Yesterday, long, LONG time commenter Tim Levier alerted me to a local political foofaraw in Denver with significant ethical implications. I would have never heard about the story otherwise, and I am very grateful for this: please, everyone, try to make such tips a habit.
Incumbent mayor Michael Hancock and the challenger, Jamie Giellis, both Democrats, are headed to a run-off in a little under three weeks. Three days ago, Giellis found herself unable to say what the letters NAACP stood for during a radio interview (“This was falsely reported in some media sources as “she didn’t know what the NAACP was”). A few hours later, Giellis’ campaign advertised a “tacos and lowriders” fundraiser at a Mexican restaurant. Smelling blood, the Hader Gotcha practitioners did a deep dive and found that ten years ago, Giellis asked in a tweet why so many cities “feel it necessary to have Chinatowns.”
This was referred to by local wags as winning the the “Triple Crown” of race-related gaffes. Her reaction was to close public access to all of her social media accounts and to refuse to answer media questions. Finally an intrepid reporter cornered her (AT the “tacos and lowriders” event), resulting in this cringe-producing interview:
Facebook continues to reject any links to Ethics Alarms posts, although one occasionally and randomly slips through apparently. I have never received any explanation for this, though some posts do get the “community standards” excuse. If Ethics Alarms violates “community standards,” it is only because the blog refuses to enable knee-jerk “resistance” plots and narratives, or engage in the Left’s mass denial that the mainstream media has become a propaganda organ and cannot be trusted.
Efforts to contact Facebook and acquire any information or response have been futile. The consequences of this action by Facebook are tangible. Posts before this action would be routinely shared on Facebook between 20 and thousands of times. It has hurt blog traffic, and conceivably my business, ProEthics, which benefits from my visibility.
Today I was made aware of the Trump Administration’s Tech Bias Sharing Tool, which is collecting accounts of censorship and other content-based abuse by social media and the large tech companies. I just posted the whole story, as only I can.
The solo performer is the immortal Doodles Weaver, Sigourney’s uncle.
1. This is indefensible, and—I hate to keep using this word, but don’t blame me, blame prevailing political winds—totalitarian. Carl Malamud believes that there should be open access to government records, and he has a group that has been putting them online for years. When his group posted the Official Code of Georgia Annotated, however, the state sued for copyright infringement claiming that giving the public access to the state’s laws and related legal materials without the state’s authorization is the “strategy of terrorism.”
No, having laws that the public has no way to see or understand without paying for them is the strategy of dictators. A federal appeals court has ruled against the state, and now Georgia wants the Supreme Court to step in. So does Public.Resource.Org, Malamud’s group, which also wants SCOTUS to resolve the issue, since the question of who owns the law is current in 20 other states that have copyrighted their annotated codes. The issue is whether citizens can have access to “the raw materials of our democracy.”
I think Georgia is going to lose and lose ugly, though I have given up prediction 9-0 Supreme Court rulings. That’s what this one should be, though.
2. More on “the best people” front. One awful aspect of the Trump Administration that cannot be defended is the President’s irresponsible appointments, which are too numerous to list. In the case of Dr. Ben Carson, whom Ethics Alarms assessed as some kind of idiot savant based on his embarrassing performance in the debates, we knew, or should have known, that Trump appointing him Secretary of HUD was a guaranteed fiasco in the making. Continue reading →
Muslim leaders in Philadelphia apologized Wednesday after video emerged of children speaking in Arabic about beheading Jews at an event at a Philadelphia Islamic center last month.
The Muslim American Society’s Philadelphia chapter acknowledged ownership of the “mistake” in a statement, Israel Hayom reports.
“Over the last decade our members have poured their soul and resources to create a harmonious, peaceful and engaged community,” the statement said. “We are very sad that within minutes all of this work was tarnished and we realize the mistake is ours to own. … We are deeply saddened to have hurt our partners in the Jewish community and beyond.”
The Muslim American Society initially called the incident “an unintended mistake and an oversight” after the video was published.
In the video, one girl says “we will chop off their heads” to “liberate the sorrowful and exalted Al-Aqsa Mosque” in Jerusalem.
“We will defend the land of divine guidance with our bodies, and we will sacrifice our souls without hesitation. We will lead the army of Allah fulfilling his promise, and we will subject them to eternal torture,” a girl reads.
Children also sang about the “blood of martyrs” and “Rebels, rebels, rebels.”
Officials said a volunteer aide selected the songs to represent Palestinian people, but added she “feels terrible she made a mistake” and has stepped down.
This is not a “mistake.” This is the mask slipping. No place of worship makes a “mistake” like this, and if the Philadelphia “Let’s kill Jews” song slipped out. then it is a fair assumption that similar indoctrination has occurred here and elsewhere that has not slipped out.
I will not pretend to have a coherent, Constitutional solution to the problem of Islam and Muslim immigrants, legal or otherwise. The U.S. must always oppose officially and culturally, discrimination and oppression based on membership in any group, be it Muslims, Communists, Scientologists, or Republicans. On the other hand, Justice Jackson’s over-quoted statement that the Constitution is not a suicide pact has never been more applicable.
Islam is a problem. It is as unethical to deny that as to react rashly and unjustly to it.
In a related development, what national news outlets other than Fox reported this story? I haven’t found any. After all, how can the Left maintain that Islam is benign and that its followers are no more dangerous than the Care Bears, the Cub Scouts and Golden Retriever puppies if people learn about Muslim children being taught songs about beheading Jews? Can’t have that! The story isn’t news, because it undermines the Greater Good, or perhaps because it undermines progressive mythology.
Frasier now and then. Psst! Brendan! You can’t ambush actresses with kisses any more! At least not unless you’re running for President as a Democrat…it’s complicated. Give me a call.
This drives me crazy. I’m preparing a sexual harassment training seminar for an association, and this story just went into the introduction.
A nice cheery puff piece is up at E!On-line. about reminiscences by actress Leslie Mann (make that feminist, woke, #Me too-supporting actress Leslie Mann) about the time she shot a movie with actor and one-time stud-muffin Brendan Frasier. A sample:
“Every morning before work we were in the hair and makeup trailer getting ready. And he would come in and kiss me on the lips,” she tells host Busy Philippswith an ear-to-ear grin. “Just like, ‘Good morning!’ And kiss. You know, like he’s European or something.”
Leslie got used to those morning smooches—earlier in the clip, the actor cheekily notes that since her character was supposed to fall for Brendan’s onscreen, she just went ahead and “fell in love with him in real life”—so it was pretty jarring for her when the kisses stopped suddenly one day.
Frasier didn’t ask permission for these spontaneous kisses, which #MeToo emphatically calls sexual assault in principle, just not when they like the assaulter. It is sexual assault, just like this is… Continue reading →
Fortunately, I had already disavowed my Harvard degree before this surfaced, so I am only mortified rather than trying to figure out how to flush myself down the toilet.
Above is an allegedly humorous gag from Harvard’s student-run humor magazine, which once gave us Robert Benchley, Al Franken, and “Animal House.” [Full disclosure:I was rejected by the Lampoon when I competed to join the staff as a student. ] The magazine has often championed sophomoric humor as well as bad taste, but there are limits to everything. I’d say using the image and memory of a brave and iconic Jewish girl who died in a Nazi concentration camp for a cheap, spectacularly unfunny photoshop gag is over the line, wouldn’t you? Wouldn’t just about anyone with an atom of common sense and decency?
Fortunately, some Harvard students erupted in anger over the photo of Frank’s head grafted on the body of a pumped-up busty bikini girl and the “ Add this to the list of reasons the Holocaust sucked” punch line. So did the New England branch of the Anti-Defamation League, which condemned the cartoon as a “vulgar, offensive & sexualized” meme that “denigrates [Anne Frank’s] memory & millions of Holocaust victims….Trivializing genocide plays into the hands of #antisemites & Holocaust deniers.” Continue reading →
Honestly now, how can anyone get depressed about ethical the state of a world with Buddy Mercury in it?
1. Yes, I know that this is just a has-been ex-child star with an inflated concept of her own wisdom and authority, but it’s significant anyway. Alyssa Milano, 46, late of “Who’s the Boss” and “Charmed,” tried to promote a female sex strike against men to protest recent anti-abortion bills in several states. This stunningly stupid idea–but classical!—was rightly attacked from both the Left and Right, but it is worthy of note for one reason: it illustrates how progressives are increasingly favoring boycotts, force, intimidation, violence and bullying as the mean of achieving their policy objectives, and abandoning reasoning, elections and law. This attitude suggests a growing hostility to democracy, and that is worrysome.
When the Lysistrata-inspired #SexStrike that she declared would deny men sex “until we get bodily autonomy back” (think about that for a minute) protest fell flat, Milano threw a self-reported tantrum on Twitter and pivoted to an appeal to emotion that omitted the legal and ethical realities. The new object of her outrage was a CBS report about an 11-year-old rape victim who couldn’t get an abortion under Ohio’s yet-to-be-signed fetal heartbeat bill. Milano, like all abortion rights absolutists but especially loudly, appears to be incapable of perceiving or admitting that anti-abortion legislation is not an expression of hostility to women at all. Right or wrong, it is based on a sincere and ethically defensible (under reciprocity and Kantian ethics) argument that a human life, even a nascent one, must have priority in the utilitarian balancing involved when a pregnancy is unwanted by the mother. Continue reading →
Already, the mainstream news media is starting to re-gurgitate retired SCOTUS justice John Paul Stevens’ opinion on gun control, as related once again in his newly published memoir. They seem to think this old news is new ammunition in its war against gun rights in alliance with the Democratic Party. (Note: ethical journalists are not supposed to be allied with any party. I may not have mentioned this in the last 24 hours.)
Bloviating about Columbia v. Heller, the 2008 decision holding that the Second Amendment created an individual right to bear arms, Stevens calls the ruling “unquestionably the most clearly incorrect decision” rendered while he was on the Court. And this proves—what? Stevens dissented in that case. His view lost. The fact that he dissented was significant when he was on the Court. That as a retired justice a decade later (who is commenting on current Court rulings from the sidelines more openly than any previous justice, a breach of professionalism and ethics) he really, really thinks he was right though a majority of his colleagues on the Court did not, should be at most a footnote somewhere on the ABA Journal’s gossip page. Instead, we will see it everywhere as “new evidence” and authority that there really isn’t a right to bear arms.
Was there widespread publicity when retired Justice Byron White wrote that his dissent in Roe v. Wade was right and the decision was wrong? No, for two reasons: White observed the traditional respect for the Court requiring that ex-Justices not snipe at past decisions after they retire., and nobody in the news media would try to hype a dissent against abortion rights.
This doesn’t even get to the sad reality that Stevens’ arguments regarding gun rights are juvenile and emotional, essentially belonging to the popular “Do something!” ilk. Continue reading →
[A while ago I wrote that I might periodically re-post one of the more than 2000 Ethics Alarms essays that have appeared here since 2009. The criteria? Let’s see:
A post that I have completely forgotten about, and don’t remember even after I’ve read it again.
A post that may be interesting to consider in light of subsequent developments since it was written (in this case, social media posts triggering workplace discipline, and police-community relations)
A lively discussion in the comments.
I think this post, based on a find by now-retired Ethics Alarms super-scout Fred, qualifies on all counts. It’s from May of 2014.]
“If there was any time I despised wearing a police uniform, it was yesterday at the Capitol during the water rally. A girl I know who frequents the Capitol for environmental concerns looked at me and wanted me to participate with her in the event. I told her I have to remain unbiased while on duty at these events. She responded by saying, ‘You’re a person, aren’t you?’ That comment went straight through my heart!”
Thus did Douglas Day, a police officer at the West Virginia Capitol in Charleston, confess to Facebook friends his mixed emotions while doing his duty.
The day Day wrote his Facebook post, Capitol Police Lt. T.M. Johnson told him that the post “shows no respect to the department, the uniform or the law enforcement community which he represents.” About a week later, Sgt. A.E. Lanham Jr. wrote to Day that he “found the entire [Facebook] posting to be extremely offensive and shocking … This is just another episode of many incidents which show his bad attitude and lack of enthusiasm toward police work in general and toward our department in particular.”
Day was thunderstruck. “If they believed there was some sort of a violation I made, then why wasn’t it addressed? They never brought me in and never said anything to me,” Day said. “In 2½ years working there, I had no disciplinary action taken against me at any time. Nothing was ever written up and I received no reprimands.” So much for the “many incidents.” Continue reading →
“I really will not allow the simplegesture to belong to the moronic dogwhistling catfishing foghorning frogmarching pigsticking dickwaving few who attempt to appropriate it for their own fatuous fantasies.”
—–British actor, writer, wit and all-around smart person Stephen Fry upon being warned that some people may think that he’s a white supremacist because he flashed the “OK” sign on Twitter.
Good for him. He didn’t grovel. He didn’t apologize. He simply said, in essence, “Oh, sod off, you fools,” and that was that. He rejected the right-wing trolls and the leftist speech police simultaneously, with open contempt. And that’s how to deal with political correctness bullying. Someone put him in touch with Harvard College.
