Etiquette and manners

The Indefensible “Nigger” Double Standard

/ Jack Marshall / 25 Comments

Andrea Quenette, a University of Kansas communications professor, has been on paid leave for four months after a group of her students filed a complaint that she had used the racial epithet nigger in  response to a question in class. She was asked about  her views on the best way to talk about race with  students, and replied that as a white woman, she found it  difficult to relate to minority groups’ challenges because she has not experienced racial discrimination herself.  She added that unlike other campuses where there had been over racist incidents, she “had not seen “nigger” spray painted on walls at KU.”

For saying this, she was subjected to campus-wide humiliation, an interruption in her teaching career and an investigation, of what I cannot imagine. She was talking about the word, she is a communications professor, words are her business, and it is impossible to talk about the word “nigger” seriously without using it (and no, codes like “N-word”  are either the exact same as using the word itself, or politically correct conventions that show just how silly word-o-phobia really is. Take your pick.) Finding offense with her using “nigger” in this context is simply a “gotcha” by race-baiting students. and as nonsensical as the gag in “The Life Of Brian” where the priest who condemns a Hebrew citizen by committing the blasphemy of speaking the name of God, “Jehovah,” is stoned by the crowd because he speaks the forbidden name in order to utter the condemnation. Nevertheless. Professor Quenette, while keeping her clearly worthless job, was sentenced to mandatory cultural competency training, a.k.a. political correctness indoctrination, and to have a second faculty member work with her to ensure that her curriculum include more diversity.

If she had enough sense, courage and integrity to be qualified to teach at the college level, she would have told the school to take its job, its curriculum, its rejection of academic freedom, its craven capitulation to race-bullying and its disgusting treatment of faculty members and shove them all. But no, she’s a good, submissive  social justice zombie who just made a mistake, and it’s time for her to grovel.

Spurred by this miserable marker of how low higher education has sunk, my indispensable issue scout Fred puckishly sent me this, a Washington Post opinion piece from a year ago. The column, by  African American free-lancer Michael Arceneaux, was sparked by an incident I also commented upon a year ago, when Kentucky guard Andrew Harrison muttered “Fuck that nigga”  behind his hand into a live microphone while answering a post-Final Four game news conference question about Wisconsin player Frank Kaminsky, whose heroics had led to Kentucky’s 71-64 victory.  My position on Harrison, then as now, was this: Continue reading →

Don’t Say The System Doesn’t Work—It Worked Perfectly With Marco Rubio

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments
As it turned out, this told us everything we need to know...

As it turned out, this told us everything we need to know…

Pundits, professors and even China are saying that the U.S. system of identifying qualified Presidential candidates doesn’t work or “is broken” because Donald Trump appears to have slipped through the net. But the occurrence of what Herman Kahn called “an unpredictable convergence of bad management and bad luck” only proves what Ethics Alarms has noted over and over again: no system, even the best, works all the time. I’ll post an article about all the people and circumstances that poked that hole in the Trump net once my nausea subsides, but in the meantime, I want to point out that the system worked perfectly with Marco Rubio. He wasn’t fit to be President, and the system exposed him brilliantly.

Good.

Rubio thought that he could follow the successful plan that put Barack Obama Barack Obama in the White House in 2008, despite similar deficiencies in experience. Like Obama, he was a young, fresh, minority candidate with a natural base, who projected intelligence and was an impressive speaker. The political and campaign processes, however, and his reaction to the stress of them, exposed his many flaws. The Obama plan wouldn’t be enough this time, in no small part because Marco Rubio is no Barack Obama: Continue reading →

“A Nation Of Assholes” Epilogue, Baseball Edition

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

To be fair, Donald Trump supporters and Trump himself are not the only ones who would transform the United States into a rude, boorish snakepit of jerks and narcissists.

There is Bryce Harper, for example, shown above in his minor league days blowing a kiss to a pitcher after a home run.  In a much discussed interview with ESPN, Harper decried the “unwritten rules” of Major League Baseball, which, among other things, disapprove of showboating, trash-talking, styling, and showing up  opposing players. Naturally, many sportswriters, whose IQ and ethical standards hover perilously close to those of the juvenile, none-too-swift Harper, are flocking to his side.

“It’s a tired sport because you can’t express yourself. You can’t do what people in other sports do,” Harper said in the interview. “I’m not saying baseball is . . . boring . . . but it’s the excitement of the young guys who are coming into the game now who have flair. If that’s Matt Harvey or Jacob deGrom or Manny Machado or Joc Pederson or Andrew McCutchen or Yasiel Puig — there’s so many guys now who are so much fun.”

Nobody’s against fun, of course, and there have been many players past and present whose unique flair was justly celebrated. Harper, not being a rhetoric master, probably mixed up the harmless with the toxic in his list unintentionally, but there’s no excuse for Pulitzer Prize-winning sportswriter Tom Boswell, other than the fact that intellectual dishonesty is his career calling card.

“From Willie Mays basket catches to Pete Rose sprinting to first on a walk to Dennis Eckersley fanning his finger-pistol at hitters he had struck out, baseball needs all the authentic extroverted individuality it can get, ” writes Boswell in his piece about Harper in the Washington Post. Ah yes, the device of the deceptive metaphor. Willie Mays used the basket catch because that’s the way he caught baseballs. Pete Rose ran to first on walks because he hustled.

The pistol routine Eckersley used (occasionally)? He was being a jerk. Continue reading →

The Flat Learning Curve Continues: Obama Skips Nancy Reagan’s Funeral. Of Course He Does.

/ Jack Marshall / 112 Comments
Obama's job learning curve: still flat.

Obama’s job learning curve: still flat.

I wasn’t going to comment on this until two of my many clueless Facebook friends had to mock an indignant article about it on a conservative site. I don’t think Obama skipping Nancy Reagan’s funeral is worthy of outrage, but it is sad. It’s almost as sad as the degree to which the people who elected him have never comprehended what his job is.

Obama is not attending Nancy’s funeral because he was previously committed to attend a vital event called South by Southwest (SXSW) Interactive festival. Michelle Obama will speak at the funeral, but she is also speaking at the festival, making it obvious that the President could also do both if he wanted to. He doesn’t want to, just as he didn’t want to show respect to a sitting Supreme Court Justice who had died suddenly by attending his funeral.

That’s Obama; we should know him by now. He’s a petty, small man, but more important, he doesn’t seize opportunities to repair the poisonous partisan divide that he helped create because he doesn’t understand the symbolic nature of the Presidency, or just doesn’t give a damn. That attitude—I think both are true— has played a major role in creating the non-functioning government and the societal divisions he will leave as his primary legacy. Continue reading →

Observations On The Democratic Candidates Debate In Flint, MI.

/ Jack Marshall / 47 Comments

Dems debate

Here’s the transcript.

1. The smug comments from Democratic pundits and operatives about how “substantive” the Democratic debates have been and how “ugly” and “childish” the GOP debates have been is really nauseating, and the news media should flag it as such. When one candidate is ugly and childish, as well as shameless about being so, the other candidates have little choice but to get down in the mud. That’s the situation in the Republican debates, and that is entirely due to Donald Trump. When, meanwhile, one candidate is notable for lack of trustworthiness and dishonesty, and her only opposition refuses to reference the major reason the public (accurately) believes her to be so,  the resulting debate will be muted. Sanders, in short, isn’t doing his job. That’s nothing for Democrats to be smug about.

2. Last week it was learned that at least 2,079 emails Clinton sent or received on her unsecured, private server contained classified material, though she initially said that she handled no classified material whatsoever. That’s at least 2,079 lies. We learned that she received those emails on two devices , a BlackBerry and an iPad that she received in June 2010, despite the fact that she said, after news broke about her personal email account,  she’d done this as a matter of convenience so she would not have to carry two devices, saying, “I thought it would be easier to carry just one device for my work and for my personal emails instead of two.” This was also a lie.

We learned that many, many  people, including lobbyists, lawmakers, White House officials, State Department employees, John Kerry and President Obama communicated directly with Clinton using her personal email address. This is just another part of the Obama Administration Ethics Train Wreck, Outrageous Arrogance and Incompetence Division. That so many should have reported it and didn’t, as well as stopped it, is no excuse for the corrupted Clinton enablers to latch onto, and it doesn’t make what she did any less outrageous and reckless. It doesn’t excuse her irresponsible conduct at all. It just shows how lazy and amateurish others were as well.

We earlier learned that hackers with ties to Russia tried at least five times to access Clinton’s account over a four hour period  on the morning of Aug. 3, 2011, by sending her emails. The Clinton campaign says there is no evidence to suggest she opened them, giving the hackers access to her computer. That is just moral luck.

Finally, we learned this week that Hillary Clinton, as Secretary of State WROTE 104 emails, using her private server, that the State Department has since designated as classified.

Was Clinton asked about anything related to her e-mail lies and incompetence regarding national security last night, or about her incompetent oversight of her own agency, which is supposedly one of the credits that makes her so qualified to be President?

No. That’s a breach of competence by CNN and Anderson Cooper, with pure complicity by Bernie Sanders. Continue reading →

Post-Debate Ethics, Part 2 (of 4): John Kasich’s Opportunity

/ Jack Marshall / 33 Comments

It is almost too late, but not quite, for Donald Trump to be derailed by a Joseph Welch-Joe McCarthy moment. I called for a qualified and competent GOP candidate to do this seven months ago, but none had the wit or courage to deliver. Since then, Trump has provided one opening after another that could have been exploited to tear away the veil of ignorance from even the eyes of the most deluded Trump supporter. One such opening was September 16, when Trump probably doomed some innocent children by promoting anti-vaxxer myths in a nationally televised debate. A medical doctor, inexplicably running for President, was standing right next to him. Did Ben Carson say, “You know, Donald, your ignorance is stunning. Vaccinations don’t cause autism, and they save lives, but as with every other topic we have talked about, you are shooting from the hip, faking expertise you don’t have, and dangerously misleading millions of trusting Americans by pretending to have expertise you don’t have. You should be ashamed of yourself. Why aren’t you?”? No, Carson, typically, mumbled something accommodating and let Trump get away with more misinformation.

Dr. Carson’s gone now, thankfully, as are many other candidates who might have burnished their own chances and clotheslined Trump with a well-planned “Have you no sense of decency?” sequel. Only one candidate remains who has any chance of pulling off the instant character assassination that Joseph Welch executed so deftly on June 9, 1954. In my post before that September 16 debate, I predicted that one of the non-Trumps would use a variation of Welch’s line, and observed that if I was wrong,  none of them “are  smart enough to be President.”

As Jeff Goldblum muses in “Jurassic Park,” Boy do I hate being right all the time.” Or being right about why I was wrong.

I don’t have much hope for John Kasich, the one remaining alternative to Trump with a chance to play Welch effectively. Continue reading →

Hugh Hewitt Bravely Takes Up The Challenge Of Identifying Substantive Reasons To Vote For Trump, And Fails Miserably

/ Jack Marshall / 32 Comments

Six reasons

Apparently “Anti-Trump Sunday” is going to bleed into Monday. Sorry. Can’t be helped.

I have been—all right, the term is trolling—some sites and blogs where Trump supporters hang out to try to get one of them to articulate a single rational, substantive reason to support him for President of the United States of America. They can’t. I am still searching, and I have put out a challenge, but still no takers. I doubt one exists.

Radio talk show host Hugh Hewitt wrote a piece for the Examiner today called “Six reasons Trump is still better than Clinton,” which isn’t exactly my quest: I can give you six reasons why waterboarding is better than flaying, too. Still, it is as close as I’ve seen to an honest effort to justify voting for Trump, even though setting the only alternative as Hillary makes it a very low bar. Personally I think Hewitt is a knee-jerk hack and favored by CNN and others as the official “Right Wing Guy” because he makes conservatives look bad, but never mind: it’s an honest effort.

It is still a failure, however. He begins by destroyng his own credibility by excusing Trump’s insults and attacks on journalists:

“Bottom line: Insults of journalists don’t matter. Short of insulting my family, it simply doesn’t matter what Donald says to me or any reporters and pundits.”

Very, very, wrong. Presidents and national leaders undermine democracy by attacking the news media and specific journalists. Leaders who do that are sliding into censorship and autocracy, and devaluing the First Amendment. Obama has already started that process; it’s unethical, irresponsible and unprofessional, as well as unpresidential and an abuse of pwoer. Before Obama, the last President who made a habit of attacking the press was Richard Nixon. Are you surprised?

After that beginning, proving to me that  Hewitt really doesn’t comprehend the vital role a President has in upholding our democratic values, I’m not that interested in his analysis, but still, here are his “six reasons”: Continue reading →

Five Reasons Why Melissa Harris Perry’s Email Is Even Worse Than Talia Jane’s Open Letter To Yelp

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

Melissa-Harris-Perry-Tampon-Earrings

Last week, Talia Jane, a low-level Yelp worker, wrote a whining online “open letter” to Yelp’s CEO that became an instant classic in the category of “How not to treat one’s employer.” Yesterday, MSNBC host Melissa Harris-Perry sent an e-mail to her colleagues at MSNBC announcing that she was refusing to appear on her show this weekend because her show had been virtually taken away from her and that she felt “worthless” in the eyes of NBC News executives. You can read the whole thing here, but here are the juicy parts:

” [A] s of this morning, I do not have any intention of hosting this weekend. Because this is a decision that affects all of you, I wanted to take a moment to explain my reasoning…

Here is the reality: our show was taken — without comment or discussion or notice — in the midst of an election season. After four years of building an audience, developing a brand, and developing trust with our viewers, we were effectively and utterly silenced. Now, MSNBC would like me to appear for four inconsequential hours to read news that they deem relevant without returning to our team any of the editorial control and authority that makes MHP Show distinctive.

The purpose of this decision seems to be to provide cover for MSNBC, not to provide voice for MHP Show. I will not be used as a tool for their purposes. I am not a token, mammy, or little brown bobble head. I am not owned by Lack, Griffin, or MSNBC. I love our show. I want it back. I have wept more tears than I can count and I find this deeply painful, but I don’t want back on air at any cost. I am only willing to return when that return happens under certain terms.

…I have a PhD in political science and have taught American voting and elections at some of the nation’s top universities for nearly two decades, yet I have been deemed less worthy to weigh in than relative novices and certified liars. I have hosted a weekly program on this network for four years and contributed to election coverage on this network for nearly eight years, but no one on the third floor has even returned an email, called me, or initiated or responded to any communication of any kind from me for nearly a month. It is profoundly hurtful to realize that I work for people who find my considerable expertise and editorial judgment valueless to the coverage they are creating.

While MSNBC may believe that I am worthless, I know better. I know who I am. I know why MHP Show is unique and valuable. I will not sell short myself or this show. I am not hungry for empty airtime. I care only about substantive, meaningful, and autonomous work. When we can do that, I will return — not a moment earlier…”

As with Talia, this screed has apparently cost Harris-Perry her job. Good. Continue reading →

Fairness To Clinton: #WhichHillary Is Fair, Black Lives Matter Isn’t

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

Racial Justice Sign

Protesters who interrupt speeches are not engaging in free speech, they are defiling it. We can expect protesters of all sizes, shapes and colors to be interfering with campaign appearances this year, forcing candidates into a lose-lose-lose proposition of either giving the activists a platform they don’t deserve, rewarding rude and disrespectful behavior and looking weak (as Bernie Sanders did last year, allowing a Black Lives Matter group to hijack a campaign appearance), trying to ignore the disruption and thus being unfair to those who came to hear a speech without static, or being  confrontational with the protesters and alienating voters who may sympathize with their cause.

This is one area in which Donald Trump has a clear advantage: since neither he nor his addled supporters care about ethical values, he can safely be abusive to protesters, and he is. At the rate his abuse is escalating, I expect him to egg on one of his mobs to burning or eating one by the spring.

Thus I must sympathize with Hillary Clinton, who just had an ironic ethics encounter. Continue reading →

More Photography Ethics: A Federal Court Rules That There Is No Right To Photograph Police

/ Jack Marshall / 22 Comments

photographing_police

U.S. District Judge Mark Kearney has ruled that citizens don’t have a First Amendment right to take cellphone videos and photos of police unless they are challenging or criticizing the police conduct.

This opinion makes no sense, and is dead wrong.

Richard Fields, a Temple University student, took a cellphone photo of about 20 police officers standing outside a house party because, he testified, he thought it would be an interesting picture. Amanda Geraci, who says she is “a trained legal observer,” whatever that is, tried to video an arrest during a an anti-fracking  protest.

Fields had his cellphone seized and was cuffed, as an officer searched his cellphone before returning it and cited him for obstructing the highway and public passages while taking the photo.  Geraci said an officer physically restrained her to prevent her from recording the arrest. The two both sued for alleged First and Fourth Amendment violations, and their cases were consolidated before the court, as the same Constitutional issues were involved.

Judge Kearney argued that Fields and Geraci would have to show their behavior was “expressive conduct” to support a First Amendment claim. Neither plaintiff met that burden, because neither told the police why they wanted to capture the images, Kearney wrote. “The conduct must be direct and expressive; we cannot be left guessing as to the ‘expression’ intended by the conduct.”

“Applying this standard, we conclude Fields and Geraci cannot meet the burden of demonstrating their taking, or attempting to take, pictures with no further comments or conduct is ‘sufficiently imbued with elements of communication’ to be deemed expressive conduct. Neither Fields nor Geraci direct us to facts showing at the time they took or wanted to take pictures, they asserted anything to anyone. There is also no evidence any of the officers understood them as communicating any idea or message.”

What astounding nonsense! Would Kearney argue that an oil painting was similarly ambiguous as “expressive” without the painter saying, “I am painting the picture so that I have a painting that I can show others”? Continue reading →