I don’t care about Amber Heard and I don’t care about Johnny Depp. However, when a celebrity says something this stunningly stupid, attention must be paid.
During an “exclusive interview” on NBC regarding her humiliating loss in her defamation trial versus her ex-spouse Johnny Depp, Heard was asked to comment on the fact that Depp’s lawyer said in his closing argument that Heard was “acting” and gave “a performance of a lifetime.” “What do you say to that?”
Heard’s response: “Said the lawyer of a man who convinced the world that he had scissors for fingers.”
Wait, what? Was anyone over the age of six convinced that Depp really had scissors for fingers, much less “the world”? This is the woman whose allegations “must be believed” and that #MeToo warriors found credible? What kind of thought process would permit someone to think that was a reasonable response to utter on television? If that’s how she thinks, then nothing, literally no fantasy, delusion or distortion is beyond her reach.
I just had to get this out of my brain or, like Louis Black’s story about an over-heard inexplicable comment at a restaurant triggering a fatal aneurysm, it might have festered and killed me.
I missed a couple of major ethics landmarks by skipping the ethics round-ups the past few days, so let’s catch up, beginning with today. The Ethics Alarms UK contingent has been AWOL from the comment wars of late, but this one’s for them: In 1215, after England’s rotten King John (you know, Robin Hood and all that) had been breaching tradition and law across the land, the barons rose up in rebellion. John, preferring to compromise rather than fight, agreed to sign a document requiring the king to guarantee rights and privileges as well as the freedom of the church. On June 15, 1215, at Runnymede on the Thames, King John set his seal to the Articles of the Barons, which was formally issued as the Magna Carta. It actually did little to restrain John and other British tyrants, but by standing for the principle that a king’s power could be limited by law, it laid the foundation for our own Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights. Clause 39, for example, stated that “no free man shall be arrested or imprisoned or [dispossessed] or outlawed or exiled or in any way victimised…except by the lawful judgment of his peers or by the law of the land.”
On June 13,1966, the Warren Court announced its landmark decision in Miranda v. Arizona, establishing the principle that all criminal suspects must be advised of their rights before interrogation. This was important, but the Supreme Court should not have been the body to compose the now iconic warning, “You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can, and will, be used against you in court of law. You have the right to an attorney. If you cannot afford one, one will be appointed to you.” A clearer example of legislating from the bench would be hard to find, and though the words were clear and well-conceived, they represent an abuse of power and role.
TV writers will be eternally grateful, however.
1. Well, she’s good at grandstanding, we knew that…Yesterday, Washington, D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser, a permanent member of the Ethics Alarms Hall of Unethical Officials since she directed that “Black Lives Matter” be painted on a D.C. street, hadg 51-star flags hung along Pennsylvania Avenue. She thus violated the United States flag code passed in 1947, which states, “The flag should never have placed upon it, nor on any part of it, nor attached to it any mark, insignia, letter, word, figure, design, picture, or drawing of any nature.”
“Ahead of Flag Day, I directed our team to hang 51-star flags along Pennsylvania Avenue as a reminder to Congress and the nation that the 700,000 tax-paying American citizens living in Washington, DC demand to be recognized,” she wrote in a statement. “On Flag Day, we celebrate American ideals, American history, and American liberty. But the very foundation of those ideals, and the basis for our liberty, is representation.” Bowser is correct that the residents of D.C. deserve representation in Congress, but this is not ancient Greece, and city-states don’t belong here. The reasonable solution has always been either for the District to get a voting member or more in the House of Representatives, or, better yet, to become part of Maryland. If DC politicians would drop the non-starting demand to be the 51st state, there might be a workable compromise. DC mayors, however, especially this one, like grandstanding better.
What would it take to make you feel that an insurance company has been treated unfairly? For me the bar is pretty high, but this crazy story may clear it.
The Kansas City Star reports that a woman contracted the sexually transmitted disease while makin’ whoopee in her lover/ infecter’s car. The cur knew he has the STD but didn’t tell her, so she filed a claim against Geico in February 2021, claiming that her liability insurance had to pay her damages. Geico’s lawyers thought the theory was bats, so the case went to arbitration.
The creep was found liable—good—but the arbitrator approved an award of $5.2 million in damages to be paid by the insurance company. The insurance company appealed on several grounds, and was denied on all points.
Now THAT’S a bad precedent. File this one under “law vs ethics.” And thanks to the now presumably kaput couple’s careless sexual proclivities and an anti-insurance company arbitrator, we can all expect our auto insurance premiums to go up, at least until an overly generous loophole is written out of the policies.
Gee, Dana, I don’t know what’s happening, because “journalists” and the untrustworthy, irresponsible, incompetent news organizations they work for refuse to tell us without their own special sauce drowning its essence. The special sauce is arrogance and bias.
Today’s nauseating example: Are Nancy Pelosi and her House Democrats deliberately stalling the special SCOTUS protection measure that passed the Senate last month as part of an effort to intimidate the conservative justices and play politics with their lives?
Have you heard about this? No? How is that possible? After all, we have so many news organizations that should be thrilled and eager to report that a planned school shooting was foiled because–wait for it!—everyone did what they were supposed to do.
The story: Someone driving past by the Walnut Park Elementary School in Gadsden, Alabama saw a man trying to get into the school and looking into cars. The citizen called the police to report what he saw. The man was aggressively trying to get into the school building, and went to several doors, all of which were locked, but the principal, once he was alerted to the threat, checked the doors to make sure. The school administrators then declared a lockdown and called the school resource officer, who called for back-up. The officer reportedly engaged the would-be invader, who allegedly attempted to break into a marked police vehicle and to take the officer’s gun. More police officers arrived on the scene and the individual was shot and killed.
If you log onto NYTimes.com now, and check above the fold, you will see a lovely story about the Jurassic Park cast and Kelly Clarkson’s performance. If you scroll down, down, down, down, down, you will find a story about the attempted assassination of a Justice. By my count, the Kavanaugh assassination attempt is perhaps the sixteenth most important news item of the day!
This revelation from last week didn’t come from the Gateway Pundit or Breitbart or another unreliable right-wing attack site avoided by Ethics Alarms. It was the observation of Josh Blackman, a constitutional law professor at the South Texas College of Law Houston, an adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute, and the President of the Harlan Institute. He was writing on the Volokh Conspiracy, which specializes in legal scholarship, and isn’t read much by Average Joe, because AJ usually can’t understand it and its articles require more than the attention span of puppy. And he was right.
Even consistently left-biased Five Thirty-Eight proprietor Nate Silver was critical…
…though tellingly equivocal: “it’s sorta crazy.” No, Nate, it’s fucking outrageous, signature significance, and a smoking gun. A genuine attempt on the life of a Supreme Court Justice after prominent Democrats and pro-fetus killing activists seeded efforts to intimidate the conservatives on the Court, and it barely makes it to the online equivalent of the Times front page? Ah, those wacky Times editors! Silver’s reaction to the Times’ abdication of responsible journalism is nearly as disgusting as the Times conduct itself. Continue reading →
The original piece was too long, so the process of debunking and exposing it is also too long. There are other issues to cover, and sock drawers to organize. Still: this kind of irresponsible, dishonest mind-poison is published in respectable places every day, and they are hardly ever challenged in print. Someone like Wajahat Ali will issue this junk and then get welcomed onto MSNBC, where Joy Reid or another one of the anti-America, anti-white racists who bloviate there will cheer him on. I know I can’t do anything about it, or him, or her. Still, I can’t do nothing either.
Let’s finish this…
If Republicans take control of the political leadership of Congress, which seems likely, they will be beholden to an increasingly radicalized and weaponized base that is fine using violence to “take back their country.”
A leftist wacko inflamed by pundits like Ali and the Jan. 6 show trial just tried to assassinate Justice Kavanaugh. I do not see how any Democrat can get away with calling Republican followers “radicalized” while their own allies convince pre-teens to change their gender, police are villified, cities like San Francisco are allowing thieves to run amuck, schools are being encouraged to teach that white America continues to oppress all minorities, children are being forced to grow up with half their faces covered, and the Democratic Party’s solution to students taking on more debt than they can afford is for the government to pay it off.
Meanwhile, Republicans refuse to move against white supremacist terrorism, which is the number domestic terror threat in the country. Instead their colleagues, Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene and Paul Gosar, openly attend conferences hosted by Nick Fuentes—a notorious antisemite and white nationalist. The hoods are off, and there’s no turning back for the GOP.
Shameless, don’t you think? This is an administration that called parents protesting anti-white propaganda in elementary schools “white supremacist terrorists.” Using two outlying, really bad, GOP House members as representative of the whole party is bold glass house stone-throwing for the supporter of a party where “The Squad”—speaking of anti-semites and wackos–has so much influence. Continue reading →
“This is not a flippant or hyperbolic thought exercise, and I’m not the only one to increasingly ponder the question: “Where else can we go when this country turns on us?”
“I’m not the only one” is a rationalization, not a justification.
“Earlier this week, New York Times journalist Farnaz Fassihi was trolled and harassed on Twitter for simply stating the following: “I’m a child of immigrants. When I was a kid, everyone I knew wished they could raise their children in America, now, everyone I know wishes they could raise their children outside of America.” If you’ve traveled and talked to people over the past few years, her statement wasn’t extraordinary, it’s a sadly common utterance.
Fassihi wasn’t “harassed” on Twitter (nobody’s forcing him to read critical tweets), and “trolled” means people simply pointed out what a stupid thing he had written, which is what Twitter does. “If everyone he knows” wishes they could raise the kids outside of America, then he lives in a bubble, and a really weird one. Why should anyone take a statement like that seriously? It reminds me of New Yorker film critic Pauline Kael famously saying that “everyone she knew” supported George McGovern in the 1972 Presidential race. The response to that is, “You need to get out more, kid.” I’m not believing the comment is “sadly common” until I see some evidence.
“Most people around the world aren’t rejoicing at America’s self-inflicted downfall, they’re looking at us with pity, sadness, and a desperate hope that we get our shit together. After all, the United States is still the most powerful and wealthy country in the world, and a doorstop against rising authoritarianism.”
“People around the world” need to get their own “shit together,” and one very popular way to do that is to come here. Currently hey don’t live here, they don’t have our values or culture, they are unenlightened observers. This is the tell-tale whine of those who want the United States to be more like the rest of the world. Continue reading →
I am in sympathy with the commenters who feel that Ali’s gaslighting isn’t worthy of the time it takes to read or rebut: it is a bit like shooting the proverbial fish in a barrel. But as soon to be Sheriff (Black) Bart (Cleavon Little) says before he hits Taggart (Slim Pickens) over the head with a shovel in “Blazing Saddles,” “I gotta!”
Now that I’m committed, however, it is clear that I can’t begin to do Ali’s rant justice—meaning to punch it in its metaphorical mouth so it slides down into a mudhole—in a single post. So I’ll primarily devote Part 2 to his “Great Replacement” claim.
Here we go…
“Is it time to leave? I’ve caught myself asking my wife this question several times over the past year.”
I’ll state up front: I don’t believe him. The threat to leave the United States is a uniquely leftist bluff, and almost always employed to cheaply make the point that “I really, really don’t like where democracy is taking us right now.” The proper reaction to that is, “Oh, shut up. Running away is un-American; if that’s your response, you don’t belong here anyway.” It’s such an arrogant and presumptuous threat. Why do you think anyone cares whether you leave or not, man? “Do things the way I want or I’m quitting!” is infantile. Continue reading →
Three notable markers in ethics lore occurred on June 10. In 1752, Ben Franklin did something creative, inventive, bold and really, really stupid, flying a kite during a thunder storm to collect lightning in a jar. He pulled it off, too, because he was lucky, as usual. Ben just as easily could have been electrocuted, meaning that he would not have been around to add his considerable wisdom, negotiating skills and talents to the founding of our nation, which might not exist today if old Ben was a-moldering in the grave when they needed him in Philadelphia. A things turned out, Ben’s kite-flying experiment added to his fame, but it just as easily could have been an epic disaster for the world.
And that, my friends, is moral luck.
Another ethics landmark occurred on this date in 1692 in Salem Village the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Bridget Bishop, the first victim of the Salem witch trials, was hanged and 18 more innocent colonists were executed (none were burned) before the epic example of how fear, ignorance and political ruthlessness can turn good people into monsters. In 1976, a scientist published a paper arguing that the young girls’ weird behavior that triggered the witch trials may not have been caused, as “The Crucible” has it, by teenage rebellion, but by a hallucinogenic fungus that sometimes infects the type of grain the Salem colonists used for bread. The theory has substantial support in the scientific community if not so much among historians.
The witch trials are particularly relevant today, because of the Jan. 6 hearings…
Finally, on this date in 1935, Bill Wilson and Dr. Robert Smith, two recovering alcoholics, founded Alcoholics Anonymous, or AA, a 12-step rehabilitation and support group program that has helped millions of people worldwide (including many very close to me) battle a terrible and widespread disease that destroys lives, families, and businesses.
1. “A Nation of Assholes,” redux. As regular readers here know, I posted A Nation Of Assholes: The Ultimate, Undeniable And Crucial Reason Donald Trump Must Never Be President nearly seven years ago, and all has transpired as I predicted. Well, not exactly as I predicted: I assumed that the rising generations would have their language and civility corrupted by having an unrepentant vulgarian and boor in the White House, but I did not predict the adults who were his adversaries quickly adopting equally unethical habits, and in some cases, worse ones. I was reminded again of this phenomenon—which as far as I can tell, only Ethics Alarms flagged—yesterday when a controversy emerged over Boston Celtics fans chanting “Fuck you Draymond” at Warriors court thug Draymond Green during yesterday’s NBA Finals game at the Boston Garden. As a born-and bred Bostonian, I can testify that not all that long ago such sporting event crowd conduct would have been unimaginable in the birthplace of Benjamin Franklin. The critics of yesterday’s disgrace concentrated on a “Think of the children!” tactic, which misses the ethics point. Chanting “fuck” is disrespectful of everyone.
Ethics Alarms 