Today I received two comments from an aspiring participant here called “snowflake.” They are really a single comment submitted in two installments. The topic was this post, about the weenie professor who grovelled an apology for daring to show Sir Lawrence Olivier’s screen performance of “Othello” in a class for discussion purposes.
Here is the comment:
Somehow, these just don’t indicate a clear comprehension of the religious holiday celebrating a humble birth in a manger, or the cultural holiday celebrating compassion, kindness, love, mercy and reverence for all life….
Come to think of it, I support capital punishment. Maybe there’s a market for an ornament featuring this image:
Why not?
Wow. Here I was expecting to be reading nasty post-mortems on the despicable Harry Reid before his corpse was cold, and instead a wave of negative punditry appeared about, of all people, revered Desmond Tutu, whose body is only slightly cooler. The controversy? Nobody doubts that he played a major role in ridding South Africa of apartheid. In 1984, he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize (whatever that’s worth). However, as the Times of Israel sees it, “underneath the godlike humble appearance was an insidious anti-Semite and anti-Israel vein that throbbed and surfaced in writings, public speaking, and conversation.”
In the U.S., the opposition to honoring Tutu was joined by lawyer and Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz, who told Fox News that by the standards the U.S. was now holding its metallic and rock honorees to, Tutu is unworthy. He said on the air,
The world is mourning Bishop Tutu, who just died the other day. Can I remind the world that although he did some good things, a lot of good things on apartheid, the man was a rampant anti-Semite and bigot?…When we’re tearing down statues of Jefferson and Lincoln and Washington, let’s not build statues to a deeply, deeply flawed man like Bishop Tutu. Let’s make sure that history remembers both the goods he did and the awful, awful bads that he did as well….He didn’t talk about the Israel lobby, he talked about the Jewish lobby. He minimized the suffering of Jews during the Holocaust. He said that getting killed in gas chambers was an easy death compared to apartheid. He said that Jews claimed a monopoly on the Holocaust. He demanded that Jews forgive the Nazis for killing them…[Tutu] encouraged others to have similar views and because he was so influential, he became the most influential anti-Semite of our time…The bottom line is that at a time when people are reckoning with the careers, of people with mixed legacies, whether it be Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, George Washington, and others, we have to include in a reckoning of Tutu his evil, bigotry against Jews, which has existed for many, many, many years.
I don’t care to dispute the fairness or accuracy of the case that Tutu was an anti-Semite. His worshipers are already doing that; I note that Wikipedia, which, like every other information source today, just can’t play it straight, shaded its article about Tutu this week to note his support for the Palestinians while adding that he professed a “simultaneous belief in Israel’s right to exist.” (The two positions are impossible to hold “simultaneously.”) It doesn’t matter; for the purposes of the ethical analysis, I will accept that Tutu was as much of an anti-Semite as Dershowitz says. Continue reading
Part I described the cowardly and pandering rationale for a New York elementary school to banish “Jingle Bells” from its curriculum, and why the cultural and political issue underlying the move is more important than the song itself.
Here is the response of the Brighton Central School District Superintendent, Kevin McGowan, in response to media inquiries about the decision. In the interests of efficiency, I will interweave my commentary with his statement, in bold.
Those in charge of Council Rock Elementary School in Brighton, New York have decided that the school won’t include “Jingle Bells” in its music curriculum and holiday events any more because of the song’s possible connection racist minstrel shows and slavery. They are utter fools, but more importantly they carry an unethical social and intellectual malady that must be addressed and snuffed out if democracy, free thinking and reason are to survive in the United States of America.
Too strong? I don’t think so. I do not even know where Brighton, New York is (though I know Brighton, Massachusetts well) and I would feel no great loss if I never had to listen to “Jingle Bells” and its hack second verse (“Upsot?”) again for the rest of my life. But the “Jingle Bell” censors and and their like carry a fearful, dim-witted determination to cauterize the variety, history and joy out of life in teensy-weensy slices that nobody sane feels are worth the trouble to fight about. They will destroy our culture and the richness of life if they aren’t stopped. The “Jingle Bells” idiocy is as good a place to make a stand as any.
I’m always a bit depressed in the period between Christmas and New Years, and scenes like the one above, which have proliferated in Alexandria, don’t help. It looks like a massacre has occurred, not that I haven’t been tempted to rub out some of the more horrible inflatable lawn displays, like the 25 foot penguin, the Christmas Imperial Walkers (I do NOT understand), and especially the giant Mickey Mouse in a Santa suit that looms across the street and has embarrassed the entire neighborhood. There is clearly no generally accepted ethical standard requiring neighbors to make certain their Christmas displays are, if not artistic, aesthetically pleasing, dignified or restrained, at least not eyesores.
1. I’m beginning to wonder…if the guilty verdict rendered against Kim Potter might not be reversed after all, as it should be. If the current feeling is that Minnesota judges don’t have the guts to buck the mob by addressing the injustice in this case, the mob’s consensus seems to be weakening. The fact that the black officer who deliberately shot and killed an unarmed January 6 rioter has faced no punishment, never mind imprisonment, has been noted extensively, and I was shocked this morning to see two letters published in the New York Times declaring Potter’s conviction to be unjust. One made the point, which has come up in Ethics Alarms comment threads, about the contrast between how Potter’s fatal mistake was treated and how deadly errors by doctors and nurses are virtually never the object of criminal prosecution. Continue reading
This story out of Muskeegee County, Oklahoma, seems too good to be true. I hope it is true. It is a measure of how much distrust the news media has engendered that such a story is impossible to accept without doubt today. Here, however, is the story we are being told.
Davyon Johnson, 11 years-old, was near the water fountain at his school on December 9 when he heard a seventh-grade boy gasp, “I’m choking! I’m choking!” The kid had used his mouth to open a water bottle and the cap had popped down his throat. Davyon, who had learned the Heimlich maneuver off of YouTube (his uncle is an emergency med tech, which Dayvon says he also aspires to be), began applying it to the older boy. On the third squeeze to the boy’s abdomen, the cap flew out.
Later that evening, when his mother was driving with Davyon on the way to an evening church service, the car passed a house that had some smoke billowing out of it. Ms. Johnson says that Davyon persuaded her to turn the vehicle around and check. They saw small fire near the back of the house, and cars outside that indicated that there might be people in the house who may not have been aware of the fire. Davyon’s mom honked her horn and called 911. Davyon got out of the car and knocked on the door.
Five people in the house stepped outside; they had not been aware of the fire. They ran, leaving an elderly woman with a walker struggling to leave the burning home on her own. (Nice.) Davyon helped her along and led her to the truck that the rest had climbed into.
When he was 8 years old, Davyon said later, he watched his father enter a burning apartment complex to make sure everyone was safe. Davyon’s father died last summer.
The Muskogee Police Department and Muskogee County Sheriff’s Office presented Davyon with a certificate on December 15 in recognition of his big day of community service. According to media accounts, the boy claims to not understand why everyone is making such a big deal over him doing what he calls “the right thing.” ‘I don’t want everyone to pay attention to me. I kind of did what I was supposed to do,” he was quoted as telling a teacher.
Here’s the kicker, which depending on how cynical you have become, will either get you choked up or make you thing, “Oh, come on!” The New York Times reports that Davyon doesn’t tell people about his recent burst of heroism unless he’s asked, and even then relates a simple, straightforward account.
“But there was one person he did want to tell,” says the Times. “One morning this month, he put on his sneakers and gray hoodie and went to the cemetery to see his father. He squatted, picked at the dirt and started to tell the stories, beginning with the scene at the water fountain.”
Luckily, a newspaper photographer just happened to be passing by…
__________________________
Source: New York Times
1. Good!
2. Why don’t they train police to understand that so cases like this aren’t necessary?
Artemas Buford Johnson was arrested when he drove past a Seattle Police Department officer, shouted “Fuck the police!” and then made a shooting gesture using his fingers. In its decision in State v. Buford-Johnson, yesterday, a unanimous ruling by the Washington Court of Appeals with Judge Lori Smith joined by Judge Bill Bowman and Acting Chief Judge Beth Andrus held that the arrest was unconstitutional.
Of course it was. The opinion stated in part, Continue reading
1. On second thought, who needs work? The United States has been a nation that embraced work as a value and a mark of character as no other. Naturally, this core value has been under assault from the Left as part of its cultural overhaul strategy. The pandemic created an opining that has been brilliantly exploited politically, leading to a large part of the work force now unwilling to work. The Congressional Progressive Caucus, the biggest bloc of liberal lawmakers in Congress, has endorsed a bill proposed by Rep. Mark Takano, D-Calif., which would seek to implement a four-day workweek. Americans work far more than people in most other affluent countries, and we also produce more without using, as some countries do that I might mention, slave labor. But the work ethic is weakening.
The anti-work ethic is the goal on one of Reddit’s fastest growing sites — r/antiwork. The subreddit is “for those who want to end work, are curious about ending work, [and] want to get the most out of a work-free life.” It is up to 1.4 million members, ranking among the top subscribed-to subreddits.
Members discuss tactics workers can use to slack off, cheat, sabotage, and steal from their employers. You would learn there, for example, that April 15th is “Steal Something From Work Day.” [Pointer and source: Linking and Thinking on Education]
2. Observations on the Gallup Poll on public approval of Federal leaders (You can find the poll here).
It is largely forgotten now, but the Brandon in “Let’s Go Brandon!” is NASCAR driver Brandon Brown. It was he who was being interviewed by NBC sports reporter Kelli Stavast at a NASCAR event October 2 when the then-popular “Fuck Joe Biden!” chant began to drown out the exchange. Stavast, thinking too quickly for her own good and not properly mindful of the falling credibility and trust of her profession, decided to try to cover for the crowd, NASCAR, or the President and commented that the NASCAR spectators were chanting “Let’s go, Brandon!,” which they clearly were not.
Thus a slur, a joke, a catch-phrase and a rebuke was born, one that has not only not faded, but that appears to be gaining in frequency and legend after nearly three months. And who has been harmed by the chant, other than civil discourse, respect for the office of the President, and our political culture?
Why Brandon himself, that’s who, though he is the one blameless party in the whole chain of events. The chant, he says, has killed his prospects of signing sponsorship deals, costing him untold thousands in future income.
Ethics Alarms 