Month: January 2023

Ivan Provorov, The Sequel: The New York Rangers Score A “Bite Me!”

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

If I had to guess where a major stand against LGBTQ+ bullying would occur, professional hockey would not have been among the candidates. All it takes, though, is a leader. In an earlier post, Ethics Alarms awarded an Ethics Hero designation and the first “Bite Me!” award to Ivan Provorov, the Philadelphia Flyers defenseman who refused to wear a “Pride”-themed warmup jersey as mandated by the team and the NHL. He knew he would be pilloried for not grovelling to the LGBTQ mob, but stood firm. He said, in effect, to those dictating which causes he must support, “Bite me!”

Now an entire NHL team, emboldened by his integrity, has followed Proverov’s lead. The New York Rangers declined to wear their “rainbow”practice jerseys prior to a home game against the Vegas Golden Knights on January 27th, which had been designated “Pride Night.” The team’s promotions had promised that the players would, but they apparently decided that they were not going to be the organization’s cynical billboards. Not wearing the jerseys does not, as some claimed, constitute a rejection of the LGBTQ+ cause. It is a rejection of forced political or social expression.

The Rangers had no right to promise a public endorsement of any particular cause by the individual players. The players had no obligation to rescue the team from an unethical and irresponsible promise that amounted to false advertising. The team still “prided” the night like crazy: it announced a charitable donation to a group that supports homeless LGBTQ+ youth, Madison Square Garden was illuminated in rainbow lights during the game. Broadway star Michael James Scott, openly gay, sang the national anthem. Andre Thomas, the co-chair of NYC Pride and Heritage of Pride, took part in the ceremonial puck drop. Fans received a Pride-themed fanny pack, while the pinwheel ceiling and panels on the outside of the Garden were illuminated in the rainbow colors.

Continue reading →

Serious Ethics Question: How Can The New York Times Defend Employing Mara Gay?

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

I guess there’s an easy answer: she’s female, she’s black, and the fact that she’s an anti-white, race-baiting bigot who isn’t very bright isn’t outweighed by those things because diversity. If that’s the best excuse the Times has, then we should all agree that its claim to being a responsible news source, never mind the creme de la creme it purports to be, if it was ever true, is no longer.

Gay regularly bloviates on MSNBC, where the standards for fairness, objectivity and accuracy are irrelevant, like a laser-pointer is to a snail. There her manifest bias and cognitive flaws don’t matter much: anyone who watches that network doesn’t want information, but partisan, emotional, red-meat hate, and Facts Don’t Matter.  Still, a Times writer introduced as a Times writer is representing the Times in public. How can the paper allow her to make the “Gray Lady” appear to be a den of hacks?

I guess because that’s what it is now.

I’ve only used the Mara Gay tag twice. but she’s shown up in many posts, never well. Check them out: it’s either funny or depressing. I liked the time in 2020 when Mara ridiculed how much money Micheal Bloomberg reportedly spent on campaign ads when he was trying to take the Democratic Presidential nomination. “Somebody tweeted recently that actually with the money that he spent, he could have given every American a million dollars,” Gay said on MSNBC (or course). “I’ve got it. Let’s put it on the screen,” said bone-headed  anchor Brian Williams. Williams then read the tweet: “Bloomberg spent $500 million on ads. The U.S. Population, 327 million. He could have given each American $1 million and have had lunch money left over.”  Morons. 500 million dollars divided by 327 million people is about a dollar and 56 cents. Williams, at least, has been sacked by the network despite its loose standards of professionalism. But the Times still employs Gay.

With Mara, stupid is always in a race with racist. In 2021, the Times even defended this rant on “Morning Joe”:

“You know, the reality is here that we have a large percentage of the American population — I don’t know how big it is, but we have tens of millions of Trump voters who continue to believe that their rights as citizens are under threat by simple virtue of having to share the democracy with others. I think as long as they see Americanness as the same as one with whiteness, this is going to continue. We have to figure out how to get every American a place at the table in this democracy, but how to separate Americanness, America, from whiteness. Until we can confront that and talk about that, this is really going to continue. I was on Long Island this weekend, visiting a really dear friend. And I was really disturbed. I saw, you know, dozens and dozens of pickup trucks with you know, expletives against Joe Biden on the back of them, Trump flags, and in some cases, just dozens of American flags, which you know is also just disturbing, because essentially the message was clear, this is my country. This is not your country. I own this. And so until we’re ready to have that conversation, this is going to continue…Because, you know, the Trump voters who are not going to get onboard with democracy, they’re a minority. You can marginalize them, long-term. But if we don’t take the threat seriously, then I think we’re all in really bad shape.“

This is typical of Gay, not an anomaly. When Colin Kaepernick quoted part of a Frederick Douglass speech as his defense for declaring the Betsy Ross flag a symbol of racism—an opinion Gay obviously agrees with— Senator Ted  Cruz replied to the Kneeler-in Chief by  linking to Douglass’s whole speech, which proved that the cherry-picked quote didn’t mean what Kaepernick was claiming. Mara Gay tweeted to Cruz,   “Frederick Douglass is an American hero, and his name has no business in your mouth.”

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NOW They Tell Us! Observations On The ACLU’s Endorsement Of Trump’s Reinstatement On Facebook

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

After Facebook announced that it was reinstating Donald Trump’s Facebook privileges this week (following over two years of blocking him, beginning while he was still President of the United States, the American Civil Liberties Union suddenly decided that a major source of public discourse and opinion in this alleged democracy was right to let a major political leader and former POTUS have the same privileges as anyone else, like, say, Democrats and progressives.

“This is the right call. Like it or not, President Trump is one of the country’s leading political figures and the public has a strong interest in hearing his speech,” the ACLU tweeted. In another statement, ACLU’s executive director Anthony Romero said,

“Indeed, some of Trump’s most offensive social media posts ended up being critical evidence in lawsuits filed against him and his administration. And we should know—we filed over 400 legal actions against him. While the government cannot force platforms to carry certain speech, that doesn’t mean the largest platforms should engage in political censorship. The biggest social media companies are central actors when it comes to our collective ability to speak—and hear the speech of others—online. They should err on the side of allowing a wide range of political speech, even when it offends.”

Observations: Continue reading →

Still More Evidence That No One Who Cares About Individual Liberty, Freedom of Expression And The Increasing Threat Of Totalitarianism In The US Should Live In California Voluntarily…

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment

With AB 2098, California’s legislature passed a bill that would punish doctors offering “false information” on the Wuhan virus and its offspring. It okayed direct government action to punish speech based on content, and was obviously unconstitutional. Naturally, Gov. Gavin Newsom signed it into law anyway: he doesn’t believe in the Bill of Rights, his party doesn’t, and apparently the California voters that keep voting for him and officials like Adam Schiff don’t either.  Their state has devolved into a kind of Bizarro World gradted to the rest of the country, a place that increasingly rejects the underlying values and principles the United States was built on, and increasingly, basic logic as well. Here’s a meme that appeared on Powerline’s always entertaining “The Week in Pictures,” which I heartily recommend:

That’s not even satire. It’s just true, and emblematic of how ethically inert the entire stat has become.

The new law prevents doctors from providing “treatment or advice” “to a patient” “related to COVID-19” when that treatment or advice includes (1) “false information” (2) “that is contradicted by contemporary scientific consensus” (3) “contrary to the standard of care.”  Threatening disciplinary action (such as the loss of one’s license to practice) the law sends “a chilling message to physicians to toe the line.” in Prof. Turley’s words. Though a first year law student would quickly see the measure was unconstitutional, California has California-culture judges. In McDonald v. Lawson one of them held the law to be just fine. Now, however Judge William Shubb (E.D. Cal.) in Hoeg v. Newsom, another challenge to the law, has granting an injunction against its enforcement. Continue reading →

Weekend Morning Ethics Warm-Up, 1/28/23: “The Usual”

/ Jack Marshall / 30 Comments

  • At 11:38 a.m. EST on this date in 1986, the space shuttle Challenger lifted off from Cape Canaveral, Florida. It’s destruction soon after marked one of the most vivid and provocative ethics scandals in American history. The tragedy—in many ways—has been discussed extensively on Ethics Alarms, and surely will be again. You can review the posts and comments here. But I’m not writing any more about the Challenger today. I’m in a bad enough mood already.
  • Contributing to my mood was a discussion I had yesterday with an apparently well-educated young lawyer. We were talking about the issue of wilful blindness or contrived ignorance, a big ethics problem in the law, where lawyers often avoid evidence of facts that would obligate them to take action that would have adverse financial or professional consequences. When I mentioned Albert Speer, the Third Reich’s architect and Minister of Armaments and War Production for Nazi Germany during most of World War II who infamously argued that he had no idea that the Holocaust was underway despite his place in the center of Nazi leadership, the lawyer asked, “Who’s Albert Speer?”
  • Earlier in the week, during her brief hospital stay, equally disturbing questions were received by my wife during discussions with nurses: “Who’s Lucille Ball?” and “What’s “Gone With The Wind”?

1. Tyrell Nichols. The police-instigated death of young Tyrell Nichols didn’t set of a string of nation-wide riots as was widely predicted last night, even though what the bodycam vidos showed was, as one police training and use-of-force expert opined after watching the video, “worse than Rodney King.” It was worse than what happened to George Floyd, too. What kept this from becoming a justification for violence in BLM World is that the brutal cops, all of them, were black. Race, not police misconduct, is what drove both the King riots and the Floyd riots, though in neither of those earlier incidents did the facts implicate race as a motive. A friend of mine, a lawyer, said yesterday that he is convinced that the constant stress of dealing with escalating crime combined with the relentless hostility that has been directed at police as they try to do a difficult and dangerous job has caused many officers to exits in a constant state of rage. In addition to that problem, the pool of individuals with the right character, skills and stability to be police officers has been shrinking, meaning that less trustworthy people are increasingly recruited to perform that difficult and dangerous job. Policing is in a death cycle. Continue reading →

From The Great Stupid, Linguistics Division, Res Ipsa Loquitur Files…

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

Wait—does that include “The woke,” “the politically correct,” “the Language Police” and “the Too Silly to be Taken Seriously?”

And Now For Something Completely Stupid! Will Somebody Please Explain To This Guy The Concept Of “Accountability”?

/ Jack Marshall / 17 Comments

That’s Anthony Loffredo above. He used to look like the inset photo, but now he calls himself the “black alien,” having surgically removed his ears, nostrils and a few fingers so he could have claws. He also sharpened his teeth and dyed them purple, while getting tattooed from head to toe.

Hey, good luck to you, dude! Whatever floats your boat!

But now Tony has authored a complaint in the New York Post. He feels put-upon and discriminated against because restaurants refuse to serve him. They say he scares the customers.

Imagine that!

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How Far Have Our Universities Traveled Into Thought Control Territory? This Far: Stanford Wants To Punish A Student For Reading A Politically Incorrect Historical Document

/ Jack Marshall / 18 Comments

A while back, one of this blog’s self-exiled commenters told me that he left because I had become more hostile to the Left in recent years, in contrast to my position when Ethics Alarms started in 2010. He’s right, of course. In 2010, this story would have been unimaginable. My standards haven’t changed. But one whole side of the political spectrum has been abandoning ethics and core American principles with increasing arrogance, aggressiveness and ruthlessness.

I am in shock over this latest episode.

After a photo of a Stanford student reading Adolf Hitler’s autobiography “Mein Kampf” circulated on campus, The Stanford Daily revealed that administrators were working with the students involved to “address” the incident. Two campus rabbis emailed Jewish students saying administrators “are in ongoing conversation with the individuals involved, who are committed to and actively engaged in a process of reckoning and sincere repair.”

Reckoning—for reading something? “Repair”? Is that the strong stench of re-education I feel in my nostrils? Continue reading →

Ethics Dunce: Jack Phillips (of Masterpiece Cakeshop):

/ Jack Marshall / 44 Comments

It is a basic life skill: quit while you’re ahead.

In 2018, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the Colorado Civil Rights Commission acted in the grip of anti-religious bias when it enforced an anti-discrimination law against baker Jack Phillips. He had famously refused to bake a wedding cake celebrating the wedding of same sex couple Charlie Craig and Dave Mullins in 2012. But that was just a technical victory for Baker; SCOTUS chose not to rule did not rule on the macro-controversies over whether a business can invoke religious objections to deny service to LGBTQ people, whether a cake is art or just a product offered by a public accommodation, or whether forcing a baker to create a cake for a gay wedding is compelled speech.

Sadly, annoyingly, unethically and stupidly, neither Baker nor the activists who are determined to bend him to their will had the sense to declare a truce.

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Friday Open Forum!

/ Jack Marshall / 51 Comments

Come on through!

All are welcome! There is peace and serenity in the light!

(Just stay on topic, please…)