1 To be crystal clear about the student walk-outs:
a) The only reason schools are tolerating them is because a majority of teachers and administrators share the anti-gun agenda the protests represent. Ethics Foul. Educators’ political views should be irrelevant to how they do their job, which is to educate students, not encourage them to skip class.
b) The students who walk out should be disciplined, and the reason they walked out should be neither a mitigation nor an enhancer. If they want to engage in civil disobedience, fine: its a grand old tradition, for causes noble and dumb alike.
c) The news media hyping the protests is unconscionable, and just another example of journalists taking sides rather than reporting.
d) Anyone who says in public that they are “proud” of these children should be fitted with a dunce cap and have it super-glued to their heads. Proud of what? That they have allowed themselves to be used as puppets, pawns and human shields by cynical politicians and activists? That they have failed to make a single valid or persuasive argument in over a month, while polluting the discussion with statistical falsehoods, blame-shifting, name-calling and demonization? That they are reveling in and parading their lack of intellectual honesty and critical thinking skills?
e) The walk-outs and protests are not merely sort of like, but exactly the same, as the “screaming at the sky” demonstrations. Those was embarrassing, and so are the wlak-outs. In particular, educators should be embarrassed. This is the level of critical thinking they are training our young to master.
f) This idiotic sign, on display in my area yesterday, nicely sums up the level of seriousness, common sense and acumen the anti-gun students have displayed so far:
2. I’m going to try to make this the last time I pay any attention to what Hillary Clinton says. I really am. During that infamous interview the India Today Conclave over the weekend, the one where she again implied that anyone who voted for President Trump was a bigot or a moron, Clinton made another statement that raised metaphorical eyebrows She was asked why she thought most white women voted for Trump, and said, Continue reading →
Nancy Pelosi Statement on Appointing Rex Tillerson (2.13.16)
“Choosing an oil executive friendly with Vladimir Putin as Secretary of State sends a disturbing signal about President-elect Trump’s priorities. Rex Tillerson’s cozy relationship with the Kremlin is especially alarming in light of his attitude toward sanctions over Russia’s aggressive behavior in Europe, while at the same time the President-elect continues to side with Russia over the judgment of the U.S. intelligence community.
Nancy Pelosi Statement on Dismissing Rex Tillerson (3.13.18 )
“Secretary Tillerson’s firing sets a profoundly disturbing precedent in which standing up for our allies against Russian aggression is grounds for a humiliating dismissal. President Trump’s actions show that every official in his Administration is at the mercy of his personal whims and his worship of Putin.”
1 O.J. was guilty??? I’m shocked! I was going to run a quiz about whether Fox broadcasting the 12-year-old O.J. Simpson interview in which he “hypothesizes” about what really happened—when Nicole Simpson and Ron Goldman ended up with the lives stabbed out of them and a trail of O.J.’s blood leading from the scene to his home—was unethical or just icky, as in “revolting taste.”
Never mind: I’m willing to say it was unethical. Fox was aiding and abetting a murderer’s efforts to cash in on his crimes. Yes, yes, I know: in the eyes of the law, Simpson is innocent. But Fox, and you, and I, and O.J.’s lawyers and certainly O.J. all know beyond a shadow of doubt that he did it, and Simpson deserves a full shunning from the culture in every respect.
Fox, many forget, produced this interview as part of the promotion for O.J.’s book, “If I Did It,” written by a ghostwriter after interviews with Simpson. Simpson got $600,000 in the deal, denying later that he had anything to do with the project, and saying, “Hey, they offered me $600,000 not to dispute that I [wrote] the book…Everybody thinks I’m a murderer anyway. They’re not going to change their mind just because of a book.”
The consensus is that the Simpson’s statements in the Fox interview amount to a confession to double murder. I saw the key portion in a promotion,, where O.J. says that he remembers being at Nicole’s home, grabbing a knife, then seeing lots of blood…but not remembering what happened in between. But Simpson is a liar and a sociopath, and because of double-jeopardy, he can say that he watched Nicole and Ron get attacked by an army of zombies he recruited and it wouldn’t make any difference.
The degree to which Fox debased itself by running this offal cannot be exaggerated, and anyone who watched it without being paid to do so is an accessory after the fact to the unjust enrichment of O.J. Simpson.
2. Bonus O.J, ugliness:Read this hateful, racist, biased and legally ignorant essay by Michael Herriot at “The Root.” Herriot is another of many contributors to CNN whose anti-white racism is palpable, but deemed acceptable mainstream punditry. How deep and widespread is this kind of blind, unreasoning hatred of white Americans in the black community? How can anyone read something like this and wonder where the upsurge in white nationalism comes from?
“It meant so much to us, and, you know, I have to let you know how it is for us now. We had you. We had the Obamas in the White House. Even on a bad day, you had a north star. You had some hope. And then it was like the universe looked just said, psych! And threw us in the toilet and closed the lid and now we’re just stuck in this crazy situation, swirling…Help us, though, help us though!…I go out there and I try to tell people, let’s not become what we are fighting. Let’s not be what we’re fighting. They tell me, shut up, Van, because we got bigots out here, we got Nazis out here, we’re getting bullied, we are tired of going high. We want to go low and kick them in the private parts!”
There is disturbing evidence that “the resistance” and the anti-Trump mob, including the news media, is heading into a new and even more deranged stage, which is scary, since the previous stage has been putting unprecented stress on the nation’s mental and political health. We saw this deterioration with Jill Abramson’s open admission that she keeps a totem of Barack Obama in her purse to stave off despair. We are seeing more and more alternate-reality rants, like this one by David Remnick in “The New Yorker.”
The rhetoric is getting more shrill and hyperbolic every day, even when the news is good. At least Paul Krugman is consistent: his rhetoric about Trump has been shrill and hyperbolic from the start. Here he is this morning:
“Now, it’s a commonplace, but also a euphemism, to say that Trump has authoritarian instincts. A more accurate statement would be that he expects the kind of treatment tin-pot dictators demand, free from any criticism inside or outside his government and greeted with constant hosannas of praise. And everyone who isn’t willing to play the full game, who has tried to play by something resembling normal democratic rules, seems to be fleeing the administration. Soon only the shameless sycophants will be left. This will not end well.”
Sigh. All of America’s strong Presidents have had autocratic instincts, with the arguable exception of George Washington. Jackson, Polk, Lincoln, Cleveland, Teddy, Wilson, FDR, Truman, Ike, LBJ, Nixon, Reagan, Clinton. Obama did as well, though he wasn’t a strong President. It’s just that people like Krugman are so offended by Trump being President that when he behaves essentially like the rest, they think it’s sinister. The complaining about this President surrounding himself with yes-men is especially hypocritical, since there were few complaints from the same critics about President Obama’s dangerously deferential inner circle, bolstered by a worshipful rather than properly objective press.
Krugman’s title is “Springtime for Sycophants.” Trump is Hitler, get it? Continue reading →
As you may have noticed, your host has been involuntarily separated from Ethics Alarms for about 24 hours. Several things occurred that under normal circumstances would have had me dashing off a post while waiting for flights or preparing to check out of my hotel—and there were definitely several comments that had me reaching for a phantom keyboard—but I was without laptop, thanks to leaving the power cord behind in my previous hotel.
So I have a little story to tell. I stayed at a decent Boston hotel last night, not a 4 star hotel like the one I just left in Atlanta (The Four Seasons), but a nice one, professionally run, dependable. Yet this morning this was my wake-up call, via recording:
“It’s 7 AM. This is your wake-up call for March 8, 2018.”
Almost at the same time, David Hogg was on CNN, explaining how darned easy it was to create a system that would prevent school shootings forevermore.
Wrong. Systems break down, you experience-free, arrogant, disrespectful, know-nothing puppet. The belief that human beings can devise systems that will solve every problem, or any problem, and do what they are designed to do without failing miserably at the worst possible times and in the worst imaginable ways is signature significance for a fool, or a child. O-Rings fail. Police don’t act on warnings that a kid is violent. Obamacare raises health care premiums. Political parties end up nominating Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. Jack Ruby breaks past police security. Communism ends up killing hundreds of millions rather than creating a worker paradise. The Titanic hits the wrong iceberg exactly where it’s weakest. Hitler takes a sleeping pill during the Normandy invasion.
David Ropeik, who teaches at Harvard and who is a risk assessment expert, finally wrote the article I’ve been waiting for…and it was published almost a month after the Parkland shooting, following almost a month of the ignorant and arrogant grandstanding by the high school students who have been used as virtual human shields by the anti-gun lobby, almost a month after the news media and expedient politicians, including the President, began pandering to grief and ignorance while going out of their way to make the public believe that school shootings are a national crisis.
I’m glad that some sunlight of reality made it through the human-made fog, but it is unconscionable that it took this long, Now let’s see how thoroughly the news media, a full partner with the ban-gun effort, will bury it.
Before I start, however, let me salute the Washington Post. I have not read a Post Sunday Outlook section since switching over to the Times—a better paper but far, far more partisan and biased than its only close competitor—and it was stunning to be reminded what a Sunday news commentary supplement looked like that didn’t feature hysterical Trump -bashing in 75%-90% of its articles. Not only that, the Post had the courage to challenge the conventional, and false, wisdom about school shootings being actively promoted by the Times and the rest of the mainstream media.
“The Education Department reports thatroughly 50 million children attend public schools for roughly 180 days per year. Since Columbine (1999), approximately 200 public school students have been shot to death while school was in session, including the recent slaughter at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla. (and a shooting in Birmingham, Ala., on Wednesday that police called accidental that left one student dead). That means the statistical likelihood of any given public school student being killed by a gun, in school, on any given day since 1999 was roughly 1 in 614,000,000.”
This is not a great risk. This is not even a significant risk. To say, as the Kiddie Corps has been telling us, that this risk is “unacceptable” can only mean that the official, anti-gun position is that no risk is acceptable. Surely no one is going to argue that a 1 in 614,000,000 chance of being killed in another Parkland or Newtown is unconscionable, but a one in 1, 228,000,000 chance is just fine. And how do we reach no risk? We spend incredible amounts of money, trash our national liberties, send kids to lightless, joyless iron boxes…and there will still be a risk
“[S]ince the 1990s, shootings at schools have been getting less common.”
What? What about all those statistics that claim the opposite? They are advocacy statistics, spun and manipulated. Cheating, in other words. Ropeik is hardly an NRA shill: it’s clear that he is venturing to make these observations while aware that he is risking his progressive bona fides, and thus his invitations to Cambridge cocktail parties. He writes for example,
The problem with all of this is what our excessive fears could lead to. Having more guns in schools, as President Trump advocates — or more guns anywhere — increases the likelihood of gun violence. …The Parkland tragedy itself teaches that more guns don’t automatically mean more safety: The school was patrolled by an armed guard.
The studies claiming that more guns lead to more gun violence are all based on cross-cultural, international comparisons, which many believe (as do I) pollute the findings. Do more guns in the US lead to more gun violence? Reiko himself cited a stat that suggests otherwise: there are more guns in the U.S. now than before Columbine, and a decline in the frequency of shootings at schools. As for the armed guard, citing a professional with a gun who doesn’t do his job tells us nothing about guns, just that it is who is holding it that matters—which is what the NRA has been saying since I was knee-high to a chipmunk.
“Saying you need to understand gun terminology to have opinions on gun policy is the equivalent of saying you need to understand the biology of a heroin overdose to have an opinion on the drug war.”
Thus went the jaw-on-the-floor stupid tweet of Zack Beauchamp, a senior report at Vox. I had written a post about the ridiculous “gunsplaining” article in the Washington Post, and foolishly assumed that even anti-gun fanatics would be embarrassed to endorse the view expressed there that those arguing for material changes in public policy should be required to understand the object of that policy. Then came Zack’s tweet.
Admittedly, and to be fair, Twitter makes people stupid. We have documented the sad Twitter-feuled decline of Harvard Law School icon Larry Tribe, and new victims of Twitter brain-suck suface every day. Bill Kristol once had a rather impressive brain, for example; look what he tweeted last week:
Wow. What a terrible, and ahistorical, analogy. The Texans at the Alamo were fighting in a war to secede from Mexico. Santa Anna was an authoritarian all right, but to Texans he was being authoritarian in the same way Lincoln was when he used forcet to keep the South from leaving. Mexico was hardly “nativist”: it invited Americans to settle the territory, and their arrival was completely legal. Indeed, Texas is a great example of what can happen when a country doesn’t control immigration at all. Twitter makes you stupid, and bias makes you even more stupid. Add anti-Trump bias to Twitter and you get Bill Kristol sounding like Maxine Waters.
Zach liked Kristol’s bad analogy too!
The fact that Vox employs a senior reporter whose critical thinking skills are so poor and whose judgment is so wretched that he happily displays them on social media is instructive regarding the influence new media commentators like Vox wield. Thus I was grateful for this Comment of the Day, by Michael West, on the post, The Desperate “Gunsplaining” Dodge’:Continue reading →
“Yet for its advocates, the questionable veracity of the Russiagate story seems much less important than what has become its real purpose—elite virtue-signaling. Buy into a storyline that turns FBI and CIA bureaucrats and their hand-puppets in the press into heroes while legitimizing the use of a vast surveillance apparatus for partisan purposes, and you’re in. Dissent, and you’re out, or worse—you’re defending Trump…In other words, there’s the truth, and then there’s what’s even more important—sticking it to Trump. Choose wrong, even inadvertently, …no matter how many times you deplore Trump, and you’ll be labeled a Trumpkin.”
“What unites [critics of Russiagate on the Left and the Right] obviously isn’t politics—rather, it’s the recognition that the Russiagate campaign represents an attack on American political and social institutions, an attack on our liberties, an attack on us. Russiagate is a conspiracy theory, weaponized by political operatives, much of the press, as well as high-level intelligence and law enforcement bureaucrats to legitimize an American election and protect their own interests, which coincide with those of the country’s larger professional and bureaucratic elite.”
You might wonder why I chose to highlight the first quote rather than the second. The second tells me nothing I don’t know, or that readers of Ethics Alarms don’t know: I’ve made it a theme here since early in 2017. I learned something from the first quote, however. This is the phenomenon I have been experiencing on Facebook, where periodically pointing out unfair and intellectually dishonest attacks on President Trump and pointing out the news media’s horrific bias increasingly get me labelled as a Trump supporter, apologist or enabler. Meanwhile, I recently had a follow-up exchange with NPR over my objections to Prof. Butler’s “Oh, come on!” outburst when I was correctly pointing out what was ethically dubious about late accusations of sexual harassment against political figures. Oh, no, I was told. He wasn’t saying “Oh come on!” because I misrepresented sexual harassment law. He was saying that because he thought I was making excuses for Trump. Continue reading →
1 Good! Billy Williams, that Derry, N.H. Used Apple Store owner who announced that Republicans weren’t welcome in his store, was evicted from his space. For weeks, a sign in the window has said that the store would re-open after renovations, which Williams’ former landlord says is not true. Williams rented the commercial space for $2,000 per month and owed $15,110 after neglecting to pay rent for seven months.
Williams, you will recall, said that he infallibly could recognize Republicans. His Facebook post announcing the GOP ban described members of the political party as “almost evil, and to be honest, usually evil.” [Pointer: Arthur in Maine]
2. Recycling Deceit: In Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport, I was intrigued yesterday by the cylindrical re-cycling receptacles that had two deposit holes, a circular one on one side, into which we were told to put cans and bottles, and a long rectangular slot on the other side, for newspapers and other paper refuse. I lifted off the top: sure enough, everything went into the same place, newspaper and cans alike. I don’t know what the term is for gratuitously demanding that the public do something pointless and trivial just to exert power, but this was it.
3. The problem with #MeToo. Commenting on yesterdays Comment of the Day, in which Carcarwhite wrote, while criticizing the #MeToo movement,
“I was kissed by Eddie Van Halen back stage in the 80’s, on the lips, a few times. He was tipsy and happy and took a selfie of us before seflies were selfies, and I’ve actually had friends on the Left tell me I should my story publicly. And they say I am ENABLING THIS BEHAVIOR by not going forward”
Commenting, Still Spartan said in part, “What you described is NOT “Me Too.” Just because some people take it too far, does not mean that it is not legitimate. Please take it from someone who had to leave a job and have her career derailed for multiple years because of this crap. It happens, and it happens every damn day.” Continue reading →
The latest tactic of the anti-gun Left is especially bizarre, but it nicely exposes the desperation and the essential dishonesty of the Parkland shooting extension of the Sandy Hook Ethics Train Wreck, which started its long journey of ethics carnage when gun control advocates decided to jettison fair and civil debate as well as any mooring to reality in exchange for demonizing, emotionalism, and hysteria.
In an op-ed in the Washington Post, gun-opponent Adam Weinstein accused pro-Second Amendment defenders and of bullying and deflection by what he called “gunsplaining.” The term was originally coined by Cosmopolitan four days before the massacre at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, though Cosmo’s version was that “gunsplaining” is just a sub-set of “mansplaining,” where men, the theory goes, inherently condescend to women by pointing out when they are wrong about anything. Weinstien’s version was a different, and even more foolish, a rationalization for ignorance:
“While debating the merits of various gun control proposals, Second Amendment enthusiasts often diminish, or outright dismiss their views if they use imprecise firearms terminology. Perhaps someone tweets about “assault-style” weapons, only to be told that there’s no such thing. Maybe they’re reprimanded that an AR-15 is neither an assault rifle nor “high-powered.” Or they say something about “machine guns” when they really mean semiautomatic rifles. Or they get sucked into an hours-long Facebook exchange over the difference between the terms clip and magazine.”
The Horror. In fact, what Weinstein is complaining about is that mean old gun-ownership supporters point out when a knee-jerk, emotion-filled gun control advocate obviously doesn’t know what he (or she!!!,Cosmo) doesn’t know what the hell they are talking about. Note the Post’s Eric Wemple, in the tweet above, calls this a “bad faith” tactic. It’s funny: pointing out that an opponent is full of malarkey has always been a valid debate tactic before, and for good reason. It means that that an advocate’s position is based on ignorance and laziness rather than sound research and facts. Why is this suddenly bad faith. “bullying” and below-the-belt tactics now?
The reason is that the anti-gun Left has bet all its chips on the power of children claiming moral authority to finally lead the anti-gun army to victory over the Second Amendment, and those children wield passion and anger but little else. Despite proclaiming themselves as “experts” on gun policy, as David Hogg recently did on Bill Maher’s “Real Time,” their expertise extends only as far as “Guns Bad!” Thus the “gunsplaining” dodge: who ever said you actually need to know what you’re talking about to be a respectable advocate? Continue reading →
1 A life in a lie, or delusion? Today’s obituaries mark a rare variety of hoax that I had somehow missed: Alan Gershwin died, after a virtual lifetime of claiming that he was the illegitimate son of the famous composer, who never made it to his 39th birthday. Read the Times story: it’s amazing. Alan essentially lived on that claim after he was discharged from service after WWII, based primarily on an uncanny resemblance to George. Was he a con man? If he believed his tale, he was not lying, just deluded. Gershwin recalls the more famous story of the American woman who said she was the Princess Anastasia.
2. Stormy weather…The most important lesson of the ongoing tabloid story involving the porn satr who is now suing President Trump is not the obvious ones. The major take-away is that this is what happens when an unholy alliance between the news media, political opponents and the Presidents themselves strip away the traditional and vital shield of public appreciation of the honor and respect the office of the Presidency has had in the past, since George Washington. Does anyone honestly believe that other Presidents did not have shady people in their personal lives who could have come forward with claims and tales embarrassing to them? Why didn’t they play the game the Stormy Daniels is engaged in? Again, the answer was simple cognitive dissonance scale reality. Traditionally the President has been so high on the scale that any gratuitous, publicity seeking attacker would fear the fury of public opinion, and correctly so. The idea of someone as low on the scale as aa porn star facing off against the President would have been unthinkable, and the news media would have left it to the National Enquirer to emblazon on its front page along with “Boy trapped in refrigerator eats foot!” Continue reading →
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