso or Dayton. Sometimes the store managers won’t react quickly enough. Sometimes there won’t be a bystander with a gun and the guts and skill to use it.

The important fact is that a crazy individual entered a public place with the intent to commit murder and the means to so it. Whether a particular attempt was or was not successful is irrelevant from a policy perspective.

  • The lesson of this near-miss is not that everyone should have guns. Resorting to the culture of the Old West is not in anyone’s best interests.

Second Amendment advocates make themselves look foolish by constantly falling back on this”solution.”

  • The hysteria-driven blanket coverage of the latest shootings makes mass shootings more likely.

Censoring the facts and basic reporting, as they did in New Zealand, is not an option here, nor should it be, Some basic restraint from cable news, talking heads and politicians, however, is both reasonable and necessary.

  • This isn’t a video-game driven phenomenon, nor a political divide-driven phenomenon, nor even a “too many guns” problem. It is a problem driven by a culture that now elevates mere attention to the equivalent of self-worth, in a nation that holds—and correctly and importantly so— that each individual, in the end, is responsible for his or her own success or failure.

We have discussed this phenomenon in many contexts on Ethics Alarms, ranging from the movie “Fame’s” warped message that the goal of young lives should be to “live forever” through becoming famous, to the reality-show driven delusion that merely being famous signifies anything but luck, and certainly not societal worth. The Sondheim musical “Assassins” posited that Presidential assassins were desperate, shadowy failures in a success-obsessed culture, who not unreasonably determined that murdering a President was the perfect way to rescue their lives from powerlessness and obscurity. The problem with thesis, though it spawned some good songs and thought-provoking drama, is that history doesn’t back it up at all, and the number of assassins and attempted assassins is too small a sample to make any valid generalizations.

  • In today’s hyped  media and information-glutted society, however, the theory makes more sense, except that it is infinitely easier to shoot up a church than kill a President, and social media makes a killer’s manifesto easy to disseminate for maximum news fodder. The Unabomber had to bargain to get his declaration published in the press.

Today a single social media post will do the trick, with fame (infamy, fame, what’s the difference?) to follow,

Morning Ethics Warm-Up, 8/9/2019: “I See Unethical People!” Edition

/ Jack Marshall / 31 Comments

S-s-s-s-stretch those ethics muscles!

(although, to be fair, the items today don’t require much stretching…)

1. Rosie Ruiz, unethical icon, has died. Rosie Ruiz got her 15 minutes of fame—well, infamy—by briefly fooling officials and the media into believing she had won the 1980 Boston Marathon. “She jumped out of the crowd, not knowing that the first woman hadn’t gone by yet,” a source who Ruiz had confessed to told The Boston Globe. “Believe me, she was as shocked as anyone when she came in first.” She wasn’t even a skilled cheater.

Nonetheless, Ruiz maintained publicly that she had been robbed of a genuine victory, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary. She even displayed her first place medal whenever possible.

Ruiz is an excellent example of how signature significance works. It would be nice to report that she went on from this one, impulsive, foolish scam and became a beloved and tireless worker for the common good. Uh, no. Cheating in a major athletic competition isn’t something anyone does who has functioning ethics alarms. Ruiz was charged in 1982 with grand larceny and forgery, accused of stealing cash and checks from the real estate firm where she had been a bookkeeper. This got her a week in jail and five years’ probation. In 1983,  she was arrested on charges of attempting to sell cocaine to undercover agents at a hotel in Miami and spent three weeks in jail. Continue reading →

Unethical Tweet Of The Month: Actress Rosanna Arquette

/ Jack Marshall / 18 Comments

Observations, besides the obvious and obligatory, “What an idiot!”…

1. This is signature significance for a stupid woman, desperately virtue- signaling to her peer group. No fair or intelligent person would say or think such a thing.

2. The tweet is declaring that an entire race should be ashamed of itself. This is bigotry; this is racism. Arquette lacks the intellectual skill to figure that out, though it is startlingly straightforward.

3. One of the responses to the tweet, which helps us define the kind of person who would follow the likes of Rosanna Arquette on Twitter, wrote, “Please don’t. I understand the inclination but this is actually more harmful than helpful. POC are not trying to shame decent white people for being white. This feeds into a right wing talking point that this is what we want. I don’t. I want allies who see my humanity. That’s it.”  Continue reading →

Comment Of The Day: “Thank God It’s Friday” Ethics Warm-Up, 8/2/2019: “Non-Reciprocal Loyalty, Woke Virtue-Signaling, Reasonable Vigilantes, And Pseudo-Plagiarism.” #4

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

I held out this terrific Comment of the Day by Isaac for almost a week, waiting for just the right moment. The right moment occurred when I decided that having to write one more word about mass shootings, “the resistance” losing its mind, or the news media finally giving up any pretense of competence and objectivity would turn ME into a mass shooter. The topic here is hip-hop and “beat-jacking,” of which I previously knew nothing.

Here is Isaac’s Comment of the Day on #4 in “Thank God It’s Friday” Ethics Warm-Up, 8/2/2019: Non-Reciprocal Loyalty, Woke Virtue-Signaling, Reasonable Vigilantes, And Pseudo-Plagiarism“:

Intentionally appropriating someone else’s song and adapting it, without permission from the original artist, I think would be considered unethical. In hip hop parlance this is “jacking,” “beat jacking” or “biting” and is considered okay by no one, even though it happens all the time. Hip hop history is filled with drama and fighting over stolen beats and songs. But where, if anywhere, the law needs to come in on this is a mystery. It’s near impossible to prove what’s intentional and what isn’t.

The line between “beat jacking” and just “sampling” (the foundation of hip hop and a few other genres) can be blurry but there is a difference. Here’s a quick and dirty guide:

-If you pull an MC Hammer or Vanilla Ice and basically perform karaoke over someone else’s music, that is obvious beat-jacking and you face cultural rejection and/or retribution. It’s also FIRMLY illegal to do this now, and it was toeing the line when Hammer and Ice did it (Vanilla Ice was forced to pay up despite having slightly changed the famous bass line of “under pressure” for his lousy song.) The more well-known the original, stolen song is, the less likely your peers will tolerate this, legal or not. Continue reading →