A. Let this be a reminder that the social media giants will try to place their fists on the scale this election cycle.
The political spot above, a creation of the Republican group America Rising, was flagged by Twitter, which warned users that “The following media includes potentially sensitive content.”
What’s the sensitive content? The video is overwhelmingly constructed of news clips and recorded quotes from political figures, including the President, that were broadcast nationwide. It appears that Twitter considers pro-Trump, Republican, conservative advocacy, even of a res ipsa loquitur variety, inherently offensive to its audience. That may well be true, but the Russian attempts to manipulate what voters see and here in the 2016 campaign will be dwarfed by the domestic efforts by the social media platforms and search engines—all for the greater good, of course.
B.Nah, there’s no mainstream media bias! Go ahead, enablers and deniers, rationalize this one. Continue reading →
The President could win this category every week, but this one is especially annoying.
It gives his enemies—and they are enemies—a stick to beat him with, since they obsess about the most trivial things he says or does anyway whether there is anything wrong with them or not.
It reinforces the stereotype that he is an idiot.
In doing so, it undermines his credibility and trust as a leader.
It makes what is supposed to be an honor for the Chiefs into a joke.
The gaffe alienates one entire state, if not two.
It exhibits extreme carelessness.
It potentially injures untold Americans, who rolled their eyes so hard that they risked blindness.
A President should know the states and major cities of the nation he leads…without having to check.
If the President is determined to communicate directly to the public, he is obligated to do so with care, consideration, and competence. He doesn’t.
PETA is so tone deaf, so irrational, and so devoid of functioning ethics alarms, it is depressing that the group has so much support. (Here’s an Ethics Alarms compendium of some of their unethical misadventures. ) Currently the group is grandstanding—again–by harassing the Punxsutawney Groundhog Club, arguing that “Phil” should be replaced with an animatronic groundhog. Whatever. (This is Groundhog Day, you know. This is Groundhog Day, you know.) That nonsense, however, has been superseded by the uproar caused by the obnoxious TV ad above.
After it was rejected by the NFL–I don’t know why: I am very much in favor of letting foolish groups expose their foolishness to the nation and pay a bundle for the privilege–PETA released it anyway. As you can see, it shows cute animated animals, including a snake, “taking a knee” like Colin Kaepernick and his acolytes as “The Star Spangled Banner” is hummed in the background. Big mistake.
Heh, heh, heh...
The ad was quickly criticized as stupid, of course, since it is, for the “kneeling” snake and fish. Others called it disrespectful to the United States, the National Anthem and veterans. The Snake Anti-Defamation League sent a venomous letter of protest. OK, that was a joke.
This isn’t: PETA was accused of “appropriating” Kaepernick’s protest against racial injustice and police brutality and attempting to equate black men to animals. This is the group that has argued that the Bill of Rights applies to whales and lower primates, so this shouldn’t be a shock.
The Root took aim and fired: “PETA colonized the Black Lives Matter Movement; disrespected Colin Kaepernick’s protest against injustice, and made a mockery of 400 years of systemic oppression by comparing Black lives to grizzly bears and bald eagles.”
But animals have been abused by humans since the cave men!
Erica Cobb, co-host of Daily Blast LIVE called PETA’s ad “disrespectful,” adding,”Black people already feel like dogs having clean drinking water is more important than black people have clean drinking water.”
The hashtag #PETA is suddenly all over social media, and not in a good way. Anita Sarkeesian, feminist activist, tweeted,
“Not wanting to add more views or attention to PETA but I’m so tired of how consistently their ‘activism’ is deeply oppressive, offensive, and degrading to ACTUAL HUMAN BEINGS. Of course, we shouldn’t be cruel to animals but the real oppression of Black folks is not equivalent.”
PETA, not surprisingly since nobody associated with the group seems to have any properly functioning ethics alarms, then started blocking critics on Twitter, but not before trying the Rationalizations known as The Unethical Role Model (#32) and The Hillary Inoculation, or “If he/she doesn’t care, why should anyone else?” (#42) by trotting out Kaepernick himself to say that he doesn’t mind the ad. (Hmmm…should I add a Rationalization called “The Idiot’s Endorsement”?)
I just wrote the longest reply to a Facebook friend I have ever authored, not counting pasting in Ethics Alarms columns. He’s a fair and smart man, but he’s in the performing arts, which means he’s surrounded by knee-jerk progressives who think Robert De Nero and Meryl Streep are persuasive political commentators and who cheered when the cast of “Hamilton” ambushed Pence. In his post, he opined that historians would condemn ” spineless, groveling, boot-licking Republican Senators who covered their ears and willfully chose not to hear from fact-witnesses like John Bolton.” He said he was sure “the truth will come out” concerning Trump’s “corrupt motives and his misuse of presidential power,” but that “giving a pass” to an “unstable, narcisisstic” President “convinced that he is above the law” was very dangerous. And so on–this is the standard mainstream media babble. I decided to write a detailed rebuttal, because I know my friend is an ethical and perceptive person, and view his acceptance of this false narrative issuing from the Left as evidence that he is the victim of propaganda. I think what might have tipped the scales for me was one of his friends citing with approval James Comey’s vomit-inducing op ed, yesterday, sanctimoniously telling us that despite the recent failure of the soft coup attempt he helped to advance, “we’ll be all right.” Gag, Ack, Yecch!
Here is what I wrote:
It pains me to see you fall into this intellectual trap, [my friend] though it is not your fault. Propaganda works, after all, and 90% of the reporting and punditry you get about the impeachment is incompetent and shockingly partisan. In fact, as with the illegal attempted impeachment of Andrew Johnson, Republican Senators are saving the Constitution and the Separation of Powers by blocking a precedent that would have reduced elections to just a temporary democratic moment until the opposing party could figure out some way to reverse hem. Few if any of the GOP Senators care for the President any more than you do (or I, for that matter), but Presidents were not intended to be impeached because Congress decides they are assholes, and that’s all that is being attempted here.Continue reading →
This would have made my head explode, except that nothing involving Twitter can make my head explode any more. This is, however, a troubling indication that the United States may be turning into Bizarro World, where right is wrong, wrong is right, smart is stupid, and stupid is smart. (The ascent of Bernie Sanders is another indication.)
Behold:
Quarterback Patrck Mahomes of the Super Bowl LIV -bound Kansas City Chiefs was attacked by the Twitter mob this week because of a series of tweets he sent when he was in high school.
Ethics Fouls #1 and #2: This is the Hader Gotcha again, described here. Some utter jerk, presumably a fan of the pro sport a friend accurately disdains as “concussionball”—that’s unethical too, but I’m leaving that alone for now– decided to see if he could make trouble for Mahomes ahead of the Chief’s AFC Championship game on Jan.-uary 19 by searching his Twitter feed for tweets that might spark his “cancellation.” That’s a hateful and unfair act (Ethics Foul #1 ) with a nauseating Brett Kavanaugh hearings odor. Then, because jerkism is spreading in the U.S. faster than the Coronavirus in China, people actually attacked the quarterback online when the selected old tweets surfaced, as if what a 16 year old expressed in a tweet had any relevance to who that kid grew up to be, or football, or the Super Bowl. (Ethics Foul #2.)
Ethics Fouls #3, #4 and #5 And what were offending tweets?
1. Stop making dogs defend Mike Bloomberg!…Is there anything too trivial that people won’t use to attack politicians? A CBS News video began circulating online yesterday afternoon showing Michael Bloomberg shaking hands with a man in Burlington, Vermont, then taking his dog’s upper jaw in his hand and “shaking” the dog’s snout He then scratched the dog’s ears. The social media mob called him a dog abuser.
Morons. That’s a move that most dogs enjoy, as well as someone grasping their whole muzzle. It shows Bloomberg is comfortable with and knowledgeable about dogs. I used to do both moves with our 165 pound English Mastiff, and our Jack Russells.
2. I know this is of interest to almost nobody who isn’t a lawyer, but trust me, it’s a big deal. The District of Columbia has long been the only U.S. jurisdiction that allows law firms to have non-lawyer partners, a structure prevented everywhere else by the general prohibition on lawyers sharing their fees with non-lawyers. When D.C. adopted its revolutionary approach, it assumed that the states would soon follow, with the American Bar Association’s assent. Because that hasn’t happened, a state-licensed lawyer with a D.C. license participating in a legal firm in D.C. could technically be found to be violating that state’s ethics rules , though the District has negotiated a truce in that potential controversy.
Meanwhile, those special law firms with non-lawyer members are proliferating like legal rabbits. Now a Jan. 23 press release tells the world that the District of Columbia Bar is taking comments regarding proposed changes to its ethics rules that could allow external ownership of law firms, as well as blended businesses in which lawyers and non-lawyers provide both legal and nonlegal services, like accounting. Or massages–who knows? Right now, law firms by definition can only practice law.
Perhaps even more significantly, California, Utah and Arizona are also studying changes that would relax ethics rules barring non-lawyers from holding a financial interest in law firms. Continue reading →
This is dead ethics alarms on display. A 41-year-old NBA legend, his 13-year old daughter and seven other human beings die in a helicopter accident, and less than six hours later, a Washington Post reporter, involuntarily abetted by The Daily Beast, issues a tweet about the low point in his life and career.
Is Sonmez going for #MeToo brownie points? It sure looks like it. Let’s get a jump on canceling Kobe Bryant, womyn! It’s never too early.
No compassion for the family, no sorrow for the dead. Gotta trash the man, because there won’t be enough time in the future to rehash the 17-year-old rape allegations that Bryant, with the assistance of the King’s Pass, managed to avoid having destroy his career.
Has social media made people so cruel? Is this just the natural ethics void political journalists and progressive websites slip into after a few years of peddling hate against the President, day in, day out?
How can ethics alarms not ring out, loud and strong, when the idea is floated to attack a dead celebrity the same day he and his daughter are killed?
Update (6:50 PM): After being excoriated on Twitter, Sonmez deleted her tweet.
Too late.
Further Update:The Post suspended Sonmez. Good.
Notice of Correction: I originally included The Daily Beast in the headline, failing to notice that the article Sonmez linked to was from 2016. The Beast is blameless, and I apologize for the error. Thanks to VPJ for the note.
A really low blow (among the other low blows, like the jerk who accused me of getting all of my ideas from Drudge) came from a former commenter here, who accused Ethics Alarms of being an “echo chamber.” That truly ticks me off. If the Trump Deranged don’t have the wits or open minds to test their biases where intelligent, informed, articulate adversaries are likely to respond, that’s not my fault, and it’s exactly what the left side of the blog’s commentariat did. They didn’t rebut the position here, proven correct, that the Justice Department’s handling of The FISA warrants were part of a dangerous effort to undermine the Trump campaign and his election: they just accused me of “drinking the KoolAid” and quit, or were insulting. They never tried to argue away the smoking gun evidence of the soft coup plans A through S that I have meticulously documents since 2016, they just act as if the current impeachment excuse is justified and offered in good faith, when it is so clearly not. It’s all denial, spin, dishonesty and mob mentality. I ended up in today’s piranha tank by pointing out to a lawyer that the the fact that Trump was intemperate at a meeting of generals was not sufficient to trigger the 25th Amendment, and that lawyers, like her, shouldn’t be misleading the public by making such lame arguments. I posted the amendment, and said that “Unable” to perform the duties of the office doesn’t mean, as she and others are arguing, “Unable to perform the duties that way she and other would prefer them to be performed” and stating that approval polls do not reflect the degree to which the impeachment charade is helping to re-elect Trump.
These are the smart Deranged. Imagine what the others are like.
1. Resistance porn.“A Very Stable Genius” is the latest “tales out of school” anti-Trump book. In this it is no different from those that have gone before, from Omarosa’s tell-all on up the ethics evolutionary scale. This one was authored by Pulitzer Prize winning journalists, so naturally the news media is celebrating it as if it is somehow different. What it is a collection of mostly anonymous accounts of people who have axes to grind and scores to settle against Donald Trump, and are violating basic professional ethics to do it. Are all of the stories true? I’m sure some are, maybe most—they don’t sound out of line with what we knew about this President before he was elected. Yet they are by very nature distorted by the theme of the book and the presumed anti-Trump bias of the book’s audience. What is so alarming about Trump’s eagerness to have a meeting with Putin? So what if he questions why U.S. businesses shouldn’t be allowed to engage in bribery abroad, when it is the accepted norm in many countries? There’s an answer to the question, but it’s not a dumb question; in fact, its one international ethicists still debate. And do you really think Trump saying to Indian prime minister Narendra Modi, “It’s not like you’ve got China on your border” wasn’t a joke? Taking it as otherwise is classic conformation bias and disrespect. It sure sounds like a typical Trump joke to me. Continue reading →
It’s disturbing how things get planted in my head: I couldn’t get the Rolling Stones out of it after someone commented, in reaction to an observation that we had another anti-Trump freakout looming when Justice Ginsberg dies, to the effect that she was the Keith Richards of the Supreme Court. Okay, but she has to leave us sometime, as do we all, and I would bet that she cannot last another four years. I don’t even like to think about how low Democrats, the “resistance” and the news media will go to try to block the confirmation of a conservative replacement, or the hysteria that will follow.
1. The Lesson: organizations tend to act to protect themselves, not the victims of their misconduct. The Boy Scouts of America may face bankruptcy as lawsuits alleging sexual abuse by leaders and volunteers proliferate. The crisis is greatly aggravated by the loosening statutes of limitations across the country. The District of Columbia eliminated the statute of limitations that restricted the time for sexual abuse survivors to pursue civil litigation, and created a two-year window for survivors under the age of 40 to file suit regardless of the date of the incident. Accordingly, Abused in Scouting filed suit in Washington, D.C., on behalf of eight men who say they were victimized as boys by Scout leaders and volunteers. The same process is going on in California, where similar suits are underway by 14 plaintiffs. California’s Assembly Bill 218 just kicked in on January 1, like D.C.’s law allowing victims of child sexual assault to file suit until age 40 and opening a three-year window for those abused as children to sue for past incidents. Many more states have or soon will follow suit.
This appears to be ready to follow the awful path of the Catholic Church’s child molestation scandal, with similar evidence of cover-ups. The BSOA are a lot smaller than the Church, but they also have far less money to pay in multi-million dollar court settlements. It didn’t take a lot of imagination to see this coming, and the Scouts were already in trouble, with a blurring mission, falling membership and gender issues.
The Boy Scouts saved my father’s life, as I’ve related on Ethics Alarms elsewhere. I’m glad he didn’t live to see this. Continue reading →
Well, that was strange. Yesterday’s warm-up turned into the long post about Judge Staton’s disturbing dissent, and by the time I had finished it and the previous “fake news” compendium, my window for getting the Saturday Warm-Up up had slammed shut. Today’s Warm-Up is largely made up of the items that were wiped off the board by the Obama-appointed judge’s “whenever the courts really, really think national policy should be different from what it is, they have the power to change it by edict” opinion.
1. Sausage biscuit ethics. I’m fond of sausage biscuits for breakfast, but the 7-11 variety have a garbage-y taste, and the sole local McDonald’s that I’m not boycotting for ethics transgressions is mobbed in the morning. Of the frozen variety, I will not patronize a company, Jimmy Dean, which uses its dead founder as a TV spokesperson without pointing out that he’s dead. Over the holidays, I tried a lesser and much cheaper brand of frozen sausage biscuit, Tennessee Pride, and they were good enough.
Yesterday I bought another box. When I pulled out a bag of two “sausage biscuits,” I saw that the sausage was sitting between two small buns, unlike the contents of the previous box. Buns are not biscuits, but the label on the box read in large type, “Sausage Biscuits.” I did notice, however, that the photo on the box showed buns.
Would that fact be a complete defense against an accusation of false labeling? I doubt it, but it doesn’t matter. “Fool me once” is once too many.
2. Res Ipsa Loquitur: “an informed public.” Twitter user @Golfergirl2018 shared a post she saw on Facebook, written by someone who sympathizes with antivaxx parents (you know…morons) who don’t want to put “chemicals” in their kids. “I think instead of chemical shots the doctors should give a small piece of the virus, so the body can build immunity,” he wrote.
BRILLIANT! Why didn’t someone think of that long ago?
Yes, it is unethical and irresponsible to publish opinions on topics you haven’t researched, don’t understand, and know nothing about. I wonder how many social media posts would survive if this were recognized as a rule of commentary? Continue reading →
Ethics Alarms 