Actually, when we first heard of David Leavitt, a gaming writer with delusions of grandeur, the Ethics Alarms verdict was not that he was an ethics villain, because the particular misconduct that sparked that 2020 post wasn’t quite dastardly enough (or maybe I was in a charitable mood). That was after he had found a mislabeled electric toothbrush (priced at $0.01 rather than $100) at Target, and when the checkout employee refused to sell the item at what was obviously an erroneous price and the store manager backed up the clerk, David went on a full-bore campaign of vengeance on Target.
“This [Target] manager Tori is not honoring the price of their items per Massachusetts law,” tweeted Leavitt, including the young manager’s photo. He called the police on the manager, and said he was prepared to take her and the store to court. Recognizing an ethically-dead progressive determined to harass evil corporations, disgusted observers started a GoFundMe page that raised $28,000 to cover the victimized manager’s inconvenience. The law Leavitt cited but never bothered to check in fact says that an obvious pricing error, one that qualifies as “gross,” isn’t enforceable. I wrote in part:
Leavitt is being an asshole, in technical terms. He knows the price posted was a mistake. A decent, fair, rational citizen would accept that, alert the store that it needs to fix the label, and stop at that. Maybe such a citizen will get some kind a reward from the store (this once happened to me). Instead, this epic jerk goes, in the immortal words of Marsellus Wallace in “Pulp Fiction,” “Medieval on Target’s ass,” and its poor manager too. His rationalization for his appalling behavior, and this is rich, is that he can’t afford to go to the dentist, so, presumably, he believes this entitles him to steal an electric toothbrush from Target…
I also wrote that I almost felt sorry for David because he had made a national fool of himself. I don’t feel sorry for him after his latest example of ethics rot. He obviously learned nothing, and indeed has decided to step a notch, several, in fact, from asshole to Ethics Villain.
Behold!
After Virginia 12th Senate District candidate Tina Ramirez. On Columbus Day, after Ramirez tweeted that she was celebrating the discovery of the New World, Ramirez tweeted her, “Why are you celebrating torture, rape, murder, and enslavement?” One is wise to ignore trolling assholes on social media, but be that as it may, Tina tweeted back,
So Leavitt, being who and what he is, decided to reply to his 331,000+ followers, all of whom are at least assholes by definition, and quite probably morons as well, “Can someone please call child care services on Tina Ramirez who’s teaching her child to be a racist?” He followed this now typical Leftist response to someone who dares to disagree with progressive edicts with the tweet,
What a terrible human being. But we knew that…we just didn’t know how terrible. And imagine: thousands and thousands of Twitter users hang on his every word. Notice also that his nauseating conduct didn’t violate any of Twitter’s “standards.”
Hurry up, Elon…
__________________
Pointer: Willem Reese
[Notice of Correction: I erroneously credited the tip to JutGory, who is also a frequent and much appreciated source of potential posts. My mistake. Delirium and excruciating pain is no excuse…]
Ethics Alarms 
I wonder if Leavette knows that the Cherokee took their own African slaves with them on the Trail of Tears. From my research approximately 20% of the Cherokee population were black slaves. Even in the 21st century the Cherokee got the their Supreme Court to deny the descendants of those slaves the rights and privileges of being a member of the Cherokee nation.
There is no doubt that Columbus was not a beneficent conqueror but neither were any other conquerors until George Marshall rebuilt the nations that were once the Axis powers.
History is repeat with the glorification of those who are to be favored. We have been taught that native Americans were peace loving peoples living in harmony with nature yet the real history of the Illinois, Iroquois, Apache and Comanche used violence to establish manhood. The term “brave” was a title given to the member who brings back slaves or scalps. The eastern tribes Cherokee, Seminole and others who integrated well with the colonists rapidly adopted the notion of chattel slavery.
The notion that we don’t give balance in our historical recollections has some merit but the motivation for adding the bad to Europeans and colonial powers is suspect when those same people are willing to ignore the violence, and indifference to human life perpetrated by their favored groups.
I attribute the lack of complete balance of the good and bad results from too little time and interest in teaching and learning history. As a result, the focus of the favored’s history will be on the good works while the disfavored will more likely to have zero redeeming value.
We can truthfully claim that indigenous peoples day celebrates slave holding societies. Other than helping Pilgrims initially, which is questionable, what major contributions are attributed to our indigenous people? Why do they rate a day of honor? When it comes to the Atlantic slave trade we always forget that those sold into bondage were captured not by Europeans but but other Black Africans. So why do we lay the blame only on one racial group? Because it fits the narrative of victimization.
Columbus was no saint but on balance his contributions to humanity dwarf those of so many other whose negative behaviors and acts directed at the conquered were just as vicious.
I am so tired of people who are not historians whose work was an objective study of the primary subject matter.
I would challenge anyone to name one example of “peaceful, kind exploration and settlement” of new lands.
Arrrrgghh, sorry, I didn’t think you were going to use this one (or that Jut had sent it to you first), so I dropped it into the “Emergency Forum” yesterday. You covered it more thoroughly, of course 😉
Actually, I don’t think I was the one who sent it.
-Jut
I’m not well. (I’ll check and fix it.)
For what it’s worth, I had to double-check myself.
-Jut
FWIW on the toothbrush thing, I’ve seen some (maybe more familiar with retail operations) claim that the $0.01 tag on the stand holding a non-functional example of the toothbrush and prominently labeled “DISPLAY” was just part of a restocking system aid, and not intended to be a price tag. Don’t know if that’s true; seems a careless & confusing thing to do.
For those that condemn Columbus by calling him all sorts of names, they should research truer accounts of his interaction with the natives. He was actually friendly with one of the more powerful chiefs and actually hung two of his men for transgressions against the tribes women.
Also, when this chief went to war with a rival chief and was victorious, he asked Columbus to take a some of survivors back to Europe, likely to be sold into slavery. This is only a brief accounting of Columbus is the new world, and there is much more for those who may be interested.
By today’s standards Columbus would be considered a villain, but he was a man for his time. It is totally unethical to judge ANY historical figure by contemporary standards. I don’t see any of the woke mob condemning the Aztecs for committing ritual slaughter on an industrial scale. Oh yeah, the Aztecs weren’t White, so they get a pass.
BTW. If they want to have an indigenous people’s day, by all means have one. But it doesn’t need to usurp Columbus day.
Ed
I was going to mention the Meso-American culture of Teotihuacan. When it comes to indifference to human life Columbus was a piker compared to these Pre-Columbian societies. This stemmed from their belief that life was not a gift from the gods but actually stolen from them when they escaped from the underworld which is how they believe their race was born. Human beings were little more than tools to be exploited for the upper classes.
There really isn’t that much to celebrate with regard to pre-columbian indigenous peoples. In the same 6000 years that the Europeans had, most of them got no farther than the New Stone Age. It should be noted that horses did not exist in the New World until the Spanish brought them, so the Plains Indians were not much more than nomads who moved around carrying all their belongings on skins stretched between sticks. The Aztecs and the Incas were more advanced in that they actually had built permanent settlements, but the Mayan civilization had already reached its peak and collapsed, as if an electric plug had been pulled. For whatever reason, the Eastern woodlands Indians remained the most primitive of the race in many ways. Many of their practices, such as Aztec human sacrifice, Eastern woodlands cannibalism, and planes Indians deliberate torture as a rite of passage to manhood, would appear barbaric to Europeans, even to the Spanish, who didn’t exactly treat non-Christians well, because these brutalities were done in the name of pagan deities. To christians, who believe that humanity was saved by the blood of their God, the idea of gods who fed on the blood of their people was extremely repulsive. That’s also partly why when the British arrived in India they came down very hard on the Hindus, but let’s not get too far afield. In the same 6000 years the Europeans had developed and/or perfected gunpowder, paper, writing, monotheism, navigation, the ocean going vessel, steel forging, combined arms fighting, and a whole host of other improvements. They had also reached the point where they were able to decisively defeat non-Christian civilizations. Right before Columbus set sail is when the Spanish finally decisively through the Moors out of Spain, and the Portuguese had done it 200 years earlier (they were already working on an overseas Empire closer to home, and that’s why King Joao II, aka the perfect prince, turned Columbus down when he sought funding). Everyone also talks about how the Mongol invasion of Europe in the middle 1200s was a near run thing in which the completely outclassed Europeans were only saved because the Mongol emperor died and the prince’s had to return to elect a new one. Almost no one talks about how the Mongols tried for Europe again a generation later and were decisively smashed by the Polish, Hungarians, and Germans, who had learned a thing or three about disciplined armored warfare, fortifications, and a few other things in the meantime. The Portuguese were soon to smash the Arabs and Indians at Diu and conquer the Indian Ocean, and before 100 years had passed, the Turks would be smashed at Malta and at Lepanto, ending the only real rival to Europe. It should come as no surprise that nations who had defeated other nations somewhat on the same level would dismiss these much more primitive and barbaric peoples and have a relatively easy time conquering them. This is just how history goes.
Now, speaking of this Leavitt guy, has anyone here actually been on his Twitter page? I have, and it took me exactly 45 seconds to get my fill of him and his thinking, if it can be called that. His last few posts consist of gloating over the January 6 hearings, repetition of “trans rights are human rights,” either to make sure everyone who stops by his page casually knows where he stands or to make sure his readers don’t forget it for even a minute, because it’s just THAT important, and telling various conservative members of Congress to go fuck themselves, at least once over a warning from Twitter to review what he was tweeting, and then mockingly saying he had thought it through and was sure Marjorie Taylor Greene should go fuck herself.
Putting it bluntly, this guy is another one of those frankly rare folks who is trying to make a living out of being an asshole. Few manage it, and those who do either have enough smart or commonsense appeal to outweigh (at least to some) their jerkassery (George Carlin), are buoyed along by the like-minded unless and until they cross a line (Ted Rall), or are bottom-feeders (Dan Savage). This guy is at best the latter, and not very good at it. You can only tell so many people to perform an anatomically impossible sex act on themselves before it gets old and loses its impact, You can only directly attack others so many times before most people start rolling their eyes and someone finally counterattacks. Apparently this jerk hasn’t learned that yet.
Didn’t Aztec brutality play a part in their eventual undoing by causing the tribes they had victimized to side with the Spanish to help bring them down? Of course, that wouldn’t be the only time that one group of “peaceful natives” in the Americas teamed up with the technically advanced invaders against a rival tribe.
In spite of his puffery, Leavitt appears to be a lowly clerk at a Marshalls dept. store, as related regarding this other incident: https://tbdailynews.com/david-leavitt-confronted-by-mcdonalds-employee-while-working-job-at-marshalls-after-shaming-her-boss-for-not-refilling-days-old-cup/
I would bet many of his followers (who are not just blocks of purchased fake “fans”) are just there to watch him beclown himself. He sure gets raked a lot in the Twitter comments.
He is definitely a candidate for the Southeast Asian geography lesson.