Late Sunday Ethics Catch-Up, 6/16/19: Last Straws, Suspicious CPR, Saving King, And “When They See Us”

/ Jack Marshall

 

Bet you gave up on me, didn’t you!

1. Unforeseen consequences. Medical journal site BMJ notes,

“Bystanders may be concerned about performing CPR on a woman and removing clothing for defibrillator use, for fear of being accused of sexual assault. Further education around CPR in women and the use of female manikins may be the first step”.

Conservative feminist blogger Amy Alkon ,says, archly,

If I’m unconscious, I give my permission for a total stranger to engage in that sexy-wexy act of vigorous CPR….Are there really pervos out there marching the streets waiting for somebody to pass out from cardiac arrest so they can cop a feel?

That’s not the right question, though.

The right question is,

“Are there really vicious, toxic-masculinity, rape-culture obsessed, anti-male #MeTo-ers who would gladly accuse a male Good Samaritan of sexually molesting an unconscious woman to advance an agenda?”

Absolutely.

2. Nice. How woke policies let the assholes in society rule our lives.

The rest of the story (as Paul Harvey would say),

Near my neighborhood, Washington, D.C. sends out environmental inspectors to guarantee that restaurants are not handing out the Earth-destroying straws. Santa Barbara passed an ordinance that decrees that a second infraction of the law could result in a maximum fine of $1,000 and up to six months in jail.

So many environmental regulations are made by people who care less about human beings than they do about abstract beliefs and virtue-signaling. Spare me the “ablest” crap. If someone requests a straw, you give it to them, and for a government that threatens waitresses and establishments for being kind and  accommodating threaten the planet as much as floating balls of plastic. At least.

[Pointer: Twitchy,  Ed Driscoll]

3. Article? What article? Here is the David Garrow  essay, “The Troubling Legacy of Martin Luther King.” which I wrote about here.

It concluded,

Come on, Pete Buttigieg! Let me see you thread this needle.  You said that the Democratic Party shouldn’t honor Thomas Jefferson. Explain why it should honor King. Go ahead, you’re supposed to be brilliant. Can you avoid choosing between #MeToo and Black Lives Matter?

So now its time to decide, you historical air-brushers, you public censors, you Soviet-style designators of non-persons, you grandstanding, virtue-signaling, arrogant, power-seeking presentists and statue-topplers. Your move. What do you want to do now?

What they want to do now is pretend the article doesn’t exist. I haven’t seen more than fleeting mentions of it in the news media since the Washington Post assembled a group of historians who were clearly more interested in attacking Garrow than in considering the implications of his research.

4. “When They See Us” ethics. I’m watching the Netflix real crime drama “When They See Us,” the dramatization of the Central Park Five fiasco. It tells the story of how five young African-American teens were wrongly convicted of a horrific rape and beating of a young woman in Central Park. The series is well cast, scripted and acted; it is also shot through with the politics of the writer/director, African-American civil rights activist Ava DuVernay, and pretty obviously, too. The five defendants are portrayed so positively that it strains credulity. The white D.A.,  Linda Fairstein, is portrayed (by newly minted college admissions scandal felon Felicity Huffman) as a racist, bullying, over-zealous prosecutor. The series even indulges in some gratuitous Trump-bashing.

It’s good television; I am pretty certain that it isn’t accurate  or fair. The series has an agenda, and real stories tend to be far grayer and more nuanced. Fairstein insists that it is full of fabrications; of course, she has her own agenda.

What is undeniably wrong, though, is that people are treating this work of historical fiction as literal fact. Fairstein, who has been thriving as a crime novelist, speaker and commentator, now has been dropped from  several corporate boards she sat on. Speaking engagements have been cancelled in response to the social media mobs; her publisher dropped Fairstein’s latest book. This is all based on her portrayal by an actress, based on the script and direction of of an activist who views the American justice system and prosecutors as intrinsically cruel and racist.

I have long felt that movies and dramatic presentations on TV and stage that portray portraying contemporary events involving living persons too frequently do terrible damage, confusing the public, spreading false narratives, and warping reputations and legacies. I’m only on episode two of “When They See Us,” but it seem to be a perfect illustration of the problem

 

17 thoughts on “Late Sunday Ethics Catch-Up, 6/16/19: Last Straws, Suspicious CPR, Saving King, And “When They See Us””

  2. So many environmental regulations are made by people who care less about human beings than they do about abstract beliefs and virtue-signaling. Spare me the “ablest” crap. If someone requests a straw, you give it to them, and for a government that threatens waitresses and establishments for being kind and accommodating threaten the planet as much as floating balls of plastic. At least.

    this whole straw ban craze was based on a flawed study by a nine-year-old kid.

    the more recent abortion ban craze has stronger roots in science.

    The five defendants are portrayed so positively that it strains credulity.

    Please elaborate further.

    The series even indulges in some gratuitous Trump-bashing.

    That is the true agenda.

    The ad which is alleged to be of Trump calling for the execution of the Central Park 5 does not even mention the Central Park Five, let alone their names.

    Reply

    • For example, the group of 30 teens allegedly “wilding” in the park are never shown doing anything illegal. One or two touch and mock a cyclist. It all looks like a charity walk through Central Park. All of the accused are portrayed as polite, caring, sensitive, nice. You can’t imagine any of them hurting a fly. None are defiant, angry, rebellious. The prosecutors and police talk about all the other crimes they committed besides the rape. We see none of these. Were there OTHER ‘wilding” groups of teens that night? Was this group the “good wilders”?The white police officers are far more menacing and thuggish than the kids, who are portrayed as choir boys throughout.

      Reply

        • An alternate point of view.

          https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/273968/central-park-5-were-murderous-thugs-john-perazzo

          Some additional pieces of evidence also demonstrate that the Central Park Five were very much involved in the attack against Miss Meili:

          While being driven to the police precinct shortly after his apprehension, Raymond Santana blurted out: “I had nothing to do with the rape. All I did was feel the woman’s tits.”
          Yusef Salaam told a detective who interviewed him: “I was there, but I didn’t rape her.”
          Kevin Richardson — whose underwear was stained with semen, grass, and dirt – told an acquaintance shortly after the attack: “We just raped somebody.”
          On April 20th, both Kevin Richardson and Raymond Santana independently brought investigators to the precise location where the previous night’s attack had occurred. Richardson, for his part, told the detective: “This is where we got her … where the raping occurred.”
          In the company of his father, Richardson told investigators that the source of several scratches on his neck had been the fingernails of a desperate Trisha Meili.
          When Kharey Wise on April 20th went with a detective and an Assistant District Attorney to the scene of the previous night’s attack, he said: “Damn, damn that’s a lot of blood. Damn, this is really bad, that’s a lot of blood…. I knew she was bleeding, but I didn’t know how bad she was. It was really dark. I couldn’t see how much blood there was at night.”
          Wise also told a detective that someone named “Rudy” had fondled the jogger’s breasts and stolen her Walkman. His knowledge about the existence of the Walkman was highly significant, for at that time, not even the police were yet aware that the jogger had been carrying such a device.
          Two of Wise’s friends testified that the day after the attack on Miss Meili, Wise had told them: “You heard about that woman that was beat up and raped in the park last night? That was us!”
          One of the numerous young people who were arrested for their participation in the various Central Park attacks of April 19th stated, on videotape, that he had heard Raymond Santana and another boy laughing about “how they ‘made a woman bleed.’”

          Aside from portraying the American criminal-justice system — and American society generally — as perpetual breeding grounds for white racism, Ava DuVernay’s When They See Us has yet one more noteworthy objective: to depict Donald Trump as a reprehensible racist who, like the country at large, was intent on satisfying his own personal hunger for a proverbial pound of black and brown flesh. At the time of the Central Park jogger attack, Trump, then in his early forties, spent $85,000 to purchase full-page ads in four of New York’s daily newspapers, wherein he:

          characterized the type of violent criminals who were turning New York City into a veritable killing field, as “crazed misfits”;
          urged New York State to “bring back the death penalty”;
          lamented that New York’s “white, black, Hispanic and Asian” families were now unable to enjoy evening walks in Central Park”;
          and said, “I no longer want to understand [violent criminals’] anger. I want them to understand our anger…. They should be forced to suffer and, when they kill, they should be executed for their crimes.”
          To normal people, those sentiments very ably convey a moral sense of justice and a concern for the well-being of all law-abiding citizens, whatever their color. But Ava DuVernay’s racist propaganda film targeting whites, characterizes them as “disgusting” expressions of anti-black racism. DuVernay’s interpretation of Trump’s words, along with her whitewashing of the Central Park Five’s horrific crimes, demonstrate just how morally sick the modern Left has become.

          Reply

  4. Whenever watching Netflix, my wife and I stop watching the program when our propaganda meter goes off. These days it goes off so often we almost always opt for British produced films and programs. This, however, is far from a guarantee.

    We even stopped watching NCIS reruns at season 14 when all things American became bad, except political correctness and the vaunted Obama’s.

    Reply

  5. #4. “treating this work of historical fiction as literal fact.”
    I call this the “JFK Effect;” I can’t count the hours I have spend arguing that Oliver Stone DID NOT stick to the facts and indeed wove a web of every existing conspiracy (save alien involvement) in his film and permanently muddied the waters concerning the assassination. Some people accept it as gospel.
    Concerning the “Central Park Five” specifically, I followed this case out of professional curiosity since I was a criminal investigator at the time of the incident. I agree on the overly positive portrayal of the defendants in that several of them were known to be troublemakers with histories of violence. At least some of the Five were also convicted of the robbery and assault of a male victim in the park that same night, if I remember correctly.
    You will hear no defense from me of the way the investigation was conducted, and bad investigations too often “taint the well” for any future efforts to discover the whole truth. While the DNA evidence eventually identified the de facto rapist, it did not exonerate the rest from having participated in the assault, but as we all know, the state has to meet the burden of proof, not vice versa. The unrelenting pressure from the media and the public must have factored in the decision to proceed with this completely circumstantial case. At the time I was really surprised when they got a guilty verdict, especially from a NYC jury.
    As background to the Central Park assaults, this occurred in a period of high violent crime and declining police presence in NYC, and was prior to Police Commissioner Ray Kelley and his “Safe Streets” program that restored some much-needed order to the city’s parks and public spaces. Multiple assaults and robberies were reported in the park that night. If you listen to police radio broadcasts from that night, it seems as though the police initially had no presence inside the park and no idea what was going on there until citizens began to report. This is foreign to my ideas of effective police crime prevention strategy.
    The historical fiction miniseries definitely has an agenda; I’m just surprised they didn’t use the “based on true events” dodge and reset the whole thing in a southern city where, you know, we’re all racists and white supremacists.

    Reply

  6. 1. A resounding YES, especially if the complainant stands to benefit from making the accusation or hates the accused. That’s why there are some women I wouldn’t spit on if they were on fire. No good deed goes unpunished.

    2. No surprise, especially not in the liberal cities. If restaurants will throw out members of the administration or paying customers wearing the wrong hat, then it should come as no surprise that they’ll worry too much about straws hurting the environment and not much at all about customer service. Give me a good old-fashioned Greek diner or family-owned ethnic restaurant where all that crap never passes the door, and, at least in PA, neither do gay couples if the owner says no (the PA civil rights statute mirrors the Federal one, and doesn’t cover orientation).

    3. Of course it doesn’t. But the fact that Trump asked his chief of staff to leave a meeting due to a coughing spell is front-page news.

    4. Gee, no surprise. Stuff like that’s as phony as “Higher Learning” where harassed white kid Remy (ironically played by Jewish actor Michael Rapaport) quickly becomes a bumbling, simplistic racist villain and thuggish Malik (Omar Epps) wins every fight and is shown as fully justified every time he and his homies beat the shit out of someone.

    Reply

  7. 3. SOP for the left: If it makes us look bad, just bury it. See, eg. Virginia Democratic elected officials who are still in office despite black face and rape allegations. All quiet on that front. MLK? What controversy? Works every time. As I predicted.

    Reply

    • Americans are noticing. Note the nationwide Moveon.org ‘Impeach’ rallies (“in 120 cities!”) had ‘dozens’ of participants.

      The left is their own worst enemy.

      Reply

  8. #3; I worked on a new blog post over the weekend, The Hidden Mr. Hyde, and I finished it a little while ago, here’s two quotes.

    “If the behavior that King exhibited in the FBI tapes is confirmed, and it likely will be confirmed, then King was a depraved sleazebag and a moral hypocrite of epic proportions.”

    Now directly related to what Jack wrote above, “What they want to do now is pretend the article doesn’t exist. I haven’t seen more than fleeting mentions of it in the news media since the Washington Post assembled a group of historians who were clearly more interested in attacking Garrow than in considering the implications of his research.”

    “Martin Luther King Jr. is getting the King’s Pass, #11 on the list of Unethical Rationalizations and Misconceptions, because;
    • Glaringly open hypocrisy. It’s fine to attack those that are considered right of the political divide but not those considered left of the political divide.

    • King is an honored part of the protected tribe of black people and any attacks against his character would be considered outright heresy.

    • People are scared to death of public retaliation from irrational 21st century social justice warriors; even social justice warriors are scared of being eaten by their own.”

    Reply

  10. “Are there really vicious, toxic-masculinity, rape-culture obsessed, anti-male #MeTo-ers who would gladly accuse a male Good Samaritan of sexually molesting an unconscious woman to advance an agenda?”

    Absolutely.

    How about;

    Are there really vicious, toxic-masculinity, rape-culture obsessed, anti-male #MeTo-ers who would gladly set up someone they dislike so they could accuse him of sexually molesting an unconscious woman and video the whole thing then smear him, get him thrown in jail, and sue him just to prove their bias that all men are pigs?

    Absolutely!

    Reply

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