J. D. Vance made the rounds of the Sunday morning TV shows, and neatly demonstrated why he will be an asset to the Republican ticket in the exchange above with CNN’s biased dim bulb Dana Bash.
Etiquette and manners
A Symptom of Creeping Totalitarianism: The Left’s Embrace of Newspeak
In the appendix to his novel “1984,” George Orwell explained the principles of “Newspeak,” the mandated lexicon of Big Brother’s dystopian society. The idea behind Newspeak was to prevent free thought and speech by limiting the public’s vocabulary to the point that “wrongthink” was impossible. Maybe nobody reads “1984” any more, and maybe the public is just as ignorant, apathetic and gullible as our political elite count on its members being. It still amazes me that the proliferation of “Newspeak” in the media and political discourse doesn’t create appropriate awareness that the U.S. is being pushed into a totalitarian regime. There is active censorship of certain words and ideas because our Dark Lords think they will upset us (or risk undermining partisan cant). Abortion? What’s that? There is only “reproductive health.” Sex-change operations and hormone treatment for minors? What are you talking about? We have “gender-affirming care.” There’s no illegal immigration, just “newcomers,” and you always want to welcome newcomers!
And so on.
Some words are so upsetting that the news media literally won’t publish them even if a story can’t be understood as a result. Yesterday Boston Red Sox star Jarren Duran, having a rough game, was taunted by a fan and caught on a live mic retorting, “Shut up, you fucking fag!” The Boston papers, however, couldn’t let their readers know what the outfielder said, because it might upset them. So the statement was published as “Shut up you (expletive) (expletive.)”
This is the Orwellian culture progressives are slowly but surely constructing for us, if we let them.
There is no apparent stopping place on the slippery slope. The Museum of Pop Culture in Seattle, one of our most left-addled communities, has an exhibit on the rock band Nirvana that informs visitors that the band’s leader, Kurt Cobain, “un-alived himself at 27.”
“The Ethicist” Weighs In On Mandatory Kitchen Remodeling
I was going to ignore this until the issue of giving money to homeless people came up on a thread about the “hero” who made sure the illegal immigrants sneaking into the U.S. didn’t risk dehydration in the process.
The ubiquitous “Name Withheld” asked Prof. Appiah whether it would be uethical to give a friend down on his income and luck the money to remodel his kitchen, which is in dire need or repair, but to make the gift conditional on the struggling friend only using the money for that purpose. Apparently NW’s partner wants to attach strings to the financial “gift,” and “Name Withheld” doesn’t. The couple have been periodically giving their struggling, single-dad friend donations to help him make ends meet for some time.
How hard is this? If you want to make certain your gift is a kitchen remodeling—who is “Name Withheld,” Betty Crocker?—you say: “I am giving you a new kitchen. Here’s the number of a good contractor; have him send the bills to me. Just keep the cost within X dollars.” If you give someone money, the money is the gift. Sure, you can say, “Now, I’m giving you this so you can remodel that dump of a kitchen,” but you can’t say, “If you use the money for anything else, then I’ll want it back.”
Ethics Quiz: The Google AI Olympics Commercial
Google pulled that ad after a wave of criticism on social media.
Is the ad encouraging children to use AI instead of writing their own messages and letters? Is it an invitation to cheat in school? Does it suggest that robots are better at expressing genuine human feelings than humans are? Is having someone, or something, write your fan letters to a personal hero a cop-out? A lie?
Is the commercial “Ick!”, unethical, or just ominous?
Your Ethics Alarms Ethics Quiz of the Day is…
Is that Google AI ad irresponsible, corrupting—unethical? Did an ethics alarm fail to sound that should have?
Confronting My Biases, Episode 13: Old Guys With Long Scraggly Beards
I saw two men today with this fashion statement, the Rutherford B. Hayes look. Actually, that photo above is the one where his beard looks relatively kempt. On the other hand, Rutherford gets something of a pass because he grew to adulthood in the era where long beards were inexplicably in, especially among Civil War officers, and he was one. Today, however, long scraggly gray or white beards send out multiple messages to me, none of them good. Like:
- “I’ve given up. I’m old, and I don’t care how I look. I’m not even trying any more. Tomorrow, I may not wear pants.”
- “Hey, I’ve never done anything that earned anyone’s deference or respect, but maybe if I look like Heidi’s grandfather, someone will treat me better.”
- “I’m Santa Claus on the skids!”
- ‘I’m retired and you’re not! Ha Ha!”
Just In Case You’ve Forgotten, April Ryan is Still an Ethics Dunce, the News Media Is Still Biased, and Trump is Still Not a Weenie
I guess there is still some hope that race-baiting, anti-white racist, Trump-Deranged, dumb-as-a-shoehorn journalist April Ryan is slowly sliding into oblivion where she belongs. Once she was a CNN correspondent, which admittedly is nothing to be proud of, but now she toils for the Grio, a racist, race-baiting, American television network and website that says its area is “black news.” Funny, I thought news was news for everyone! Oh well, live and learn. Next on Ryan’s career freefall? Oh, maybe Hip Hop Weekly? But never mind.
April has a long Ethics Alarms dossier, the most recent entry in 2020, when she reprimanded reporters for writing about a leaked recording of Joe Biden making unpalatable comments about the “defund the police” movement. As Jonathan Turley said at the time, “[W]e are moving dangerously close to a de facto state media with the cooperation of Big Tech companies. Ryan believes that it is outrageous to rely on unapproved material if it is critical of Joe Biden (despite her use of such material for the last four years against Trump).”
Indeed she does. My favorite Ryan episode was in 2017, when she hectored Trump press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders at the end of a press briefing in which Sanders confirmed the administration’s position that toppling statues of historical figures is both bad history and bad civics by shouting, “Sarah, is slavery wrong? Sarah, is slavery wrong? Does this administration think that slavery was wrong? Sarah, does this administration believe slavery was wrong?”
A class act, to be sure.
The latest April Ryan sighting came as Donald Trump bravely and appropriately agreed to take questions in Chicago today from members of the National Association of Black Journalists. Ryan, of course, was in the camp of the members who have pledged to follow the “Trump is a racist” narrative, contrived though it is. “The reports of attacks on Black women White House correspondents by the then president of the United States are not myth or conjecture, but fact,” Ryan tweeted, or Xed. The group’s co-chairwoman of the convention, Washington Post columnist Karen Attiah, resigned in protest: after all, why give a Presidential candidate a chance to change minds that have already been made up? Yeah, this is the perfect group for April Ryan.
Somebody Please Explain To the Palm Beach County State Attorney, the Secret Service and Judge Cymonie Rowe That Being An Asshole Is Protected Under The First Amendment…
I’m truly sick of this stuff. What we have here isn’t even a close call. Michael Wiseman, 68, from Jupiter, Florida, was arrested by local police officers on July 19 because he posted ugly comments on social media expressing disappointment that former President Trump wasn’t assassinated in Butler, Pennsylvania. “The shooter missed,” he wrote on X. “He can’t be the only patriot. Cocksucker, mother and daughter fucker Trump.” And, “Why is Trump allowed to be alive? We need to train patriots. Thomas Matthew Crooks deserves a posthumous Congressional Medal of Honor, a stamp, and a national holiday.”
And, “Some people need to be better shots if they know they are going to kill a monster.” Shortly before his arrest, Wiseman wrote, “I am advocating Trump and Vance’s daughters get raped and THEN tell me they won’t fly their kids out of the USA for an abortion.”
Ethics Villain: Ex-J.D. Vance Friend Sofia Nelson
“Villain” is the best I can muster right now. I really can’t find the right word for someone who would do what Sofia Nelson did, or who would be able to look at themselves in the mirror after she did it.
Nelson, a close friend of J.D. Vance’s in law school and for many years thereafter, sent about 90 of the emails and text messages they exchanged from 2014 through 2017 to The New York Times. Nelson is gay or a trans-male or a trans-female, or something, I couldn’t possibly care less. Nor will I read the Times’ article about what its partisan “Slime Trump and Vance!” posse found in the emails thus far. All that matters from an ethics perspective is the throbbing betrayal of trust represented by anyone the sharing past private communications with a media outlet without obtaining consent and permission from the other party to the exchanges. It’s revolting that the Times would accept such stuff: this is a National Enquirer level story. Trump’s running mate once wrote “Love you” to a guy who is now a chick! Ew! Does that mean Vance is gay, not that there’s anything wrong with that?
Ethics Observations on J.D. Vance’s “Childless Cat Ladies” Controversy
The Axis of Unethical Conduct “pounced” on newly nominated Trump running mate J.D. Vance this week over a “re-surfaced” video in which Vance said that the country is being run “by a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable too.” The comment was made in an interview with former Fox News host Tucker Carlson when Vance was beginning his ultimately successful campaign for the Senate.
Observations:
1. Gee, just the GOP needs—TWO candidates who lack functioning filters between their brains and their mouths.
Ethics Dunce: Chaya Raichik
Chaya Raichik, the industrious conservative gadfly who infuriates the Left by posting the most ridiculous and self-indicting TikTok videos by unhinged progressives, definitely has a nasty side. Exposing public figures, celebrities, local officials, scholars, professors, teachers, corporate execs, prominent athletes, “influencers,” Hollywood stars and would-be activists is an admirable (and useful) pursuit—after all, they post the stuff that makes them look ridiculous or sinister and know that what they say gets noticed. Such statements also often demonstrate why they should not continue in their chosen professions. Siccing the social media mob on a typical working American who posts something dumb on Facebook is very different. It is cruel.
Recently Raichik’s Libs of TikTok account has expanded its target range to private Facebook posts that included ugly comments on the near assassination of Donald Trump. (I could point her to some by my Trump-Deranged friends.) “To bad they weren’t a better shooter!!!!!” was the witty if ungrammatical retort Darcy Waldron Pinckney posted on Facebook to her modest number of FB friends. She worked at Home Depot, but not after the influential anti-woke warrior launched her (also misspelled) “quip” into cyberspace hyperdrive. A week ago, Raichik posted a screenshot of Pinckney’s comment with her photo (above) and wrote, “Hi @HomeDepot! Are you aware that you employ people who call for political violence and the ass*ss*nat*on of Presidents? Any comment?”
Ethics Alarms 