1. Unforeseen consequences. Medical journal site BMJ notes,
“Bystanders may be concerned about performing CPR on a woman and removing clothing for defibrillator use, for fear of being accused of sexual assault. Further education around CPR in women and the use of female manikins may be the first step”.
If I’m unconscious, I give my permission for a total stranger to engage in that sexy-wexy act of vigorous CPR….Are there really pervos out there marching the streets waiting for somebody to pass out from cardiac arrest so they can cop a feel?
That’s not the right question, though.
The right question is,
“Are there really vicious, toxic-masculinity, rape-culture obsessed, anti-male #MeTo-ers who would gladly accuse a male Good Samaritan of sexually molesting an unconscious woman to advance an agenda?”
Absolutely.
2. Nice. How woke policies let the assholes in society rule our lives.
1. Thank you, loyal commenters, for a yeoman job in yesterday’s Open Forum.
2. Confederate Statuary Ethics Train Wreck update. Now the historical airbrushers (all from Progressiveland, just in case you couldn’t guess) are going after Civil War recreations and commemorative events. The head of the Lake County Forest Preserve in Illinois declared that there would be no more annual Civil War Days event after next month’s edition, if he gets his way. He doesn’t think Confederate flags should ever be displayed, even in battle recreations. Besides, he wants the event to be retooled so that instead of commemorating the single most important period and struggle in U.S. history, it advances an understanding of climate change.
(Who are these people? How did they get this way? What do we do about them so the cultural damage they inflict is contained?)
The home-grown historical censor also said,
“This has nothing we want, nor should celebrate, nor re-enact. When southern states are being made to tear down every statute representing this racist, murdering chapter of our history, I can’t believe here in Lake County our own forest preserve is preserving and celebrating it every year, and with our tax dollars.”
This deliberately brain-dead approach to U.S. history is working (aided greatly by the atrocious neglect of American history in our schools), and by working I mean promoting ignorance so citizens can be more easily misled. The Wall Street Journal reported that visits to Civil War national battlefields are falling off. Over 10 million Americans visited Gettysburg, Antietam, Shiloh, Chickamauga/Chattanooga, and Vicksburg in 1970. They only had 3.1 million visitors last year.
That’s about as many tourists as visited the “Cheers” bar in Boston.
Former police officer Mohamed Noor was sentenced last week to spend 12 and a half years in a Minnesota prison for shooting Justine Ruszczyk, an unarmed woman he killed while on patrol in 2017. I don’t see how anyone could read the facts of the case and not conclude that Noor was guilty of negligent homicide. I don’t see how anyone could rationally complain that his sentence was excessive, either.
Ruszczyk, who was white—unfortunately this fact is relevant—and soon to be married, called 911 twice to report what she thought was a sexual assault going on in the alley behind her Minneapolis home. Officer Noor and his partner responded to investigate. Ruszczyk came out to the darkened alley to meet them, presumably to explain what she heard or saw, and was soon dead of a single shot, fired from the open patrol car window by Noor. At the trial, Noor said he feared for his life when he saw Ruszczyk approaching his cruiser and fired. “She could have had a weapon,” he said .
The reported crime, sexual assault, the officers were investigating did not involve a weapon. If Noor’srationale was enough to justify shooting Janet Ruszczyk, presumably an officer could justify shooting anyone, at any time.
Prosecutors argued that Noor acted unreasonably by firing at unknown figure out his window without shouting a warning, and that it amounted to third-degree murder. Well, of course it did. He was convicted by a jury in April . Twelve years for recklessly killing an unarmed woman who was trying to be a responsible citizen is not an unreasonable sentence, and is within the sentencing guidelines for the crime. Continue reading →
Oberlin College deliberately set out to destroy a local bakery for insisting that laws apply to black college students. Now, in the case of Gibson’s Bakery v. Oberlin College, a jury has awarded 11 million dollars in damages to the bakery owners, and punitive damages might up the award to over 30 million.
Good. Very good. Spectacularly good.
Ethics Alarms first wrote about this awful story here. A precis:
On November 9, 2016—probably not coincidentally the day after Donald Trump was elected, throwing ultra-liberal schools like Oberlin into a ludicrously extended period of irrational fear and loathing—Jonathan Aladin, Endia Lawrence and Cecelia Whettstone were caught stealing bottles of wine from Gibson’s Bakery, a small family-owned establishment with a contract with Oberlin . As they have been duly trained by our culture, the students played the race card, initially claiming the shop had racially profiled them, and that their only misdeed was presenting fake IDs. When that wasn’t working, the three admitted their guilt and also signed statements that the store was innocent of any race-related bias. It also appears that the students punched and kicked the shopkeeper. … (Here is the police incident report.)
The day after the arrests, hundreds of students protested outside the bakery, and Oberlin’s student senate published a resolution saying Gibson’s had “a history of racial profiling and discriminatory treatment.” The Oberlin police conducted an investigation into the arrests and found “a complete lack of evidence of racism.” Over a five-year period, the bakery had pursued charges against 40 shoplifters, and only six were African-American.
…The owner met with then-Oberlin President Marvin Krislov and Tita Reed, assistant to the president, and they pressured him to drop criminal charges against the three students and any future student-thieves who were first time offenders. When he did not agree, the complaint alleges, the school made good on its threat and dropped its decade’s long contract with the bakery. … Meredith Raimondo, vice president and dean of students, joined students and members of the school faculty in campus demonstrations against the bakery, distributing a flyer that accused Gibson’s Bakery of being a “RACIST establishment with a LONG ACCOUNT of RACIAL PROFILING and DISCRIMINATION.” A boycott of the business was organized, and according to the complaint, facilitated by the school. College tour guides reportedly informed prospective students that Gibson’s is racist. …
The Ethics Alarms post listed the probable factors at work: Continue reading →
The Chicago Cubs ridiculous virtue signaling and capitulation to political correctness bullying is metaphorically coming home to roost.
Love it.
In May, as I wrote about here, the Cubs banned a fan for life because he made the ubiquitous “OK” sign behind a black broadcaster. Nobody had any basis to say with certainty what the fan meant, but after the Twitter mob demanded the fans head, the Cubs meekly complied. You see, the OK gesture might have meant, “My race is better than your race,” because a rumor was circulated online that “OK” is a white power symbol. It might have been trolling by someone who knew that the symbol would trigger social justice warriors. Or, you know, OK might have just meant “OK” as it as for almost 200 years.
I’m glad—thrilled may be a better word—that we now have strong evidence that Martin Luther King was not merely an unfaithful husband and compulsive dog (we already knew that, and so did J. Edgar Hoover), but that he was far, far worse. Of course, this doesn’t change in any way my assessment of King’s important contributions to civil rights, human rights, the culture and the nation. I just love to see people who have adopted an impossible and unethical standard for other important historical figures in order to preen, grandstand and mold history to their liking and purpose, to be hoisted—HARD–by their own petard.
King biographer David Garrow unearthed previously classified FBI documents showing that King was a bad guy in private by any measure, even using a Donald Trump or a Bill Clinton standard.
For those whose view of candidate Trump was permanently lowered by his being caught on video crudely boosting about “grabbing women by the pussy,” William Sullivan, assistant director of the FBI, wrote in a 1964 memo among many recently released that King joked to his friends that “he had started the ‘International Association for the Advancement of Pussy-Eaters’.” There is an incident recorded by FBI agents and held in a vault under court seal at the US National Archives showing that King “looked on, laughed and offered advice” while a friend who was also a Baptist minister raped a woman described as one of his “parishioners”.
Believe it or not, that story gets worse. The FBI reported that King joined Logan Kearse, the pastor of Baltimore’s Cornerstone Baptist church, who had arrived in Washington with what the FBI summary describes as “several women ‘parishioners’ of his church” in an orgy in Kearse’s hotel room at the Willard Hotel. The FBI, having neen tipped off about the visit and that King would be involved, bugged the room.
The civil rights icon and his reverend friend “discussed which women among the parishioners would be suitable for natural and unnatural sex acts.” One of the women protested, so Kearse raped her as King watched. Continue reading →
The problem with so many of the statue-toppling/ renaming debacles at U.S. universities isn’t just that they are transparent grandstanding, virtue-signalling and pandering to power-seeking black activists. The more disturbing problem is the intellectual vacuousness and lack of critical thought that school administrators display in the process of their grovels. The recent action of Bowling Green State University in Ohio is a particularly noxious example.
[Correction notice:the post originally had the university in Virginia, perhaps because I was once pulled over for reckless driving in Bowling Green, Virginia. Anyway, that was wrong. My apologies.]
Lillian Gish ( 1893-1993) had an epic film career spanning 75 years, from 1912, in silent films, to 1987. She was frequently called the “First Lady of American Cinema,” and film historians credit her with introducing basic movie performing techniques to her craft. The PBS series, American Masters devoted an episode to Gish’s life and achievements; Turner Classics Movies observes,
Having pioneered screen acting from vaudeville entertainment into a form of artistic expression, actress Lillian Gish forged a new creative path at a time when more serious thespians regarded motion pictures as a rather base form of employment. Gish brought to her roles a sense of craft substantially different from that practiced by her theatrical colleagues. In time, her sensitive performances elevated not only her stature as an actress, but also the reputation of movies themselves.
She had 120 film and TV credits before she was done, including “Night of the Hunter,” an enduring classic. In short, she was important. She enhanced the culture and her industry, and she earned her honors. She should be remembered.
Bowling Green State University has honored Lillian Gish (and her less-celebrated acting sister Dorothy) for more than 40 years. But members of the college’s Black Student Union objected the theater’s name, on the grounds that in 1915, when she was 22 years old, she was one of the stars in D.W. Griffith’s “Birth of a Nation,” a seminal work in the U.S. film canon by one of its most talented and influential directors. The film, despite its artistic merits and importance to the development of the movies, is widely regarded as racist in content and purpose, celebrating as it does the rise of the Klu Klux Klan. The film is also blamed in part for the rise of Jim Crow in the South, also aided by President Woodrow Wilson’s open promotion of the movie as well as Griffith’s political views.
None of which has anything to do with Lillian Gish. Actors don’t write scripts or control a movie’s message, nor are they responsible for how audiences perceive a film beyond their own performances. D.W. Griffith was not only the early 20th Century’s equivalent of a Stanley Kubrick or Steven Spielberg, he was young Lillian’s patron and metor. She had literally no choice other than to accept his decision to cast her in his Reconstruction opus; to rebuff him would have risked ending her career. Nor was there any way, in 1915, for Gish to know what the impact of “Birth of a Nation” might be, or to know, while she was being filmed, what the director would do with the footage.
Gish was not responsible for the movie, and holding that she was is as ignorant and indefensible as it is unfair. Continue reading →
Well, let’s see: my college has embarrassed me, my law school’s professors continue to make me wish I had earned a law degree by drawing “Skippy” from the cover of a matchbook, black students were apparently insulted in my home city’s famous art museum, my baseball team allowed itself to be split by “the resistance,” and my adopted state of Virginia has the most ridiculous governor since Rod Blagojevich was making Illinois residents consider moving to Tierra del Fuego.
To refresh your memory regarding the Ralph Northam Ethics Trainwreck, since it’s been stashed in the news media memory hole for a while: the same week that he appeared to casually explain how post-birth abortion works while showing all the passion of someone describing how to replace a carburetor, Northam’s med school yearbook surfaced showing the governor-to-be either dressed as a Klansman or wearing blackface, unless you subscribe to the theory that the photo of two men in such get-ups was just randomly planted on Northam’s page.
In a dizzying sequence, the Governor 1) apologized for the photo and wearing blackface in it, apparently admitting that it was him 2) said that he didn’t think either figure was him, and he could “tell by looking at it” 3) admitted that he did once wear blackface to look like Michael Jackson in a talent show 4) said that he had to have someone explain to him recently that blackface was considered offensive.
The short version: he’s a babbling, untrustworthy idiot. Continue reading →
Reflections: In D.C., today is being treated like a Friday, as it is assumed that everyone is taking off tomorrow for an extended 4-day weekend. It is irrelevant to ProEthics since we don’t take vacations, and ethics never sleeps, but impactful to Ethics Alarms, which means that I will be blogging for a handful of stalwarts—thank you all—and otherwise talking to myself.
This has me already thinking about Memorial Day, which in turn causes me to think about my father, who will be spending the holiday, now and forever, with my mother at Arlington National Cemetery. Being a World War II veteran was second only to being a father and husband in my father’s view of his life’s priorities. In his final years, he often drove down to the Mall and the World War II Memorial, wearing his vest with his medals, and served as kind of a volunteer exhibit himself, a real, live Word War II veteran for visitors, especially students and your tourist, to take photos with and interview. Many of his encounters that began with, “Excuse me, are you a real soldier from the war?” ended with him being hugged and even getting gifts. Now I regret I never accompanied him in some of those weekly excursions into old memories and personal pride. I only found out about them after his death in 2009.
A about a week after my dad died, I was at my parent’s condo with my mother. A knock on the door brought another resident of Fairlington South ( an Arlington, VA development converted from Army barracks during World War II) into the room. He was an active Vietnam vet, about my age, who had engaged my father to speak to his veterans’ group a few times, and who obviously admired Dad a great deal. He entered cheerily and asked, “Where’s Jack?” When I told him that Dad had died, the expression on his face melted into abject shock and grief so quickly and vividly that the image haunts me to this day.
I don’t think I fully appreciated how much my father was respected and loved by even casual acquaintances who knew about his service and character until that moment.
1. Theory: If you can’t win under the rules, change the rules. Nevada has joined the states attempting to by-pass the Constitution with the scheme of directing its electors to vote for the winner of the popular vote regardless of which candidate the state’s residents favored. I think that means 15 states, all with Democratric Party-dominated legislatures, are trying this stunt so far in frustration over Al Gore and Hillary Clinton joining Andrew Jackson, Samuel Tilden and Grover Cleveland on the list of Presidential candidates defeated by the Electoral College.
This is grandstanding: the device is unconstitutional on its face, and sinister mischief: the idea is to pander to civic ignorance (“Of course the popular vote winner should become President!” is an easy call if you don’t know anything about history or why the Electoral College was installed) and almost guarantees a Constitutional crisis and maybe violence in the streets the next time a Democrat loses despite a popular vote edge. Continue reading →
[Unrelated to the Stupid theme, but of interest: my mostly Democratic audience for today’s sexual harassment training had no sympathy whatsoever with Joe Biden’s shameless groping, nor with his party’s hypocrisy in supporting him (so far.) Another interesting exchange—I was ready for the question—was when an attendee asked about “the current occupant in the White House” and his sexual harassing ways. “Has he harassed anyone while President?” I asked. She said, “Not that we know of.” Then I put up one of Uncle Joe’s groping photos. “How can a party that nominated someone who openly harasses women on camera challenge same but speculative conduct by the President?” I asked.
It’s also interesting that the un-American and unfair concept of presumed misconduct has so infected progressive thought where Donald Trump is involved. This was the answer I got repeatedly from one of our Self-Exiled Warriors of the Left before his exit: he knew that the President had colluded with the Russians and stolen the election because that’s just the kind of person he is.
What kind of governments oppress, accuse and punish people based on the kind of person they are?]
Stupid #1. In my back yard of Richmond, Virginia, a woman left instructions in her will that Emma, a healthy Shih Tzu mix, be put down. The Chesterfield County Animal Services , where Emma was residing, appealed to the executor of the dead woman’s estate. “We did suggest they could sign the dog over on numerous occasions — because it’s a dog we could easily find a home for and re-home,” said Carrie Jones, manager of Chesterfield County Animal Services. Nope. Representatives took Emma in custody to be euthanized. The dog’s remains were cremated, and her ashes were placed in an urn to be returned to the “authorized representative of the estate.
There’s no excuse for this screaming example of human arrogance, narcissism, cruelty and idiocy. As a matter of public policy, testamentary wishes involving the killing of anything should be declared unenforceable by law.
Trust the humans, Emma: they have decided that you’ll be happier dead.
Stupid #2: Boy, I don’t know if Kamala Harris is beatable in the Ethics Alarms contest to be the worst candidate for the Democratic nomination.
To begin the week,, Harris announced her plan to close “the gender wage gap in the United States,” which is largely a fake talking point the Democrats have been flogging for decades. Her proposal would require that businesses submit their payroll to the federal government, and if employees in the same position are not paid the same (absent legitimate reasons like seniority or merit, the company would face fines, including a fine of 1% of the company’s profits for every 1% of a “wage gap” that exists.—after expensive appeals, of course. Good plan!!!
But I digress. After Harris’s announcement,the Washington Free Beacon investigated her own staff’s salaries and found the the median male salary disbursement was $34,999 and the median female salary was $32,999, a 6% gap.
How smart, responsible and competent would a candidate have to be to make certain that her own staff salaries showed nothing that could even be claimed to be a “gender gap”by grandstanding a proposal like hers?
Not very, but apparently Harris can’t even clear that low bar. Continue reading →
Ethics Alarms 