Part I described the cowardly and pandering rationale for a New York elementary school to banish “Jingle Bells” from its curriculum, and why the cultural and political issue underlying the move is more important than the song itself.
Here is the response of the Brighton Central School District Superintendent, Kevin McGowan, in response to media inquiries about the decision. In the interests of efficiency, I will interweave my commentary with his statement, in bold.
1. Good!
2. Why don’t they train police to understand that so cases like this aren’t necessary?
Artemas Buford Johnson was arrested when he drove past a Seattle Police Department officer, shouted “Fuck the police!” and then made a shooting gesture using his fingers. In its decision in State v. Buford-Johnson, yesterday, a unanimous ruling by the Washington Court of Appeals with Judge Lori Smith joined by Judge Bill Bowman and Acting Chief Judge Beth Andrus held that the arrest was unconstitutional.
Of course it was. The opinion stated in part, Continue reading
Part I set some kind of Ethics Alarms record for reader disinterest, which I much admit, I don’t understand. These are all topics we have covered in some detail here over the last year, and the analysis of them by the alleged “newspaper of record’s” experts is, to say the least, perverse and revealing…yet the post’s first installment inspired just a single comment. Well, the Times’ take on the remaining issues are arguably worse. I find it fascinating, anyway. Here’s the rest of the highlights…
It is embarrassing for a supposedly respectable news organization to frame an issue in such a hysterical and intentionally fear-mongering manner, which assumes one side of a debate is correct without reflection of nuance. The Times’ author on this topic, Farhad Manjoo, is a tech reporter, not an expert on climatology, so he has been given a platform to opine on something he doesn’t understand sufficiently to discuss reliably. On the topic of climate change, this is, sadly, typical. His article contains the kind of sentence midway through that would normally make me stop reading because of the bias, spin, hyperbole and mendacity: “During the Trump years — as the United States tore up international climate deals and flood and fire consumed swaths of the globe — unrestrained alarm about the climate became the most cleareyed of takes.”
There were no “climate deals,” just unenforceable virtue-signaling and posturing like the Paris Accords; the link between present day “flood and fire” and climate change is speculative at best, and unrestrained alarm is never “cleareyed,’ especially when those alarmed, like Manjoo, couldn’t read a climate model if Mr. Rogers was there explaining it. Then, after telling us that the Trump years were a prelude to doom, he says that since 2014, things are looking up. Much of what he calls “bending the needle” occurred under Trump.
This one is so easy and obvious that the fact that the Times thinks it deserves special attention is itself a tell. The answer is “Of course not!,” as an Ethics Alarms post explained. An absolutely competent biography was pulled by its publisher, W.W. Norton, never to be in print again, because its author, who had written other acclaimed biographies, was in the process of being “cancelled” for allegations of sexual misconduct toward women. I wrote,
“…[P]ublisher W.W. Norton sent a memo to its staff announcing that it will permanently take Blake Bailey’s biography of Philip Roth out of print, as a result of allegations that Bailey sexually assaulted multiple women and also behaved inappropriately toward his students when he was an eighth grade English teacher.
If that sentence makes sense to you, The Big Stupid has you by the brain stem.
It apparently makes sense to the Times, although its review of the matter doesn’t answer its own question. Why not? This is also obvious: as journalists, the idea that what a writer writes should be judged by what a writer’s personal life has involved is anathema, but the Times’ readers are so woke that the paper would dare not say so. Integrity! Continue reading
I know Ethics Alarms has covered this before ( like yesterday’s compendium, #4), but it’s “Popeye” territory: there’s only so much I can stand. Or “stands.”
Several sources are quoting (Ugh! Yecchh! Ptui!) Hillary Clinton’s assertion that poor Kamala Harris is being unfairly criticized because of her gender. You know, like Hillary was. ( I actually typed that without breaking up laughing. It’s a Christmas miracle!) The losing Presidential candidate responsible for the most incompetent campaign in U.S. political history said,
“There is a double standard; it’s sadly alive and well,” Clinton told the newspaper. “A lot of what is being used to judge her, just like it was to judge me, or the women who ran in 2020, or everybody else, is really colored by that.”
Harris, meanwhile, has been reportedly whining to staff and confidantes about how none of the previous 48 Vice-Presidents were covered as negatively as she, nor so insulted by critics. So now we know that on top of her other throbbing deficiencies, Kamala Harris don’t know much about history, to quote Sam Cooke. Continue reading
Boy, has today ever been a rotten prelude to Christmas! There’s nothing like feeling like Bob Cratchit and Scrooge at the same time….Hit it, Judy!
Yeah, easy for YOU to say…
1. Admittedly, it’s hard to be unusually unethical on a phony show like “Paranormal Experiences,” but I was fascinated to see how actual news footage of a dog rescue would be tied into the show’s theme. A dog was viewed by a crowd at New York’s East River as it desperately dog-paddled for land, then panicked and began swimming in circles. A police officer dived into the freezing (and filthy) water and grabbed the dog by the collar, getting bitten in the face and hand in the process, to tow the canine to safety as the crowd cheered him on. How was this “paranormal”?
As one onlooker explained it, the officer was a water rescue specialist, and the crowd had gathered for a ceremony honoring him. It couldn’t be a mere coincidence that a drowning dog just happened to turn up during that ceremony for that officer, could it? No, something supernatural was afoot! Such a coincidence can’t happen by itself!
Yes, it can, and does, every day, many, many times, you moron. A TV episode like this makes the public stupid and superstitious, which makes them easy to manipulate and con. Given enough time and random events, anything that can happen will happen, and the proclivity to see portents and miracles in standard chaos-driven events undermines life competence.
Where do you think the term “lucky dog” came from?
I am getting sick of all the unethical political junk that has been rearing its yuletide head of late, so I’m sure you must be even more sick of it. But stuff like this, which doubles as rotten journalism too, just has to be noted. After all, what the mainstream media wants is for it to just slip away. All the better to help it lie to you later.
This is yet another IIPTDXTTNMIAFB example, short for “Imagine if President Trump did X that the news media is accepting from Biden.” These drive me crazy, because they demonstrate just how much what was once our journalism has transformed into partisan propaganda. The public was hammered daily with media accounts, fact-checks and accusations about how often Donald Trump “lied,” even to the extent of a phony “data base” that called even obvious cases where Trump was joking “lies.” All lie-counting stopped when Joe Biden was elected, however. That was remarkable, especially because Biden has uttered some of the most infamous lies in political history, notably when he gave an entire speech that he stole from another politician—and it was supposed to be an autobiographical speech!
Well, Joe Biden was making up events in his life once again, this time in an address to historically black college graduates in South Carolina, where, not for the first time, he said that he “desegregated restaurants and movie theaters” during the Civil Rights movement.
With crime rates soaring in many cities and “smash and garb” raids disrupting large retailers, companies like Home Depot, Nordstom’s and Target are calling on communities to increase policing. By “like,” I mean companies that previously hailed Black Lives Matter and other anti-policing organizations,, festooned their stores, ads and websites with endorsements of BLM as it vilified law enforcement and called for “defunding” the police, and gave large grants to it and other “social justice” movements seeking to reduce police protection of communities across the nation.
It was all part of “The Big Pander” sub-division of The Great Stupid, itself fueled by the George Floyd Freakout, because it makes perfect sense to decide that a single brutal police incident proves that all police are racist menaces. The fake history “1619 Project” and offshoots of Critical Race Theory also were bolstered by these corporations’ cynical virtue-signaling, at a time when catering to criminals is seen as a virtue.
—Sunny Hostin, throwing in her contribution to “The View’s” desperate efforts to offer excuses and rationalization for convicted hate-crime fraud Jussie Smollett and the race-baiting Democrats and pundits that instantly believed his absurd story and blamed his “attack” on Donald Trump.
Hostin, incidentally, is a lawyer. A lawyer actually made an argument that devoid of logic. What does that tell us about the law school that graduated her (Notre Dame), the Justice Department that hired her (Clinton’s), and the news networks that employed her as an analyst (CNN, Fox News, Court TV and ABC). Is there a dumber statement that is even possible to make? “It’s a ‘good thing’ that an obviously made-up hate crime account was believed, because we want everyone to believe even fictional accusations, though doing so wastes money, take police away from investigating real crimes, and increases societal divisions and suspicion.” Brilliant!
All right, all right: I know calling ethics fouls on the blather that passes for debate on “The View” is like beefy ex-male swimmer winning races against life-time females. Nevertheless, people watch “The View,” get fed “logic” like Hostin’s, and become dumber and dumber, until next thing you know they’re voting for Kamala Harris for President. Responsible citizens don’t just need ethics alarms, they need idiot alarms. If you can’t hear a comment like Hostin’s and instantly know what she said was idiotic, you’re not an asset to a democracy. Continue reading
The New York Times has an astounding, depressing op-ed by a black woman, a “journalist and an author” named Erin Audrey Kaplan in which she announces unequivocally racist, bigoted, anti-white sentiments without a hint of self-awareness. It would be nice to think the Times printed her hateful essay as a “Don’t be like this bigot!” cautionary tale. Knowing the Times as I do, I doubt it.
Kaplan writes that she lives in “a mostly Black and Latino city in southwestern Los Angeles County.” She decided to build a Little Free Library (one of my neighbors in Alexandria has one) in her front yard. The birdhouse-like object (see it in the photo above?) invited pedestrians walking by to borrow (and later return) a book. Kaplan says she erected hers “to signal to my longtime neighbors that we had our own ideas about [community] improvement, and could carry them out in our own way…I envisioned it as a place for my neighbors to stay connected during the pandemic.”
She relates that she took pleasure in observing various neighbors stopping at the tiny library and accepting its friendly invitation, until…
..a young white couple happened by. She writes,
What continues to amaze, as pro-abortion supporters and activists throw every conceivable argument they can come up with against the proverbial wall in hopes that one might stick,is how insubstantial, emotional and often intellectually dishonest those arguments are. As the Supreme Court deliberates, we are certain to hear and read many more, and I honestly can say that I am hoping for a legitimate and persuasive one to finally emerge.
What I fear we will get, however, as the arguments do not stick but slide off that wall like wet tissue, is more warnings, threats, insults and jeremiads, like Justice Sotomayor’s despicable “stench” question, which I translate as, “Aren’t you properly terrified that if we don’t just do as the pro-abortion machine demands rather than analyze a difficult problem objectively according to facts, law and ethics, people who have already made up their minds regardless of all of those will be furious?”
The “pro-choice” rhetoric increasingly reminds me of the arguments made by the slave-holding South as thoughtful abolitionists and the anti-slavery sentiment strengthened ten-fold by “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” began backing defenders of “the peculiar institution” into a corner. They primarily invoked invalid or dishonest arguments: “science” and “studies” claiming to prove that black people were not quite human (see above), and did not have the “necessities” (to quote poor Al Campanis a century later) to be free; slavery had been permitted so long that it constituted a betrayal to end it; a Supreme Court ruling had protected the practice, and the way of life that slavery’s practitioners enjoyed and benefited from immensely would be threatened if slavery were banned. These are all essentially the same arguments being advanced today to justify continuing to treat another group of vulnerable and exploited human beings as property and non-humans. The fetus doesn’t deserve human rights because it isn’t “viable” or “cognizent.” A right that has been part of the law for half a century should never be challenged. Roe v. Wade is to the unborn as Dred Scott was to slaves.
And, perhaps most of all, American women have thrived by treating developing babies as disposable by “choice.”
Here is Ryan Harkins’ Comment of the Day addressing the related argument, advanced by a law professor, that the right to kill the offspring of incest and rape is essential to the advancement and success of people like her.
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Ethics Alarms 