I know I’ve written about this before, but it drives me crazy. It also shows how incompetent and infantile our hallowed institution of journalism has become.
Pope Francis, we were told in stories across the web, “has again used a homophobic term after apologizing last month for saying gay men should not be admitted to church seminaries because ‘there’s already too much f*****ry….he used of the word ‘frociaggine’, a vulgar Italian term roughly translating as ‘f*****ness’, on May 20 during a closed-door meeting with Italian bishops.
Wait…what does the word mean again? Nobody would print it. Using the word was so newsworthy everyone was writing about it, but our public censors refused to reveal it. What is “f*****ness? Why should I have to play “Wheel of Fortune” to learn the key elements of a news story? The New York Times refused to translate “frociaggine” into English, but the Italian word means nothing to me and most Americans. It sounds like some kind of ragu. All the Times would reveal was that it was an “anti-gay slur,” a “homophobic slur,” or just a “slur.” If the Times prints all the news that’s fit to print, then why won’t it print the key element of such fit news? Personally, I couldn’t care less what the Pope says, but I do object to having to visit multiple web sites to find out what should have been revealed in every published report.
24 Hour Fitness, a relatively recent entry into the gym wars, issued this memo to its staff about appropriate attire:
You can’t possibly read that, so here is the good stuff in the May 2023 internal document:
“We’ve committed to creating a more inclusive environment at 24 Hour Fitness, recognizing that we have work to do to become stronger allies in support of those who are impacted by systemic oppression and inequality…
…Currently approved movements and/or social causes, along with approved expressions are:
“Black Lives Matter”/”BLM” (words)
“Pride” and or pride rainbow logo
Juneteenth logo symbol, or date – on Juneteenth (June 19th)
Flag or United States logo – on holidays such as Memorial Day, Flag Day, July 4th, Veteran’s Day, Patriots Day, etc.
Now various organizations are calling for the chain to be boycotted. It asked for this. The place is managed by morons.
Businesses that have nothing to do with politics should keep politics out of their business, advertising and workplace policies. This is especially true if those running the business have only rudimentary understanding of basic principles of democracy and the English language. You cannot tell employees what “movements” are “approved” and claim to be “inclusive.” Having “approved expressions” is also offensive to democratic principles and values.
Worst of all is the head-exploding policy of approving symbols promoting anointed sexual orientations and a racist, Marxist scam year’ round, but limiting attire sporting the American flag to holidays. Hey, can I whistle “God Bless America” while I’m doing curls if it isn’t the Fourth of July, or only “Lift Every Voice and Sing”?
“When the going gets tough, the tough get unethical.”—Me. Also, in election year 2024, Machiavellian and disgusting.
These are repulsive people. When I saw the Rolling Stone headline, “Justice Alito Caught on Tape Discussing How Battle for America ‘Can’t Be Compromised,'” I thought, “Oh-oh.” Then I read the story. Alito was tricked by a left-wing James O’Keefe imitator (Ethics Alarms’ verdict on O’Keefe’s methods and conduct has been consistent and unequivocal from the beginning: he’s an unethical journalist, dishonest and untrustworthy, whose methods have occasionally uncovered hidden agendas that can’t be ignored) posing as a conservative admirer at an event. Attending the Supreme Court Historical Society’s annual dinner on June 3, Lauren Windsor, a progressive documentary filmmaker, introduced herself to Alito as a religious conservative. Then she proceeded to ask him leading questions and offer her own “opinions.” What she learned was that Alito was nice to strangers, and that with a stranger who seemed to admire him in a social setting, he chose to be agreeable rather than confrontational.
Here is the exchange: Windsor approached Alito at the event and reminded him that they spoke about political polarization at the same function the year before (who knows if they did or not, but if Alito didn’t remember, he wasn’t going to argue about it). In the intervening year, she told Alito, her views had changed. “I don’t know that we can negotiate with the left in the way that needs to happen for the polarization to end,” Windsor said. “I think that it’s a matter of, like, winning.” Alito’s reply: “I think you’re probably right. On one side or the other — one side or the other is going to win. I don’t know. I mean, there can be a way of working — a way of living together peacefully, but it’s difficult, you know, because there are differences on fundamental things that really can’t be compromised. They really can’t be compromised. So it’s not like you are going to split the difference.”
You will see from this that the Rolling Stone headline is misleading and deceitful. Alito’s comment could have been made from either side of the ideological spectrum: it shows agreement with neither side. Moreover, it begins “You’re probably right,” which could easily mean, “You’re full of crap, but you’re welcome to your opinion, and I’ll make you feel like a Supreme Court Justice agrees with you because I’m a nice guy and now you can tell your friends, ‘Justice Alito agreed with me!'”
I have often wondered about this phenomenon, reflecting back on my lucky hour-long conversation with Herman Kahn when he was widely regarded as the smartest man alive. He was an unpretentious, kindly, engaging individual, and throughout our conversation made me feel like I had expressed theories and ideas that he thought were perceptive and valuable. Maybe he left that meeting and told a friend, “Boy, I was just trapped talking to an idiot for an hour!” But he made me feel good, which is an ethical thing to do.
And I wasn’t secretly recording him so I could leak to the Washington Post my comments as his revealed beliefs.
Next Windsor told Alito: “People in this country who believe in God have got to keep fighting for that — to return our country to a place of godliness.”
“I agree with you. I agree with you,” Alito replied. Rolling Stone adds at that point that he “authored the Supreme Court’s 2022 Dobbs decision, which reversed five decades of settled law and ended a constitutional right to abortion.” Oh! I see. Alito voted to end Roe “to return our country to a place of godliness” ! He’s a religious fanatic! He helped end Roe because of his religious beliefs!
Read the words, as Sir Thomas More might say. All Alito says is that he agrees that people need to fight for what they believe. He doesn’t even say that he believes in God. He also just says, “I agree with you. I agree with you,” which under those conditions might mean, “Now, nice talking to you, but stop monopolizing my time and let me meet some other people.” There is no rhetorical smoking gun in this conversation and nothing illuminating or newsworthy, except perhaps that the desperate left is stooping to emulating an unethical conservative fake journalist to discredit the U.S. Supreme Court, and unfairly victimizing Joseph Alito for the third time in two weeks.
These are, I repeat, disgusting people.
The New York Times, I must note, was hardly better than Rolling Stone. It also treated this manipulated, unethically recorded and ambiguous conversation as news worthy, and had a deceitful headline of its own: “In Secret Recordings, Alito Endorses Nation of ‘Godliness,’ Roberts Talks of Pluralism.” That implies that Alito (and Roberts) were aware of the recordings, and worse, Alito did NOT endorse a nation of “godliness.”
Burn and desecrate all the American flags you want, but don’t you dare mar the “Pride Flag”!
In Spokane, Washington, police arrested three people for using their cycles to put skid marks on the large “Pride” flag painted on a street. Then Lime, the ostentatiously woke e-bike distributor, resolved to punish anyone who used one of its vehicles for a similar activity, announcing,
In a new filing released today, Justice Clarence Thomasamended his financial disclosure for 2019 to note that he “inadvertently omitted” reporting two extravagant vacations paid for by conservative billionaire Harlan Crow, one to Indonesia and the other to the Bohemian Grove, an all-male retreat in northern California. Just slipped his mind! Hey, it could happen to anybody! Who hasn’t completely forgotten about a luxury trip they have enjoyed on the dime of a politically active tycoon? Heck, I know I just remembered one today, after I read this story. Well, it’s all better now; Thomas just retroactively corrected his lie of omission from five years ago.
Anyone who accepts this is ethically estopped from complaining about the White House editing Joe Biden’s blabberings to make him sound less like he belongs in a hospice.
Pro Publica correctly notes that last year, when these and other examples unusual largess from Crow—like paying for Thomas’s mother’s house—were revealed, Thomas’s “Justice Thomas’s lawyers issued a statement on the Justice’s behalf. saying that the allegations were untrue.
Like all lawyers, Supreme Court Justices are prohibited from lying in the course of their professional conduct. The prohibition on lawyer conduct is serious, but even more serious for judges, and extra-special, supercalifragilisticexpialidocious serious for the highest judges in the land.
Thomas is a disgrace, as I have said before.
But at least he never let his wife fly a 250-year-old historical flag that some idiots used to express their own political opinions…
Why would anyone present themselves to the world and strangers with a pose like that? (I am going to try to ignore another bias in this post, otherwise attractive people who wear nose rings, which I regard as the equivalent of deliberately having a booger hanging out of a nostril.) I’m a stage director: interpreting and evoking facial expressions and body language is what I do (and well, by the way). I would direct an actress to use that pose and expression if she were playing a character who was arrogant, defiant, remote, contemptuous of the world and hostile.
Someone who presents themselves in such a manner in real life is either so insecure that she is trying to keep everyone at a safe distance, or arrogant, defiant, remote, contemptuous of the world, hostile, and proud of it. This is a form of visual incivility. “Why should I waste time with you, peasant?,” that look says to me. And my response to that look is, “Oh, bite me. Get over yourself. Grow up.”
Major League Baseball, almost destroyed by a gambling scandal in 1919, with two of its greatest players, Shoeless Joe Jackson and Pete Rose (its all-time hit leader), banned from the game and exiled from the Hall of Fame for participating in baseball gambling (Jackson helped throw a World Series for gamblers; that’s him above. He was no Ray Liotta, was he?), is suddenly awash in new gambling scandals. How could this happen, you may ask? Easy. Once the Supreme Court opened the door to online gambling, all of the professional sports leaped into the money pit. Now online sports gambling outfits like DraftKings are the most ubiquitous sponsors of televised sports. In the middle of televised Red Sox games, the screen will show the odds on bets like “Will Rafael Devers hit a homerun?” David Ortiz, a lifetime Red Sox hero and icon, stars in commercials for DraftKings. The obvious message is that gambling on baseball is fun, virtuous, harmless, and…
For Major League Baseball, with its history, of all sports, to take this U-Turn was wildly irresponsible and perilous. How can the sport maintain the fan’s trust in the legitimacy of games played in an environment where billions are being wagered on them, openly and without any fear of corrupting the players?
Fay Vincent, the last real baseball commissioner (the first one was appointed because of the Black Sox scandal in 1919) told the Times, “The inevitability of corruption is triggered by the enormous amount of money that’s at stake. When you pour all this gambling money into baseball, or all the professional sports — or for that matter, even amateur sports — that amount of money is so staggering that eventually the players and I think, tragically, the umpires, the regulators, everybody is going to be tempted to see if they can get a million dollars.”
Vincent is an ethical man. The current “commissioner” (he’s the owners’ toady, just like Bud Selig, his predecessor), not so much. In a statement reacting to baseball this week banning one Major League Player for life for gambling on his own team and suspending four more for a year, Rob Manfred ludicrously said, “The strict enforcement of Major League Baseball’s rules and policies governing gambling conduct is a critical component of upholding our most important priority: protecting the integrity of our games for the fans. The longstanding prohibition against betting on Major League Baseball games by those in the sport has been a bedrock principle for over a century.”
Funny that after decades of no gambling scandals, baseball is suddenly drowning in them. What a coinkydink!
What’s Nakba? It is a pro-Palestinian framing of the forever conflict in the Middle East between Israel and the Palestinians. Nakba refers to the beginning, when the United Nations announced its two-state resolution of the Palestine conflict with Israel getting one of them, and the Arab states along with the Palestinians attacked the new Israel territory with the objective of making the Israeli state a single Palestinian state. Israel won, and that historical episode is referred to as Nakba, “the disaster,” by the Palestinians.
I view it as the equivalent of the die-hard Confederacy fans in today’s South calling the Civil War “the war of Northern aggression.” It’s a false and biased framing that justifies everything the Palestinians do and try to do to Israel (like wiping it off the map), including terrorism. It is the reverse of the more correct and honest Israeli framing, which is that Palestinians could have had their state in 1948, tried to wipe out Israel instead, and now reside in the mess of their own making.
Soon after Hamas’s October 7 terrorist attack (the hostages appear to all be dead by the way, which should have been assumed by now), the Harvard Law Review asked Rabea Eghbariah, a Palestinian doctoral candidate at Harvard Law School and human rights lawyer, to prepare a scholarly article taking the Palestinian side of the latest conflict. Eghbariah, who has tried landmark Palestinian civil rights cases before the Israeli Supreme Court, submitted one, a 2,000-word essay arguing that Israel’s attack on Gaza following the Hamas act of war should be evaluated through the lens of Nakba, and within the “legal framework” of “genocide.”
I suppose I should clarify that by noting that what the New York Times calls “extremists” are really “Americans who believe that organizations shouldn’t be aiding and abetting law-breakers and those who deliberately defy U.S. immigration laws.”
This Times story (again, I’m making a gift of it, because I pay the Times fees so you don’t have to) is a virtual cornucopia of fake news and progressive propaganda devices by the Times (but I will doubtless get a protesting email from self-banned Time apologist “A Friend” saying that it’s OK because some Times readers point out the dishonesty.)
Let’s see: the gist of the thing is that “after President Biden took office in 2021 promising a more humane approach to migration, these faith-based groups have increasingly become the subjects of conspiracy theories and targets for far-right activists and Republican members of Congress, who accuse them of promoting an invasion to displace white Americans and engaging in child trafficking and migrant smuggling. The organizations say those claims are baseless.”
I’m dizzy already:
“More humane approach to migration” means and meant “less enforcement of immigration laws against illegal immigrants.” Enforcing laws in general is considered cruel and racist by the 21st Century version of progressives.
“faith-based groups” is being used here to signal virtue and good intentions because that suits the writer’s agenda and that of the Times market. Being “faith-based” is considered meaningless, however, when the “faith-based” are opposing the killing of unborn children or objecting to being forced express support for same-sex weddings.
See that framing? Any objections to open borders is based on the “Great Replacement” conspiracy theory, sayeth the Times. That’s a lie by omission. Most Americans who object to letting illegal immigrants get away with breaking our laws do so because illegal immigrants shouldn’t get away with breaking our laws. I, for example, don’t care if they end up voting for Truth, Justice and the American Way. I wouldn’t care if they were all white, or albinos even. They don’t belong here. Let them get in line like they are supposed to. And the “human trafficking” stuff: this is a classic example of deceptive cherry-picking, making a position look ridiculous by only mentioning the bad arguments for it while ignoring the valid ones.
Sure, those claims are baseless. The claims that the “faith-based organizations” are aiding and abetting illegal conduct, however, are 100% true.
Major League Baseball’s absurd and self-wounding decision to lump all of the old Negro League season and career statistics in with those of its own players is impossible to defend logically or ethically. Ethics Alarms discussed this debacle of racial pandering here, three days ago. What is interesting—Interesting? Perhaps disturbing would be a better word—is how few baseball experts, statisticians, historians, players and fans are defending this indefensible decision or criticizing it. As to the latter, they simply don’t have the guts; they are terrified of being called racists. Regarding the former, there is really no good argument to be made. MLB’s groveling and pandering should call for baseball’s version of a welter of “It’s OK to be white” banners and signs at the games. Instead, both the sport and society itself is treating this “it isn’t what it is” classic like a particularly odoriferous fart in an elevator. Apparently it’s impolite to call attention to it.
Ethics Alarms 