Bravo.
Social Media
Ethics Quote Of The Month: Senator Rand Paul (R-Ky)
I was literally going to start this post with nearly the exact same statement, except I was going to ask how many progressives and die-hard Biden defenders would have the integrity to condemn the revelation that Facebook and Instagram censored posts and changed their content moderation policies after unconstitutional pressure from the Biden White House.
Not that this should have surprised anyone; it certainly didn’t surprise me, Censorship, deception and suppression of news, facts and reality is how the current mutation of the Democratic Party rolls, and Big Tech and social media have joined the mainstream media as their enablers and accomplices.
Incompetent Elected Official Of The Month (Well, One Of Them) And Unethical Tweet Of The Month: Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN)
“Curmie’s Conjectures”: Another Case from Yale, This One with a Twist
by Curmie
I had a post about half-written, talking about the fact that SCOTUS justices are nominated and confirmed (or not) primarily for their adherence to certain political principles rather than for their integrity, judgment, legal expertise, or temperament.
‘Twas not ever thus. In my lifetime, five SCOTUS Justices were confirmed by a voice vote and three others received all 100% of the votes. Another seven received at least 80% of the votes. But of the current members of SCOTUS, only Chief Justice Roberts received majority support from Senators of both parties… and that was by a single vote. Justice Thomas, who’s been around the longest, is the only currently-serving member of the Supreme Court to have been confirmed by a Senate controlled by the party not in the White House at the time.
This, I was about to argue, makes the process depressingly predictable: liberals over here, conservatives over there, with Roberts as the closest thing to an unreliable vote for “his side.” I was getting around to talking about the allegations against Justice Alito: did he really do something wrong, or is furor mostly partisan in nature? Answer to both questions: yes.
But then, despite the predictable split in the two Affirmative Action cases, we also see Gorsuch writing a scathing dissent on Arizona v. Navajo Nation, Barrett and Kavanaugh voting with the liberal bloc on Moore v. Harper, and Jack saying pretty much what I would have said about the Alito case. I may want to return to the general outline of my half-written essay at some point in the future… but the timing isn’t right, now.
So let me go off in a different direction and talk about a faculty member dismissed from an elite university for her political statements. The headline on the FIRE article begins “Yale shreds faculty rights to rid itself of professor…” Certainly we’ve seen a fair amount of that kind of fare here on Ethics Alarms. What’s different is what follows in that title: “…who called Trump mentally unstable.” Well, that sure goes against the whole “universities are cesspools of Woke indoctrination” mantra, doesn’t it?
Ethics Observations On The LaGuardia Community College Graduation Incident
That video above is now the only YouTube available record of last week’s viral TikTok video showing Kadia Iman, a “social media influencer” and OnlyFans model who spiced up her graduation from LaGuardia Community College by forcibly taking the microphone from the school official announcing the graduates and using it to give her own defiant message. The video is also evidence that the representations made by Iman regarding the justifications for her behavior may not be exactly accurate.
In her own TikTok video of her attack, Iman is heard saying into the mic, “I want the mic! Let go! You didn’t let me get my moment!” Then she says “I’m graduating today. I don’t like how you snatched the mic out of my hand, so today is going to be all about me!”before dropping the mic and walking away. Later, she took to social media to explain why her “moment” was justified, saying,
“To everyone saying I should be embarrassed or I’ll never get a job … I’m a black woman in America. I am always in the right … u will not gaslight me into thinking I’m the bad guy. I did it for girls that look like me. Love u.”
She claimed that the white graduating students were given an opportunity to say their names, majors and a few other details while up on stage, but that she and other black students were not granted the same privilege by the white administrator, prompting Iman’s anger and violent reaction.
“Basically, what happened was I was walking on and we had to say our names before we get on the stage,” she said. “So I was saying my name and she literally — my name is long, obviously, I have like three syllables in my name. So, I didn’t even get to finish saying my name, and then the people that went before me, they all got to say their name, their major, and even extras,” Iman continued. “Me and another girl noticed that she was pulling down the mic super fast for some black people.”
“I’m not a problematic person, I don’t want to ruin no ones day, I don’t want to violate anybody, but that is what she did. She didn’t even let me finish speaking, she put the mic down and cut me off and that was the only chance I had to speak. I just feel that wasn’t right,” she concluded.
The school’s version, not surprisingly, is somewhat different.
Introducing “Curmie’s Conjectures,” A Recurring Ethics Alarms Column
[ Curmie should be familiar to comment readers here as one of EA’s erudite and witty participants in our daily debates. He has a real name, of course, which he is at liberty to reveal when the mood strikes him. Curmie is an experienced blogger; his own site, Curmudgeon Central, has been referenced and linked-to frequently here over the years. The consistent quality and ethical analysis that he always brings to his commentary, as well as the fact that Curmie has a more liberal orientation than many feel your host displays, made his addition to the Ethics Alarms team (see, two is a team!) both logical and wise. The fact the we share a deep involvement with theater and the performing arts had nothing to do with it. Well, maybe a little.
Curmie has no set schedule for his contributions, and has complete editorial discretion unless he begins babbling incoherently and shows signs of a stroke. And now I’ll get out of the way and leave you in Curmie’s capable hands.-JM ]
Strange Bedfellows: Socialism and Free Expression
by Curmie
Reading Jack’s piece on the Gallup poll that suggested an increase the percentage of Americans who self-identify as conservative, my first thought was, “so where do I fit in this model?”
There are so many variables: I’m quite liberal on some issues, staunchly conservative on others. I took a couple of those online quizzes: according to Pew, I’m “Ambivalent Right” (whatever that means); according to politicalpesonality.org, I’m a “Justice Warrior” (erm… no); ISideWith has me as a Green (not really, although I’ve been accused of worse).
Moreover, such things are always relative: there’s no doubt that I’m well to the left of most people in my Congressional district and of most readers of Jack’s blog, but I’m a fair distance to the right of many of my colleagues in academic theatre. Moreover, times change. My once-radical position on gay rights, for example, is now rather mainstream: my belief system had remained virtually unchanged, but it’s now no longer “very liberal,” and may even be “moderate.”
Most importantly, distinguishing between left and right isn’t always the appropriate axis. Sometimes it’s the continuum from authoritarian to libertarian that really matters. Political Compass places me solidly to the left of center, but even further into libertarianism. And it is on these issues—of non-interference by powerful forces, be they governmental, corporate, or otherwise—where Jack’s readership is most likely to agree with me (vice versa).
In other words, my longtime assertion that, to quote the title of a piece I wrote a few months ago, ““The Left and Right Both Hate Free Expression—They Just Do It Differently” ought not to surprise us overmuch. What might is a casual observation I made while doing a little research for my second of my two posts on the Roger Waters controversy.
Call Me A Stickler, But I Don’t Want Anyone Who Talks Like This Deciding What Is Acceptable Speech, Discourse Or Opinion…
Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, said this during an interview on the “Lex Fridman Podcast”about his discovered wisdom about the difficulty of censoring social media:
“So misinformation, I think, has been a really tricky one because there are things that are obviously false, right, or they may be factual but may not be harmful. So are you gonna censor someone for just being wrong? If there’s no kind of harm implication of what they’re doing? There’s a bunch of real issues and challenges there. Just take some of the stuff around COVID earlier in the pandemic where there were real health implications, but there hadn’t been time to fully vet a bunch of the scientific assumptions. Unfortunately, I think a lot of the kind of establishment on that kind of waffled on a bunch of facts and asked for a bunch of things to be censored that, in retrospect, ended up being more debatable or true. And that stuff is really tough, right? It really undermines trust,”
Oh for God’s sake….Observations:
Depressing Ethics Notes From The Education Apocalypse, Part I: Graduation Follies
Let’s begin with the first of four troubling graduation tales, this one involving the rampant narcissism that social media and the popular culture imparts on our youth, aided and abetted by educational professionals.
Above is a newly-minted University of Arizona grad, known online as “Rachel Davenpole,” who donned a pair of see-through platform heels and a red thong to pose in a stripper-style split on a pole she had erected on campus for the task. Her erudite response to social media critics who found her photos inappropriate was was: “Graduated Magna Cum Laude (3.8 GPA) and received over $40,000 in scholarships … let’s get u a mirror so we can see who this tweets about babes.” Her non-sequitur defense was sufficient to inspire the New York Post—there are some good reasons why the rest of the media doubted you on Hunter’s laptop, guys—into giving Rachel even more of the publicity she craves with a news story.
Now watch Rachel be shocked when the employer who hires her for her first adult job thinks sexual harassment is appropriate…
Next, there is Marlin High School near Waco, Texas. According to a statement posted to Facebook, it has postponed its graduation after just five of 33 seniors could meet the requirements for graduation because of grades or attendance problems. The school says it will reschedule the graduation until June so students will have more time to qualify. But the problem isn’t the students, is it? Here’s a chance to re-post one of my favorite Charles Addams cartoons:
Ethics Dunce: Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy [Link Fixed]
There is no way not to take yesterday’s public warning from the nation’s top health official as ominous, indeed sinister. U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy expounded on the risks of social media to children and teens, citing possible “harm to the mental health and well-being of children and adolescents.” The remarkable 19-page advisory, begins by acknowledging that the effects of social media on adolescent mental health are not well understood, and even that social media can be beneficial to “some users.” It then goes on to argue ,“There are ample indicators that social media can also have a profound risk of harm to the mental health and well-being of children and adolescents.”
And thus the U.S. Surgeon General lays the groundwork for government censorship, despite admitting that there is insufficient hard data to support his conclusions. Parental supervision is not enough for this government, as we have already seen in multiple settings. After all, “it takes a village,” the village that one side of the current culture wars is trying to define includes treating words and expression as “harm” from which people must be kept “safe.” Predictably, the near-completely compliant national news media is behind such government appropriation of parental authority, in this as well as other matters.
Next Up On The Rapidly Expanding List Of Speech Progressives Want To Censor: “Fear Speech”
New York Times reporter and opinion writer Julia Angwin has been given a prominent space in the latest Sunday Times to expound on why another kind of speech needs to be suppressed, controlled and if possible, censored: “fear speech.”
Already the relentlessly radicalizing progressive hoard has embraced the anti-American concept of censoring other kinds of speech according to their very subjective definitions: “misinformation,” meaning opinions or analysis they disagree with, or distortions of truth that emanate from someplace or some one not devoted to advancing the Left’s goals and agendas, and “hate speech,” which they want to have excluded from First Amendment protections as they define it on a case by case basis. Now the Times is starting the metaphorical ball rolling to target more speech that these two categories might miss. Its designated messenger declares,
This year, Facebook and Twitter allowed a video of a talk to be distributed on their platforms in which Michael J. Knowles, a right-wing pundit, called for “transgenderism” to be “eradicated.” The Conservative Political Action Coalition, which hosted the talk, said in its social media posts promoting the video that the talk was “all about the left’s attempt to erase biological women from modern society.”
None of this was censored by the tech platforms because neither Mr. Knowles nor CPAC violated the platforms’ hate speech rules that prohibit direct attacks against people based on who they are. But by allowing such speech to be disseminated on their platforms, the social media companies were doing something that should perhaps concern us even more: They were stoking fear of a marginalized group.
Note the carefully crafted rhetoric: stoking fear of a marginalized group. Stoking fear of a group to marginalize it as much as possible for political gain is apparently hunky-dory, as in…
She continues,
Ethics Alarms 