Unbelievable.
But then, it is San Francisco, after all.
For some reason, the San Francisco Giants first year manager, Tony Vitello, couldn’t figure out that his outfielders’ post-victory celebratory ritual was inappropriate in a public venue, on TV, while playing America’s Pastime in front of family audiences.
The Commissioner’s office finally told them to cut it out. Why it took until May, I have no idea.
I would have fined the manager, the players and the team. A lot.
Morons.
In one SCOTUS case after another, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, a demented President’s irresponsible DEI selection for our highest court, has demonstrated an absence of judicial integrity, or, in the alternative, intellectual ability. Her questions in oral argument have been incoherent, and her legal reasoning is regularly polluted by obvious partisan bias. She is, in short, an embarrassment to the Court, the nation, the judiciary, the law, her race, her gender, and her party. Finally, following an extreme example of Jackson’s incompetence, Justice Samuel Alito came as close to calling her an idiot as a Supreme Court Justice can within the limits of professional civility.
It’s about time.
The Supreme Court last night granted a request to lock in its opinion in Louisiana v. Callais, discussed on EA here and here, where the Court struck down a congressional gerrymander as racially discriminatory in breach of federal law. The decision allows Louisiana to draw a new map in time for the 2026 mid-term elections. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson was the sole dissenter in the 8-1 decision to eschew the delay. Jackson’s fatuously argued that the Court’s ruling “has spawned chaos in the State of Louisiana.”
Yes, chaos is often the result when a state is trying to do something unconstitutional and is blocked.
A high school student in Philadelphia made series of videos, posted on TikTok, showing how exposed how some of his classmates could not read well nor comprehend relatively simple sentences. “whatthevek” posted a video showing single high school-aged students was unable to read the sentence, “She wore a silhouette of clothes that were extraordinary but somewhat gauche.” He made a follow-up video a day later in showing students unable to make sense of the sentence, “The colonel asked the choir to accommodate the governor’s schedule.” The videos were filmed at the city’s Preparatory Charter School of Mathematics, Science, Technology and Careers.
How surprised are you? I’m not.
The two videos went “viral,” accumulating 1.7 million likes and thousands of comments. The student says he won’t be posting a third, however. “I would post a part three, but the school board is trying to expel me, stop me from going to prom, and stop me from walking at graduation,” he revealed on Instagram last week.
South Philly-based Prep Charter has yet to conform or deny this. State test scores show that just 53% of students at the school tested proficient in reading, and 19% were proficient in math. Roughly 71% of Philadelphia’s fourth-graders cannot read at grade level, according to statistics from Philadelphia-based social justice group Achieve Now. The group also holds that about half of all adults in Philadelphia are functionally illiterate, one of the highest rates among large US cities.
Let us assume that the student, whose name is not yet known, is indeed facing punishment for his videos.
1. Nah, Trump Derangement is a myth!
2. If you want to see this orgy of hate and violence without the annoying commentary, here’s a link I couldn’t embed.
2. How does a mush-mouth like Topping have the gall to host a show of any kind? Jeeeez, whatever your first name is, get a coach! Learn to speak clearly. Slow the hell down. Not only are you hard to understand, your speech pattern is excruciating to listen to. This is malpractice.
Why hasn’t anyone told him?
3. Look at the hate on this crazy old bat’s face! What could possibly justify that?
4. There are several places on the web where one can purchase Trump pinatas. Here, for instance.
5. The onlookers cheering her on epitomize the description “angry mob.” The Axis of Unethical Conduct made them this way, hammering away at “Trump is a Nazi” and related slander and libel, day after day, for ten years. And it has caused brain damage. The remedy to speech is, we have decided as a nation, more speech, and “hate speech” is still protected speech. Inciting riots, however, is not protected speech. Nonetheless, inciting riots in slow motion, over long periods of time, by repeating demonizing and violence-triggering propaganda and rhetoric over and over again until it is embedded in weak minds, is legal. It is also unethical.
6. Do you think the crazy woman doing this while wearing a shirt that extols kindness on the front and the Golden Rule on the back recognizes the double standards she is embracing? It it intentional satire? Is she just an idiot?
7. Democrats cheer on this kind of lunacy while insisting that their “8647” rhetoric plays no part in the repeated assassination attempts. The only President I can find whose avatars were subjected to such vicarious and symbolic violence was Abraham Lincoln during protests like the draft riots in New York. (Confederate equivalents don’t count.) True, he wasn’t…
Oh. Right.
8. I react emotionally to people attacking and defiling images of the President of the United States. just as I do to flag burning. It is an attack on my nation, its institutions, its history and its values. The conduct shows civic disrespect that cannot be rationalized away.
______________
Pointer: Steve Witherspoon
Again, such a post is signature significance for Trump Derangement. No one who isn’t clinically ill with this cerebral malady would ever post such crypto-libel. It might as well have read “I am not a cannibal” or “I am Marie of Romania.” There is no evidence, none, that Donald Trump is a pedophile, yet the Trump Deranged believe it anyway. What did Donald Trump ever do to justify this delusion? How does beating Hillary Clinton in the Electoral College translate into likely pedophilia?
Now, the long-time friend who posted this today is an actor, and a communist (he’s one of those who says, “Real Communism has never been tried”) but he’s not an idiot. He’s serious and informed. Yet I would no more post a statement on Facebook that is that batty than I would announce that I am the reincarnation of Mae West. My friend only did it, presumably, because he is certain that none of his friends will think less of him for doing so, and that most of them will agree with him.
Ethics question: Should friends let friends make fools of themselves even if most of the people in their bubble don’t realize it? Isn’t this like noticing that a friend has a big piece of spinach on a front tooth? The problem is that someone who posts something this stupid isn’t likely to listen to reason, logic, or rational analysis. Are friends obligated to try to alert friends when they are behaving foolishly in public even though the likely result is losing that friend?
The latest unfair conservative assault on Jimmy Kimmel led me to do a quick survey of all the Ethics Alarms “Stop Making Me Defend X” posts. With this one, Jimmy indeed becomes the leading non-political figure in number of SMEDX entries, with three. I bet you can guess the leader in the political figure category: yes, it’s Donald Trump. (In second place is Joe Biden.)
President Trump was the subject of the very first such post, way back in 2015 when I was writing a “Letting Donald Trump be President is like letting a chimp pilot a passenger jet” post almost weekly. The list of figures (and sometimes other things) that have prompted rueful defenses here is a rogues gallery: Kathy Griffin, Robert De Nero, Bill Maher, Bill and Hillary, Eric Swalwell, Eric Adams, Chris Cuomo…the most recent was Jeff Bezos, just a week ago. The previous SMEDX effort in defense of ABC’s disgusting late night host was last September. I began it like this, quoting my first defense of this asshole in 2017, and I wouldn’t change a single word today:
“I detest Jimmy Kimmel. I loathe him. He is the most revolting of all the Left-Licking late night and cable progressive comics, worse than Colbert, Maher, Samantha Bee, all of them. All of them combined. He is an ongoing blight on the ethics of American society, and yet he is self-righteous in the process.’ My opinion of Kimmel has, if anything, deteriorated since I wrote that.”
However, the current conservative pundit, website and MAGA attacks on Kimmel as the symbol of Axis hate-rhetoric that irresponsibly encourages Trump Deranged assassins is completely unfair. (So are the attacks on House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries for his “total war” statement.)
On his show last week, Kimmel was riffing on what he might say if he were the MC at the upcoming White House Correspondents’ Dinner. “Our first lady, Melania, is here. Look at Melania, so beautiful. Mrs. Trump, you have a glow like an expectant widow,” Kimmel said. Of course Kimmel didn’t know that there would be an assassination attempt that night. But more importantly, there was nothing violent about the joke at all. In fact, it was well-constructed; the line can be interpreted in several ways, but taking it to be referring to Trump’s assassination is not among them.
Melania is considerably younger than her husband: in an earlier era, she would be called a “trophy wife.” I think I may have heard a wag make nearly that same joke decades ago when I attended a trial lawyers association convention. The number of decrepit antediluvian millionaire lawyers with gorgeous 20- or 30- something women on their arms was fairly revolting. Kimmel’s joke could have easily been made about the late professional bimbo Anna Nicole Smith when she married, at 26, an 89-year-old billionaire. Remember?
I can see why the First Lady was insulted by the innuendo (a bit “too close to the bone”), and, taking a cue from her husband, exploited Kimmel’s bad luck to pounce on Jimmy the way Jimmy pounces on the President literally every night his show airs. Nonetheless, it was unethical. “Tit for tat,” revenge and deliberate mischaracterizations are still unethical no matter how much the target “has it coming.”
Note the 3.6 thousand “likes.’
I wrote about Justice Sotomayor’s unprofessional (but what should one expect?) slap at fellow Supreme Court Justice Bret Kanavaugh here. Not only was “The Wise Latina’s” attack based on an ad hominem attack rather than the, you know, law (but what should one expect?), it was a betrayal of her colleagues on the Court and one more appeal to divisiveness based on emotions.
Now the Justice has “apologized,” with this bare bones statement:
“At a recent appearance at the University of Kansas School of Law, I referred to a disagreement with one of my colleagues in a prior case, but I made remarks that were inappropriate. I regret my hurtful comments. I have apologized to my colleague.”
It’s a crummy apology at best. She does not explain why her personal attack, using the cheap “privilege” tactic (as in “People like you just never understand..”) was “inappropriate,” or expressing clear contrition, like saying, oh, for example, “I was wrong.”
On the Ethics Alarms Apology Scale, I rate this pro forma dodge as at best a #6 (1 is perfect, 11 is worst): “A forced or compelled [apology] when the individual…apologizing knows that an apology is appropriate but would have avoided making one if he or she could have gotten away with it.”
In other words, it’s the bare minimum apology that isn’t completely insincere. You know what happened; everyone does. Chief justice Roberts told her that her conduct was unacceptable and ordered her to apologize to Kavanaugh and possible the entire court.
No, Bill Maher isn’t a professional athlete, but that’s my favorite graphic of a celebrity middle finger. Besides, it reveals Bill’s essential ugliness.
Red Sox outfielder Jarren Duran talked about his 2022 suicide attempt in a Netflix docuseries about the Red Sox released last year. He received a lot of praise for his openness, which he said was intended to increase awareness among others struggling with depression and mental health issues.
But jerks reign supreme, especially in sporting event crowds. Last night, as the Sox played the Twins at Target Field in Minneapolis, a Twins fan sitting in field box seats shouted at Duran that he should kill himself after he grounded out in the fifth inning.
The player responded with the obscene middle finger gesture. “I shouldn’t react like that,” Duran said after the game. “That kind of stuff is still kind of triggering. It happens.“
Flipping off a fan during a game is typically an automatic suspension and fine. Should it be in this case?
1. Good, I’m glad they are gone.
2. The latest bannee, “Jude” managed to get me to respond to a couple of unauthorized comments post-banning. (This is because he wasn’t around long enough for me to remember his name.) In the unauthorized comments, since sent to spam hell, he illustrated the basis for his banishment by stating, with absolute certainly, that the experience I described here was triggered by a scam, and that I made a dumb mistake by calling both the collection agency (a law firm) and the company that had mistakenly charged me. I had been phished, Jude the Obscure Asshole insisted. No, I replied, I had not been phished, and I have sufficient experience with such things to have checked. Jude just arrogantly insisted that he was right and I was wrong, without any of the information I had that he did not.
I just received an email from AfterPay USA. It reads,
“Hi Jack, Thank you for your patience regarding your ID Theft Claim – Disputed Liability with respect to Afterpay account 10082791185.
Afterpay has concluded our investigation and your ID Theft claim has been accepted. You will not be held liable for Afterpay account 10082791185 or any debt incurred from this account.
What does this mean?
Thank you,
Vivien
Global Fraud Senior Specialist
I was right. Jude was wrong. So Jude can bite me.
Ethics Alarms 