Western Connecticut State University President John Clark, who asked for the community’s help identifying students—if they were students— who distributed what he called “hate filled flyers and inscriptions on our university property.” These were more of the 4Chan-inspired “It’s OK to be white” and “Islam is right about women” trolling devices.
“I wanted to assure you that a full scale police investigation is underway,” Clark wrote, stating that the FBI, state police and municipal police were reviewing surveillance footage iand grilling those “who may have witnessed any of this despicable and utterly unacceptable behavior.” In full grandstanding and virtue-signalling mode, Clark declared that any WCSU community members identified as responsible for the flyers “will be subject to the severest disciplinary actions, including dismissal as well as possible civil and criminal actions.” He described the flyers’ message as “disgusting,” “hateful,” “virulent,” “sick and outrageous.”
1 . The progressive deterioration of the ridiculous Joy Behar. It’s clear the stress of engaging in issue debates for which she lacks the temperament, the education or the necessary data is stressing out Joy. On today’s edition of The View, some studio audience members who hadn’t received the memo that they were expected to only endorse the “views” of the correct side of the political spectrum applauded guests Donald Trump Jr. and Kimberly Guilfoyle as they supported the President. Behar snapped at them, “This is not a MAGA rally!” In such places there may be technically free speech, just not free non-conforming speech without abuse.
2. This makes no sense at all, nor is it ethical.Eric Ciaramella is the so-called whistle-blower who gave Rep. Adam Schiff the wisp of an excuse he needed to manufacture Plan S for removing the President, the supposed “quid pro quo” deal to make the Ukraine look for “dirt” on Joe Biden and his son. Lots of sources have published this—heck, I have—and no one has credibly denied it. In schoolyard terms, the cat is out of the bag. Nor is it in any way illegal for a news organization to publish what is increasingly public information. Okay, say he’s the “alleged” whistleblower.
Nonetheless, a Fox News executive sent out an email ordering Fox personnel, including hosts like Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham, not to mention the name on the air because the network “had not confirmed it.”
Fox News, as you know, is always so careful about the accuracy of what its talking heads say.
Fox News media ethics watchdog Howard Kurtz defended not releasing the name of the whistleblower, saying it would send a “chilling message” to whistleblowers in the future. What “chilling message?” That if you decide to fulfill your partisan goals and help your pals by trying to bring down a President with rumors and hearsay, you should have the guts to do it publicly and accept the consequences? It’s not the news media’s job to make things easy for whistleblowers, and it is especially not their job to pretend that information already being publicized is a mystery.
The background and professional connections of this “whistleblower”—he’s really a leaker—are relevant to his credibility and the legitimacy of the current impeachment push. The public has a right to know, and democracy dies in darkness.Continue reading →
HEY! Don’t you see that? IT’S RIGHT IN FRONT OF YOU!”
These two recent stories puzzle me. There are some aspects of civil conduct and societal norms that every cognitively functioning human being who lives in this society and culture cannot possibly have failed to notice. Nonetheless, these events keep happening. Quite part from the specifics of the incidents, they represent a failure of basic life competence.
1. California: Another Teacher Uses Blackface
I have, much to my sorrow—it was one reason Ethics Alarms is censored on Facebook—defended the use of dark make-up when its objective is not to denigrate and mock a race, but to play a dramatic role in a context where such make-up is necessary. White actors should be able to play the Moor Othello. In a saner society, white kids should also be able to dress up as Barack Obama or Beyoncé for Halloween, but interpreting any use of dark make-up as a deliberate reference to minstrel show “blackface” is now part of the victim lobby’s power tool kit, and one has to be aware of and understand the risks of bucking a treasured narrative.
How could any teacher not know, following the travails of Governor Northam in Virginia and Justin Trudeau in Canada, about this cultural landmine? If these elected officials, among others, were threatened by the cancellation culture for having used black makeup as students years ago, wouldn’t it be screamingly obvious that using blackface today, before a classroom, would be professional hari-kari? (Oops! Cultural appropriation there!)
Yet a white high school teacher in Milpitas, California wore blackface in his class on Halloween to do an imitation of the rapper Common. Of course one of the students made a viseo, of course it came to the school board’s attention, of course it created an irresistible opportunity for members to grandstand and engage in virtue-signalling, and of course such opportunities must not be wasted.
Thus Chris Norwood, the president of the school board in solemnly intoned that the behavior was “inappropriate, unprofessional and insensitive” and called for an investigation, adding,
“As an African-American man, the history of blackface reminds me of the cruelty, hatred and fear my parents and people of African ancestry have dealt with in the past and still experience today around the world. Unfortunately, blackface still permeates global society today through social media, comedy and fashion.”
Former Virginia lawmaker Joe Morrissey won the state Senate seat for the 16th District in the Old Dominion last night, defeating Independent Waylin Ross. Morrissey got more than 60% of the votes, showing an enthusiastic electorate. He will now represent parts of Richmond, Chesterfield County, Petersburg, Hopewell, Prince George County, and Dinwiddie County.
Who is Joe Morrissey? Let me refresh your memory using this post, from 2014. The first half of it was about revolting Republican House member Blake Farenthold—the guy wearing the duck pajamas—
who was, thankfully, finally forced out of office in the wake of #MeToo. The second half was about Joe: Continue reading →
An old, old, lament: “Laws are for the little people…”
I am constantly impressed at the perceptive and eloquent comments that issue from such a large number of Ethics Alarms readers. It cushions the blow of the traffic fall-off here that came shortly after the 2016 election, as the rapid Trump-Haters and resistance acolytes fled to secure echo chambers. (Facebook banning EA didn’t help.) I’d like both, sure, but I’ll take quality over quantity every time.
Aaron Pascal is long-time participant on Ethics Alarms, and he has issued many provocative comments, usually with a refreshing edge. This, in reaction to the most recent of AOC’s annoying and ethics-dead tweets, is one of his best.
“Jail the poor to free the rich” smacks of a combination of two extreme positions on two separate valid social dilemmas interacting.
First, there is the moderately unsettling (to me) privately funded and operated prison system. It’s been suggested that inmates are the product that is sold to bring in money. If people stopped being put in prison, then the corporations running the prison would lose money. Ergo, they get the politicians (especially the nasty, racist Republicans) to criminalize more activity, and push for longer sentences for smaller and smaller offenses. Especially if the crimes you tighten up on end up imprisoning a disproportionate number of racial minorities. Not a viewpoint completely without merit, but if you assume it’s the norm it certainly encourages a topsy turvy view of criminal activity vs the justice system. It also requires picturing the police, the justice system, the prison system, and the government as really bad, selfish people. Which is only a problem for leftists once you get to the government, which once you assign the blame to those horrible Republicans, the cognitive dissonance goes away. Continue reading →
My best friend of long standing’s favorite singer is Nat King Cole. He really doesn’t sound like anyone else, does he? I wonder how many millennials have heard his amazing voice, or would have the perspective to appreciate it.
Speaking of listening, I was prompted this morning to reflect on what a vital life-competence skill listening is. It is really an acquired skill: various Facebook discussions make it clear that most of the Facebook Borg warriors are no longer listening (or otherwise paying attention) to any information that doesn’t bolster their confirmation bias.
What made me think about this today was happening upon an early morning showing of “Casablanca” on Turner Movie Classics. I must have seen the classic a hundred or more times since first watched the whole movie in college, and yet today was the first time I heard what “Rick” Blaine’s real first name was. All the other times I watched the movie, this passed by my consciousness without leaving a trace, but his real name is used three times. (Hint: it’s not Richard, though that’s what Ingrid Bergman calls him…)
1. A great President in many ways, but also a terrible human being. Watch the culture and the news media bury this. “The Jews Should Keep Quiet: Franklin D. Roosevelt, Rabbi Stephen S. Wise and the Holocaust,” a new book (published in September) reveals new archival evidence that shows FDR’s callous and bigoted treatment of European Jews prior to and during the Holocaust. I know the author, Dr. Rafael Medoff of the David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies, as a result of his assisting The American Century Theater with several productions that involved the Jews and Israel.
The book’s revelations are not shocking to anyone who had looked at the evidence objectively even before this new material, but Roosevelt is a hallowed Democrat Party icon, and it has been, and I assume will continue to be, resistant to any effort to inform the public of this horrific moral and ethical failing, one of many FDR was guilty of inflicting. From a review:Continue reading →
(Bear with me: This video will be relevant by the end, I promise..)
“If you’re going to take people’s guns away, wait until you get elected — then take the guns away. Don’t tell them ahead of time.”
“The View’s” panelist Joy Behar, commenting on Beto O’Rourke’s exit from the Democratic presidential nomination race after announcing that he advocated the confiscation of semi-automatic weapons.
I don’t even watch “The View,” and Joy Behar’s ignorant and strident vocal abuses of law, ethics and logic have still made it into many Ethics Alarms posts. Imagine if I actually watched the show regularly. The woman is astoundingly ignorant, and celebrates it, issuing loud and emphatic opinions that would be argued down in a competent 7th grade class (if there are such things), yet ABC gives her a public platform that is only responsibly reserved for, if not brilliant and knowledgeable pundits, at least ones that could win a game of Scrabble with a Dachshund puppy.
You know what her last featured howler was on Ethics Alarms? This: she asked, in reference to a President Trump tweet mocking Rep. Omar, “Why can’t he be brought up on charges of hate speech?Why can’t he be sued by the ACLU for hate speech? I don’t get it. How does he get away with this?”
Why? WHY, you incredibly ill-informed woman? Because there is no such crime as “hate speech.” Because the ACLU defends free speech, it doesn’t sue people for what they say. You don’t get it because you’re the most illiterate, ignorant pundit on television, maybe on television since its inception. He gets away with this because it’s the United States, and we have a Bill of Rights. Or as the late Sam Kinison would say,
This latest must be my favorite Joy cretinism. See, she’s a typical progressive totalitarian as well as a dolt. The way to get your agenda enacted is to lie to the public so they vote you into office based on false pretenses! Sure, that’s the ticket! And not just any agenda, either—this isn’t like Barack Obama promising to be a unifying President who favored neither black not white. No, Joy wants candidates who plan on gutting individual rights to lie about their plans so citizens will go to the polls like lambs to the slaughter. Usually it’s villains that TV shows trying this trick, monsters like Hitler and Sideshow Bob. The View has a permanent panelist who endorses that route to power, openly, proudly.
She better watch out: Democrats don’t want her spilling the beans like that,
Of course, the strategy is impossible. To begin with it’s unconstitutional, but naturally Joy, having slept through school, doesn’t know this. Second, eventually people would find out that Beto’s Brownshirts were going door to door, and the results would not be pretty. These are just details, however: Joy just says whatever flotsam and jetsom flots into her cranium, and does her level best to make View viewers as brick-stupid as she is. Here are some other Joy highlights from past posts:
Speaking of Joe Biden’s habitual groping: “It’s a long way from smelling your hair to grabbing your hoo-ha… I don’t think it rises to the point we’ve been listening to like Harvey Weinstein and the rest of these people”
Justifying Democrats manufacturing imaginary offenses by the President: “Because we’re desperate to get Trump out of office. That’s why.”
Explaining how the GOP can control the Senate when more votes were cast for Democrats in the House: “Because of gerrymandering!”
On the Senate Judiciary Committee in the Kavanaugh hearings: “These white men, old by the way, are not protecting women… They’re protecting a man who is probably guilty.”
Responding to Alan Dershowitz’s criticism of Mitch Mconnell blocking the Merrick Garland nomination: “Well then how come Mitch McConnell is not in jail? That’s what I want to know.”
There are many more. Now, Joy has a right to be stupid, but she does not have a right to have a major network facilitating her making the public stupid. As I wrote here, I don’t advocate her being forced off the air by boycotts, in the manner that so-called liberals have tried to silence Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Laura Ingraham and Tucker Carlson. That’s censorship; that’s the Left’s MO in 2019. However, it is irresponsible for any network to package the clueless opinions of a woman with the intellect of a Pet Rock for public consumption. It’s like selling tainted food, or a car that keeps breaking down.
It is broadcast malpractice. She should be fired. She should have been fired years ago.
I even wrote a song about it. Sing the words to the music of “How do you solve a problem like Maria?”(from “The Sound of Music”) in the video above. I skipped the intro: it starts with the main theme.
Can’t The View Fire an Idiot Like Joy Behar?
Can’t the View fire an idiot like Joy Behar?
Why can’t they put that loudmouth in her place?
The View should protect the public from her nonsense
And wipe that smug expression off her face.
Many a thing you know they’d like to tell her
There is so much she doesn’t understand
But how can they make her read
Or research before a screed
You might as well try to lift a baby grand…
Oh, how do you fix an idiot like Joy Behar?
When will this moron finally be canned?
She is constantly confused
Ill-informed and so bemused
Hasn’t read the Constitution even once…
She’s predictable I guess
Since her values are a mess
She’s not clever! She’s not funny! She’s a dunce!
But Joy’s certain she is smart
And with gusto plays the part
Of the brave progressive warrior at work
Confrontational and loud,
She’s intolerant and proud
She’s embarrassing…let’s face it,
She’s a jerk.
Can’t the View fire an idiot like Joy Behar?
Why do they want to make their viewers dumb?
It’s so perverse inflicting her like they are…
Her opinions are like a drug that makes brains numb.
1. So now we know…The mysterious “whistleblower” is almost certainly Eric Ciaramella, a CIA analyst, former National Security Council staffer, and a career intelligence officer.who has served in both the Obama and Trump administrations. It would have been nice and reassuring if he were not so strongly tied to the Dark Side, meaning the Democrats and various “resistance” figures, but he is. That doesn’t mean he had an agenda, but somehow all of the leakers and rebels who have been instrumental in keeping the Left’s coup fires burning have aspects of their backgrounds that justify skepticism.
From the generally useful and fair article about in Heavy:
Ciaramella has worked for the Central Intelligence Agency for several years and was assigned to the White House during the end of the Obama administration. He worked closely with Biden in his role as an expert on Ukraine. Ciaramella also has ties to Sean Misko, a former NSC co-worker who now works for Representative Adam Schiff and the Intelligence Committee. According to The New York Times, the whistleblower first went to a CIA lawyer and then to an unnamed Schiff aide before filing the whistleblower complaint. The aide told the whistleblower to follow the formal process, but conveyed some of the information he learned from him to Schiff, without revealing his name, The Times reported.
“Like other whistle-blowers have done before and since under Republican and Democratic-controlled committees, the whistle-blower contacted the committee for guidance on how to report possible wrongdoing within the jurisdiction of the intelligence community,” said Patrick Boland, a spokesman for Schiff, told The Times.
The whistleblower’s ties to Democrats, including Biden, Schiff, former CIA Director John Brennan, former Director of Intelligence James Clapper and former National Security Adviser Susan Rice, have created controversy, with Trump and Republicans using his past work with them in an attempt to discredit him.
I did say generally fair. The fact that this guy who created the path to the latest impeachment excuse just happens to be a Democrat with connections to a veritable nest of anti-Trump zealots does and should discredit his objectivity to some extent. An “attempt” shouldn’t be necessary.
A study published today in JAMA Pediatrics warns that kids’ literacy and language skills suffer with screen use, and MRI scans of their brains appear to back up the findings…. Forty-seven 3- to 5-year-olds took a test to measure their cognitive abilities, and their parents were asked to answer a detailed survey about screen time habits. …The scans revealed that kids who spent more time in front of screens had what the authors call lower “white matter integrity.” White matter can be roughly thought of as the brain’s internal communications network—its long nerve fibers are sheathed in fatty insulation that allows electrical signals to move from one area of the brain to another without interruption. The integrity of that structure—how well organized the nerve fibers are, and how well developed the myelin sheath is—is associated with cognitive function, and it develops as kids learn language. …Lead author John Hutton of Cincinnati Children’s Hospital told MIT Technology Review there’s a clear link between higher screen use and lower white matter integrity in the children his team studied. That structural change appears to be reflected in the results of the cognitive test the kids took as well, which showed high screen time associated with lower levels of language and literacy skills. “The effect size is substantial, as these findings also rigorously controlled for multiple comparisons across the brain,” Hutton says.
One easy and ethical remedy would be for parents to make sure their kids don’t see them constantly staring at their phone.
3. A terrific, ethical, extemporaneous speech from Richard Dreyfus. No, Richard Dreyfus is not, and has never been, a typical Hollywood knee-jerk leftist. Glenn Beck’s conservative website “The Blaze” was “astonished” when actor/educator Richard Dreyfus recently told Fox News host Tucker Carlson,
“You were talking about the speakers on university campuses. And I am totally, incontrovertibly on your side about this. I think any intrusion into freedom of speech is an intrusion into freedom of speech. And when one of the presidents of one of the colleges said, ‘this is a school, not a battlefield,’ I said, no, it is a battlefield of ideas and we must have dissonant, dissenting opinions on campuses and I think it’s political correctness taken to a nightmarish point of view
I have withdrawn from partisan politics. I am a constitutionalist who believes that the Constitution and the Bill of Rights must be central and the parties must be peripheral. What’s most important for me is what you just mentioned haphazardly, we are over 30. Civics has not been taught in the American public school system since 1970. And that means everyone in Congress never studied the constitution and the bill of rights as you and I might have. And that is a critical flaw because it’s why we were admired and respected for so long, it gives us our national identity, it tells the world who we are and why we are who we are, and without a frame that gives us values that stand behind the bill of rights, we’re just floating in the air and our sectors of society are not connected.
What’s really important is that the assumptions of the left and the right are all skewed wrong. We have to find areas of agreement and areas that we share. And we do share the notion that education accomplishes certain things. One, it turns students into citizens. And, two, it teaches students how to run the country before it’s their turn to run the country. And, three, it teaches the values of this nation.
People come from all over the world or are born into this nation without the values that we have here. That’s why they came here, to get them. And what are they? You can put them in opportunity, rise by merit, mobility, and freedom. That’s what we sell. And if you don’t want that, you’ve chosen the wrong place. And you don’t get a pass by being born here, you have to learn it. Even the Ten Commandments are not known at birth. You must learn them. And we must learn our values and if we don’t, we are fatally, fatally wounding ourselves. We will not have any way to really combat the ideas behind ISIS because we won’t know our own. And we have to.
The one thing I can admire in activists, even those whose agendas I find wrong-headed and irresponsible, is integrity. Are they genuinely passionate about what they advocate? Do they really believe the arguments they put forth? Will they adhere to their stated principles even when it becomes profitable or convenient to reject them? I may think an activist is ill-informed, addicted to demagoguery and not very bright (Rep. Octavia-Cortez comes immediately to mind), but I will always, perhaps grudgingly, appreciate his or her passion, dedication, and persistence, if they are accompanied by integrity.
And then we have activists like Ashley Auzenne, 39, a Texas mother who fought for stricter gun control laws and an end to gun violence until last week, when she used a gun to kill herself and her three young children, Parrish, 11, Eleanor, 9, and Lincoln, 7.
I think it’s fair to call someone who says she wants to to end violence (Auzenne’s Facebook profile pictures were accompanied with the hashtags #Enough and #EndGunViolence) and then engages in it herself a hypocrite, a liar who publicly pretended to hold one view while personally being capable of engaging in the exact conduct she condemned when it suited her own perceived needs.
Perhaps, on the other hand, we should regard her as the real life equivalent of the villains in various TV shows and movies like 2007’s “Live Free or Die Hard,” the third installment of the Bruce Willis “Die Hard” franchise. In that movie, a tech whiz who had failed in his efforts to persuade the government that crucial systems were vulnerable to hacker attacks sets out to prove his point by becoming a cyber-terrorist who takes control of government and commercial computers across the United States to launch a “fire sale” disabling the nation’s infrastructure. Continue reading →
Call it demagoguery, grandstanding, ignorance, rabble-rousing or whatever you choose, an elected representative of the government tweeting such nonsense to those foolish enough to follow her is irresponsible in the extreme.
Hundreds of protesters hit the streets Friday and Saturday in Brooklyn to protest police brutality by the NYPD and its crackdown on subway fare evaders. Naturally the demonstrators chanted “No justice, no peace,” the current content free, no thought required slogan of choice by those who couldn’t articulate what they consider justice if they had a teleprompter. Continue reading →
Ethics Alarms 
An old, old, lament: “Laws are for the little people…”
I am constantly impressed at the perceptive and eloquent comments that issue from such a large number of Ethics Alarms readers. It cushions the blow of the traffic fall-off here that came shortly after the 2016 election, as the rapid Trump-Haters and resistance acolytes fled to secure echo chambers. (Facebook banning EA didn’t help.) I’d like both, sure, but I’ll take quality over quantity every time.
Aaron Pascal is long-time participant on Ethics Alarms, and he has issued many provocative comments, usually with a refreshing edge. This, in reaction to the most recent of AOC’s annoying and ethics-dead tweets, is one of his best.
Here is Aaron Pascal’s Comment of the Day on the post, “Unethical Tweet Of The Month: Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY)”….