It was a very lively weekend here at Ethics Alarms, though few but the most hardy regulars chose to partake in it (as usual on weekends). Meanwhile, a backlog of impressive proportions started clogging the canal, so I have little choice but to do a multi-issue post despite my pledge to cut down on them (too much time to write, too few readers).
Among the weekend’s joys for me was a barrage of insulting and woke-intense attempted comments from a single ideologue, attacking nine separate posts with standard issue progressive talking points and “it isn’t what it is” rants. I especially enjoyed being called a racist because I wrote this in the post about ESPN’s Stephen A Smith:
If anyone would be thrilled to excuse black culture malignancy by crying “systemic racism,” it would be Smith. Instead, the amazing number of shootings in Chicago over the Memorial Day Weekend prompted Smith to ask the black community: “When are we going to look at ourselves when it comes to black people being killed in the streets of America?”
The destructive nature of American black culture has been a topic of scholarship and analysis by researchers, social scientists and pundits for more than 50 years. It may be unfashionable to speak plainly on the topic (as Smith was trying to do), but using the racist label to avoid addressing the problem by denying its existence is part of a tragic trend. No, his comment(s) never made it out of moderation. On this post, he called me an extreme right “denialist” for calling Ireland’s cow slaughtering plan absurd. Again I ask, “Who are these people? How did they get this way? Can they be helped?”
1. Wait, what? Self-checkout machines in Big Box stores, coffee shops, bakeries, airports and sports stadiums are suggesting to customers that they leave a 20% tip, according to a report from the Wall Street Journal. Unbelievable. I refuse to use the damn things because a) half the time they don’t work 2) I don’t trust them 3) they are putting people out of jobs 4) I enjoy interacting with human beings behind counters, so I wasn’t aware of this emotional extortion attempt (which is now ‘5)’ on my list. This is a scheme for companies to pass off the burden of paying employees on the customer rather than increasing employee salaries. Despicable. Here’s a tip: Bite me!
2. Curmie Corner: Over at his own blog, Curmudgeon Central, Ethics Alarms commenter Curmie has posted a superb, many faceted, provocative essay about Pink Floyd’s former composer-bassist Roger Waters and his problem with German police for wearing a “Nazi-style uniform” at a recent concert in Berlin. This is the kind of deep ethics dive I wish I could do more of, and, as you may have noticed, Curmie is a deft writer who, unlike your host, avoids typos. You will want to read “Roger Waters, Pink, Nazis, and Freedom of Speech.”
3. What fresh new hell is this? Jonathan Turley has become the go-to source when EA is in short supply of head-exploding academic woke insanity. I’m definitely not in short supply, but I checked the professor’s blog anyway this morning, and found out that Biden Administration nominee Professor Justin Hansford, the only American representative on the United Nations Permanent Forum on People of African Descent (PFPAD) for the 2022-2024 term, is a complete wacko. He addressed the United Nations Permanent Forum on People of African Descent last week and called for the establishment of a United Nations Reparations Tribunal to “order” the payment of reparations to African Americans, saying in part,
But so far we have left it to the scholars of the past, the lawyers of the past, the white scholars, white lawyers, to determine the bounds of our legal imagination, to determine the narrow structures that we will use to determine what justice looks like for our own people. So I come to you today with a novel proposal, that we begin to think our own thoughts, propose our own vision of justice, and implement that justice, as part of the Permanent Forum on People of African Descent.
The professor is an advocate for not only reparations but “police abolition.” And he is allowed to warp young minds at Howard. Turley, ever the advocate of academic freedom, writes that “Reparations is a debate that we should have as a nation, including in Congress.” No, it’s really not, just as we don’t need to debate the merits of electing Presidents with a paper/stone/scissors tournament. It’s an impossible, irresponsible, stupid, unjust and fatally divisive idea, and I conclude this as one who, briefly, in the throes of temporary frustration and insanity, endorsed it. There are plenty of real policy options to debate. Reparations isn’t one of them.
3. Journalism! Admittedly, the Daily Mail is hardly the New York Times, but I filed this shameful news story, headlined “Grandmother in her 70s is mauled to death by ‘banned and out-of-control’ family dog as she sunbathed in garden” in my “How low can journalism sink?” file. “Banned” means banned breed: the UK, like Canada and other ignorant nations (and many U.S. cities) purports to prohibit allegedly dangerous dog breeds, a form of canine racism that Ethics Alarms has discussed frequently. Which banned breed was involved? Hilariously, nobody seems to know, but the Daily Mail was still sure there was one. “Police say it was a banned breed but I’m not sure. I don’t know what it was – quite a size with a big head, a bulldog Mastiff type,” said a neighbor quoted in the story. “When [the owner] got it he said it was a rare breed and there were only six in the country.” Although the Mail doesn’t say what the dangerous breed was, it does inform us that he Dangerous Dog Act 1991 bans owning, breeding, selling, giving away, or abandoning four dog breeds in the UK: American Pitbull terriers (like my dog), Japanese Tosas, Dogo Argentinos (quite possibly also part of Spuds’ mix) , and Fila Brazileiro. Crossbreeds of those breeds are also prohibited “depending on a judgement of their physical characteristics and how well they match a ‘typical’ description.” In other words, any dog can be assessed a “dangerous breed” according to what it looks like and who is doing the looking. In Great Britain, there is no “typical” Tosas, Dogo Argentinos or Fila Brazileiros: the dogs are all extremely rare and even dog experts can’t easily identify them. The ludicrous vagueness of these laws is so obvious, and yet the news media dutifully and uncritically reports them as if they make sense. But then this is a news media that puts a “fact” in the headline it neither reveals not confirms in the story.
4. Speaking of incompetent, biased and irresponsible journalism, here’s NPR:
“I think one of the reasons we had so much distrust from this past election was because all of a sudden either over the course of the night, or in the wee hours of the morning, votes were discovered,” said one man, repeating a common false claim about how votes were tallied in 2020.
Do news media outlets expect readers to check their links? I checked that one: it went to a Reuters “fact check” that did NOT prove or even argue that man’s claim is false. The Reuters piece says simply that “Vote spikes in Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania do not prove election fraud.” It doesn’t deny that there were election spikes in the wee hours of November 3, 2020 in Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania. It says outright: “These vote spikes did occur.” So what is the “false claim” the unnamed man quoted by NPR is “repeating”? There is distrust from the past election. They late night vote tallies are a major reason. The late night vote tallies did occur. But NPR is so committed to reflexively calling Republican doubts about the 2020 election of Joe Biden “baseless’ at every opportunity that it doesn’t even realize when that’s not what’s being asserted.
5. Which reminds me: fact checks…The news media galloped to the rescue of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez when she made a fool of herself (admittedly, carrying coals to Newcastle) by alerting her Twitter fans that there was a parody account “releasing false policy statements and gaining spread” and warning them not to be fooled. As I wrote here, the parody account was already explicitly and ethically clear about its provenance and purpose, as it was called “Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Press Release (parody).” Nonetheless, multiple supposedly reliable sources felt it necessary to pretend that the parody account was “misinformation” because it issued such fake but troublingly plausible AOC satire as “Printing money is the only way out of inflation,” “If Congress would’ve passed my 93 trillion dollar Green New Deal, inflation would be 0.00% right now,” and “If we don’t move to 100% green energy soon — car emissions will kill off the human race just like it did the Dinosaurs.” Snopes (of course, hack Democratic Party tool that it is), rushed to explain, “No, AOC Didn’t Say ‘Printing Money Is the Only Way Out of Inflation.’” Politico cautioned,“No, that isn’t the real AOC you may have seen on Twitter”: “An account impersonating the New York congresswoman cropped up over the weekend, going viral and catching the attention of Twitter’s owner and the lawmaker herself.”
No, the account did NOT “impersonate AOC, because it explicitly announces itself a “parody.” Then Reuters issued a “fact check” saying, “A tweet stemming from a parody account impersonating U.S. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is being taken seriously by users online.” Substacking conservative pundit Don Surber notes that, strangely, the news media was never similarly alarmed about Trump parody accounts. Nah, there’s no mainstream media bias!
6. Meanwhile, in the world of Big Tech bias, YouTube will finally allow people to opine that the 2020 defeat of Donald Trump was not as pure as the driven snow. YouTube announced that it will leave up content questioning the fairness or legitimacy the 2020 presidential election and other U.S. elections, reversing the policy it established in December 2020. The company, owned by Google, now says leaving the policy in place may have the effect of “curtailing political speech”—gee, ya think???— “without meaningfully reducing the risk of violence or other real-world harm.”
Great! Only two and a half years of online political censorship based on content!
“Two years, tens of thousands of video removals, and one election cycle later, we recognized it was time to reevaluate the effects of this policy in today’s changed landscape,” YouTube said. “With that in mind, and with 2024 campaigns well underway, we will stop removing content that advances false claims that widespread fraud, errors, or glitches occurred in the 2020 and other past US Presidential elections.”
You know—false claims, like what that guy quoted by NPR said…
7. No, this is not what the judicial ethics codes call not “engaging in behavior that is harassing, abusive, prejudiced, or biased.” Macomb County Circuit Court Judge James Biernat, understandably disgusted by the murderer and rapist he was about to sentence, blasted the man from the bench for his vicious crimes and his indifference to human life, saying, “You’re a pedophile, you’re a murderer, and you’re the embodiment of evil.” Judge Biernat continued, “Try to commit suicide before you do any [more] of this. Take yourself out so you don’t kill people and try to rape 5-year-olds.”
Telling a defendant to kill himself is just a bit over the ethics line.
8. Finally…Corporate integrity, Pride Month edition. On the left, the LGBTQ-pandering logos some corporations are grandstanding with in June; on the right, the way the logos look in Muslim countries:
Ethics Alarms 
“As I wrote here, the parody account was already explicitly and ethically clear about its provenance and purpose, as it was called “Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Press Release (parody).””
Yes, but if you look at some of the links (like the one to Snopes), the name is so long that the word, “(parody),” does not appear on the tweet.
I don’t know if that is always the case, but there may be a reasonable cause for confusion, especially with the blue checkmark next to it.
-jut
Okay, maybe it is only blocked out on re-tweets.
-Jut
I think this topic could benefit a deeper ethical analysis. First: I’m 100% with you on the length of the account name covering up the eventual (Parody) tag at the end. More often than not, but definitely in this case, I block the parody account.
1) The account isn’t “full parody”. The copying of the profile picture, how subtle everything was crafted genuinely caused confusion.
2) Parody, in my mind, is best served as a tool to “mock” or show hypocrisy. The content this account was producing was more invention than mockery.
3) Back to the name – if you aren’t more forthright that you are the parody account, you will cause confusion. If you cause too much confusion, you need to dial it up. Make your name “Ain’t OC” or something.
For some reason, I started seeing a parody account of Movie News. I follow an account called “Discussing Film”. Suddenly I was seeing “Disbussing Film”. Again, it was a highjacked profile pick and unless I saw the change from c to b, I was genuinely confused. Some fantastical things that might be true but it wasn’t funny, it was just…annoying.
I think we all deserve to have “nice things” and I’m completely fine if we obliterate those who don’t do good parody. The Babylon Bee does great parody because, like The Onion, it has it’s own identity and it’s a parody of a proper newspaper without stealing that identity. I don’t need a twitter feed filled with every 13-year old with an iPhone creating endless accounts of “politician name PARODY” thinking they’re somehow clever. No effort goes into that type of account and they’re just building a following until one day they do a programming change and rebrand as some activist group with a built in following and disproportionate social media reach.
The best first step in this fight would be to dismantle the practice of scrapping a profile picture from a parody target into a parody account.
Prologue: You can’t help them. They can only help themselves by educating themselves and teaching themselves rational thinking and reasoned debate strategies. They’d rather use reductionist name-calling meme thought, instead.
My husband was in a Sunday School class with a man who didn’t want to learn what the Bible said. He wanted the preacher to explain it instead. That never works out well. Which is why I explained to my middle school girls this week that, for centuries, the Bible was only written in Latin and could only be painstakingly copied by hand which meant few people had them and even fewer people could read them as they weren’t literate in their own language, much less in Latin. This allowed bad rulers and bad Church officials to manipulate the masses by telling them what the Bible said and were sometimes wrong. I told them that there are enough Bibles in the United States for each household to have several, they’re written in English and that education for both boys and girls has made it possible to read the Bible for oneself rather than let bad actors in politics and other influential spheres tell them incorrectly what it does or doesn’t say.
People that think like your troll friend don’t want to read the information for themselves, they only want talking points and marching orders handed down by the elites.
Tipping Options: I’ve run into those. The machines became ubiquitous during the pandemic as a way to avoid the physical handling of money. Of course, they’re now being used to keep from hiring enough cashiers and servers. Businesses that don’t normally provide traditional tipping services are buying the machines which probably already have the tipping option automatically programmed in. If I didn’t tip someone at the coffee shop for handing me a bagel before the pandemic, I’m not doing it now.
U.N. Interference: If I’m not mistaken, it was Indiana’s own late Julia Carson (whose grandson, Andre, inherited the skin color, perpetual chip on the shoulder and Congressional seat he now holds) that asked the U.N. to come in and monitor our elections after the whole Bush/Gore debacle. The U.S. holds no dearth of people who want the U.N. to make the U.S. into its own incompetent corrupt image.
Surprise Votes: And those same people would have been screaming for blood had Trump votes been discovered that pushed him ahead of Biden.
AOC Parodies: Some of the tweets made me giggle for the past few days. She has no sense of humor. Besides, Trump was eeeeeeeeee-vil, remember?
YouTube: Of course, the damage has already been done, right?
Logos: Oh, come now. Does anyone really believe they actually support Pride Month more than their bottom lines?
In a rare visit to Twitter a few days ago, I may have caught a glimpse of the parody account in the wild. Whatever I saw then, it did not have the “(parody)” tag in the title; it did have a blue “verified” check, which led me to conclude it was a real post from Rep. Ocassio-Cortez. I did a modicum of due diligence, and found nothing suggesting parody, except the content (which I unfortunately cannot recall, making this the vaguest heresay/anecdote unfortunately). The post was incredibly bizarre that I questioned whether she would actually say it, yet toublingly plausible.
So in AOC’s defense, the account may have renamed itself to play innocent.
(In the grand internet tradition of shadow editing to cover up unethical behavior).
Found the now-deleted tweet in my browser history:
https://twitter.com/AOCpress/status/1662834254127022081
Rereading the comments to confirm it is the same tweet, I am pretty confident that it did not clearly say “parody” anywhere when I first read it. I wouldn’t have dug around further if it had.
Fascinating. You’re right: that’s a bit like “subsequent repairs” after a negligence lawsuit. On ethe other hand, if people are likely to think ridiculous statements attributed to you by a parody account are genuine, it’s time to self-assess.
Re no 2. Hilarious. In 1990 he performed the entire album at the berlin wall. Including an actual wall put up during the concert. Somewhere in there a unit from one if the germanies goose stepped across the stage. I think it was east german border police. Had a friend who went to the concert. He said the energy was amazing, triumphant and joyous. Hardly celebrating nazi’s, pretty much the opposite.
Much of Roger Water’s politics is 180 degrees from my own but that simply means one of us or both of us are wrong. I, however, did not lose a father or close relative to the Nazi’s as he did, so we view the world through different prisms.
The album and film The Wall had a profound effect on me and still does. It changed me. For the first time in my life a film made me examine the influences and events that shaped me as I grew into adulthood. At the time I was on a double date and while I squirmed or choked up as I witnessed the imagery on the screen I wondered why my companions were not seeming to be affected in the least by what we were watching.
It matters not at this point but I think I can safely say that Water’s art made me evaluate things differently. Unfortunately, for Germans and Europeans in general any association with Nazi imagery is verboten because so many want to deny their own complicity in allowing real Fascism and a belief in racial supremacy to take hold politically 90 years ago. The irony is that suppressing the art today is little different than holding bonfires in front of libraries. They should learn the lessons of the past.
Thank you. I rather enjoy the fully semi-automatic multitopic posts as it gives me a quick taste and I can go decide if I want more detail.
Initially scanning, I misread “multitopic” as “misanthropic”. That gave it an entirely different meaning…but still sort of worked 😉
Will they also allow people to claim that Trump colluded with the Russians®™ to steal the 2016 election.
Of course!!!!
Did they ever block those?
Three thoughts this Tuesday morning.
1: When the self-checkout machine provides exceptional service, I will be happy to leave it a tip. Computers are people, my friend.
2: Today is D-day, it appears that Ukraine has chosen it as a properly symbolic date to start their counter-offensive. My thoughts are with them.
3: My thoughts this D-day are also with Theodore “We’ll start the war from right here” Roosevelt Jr. whos actions (dramatized in The Longest Day led to a posthumous Medal of Honor. The citation reads…
When we think of various presidential failsons–and there have been more than a few, I’m looking at you Charles Adams–let’s remember that politicians can also raise brave and extraordinary people.
On 3 (the second one) –
““Banned” means banned breed: the UK, like Canada and other ignorant nations (and many U.S. cities) purports to prohibit allegedly dangerous dog breeds, a form of canine racism that Ethics Alarms has discussed frequently.”
Canada does not have BSL. The city of Winnipeg does, and the province of Ontario does, and while Americans could be forgiven for thinking that Ontario is Canada, because Ontarians certainly act like it, they are not, in fact.
I’ll fix that. Careless.