Translation: “Elect me, or we’ll burn down your cities.”
No, Joe, we know your party and its followers have devolved into violent totalitarian thugs, who, as they have proved since 2016, are incapable of accepting the results of elections, or the responsibilities of democracy. we know if they lose, they will be violent.
I know you’re suffering from cognitive decline, and I’m genuinely sorry about that. It’s not your fault, but it is your fault that you are still running for President when you are physically incapable of doing the job. Maybe that’s why you tweeted such a cretinous, offensive message that demonstrates such ignorance of the American character. Nikita Khrushchev could have sent a message to Americans when cowards here were chanting, “Better Red Than Dead,” “Does anyone believe that that there will be less death and destruction if America keeps opposing us?”
An angry employee took that photo of a slide used in a diversity training program. Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company’s has a “zero-tolerance policy”,” and like almost all such policies, the employee or committee charged with developing it lacked the wisdom, perspective, legal guidance, common sense, and ethics skills to do it competently. The employee says the obviously incompetent slide above was presented at the Topeka plant by an area manager and says the slide came from Goodyear’s corporate office out of Akron, Ohio.
“If someone wants to wear a BLM shirt in here, then cool. I’m not going to get offended about it. But at the same time, if someone’s not going to be able to wear something that is politically based, even in the farthest stretch of the imagination, that’s discriminatory,” said the whistle-blower. “If we’re talking about equality, then it needs to be equality. If not, it’s discrimination.”
Stipulated: The likelihood that Joe Biden really tweeted this is slim. Nonetheless, poor Joe is still accountable for his social media accounts and the employees he hires to represent him in cyberspace. This lie is his lie, and his lie is also six years old. Biden is stuck with the lie, because 1) he has no integrity and will say anything he thinks will get him elected and 2) because this lie still constitutes part of the foundation of Black Lives Matter, the organization most responsible for the riots disrupting cities across America along with the special bonus that anyone with the sense to reject their scam is immediately tarred as a racist, and maybe fired or forced to resign.
The use of the “Mike Brown was killed by a racist cop” lie is, at this point, smoking gun proof that an individual is trying to aggravate and exploit racial distrust and hate to advance their own agenda. That makes them, to be blunt, scum.
During the depressing Democratic primary season, three Presidential hopefuls—Pete Buttigieg, Kamala Harris and Elizabeth Warren, employed the lie, and I’m pretty certain every one of them knew it was false. The Democratic Party, which has cynically embraced Black Lives Matter, is, by extension, promoting the lie. Continue reading →
Richard Spoor, he tells us, is a public interest lawyer with a special interest in land reform, mines and communities and compensation for occupational diseases, and a “militant non-racialist,” whatever that means. His tweet is addled in so many ways:
The fate of these two lawyers turned terrorists is no more “sad” than any story of previously law-abiding citizens whose ethics alarms stop working as they knowingly break the law.
The fact that they are “young” makes it no more sad than if they were older, like 50. They’re not kids: both are over 30. They cannot claim immaturity or lack of experience. My son nearly ruined his life with a terrible, spur of the moment decision that could have killed him and others, but he was a teenaged male. He was also lucky. Truly young people like he was wreck their lives with bad decisions every day. That’s sad. Adults doing it is something else.
Participating in a riot and throwing a Molotov cocktail is not the act of an “idealistic” person by definition. Breaking the law, engaging in violence, and trying to destroy property for no good reason does not embody “ideals.” They embody the opposite of ideals. If the two lawyers were really idealistic, this wouldn’t have happened.
They didn’t “get wrapped up” in BLM’s racist movement, they joined it. It isn’t something that just happened to them.
“Moment of madness” is another version of Rationalization #19, The Perfection Diversion, or “Nobody’s Perfect!” and “Everybody makes mistakes!” People don’t suddenly throw Molotov cocktails and go “Ooopsie! What was I thinking?” That’s not “a mistake,” it is the culmination of many intentional acts leading up to a serious crime.
1. Let’s start with some good news! In April of last year, I wrote about Massachusetts judge Shelley M. Richmond Joseph, who was charged with obstruction of justice, along with another court officer, for helping an illegal immigrant (and criminal) elude arrest by the ICE. The story is here. It looks like the judge is going to trial.
U.S. District Judge Leo Sorokin has now denied the judge’s lawyers’ motions to dismiss in a July ruling. “After careful consideration, the motions to dismiss are DENIED because the Indictment alleges the elements of the offenses and sufficient supporting factual detail,” he wrote . Joseph’s attorneys are claiming was that she is protected by judicial immunity, though that should only apply to actions a judge engages in under judicial authority and in the course of her duties. Instructing a court employee to help an illegal immigrant evade being taken into custody by ICE agents after his hearing on criminal charges, including drug possession, is not known as “being a judge.” It is known as “obstructing justice.” Even if the judge avoids punishment, her days as a judge are over.
Good.
2. What’s this? MORE good news? I have been looking for cracks in the monolithic mainstream media, with defections by individuals in the midst of the journalism’s abandonment of its duties to democracy in favor of news manipulation and partisanship. Less than a month ago, New York Timed editor Bari Weiss called out the oppressive culture of partisanship and conformity at the her paper, earning her Ethics Hero status.
Last month MSNBC producer Ariana Pekary quit the network, arguably the most unethical of all the broadcast news outlets, and yesterday she published a blog post explaining why. “I simply couldn’t stay there anymore.” She wrote:
“My colleagues are very smart people with good intentions. The problem is the job itself. It forces skilled journalists to make bad decisions on a daily basis….It’s possible that I’m more sensitive to the editorial process due to my background in public radio, where no decision I ever witnessed was predicated on how a topic or guest would ‘rate,’ The longer I was at MSNBC, the more I saw such choices — it’s practically baked in to the editorial process – and those decisions affect news content every day. Likewise, it’s taboo to discuss how the ratings scheme distorts content, or it’s simply taken for granted, because everyone in the commercial broadcast news industry is doing the exact same thing. But behind closed doors, industry leaders will admit the damage that’s being done…I understand that the journalistic process is largely subjective and any group of individuals may justify a different set of priorities on any given day. Therefore, it’s particularly notable to me, for one, that nearly every rundown at the network basically is the same, hour after hour. And two, they use this subjective nature of the news to justify economically beneficial decisions. I’ve even heard producers deny their role as journalists. A very capable senior producer once said: “Our viewers don’t really consider us the news. They come to us for comfort.”
She claims to want to be part of a solution to this dire situation. We shall see. I reached out to her in an email yesterday, offering my guidance and expertise, gratis of course.
3. On the theory that transparency is good news, it was nice to see Democratic Rep. Karen Bass, supposedly one of the top contenders to be Joe Biden’s running mate, demonstrate how dim-witted she is and unqualified to be President, though at this point even she could probably beat poor Joe Biden in a spelling bee. Over and over, on several Sunday news shows, she repeated her previous explanation for praising Fidel Castro , telling Chuck Todd on “Meet the Press,” for example, regarding calling the brutal dictator’s death a “great loss to the people of Cuba,” that she “wouldn’t do that again. Talked immediately to my colleagues from Florida and realized that that was something that just shouldn’t have been said.”
Astounding. She wouldn’t say that what she said was wrong, outrageous for a member of Congress and demonstrated inexcusable ignorance, but that she should have kept the opinion to herself. Todd, of course, being one of the worst hacks in captivity, didn’t bother to press her on the point for the benefit of members of his audience who can’t recognize signature significance when it’s right in front of them.
Biden, or whoever his ventriloquist is, is officially trapped in ethics zugzwang. The only reason Bass is even being considered is that Biden has to select a black (George Floyd!) woman (#MeToo!) as his VP, and all of his remaining options are horrible by any objective standard. This will be a flaming lesson in the foolishness of placing physical characteristics over ability, experience and character, a perfect example of why affirmative action doesn’t work and will never work. Bass is a light-weight, but Biden’s two other options are Kamala Harris ( whose ugly Ethics Alarms dossier is here), and <ack! choke! yecch! barf! gag!> the even more horrible Susan Rice, Barack Obama’s ethics-free acolyte. Her dossier is here. She would be the most sinister Vice-President candidate since Aaron Burr.
I have to poll this: Who is Joe’s best choice among this unethical trio?
I’m not going to allow “None of the above,” because I don’t think he has that option, or at least doesn’t have the integrity to insist on choosing a qualified candidate who has the wrong tint or chromosomes.
4. Finally, to end on a downer, the Unethical Non-Trump Tweet of the week. Orlando Magic forward Jonathan Isaac was the only NBA player not to kneel during the National Anthem, and also refused to wear a “Black Lives Matter” warm-up like the rest of his teammates. In Sunday’s game, he tore his ACL, a season-ending and career threatening injury. ESPN radio host Dan Le Batard then ran a poll on Twitter asking, “Is it funny the guy who refused to kneel immediately blew out his knee?”
When the poll was pulled, about 45% of respondents said that it was funny, which tells you all you need to know about NBA fans and Black Lives Matter supporters—the genuine kind, not the grovelers. Le Batard issued a phony apology, Level 10 on the Apology Scale.
“We apologize for this poll question,” he wrote. “I said on the front and back end of the on-air conversation that I didn’t think it was funny. Regardless of the context, we missed the mark. We took the tweet down when we realized our mistake in how we posed the question to the audience.”
Lies and more lies. They took the tweet down when it was clear they were getting slammed for it. If he didn’t think a young athlete getting injured was funny because he dared to oppose the BLM mob, why would he think anyone else would? When is someone getting hurt who has done nothing wrong and who did not do something foolish to cause the injury ever funny?
Now, admittedly, this is an especially dumb tweet, even by President Trump’s standards:
1. It just plays into the hands of the “resistance” and Democrats, as well as their allied mainstream media pundits, supporting their lie that the President is planning on refusing to accept the results of the election if he loses. Is their baseless claim any more reasonable and divisive than Trump’s constant claims that mail-in ballots will lead to massive election fraud? In fact, it’s much less reasonable, as well as hypocritical, since Democrats never accepted the legitimacy of Trump’s election, and have been plotting to undo it by any means necessary. Still, their irresponsible blather doesn’t justify or excuse Trump’s. Continue reading →
When ABC posted this today, the name and identity of the driver of the car was known. He is African American. The New York Times and others had the complete story.
ABC deliberately used “luxury car” to suggest a wealthy white racist. If you really think that choice of words, without the name of the driver who bears that good, old Anglo-Saxon name of Dawit Kelete, wasn’t deliberately chosen to mislead readers, you are among the perfect victims of mainstream media manipulation.
Fox News pundit and wit Greg Guttfield tweeted, fairly and appropriately,
Your social media followers, friends and relatives who still say that mainstream media bias is a conservative conspiracy theory are insulting you and undermining your rights as a citizen. You should not, must not, passively accept this. If you do, you are enabling the deceptions and the effort to manipulate public opinion for partisan gain.
Of course, there is always the explanation that your social media follower, friend or relative is a gullible dolt with the analytical ability of a hunk of cheddar.
In which case, I urge you to ponder your questionable taste in associates.
Associate Professor of Gender and Women’s Studies Sami Schalk describes herself as a “Sarcastic fat Black disabled queer femme,”—yes, she’s full of herself!—added,
“Make real substantive long term change commitments or the uprisings will continue. So many people have so little to lose in the wake of the pandemic. Folks got time & anger & not much else to do with it but disrupt the fuck out of this city,”
Observations:
Why do universities allow people like this to teach our young?
What responsible parents would pay a cent to an institution to inflict the ravings of a fanatic like this on their children?
Who taught those young protesters so negligently that the statues mean nothing to them?
“Your people”—funny, I always thought that kind of distinction was racist—aren’t in “cages,” you fool—they’re in prison, just like “my people.” Those who are there are there because they don’t know how to live in a civilized society, and refuse to obey its laws, thus harming the rest of us. A cheap, transparent rhetorical trick like “cages” doesn’t change the truth.
I’m curious how long the self-contradictory narrative will survive that the protests are about systemic racism and George Floyd, when so many of its leaders and cheerleaders openly admit the goal is power? Like so much of the 2016 Post Election Ethics Train Wreck, it all comes down to just how apathetic and gullible the American public is.
This is the crowd the leaders of the Democratic Party is supporting, encouraging, and enabling. Sure, it’s cynical and dishonest, and wildly reckless, but as the saying goes, grab power by any means necessary. Voters have four months to figure out what’s going on.
“Cases are going up in the U.S. because we are testing far more than any other country, and ever expanding. With smaller testing we would show fewer cases!”
Now, this could be a joke. It should be a joke, because the statement is per se idiotic. Cases are doing whatever they are doing regardless of whether they are identified or not. Not knowing about a case of a virus infection, or a thousand cases, because we aren’t testing enough to find them, doesn’t make the cases disappear. This is so obvious, and the opposite assertion so ridiculous, that one almost has to believe that Trump’s tweet is a joke. After all, the logical extension of that tweet would be that the pandemic could be eliminated if we ceased testing. He can’t possibly think that.
One could also call this an ethical tweet, as it neatly unmasks the hypocrisy of the scientific community as well as the self-serving myth that scientists are squeaky-clean objective and do not bend their pronouncements to partisan and political motives.
Bergstrom is a science star. Atheoretical and evolutionary biologist and a professor at the University of Washington in Seattle, he has been a vocal critic of low-quality or misleading scientific research. Now he is proving how we get it.
In another tweet, he writes, “We are having difficult but vital conversations about whether public health professionals can support the #BlackLivesMatter.protests during a pandemic. I’m unhappy to see these defaulting to utilitarian calculus rather than considering deontological or virtue ethics perspectives.”
That one’s pretty funny. The reason policy-makers are told that they must follow in lockstep the pronouncements of “experts” is that scientists et al. are not calibrating facts, recommendation and conclusions based on biases, personal preferences and non-factual considerations. In fact, that is the very reason policy makers must make the trade-offs scientists cannot, or should not. Now, struggling to find a way out of the obvious verdict of hypocrisy, Bergstrom is extolling “virtue ethics.” The problem is that virtue ethics also requires balancing and prioritizing among the virtues. Now we know that Bergstrom, among others, calibrates his recommendations according to his own political and ideological preferences. Go to work to continue earning income and care for one’s family? Not important enough to justify the risk. Gather in church to serve one’s spiritual needs? Nope. Attend a funeral of a loved one to express grief and respect? Not worth the risk. Protest being forced to accept an economic Armageddon and the suspension of civil rights to prevent virus-triggered fatalities that have been tolerated in the past without installing such draconian measures? Selfish and irresponsible.
Mass demonstrations in the streets out of anger and opportunistic political motivations, leading to millions of dollars of property destruction, human misery, deaths of bystanders and police, looting and riots in furtherance of vague objectives and generalities?
