Awash with shame for forgetting D-Day yesterday…

I don’t know about you, but for me the days merge into each other of late. I didn’t realize that I had snubbed D-Day until almost midnight. My Dad used to remind me that my existence may have been due to his unexpected inability to participate in the invasion: he had been assigned as an observer, which sounded scary to me, but “luckily” the idiot who blew himself and my dad’s foot up with a live hand grenade took him off the beaches.

1. I wonder...are the same PR hacks who wrote all of the “we’re all in this together? messages about the Wuhan lockdown the ones responsible for the smarmy “black lives matter” messages various companies are putting out?

Yesterday I was watching a movie on Vice, and the CEO kept interrupting the film to blather on about social justice. He is going to host a special, and among the guests—Trayvon Martin’s mother! That tells me all I need to know about the program. Outside of the false narrative constructed around it, the Zimmerman-Martin affair holds no enlightenment about systemic racism, police, or anything else useful, other than being a fine example of how the news media and politicians exploit race whenever they can.

The ethical values breached are honesty, responsibility, and citizenship.

2. Ann Althouse posted this sign from her neighborhood (Madison, Wisconsin).

Yeah, that attitude will really assist the battle against “systemic racism.” Nothing builds racial trust like one race telling the other that there are some opinions it can’t express because of their race.

These are the people that the NFL, Uber, BestBuy and so many other businesses and institutions are supporting.

The ethical value being ignored are trust and integrity.

3. From the “This will work out well” files: NYC Mayor De Blasio tweeted at 11:20 a.m. this morning: “This morning we committed to move resources from the NYPD to youth and social services as part of our City’s budget. Our young people need to be reached, not policed. We can do this AND keep our city safe.”

Young people don’t need to be policed! That will come as welcome news to social scientists and criminologists who have complied statistics on the demography of urban crime. Like so many of his ideological tilt, De Blasio continues to believe that insisting that a utopian, progressive-talking point, counter-reality measure will work is enough to ensure it will.

It should be fun watching the inevitable results of the lesson to come, at least for those of us not living in New York City. Well, except for all the deaths, of course…

The ethics issues here are competence and responsibility.

4. The latest false media narrative…and yet another deployment of Rationalization #64, Yoo’s Rationalization, or “It isn’t what it is”…is nicely encapsulated by this BBC headline: “27 police officers injured during largely peaceful anti-racism protests in London.”

I am seeing the same dishonesty all over the news media and in the propaganda of various pundits: the protests have been “mostly” or “largely” peaceful. It is part of the effort to partition the protests from the arson, violence , looting and rioting that have arisen out of the protests, and, as is so much else in recent weeks, it is a bet that the public is really, really stupid. Peaceful protests don’t result in 27 police officers being injured, by definition. Peaceful protests do not require intervention by police officers and the National Guard. It is estimated that looting and property damage in New York alone from these “mostly peaceful” protests will be many millions of dollars. Peaceful protests do not result in millions of dollars of property damage.

I guess the memo went out, but all this kind of reporting does is further expose the media’s addiction to deception and fake news.

In a related #64 development, London’s mayor tweeted this…

AFTER approving a city-wide George Floyd protest that looked like this:

Those English! Such great senses of humor!

The ethics values missing here are competence, responsibility, integrity and honesty, and also taking care to not make citizens think their fates are in the hands of a moron.

5.  Now this is an op-ed New York Times employees approve of...You will recall that an op-ed last week by a U.S. Senator, calling for the use of troops to maintain peaceful protests in riot scarred cities, sparked a mass objection by Times staff, leading to an apology from management and promises to hew more closely to favored progressive agendas in  future choices of opinion pieces. Today, I see that my Times edition includes this measured op-ed by a black writer named Chad Sanders. It begins with paranoia: “My book is coming out in a few months, and I don’t know if I’m going to be alive to see it, because I’m a black man…As a black man, what I actually feel — constantly — is the fear of death; the fear that when I go for my morning stroll through Central Park or to 7-Eleven for an AriZona Iced Tea, I won’t make it back home. I fear I won’t get to celebrate my parents’ 40th anniversary; I won’t get to add money to my nephew’s brokerage account on his third birthday; I won’t get to take my partner out dancing in her favorite Bed-Stuy bars.”

Yes, just like the Jews in Nazi Germany, Chad. Better find a secret attic to hide out in until the heat is off.

As Chad explains his terror, he cites Emmet Till, George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and Trayvon Martin. Actually, Chad, it’s pretty easy not to meet the fates of any of these people. Don’t go back in time to 1955 Mississippi if you don’t want to be lynched like Emmit Till.  Try to avoid the million-to-one odds of being the victim of a mistaken no-knock search warrant like Taylor, who was killed in the crossfire when her boyfriend, not unreasonably, assumed it was a home invasion and opened fire on police. These botched police searches are rare (but not rare enough) and they have cost both white and black lives over the years. Being black doesn’t increase the chances that police will make a mistake.

Not quite as easy as avoiding Till’s fate, but still pretty easy, is avoiding what happened to Trayvon Martin. That would involve not jumping a Hispanic man with a gun, and getting shot in self-defense while trying to beat his brains in.

Chad’s op-ed ends with recommendations to white friends who want to endear themselves to him, including these:

• Money: To funds that pay legal fees for black people who are unjustly arrested, imprisoned or killed or to black politicians running for office.

• Texts: To your relatives and loved ones telling them you will not be visiting them or answering phone calls until they take significant action in supporting black lives either through protest or financial contributions.

Interesting! How would one know which black people have been unjustly arrested or imprisoned? Presumably all of them, right, Chad? Meanwhile, Chad’s position is that anyone who doesn’t support his causes should be told that they aren’t worthy of continued association with friends and loved ones.

That, to the Times staff, is a responsible, reasonable op-ed.

I don’t know how many basic ethical values such a position breaches. It is, however, a perfect illustration of how bias makes you stupid.