I have three substantial posts to get up already this morning, but the swirl of billable time and EA time had me a bit scattered. Here are a few flickers from the neurons that are early risers:
For some reason, traffic here was way up all day yesterday, and I have no clue why or whether a particular topic was driving it. Theories welcome.
On the other hand, as Captain Hook never would say, I find the lack of interest in this post puzzling. 1) Arbitration is routine in so many disputes now, and the system, and the arbitrators, are untrustworthy. Attention should be paid, and 2) the arbitrator’s decision at the heart of the essay is particularly indefensible, blocking a major newspaper from firing a partisan, racist hack who lied in a social media post because—lying and being a racist (anti-white, of course) is not sufficient cause to fire an opinion columnist?
The personal mission I alluded to on Sunday took up most of the day, caused me to miss two deadlines, aggravated an injury to my ankle and left me exhausted. Never mind. A little dog found her “forever home” (why that cheesy phrase gets me all choked up is a long-running embarrassment, but I can’t help it) and my sibling has been the happiest I have seen since her very first dog perished over a year ago. The Power of the Dog.
On gross baseball nick-names: the Seattle Mariners catcher, Cal Raleigh, is called “The Big Dumper.” The Mariners broadcasters love to use it, presumably because their maturity level is at the approximate level of a 12-years-old. For some reason, Seattle seems to like such snicker-inspiring monikers. The Mariners also originated the nickname for 6’10” Hall of Fame pitcher Randy Johnson: “The Big Unit.” Yes, that meant exactly what you’re thinking. Ew.
This:
True gaslighting, and another fake protest, like the “No Kings” nonsense. Sharpton and his Axis allies don’t want to “protect the vote,” they want to keep elections vulnerable to fraud and fixing.
Can you believe that quote? Astounding, unreal, incredible. (As a side note, what the heck is the New England Journal of Medicine doing publishing an article about a Cambridge University scamster given a position on the faculty based mostly on his color and secondarily on his transparently fantastic biographical claims and stolen scholarship?)
Doll’s statement literally stands for the elimination of integrity, merit, honesty and accountability as core standards of Western civilization, replacing them with…what, exactly? Feelings? Artificial virtue? Group-based advancement?
I suppose this chart…
.
..helps explain how a medical journal author would write such crap, but it doesn’t explain what overdose of cracked ideology, indoctrination, group-think and incipient brain rot was necessary to get us to this point.
As I have already written here a few times, I am sick of the Arday story, but we cannot be sick of what it signifies because it is too important to ignore. As Glenn Greenwald wrote, “One cannot honestly defend Arday either for his deceptions or his apparent suicide. And, in fact, no one really is. What the protesters and petitioners are doing is defending themselves. University administrators, professors, writers, and other liberals are out in the streets screaming at the press for revealing the depths of elite academia’s racism, gullibility, and dishonesty. They’re focusing on the media to take themselves out of the spotlight.”
Yes, this news made my head explode. I will be picking up pieces of skull and bloody lumps of gray matter for the rest of the day.
Sarah Miller Espinosa, an arbitrator, ordered The Washington Post to rehire anti-white, racist, biased and dishonest opinion columnist Karen Attiah, whom the paper properly fired in September because of her social media posts regarding the assassination of Charlie Kirk. The Post has to compensate her with back pay too.
The Post, Espinosa wrote, “did not have good and sufficient cause” to terminate Attiah and violated its labor agreement. “The Washington Post failed to establish the grievant engaged in gross misconduct,” she concluded.
Oh, really?
In its report on this gob-smacking ruling, the NY Times cites Appiah’s BlueSky post that read, “Refusing to tear my clothes and smear ashes on my face in performative mourning for a white man that espoused violence is … not the same as violence,” as representative of the offending chain that the columnist issued after Kirk’s assassination. In the EA report on the episode, I focused on this one:
Oooh, damning! Racist! Except that Kirk never said that, despite the fact than Attiah put the statement in quotes. What he said, according to Attiah’s source, The Guardian, was…
“If we would have said that Joy Reid and Michelle Obama and Sheila Jackson Lee and Ketanji Brown Jackson were affirmative action picks, we would have been called racists. Now they’re coming out and they’re saying it for us … You do not have the brain processing power to otherwise be taken really seriously. You had to go steal a white person’s slot to go be taken somewhat seriously.”
The quote was not about black women at all, but referring to four specific and named black women who Kirk believed had demonstrated that they were not qualified for the positions they occupied. (I’d say that three of the four clearly warrant Kirk’s assessment; I’m not sure about Michelle. I would have used Kamala Harris).
Attiah, then, rewrote the quote to make Kirk seem prejudiced against all black women. She used quotation marks, though what she wrote was not what he said. She intentionally lied to readers to make Kirk’s assassination seem deserved. That’s why she was fired by the Post, and the only point of contention is why, as an anti-white, racist hack with no regard for journalism ethics (not that the Post wins any prizes in that area either), she was working for the paper in the first place.
The Washington Post, in defending Attiah’s sacking, maintained that her rant about Kirk injured “the integrity” of the organization and violated standards requiring employees to use social media with civility and respect. “Karen’s social media feed yesterday and today is beyond the pale, completely unacceptable for someone associated with Opinions,” the Post’s opinion editor wrote after her outburst. The arbitrator disagrees! A columnist lying on a public platform, fabricating a quote and using it to support a racist “opinion” isn’t a black mark on the integrity of the newspaper that employs her. Good to know.
To be fair, the Post was irresponsible to hire the woman in the first place. She should never have been hired, and should have been fired—well, except according to the strange standards of Espinosa—in 2023, when Attiah made as ass of herself by opining that a newly unveiled sculpture (in Boston) celebrating the marriage of Martin Luther King and Coretta “perfectly represents how White America loves to butcher MLK.” Oopsie! The sculptor was black and the commission that approved the design was mostly black. I wrote at the time,
“Appiah is a ridiculously careless and dumb racist. How could someone publish a diatribe like she did without checking to see whether the artist was white? She could because she is such a racist that it never occurred to her that something she objected to wasn’t the fault of whites. This is the apex of racism, its most ugly form. To the KKK, everything wrong with their nation was the fault of blacks, Catholics and immigrants. To Hitler, all of Germany’s ills were attributable to Jews. To people like Attiah—and don’t kid yourself, there are a lot of them—whites are the enemy, evil and a human pathogen on society. That’s bad enough that it should disqualify her from a position of authority and influence at the Washington Post. But she also has exposed herself as frighteningly lacking basic reporting skills and journalistic integrity. She is doubly untrustworthy. No apology, no excuse-making can erase this debacle. I am eager to see if the Post has the courage and professionalism, as well as respect for its readers, to do what has to be done. My guess? No.”
But based on this arbitrator’s ruling, there is literally nothing Attiah could write that would disqualify her from having a platform for her hate, ignorance, dishonesty and stupidity on the opinion pages of the Washington Post. The mind boggles: Castrate all men! Put the Jews in camps! Kill Trump! “I am Marie of Romania!” Attiah’s lawyer called the decision “a landmark victory for one of our nation’s crusading journalists.”
Over the past year, I have been professionally involved in several cases involving arbitration. In too many of them (and one is too many), the arbitrator’s decision was incomprehensible and incompetent. Many arbitrators are ancient retired judges; others are incapacitated by unstated biases. Arbitration clauses exist to save the immense costs of litigation, but when the result is a howler like this one, it demonstrates a triumph of finances over logic.
I also want to mention that almost all of the Times readers who commented on this declaration that no columnist’s opinions are so repulsive and biased that they are grounds for firing for cause thought it was wonderful.
There has been so much weird, impulsive, counter-intuitive and counter-factual support for frauds, knaves and evil-doers on the ideological left that I have had a hard time keeping up with it—or maybe my brain is just rejecting what it regards as bad juju. An astounding number of young Democratic-Socialists lionize Luigi Mangione, who shot an insurance exec in the back in an alley. Hasan Piker, who campaigned with Abdul El-Sayed, now the Michigan Democratic Party candidate for the U.S. Senate, has repeatedly expressed his approval of the assassination of Charlie Kirk. I have several Trump-Deranged friends who would have sent flowers of thanks to any of the recent failed assassins whose target was President Trump. The support for Jason Arday and his sanctification as a victim is also part of the trend.
But this latest example is special. Hundreds of women, dressed in pink, protested last week outside Plymouth Superior Court in Massachusetts to show their support for Lindsay Clancy, the former nurse being tried for the murdered her three young children.
The mob wore shirts reading “Believe,” “She Needed Help” and “Peace for Lindsay.” Clancy, 36, pleaded not guilty to three counts of first-degree murder in the deaths of her children—Cora, 5, Dawson, 3, and Callan, 8 months, in January 2023. Her defense now is that she was suffering from postpartum psychosis and severe mental illness and therefore should not be held criminally responsible. Okay. That’s the defense’s job in a case like this, and surely any mother who would murder her own kids, or any children for that matter, has a strong argument that she was legally insane. However, in 1994 when Susan Smith was convicted of murdering her two sons, three-year-old Michael and one-year-old Alexander, by strapping them in their car seats, and rolling her car into a lake, there was no such public sympathy for her. The defense’s insanity defense was rejected by the jury.
Social media, of course, is part of the difference, and the Clancy episode may stand as a perfect example of how the internet warps values, perception and ethics. The murderous mother’s sympathizers have followed the livestreamed trial daily, often analyzing witness testimony in real time. TikTok has viral videos with legends like “I Am Lindsay Clancy,” often showing the poster holding her own infant. (I would think such videos justify visist from child protective services.) “I Stand With Lindsay” merchandise—shirts, hats, stickers, mugs, socks and bags —-are being sold on line. A GoFundMe established for Clancy’s parents had 31,000 contributions by the end of last week, raising over a million dollars.
This woman murdered her children, remember, and there is evidence that she planned it; she didn’t just “snap.”
So Ethics Alarms has to ask the threshold question to begin an inquiry into so many ethics problems: “What’s going on here?”
Much of today will be occupied by my driving my little sister to West Virginia where she will finally adopt a new dog more than a year after her beloved canine companion, a sweet Havanese, perished of old age. From experience, I know bring a new dog home is a two-person job. I won’t be able to post on developing ethics catastrophes until this afternoon, but I am hoping to leave enough metaphorical bread crumbs behind to prompt some lively discussion.
For instance…
1. I know I alluded to AOC’s head-exploding statement on ABC’s “This Week” a week ago that “Woke 1 was crazy” but attention should be paid. Then she said, “And I think that what’s important is that we have to assess what a candidate is saying now.” How can anyone trust a politician who would say something that cynical and damning? “Oh yeah, my party and I advocated all sorts of crazy stuff way back then (a few years ago!), but come on, don’t hold us to that nuttiness.” This is a back-room consultant’s solution to problem of the Axis embracing so many so-called 80-20 positions—let minors get their genitals mutilated with “gender affirming care,” defund the police, abolish prisons, forgive student loan debt, “et cetera, et cetera,” as the King of Siam would say. Funny… in my world, people who say they believe ridiculous things are regarded as, in fact, ridiculous: untrustworthy and irresponsible even if they bleat “I didn’t mean it!” later.
2. Oh good: I haven’t had a “Yankees suck!” topic for a while!An upsetting essay (gift link) in the New York Times begins…
“On one side of East 161st Street looms Yankee Stadium, the baseball fortress in the South Bronx that is the home of baseball’s $10 billion franchise, the richest in the sport. On the other lies a park in one of the Bronx’s poorest communities, built on the site of the former Yankee Stadium after the old home of the Yankees was torn down in 2009 and 2010. Macombs Dam Park was originally intended to serve as a shrine to the team’s history. Plaques commemorate great Yankee moments, as does the iconic facade that was stationed above the original entrance. Quotes from Yankee greats make up the park’s signage, and Elston Howard Field was created as a replica of a stadium that stood for 85 years. The park is about 44 acres, and also includes a track, playground and basketball courts. Yet over the past decade, the park has fallen into a state of decrepitude, trash littering the venue. The playing surface, with uncut grass and sprouting weeds, is uneven and unsafe. The field, when untended, is largely unplayable.”
The story continues to tell us that kids have broken ankles and legs trying to play on the field because of all the holes, and that parents in the area, one of the state’s poorest, feel betrayed and ignored. Nonetheless, however, none of the parties with interests in the project have stepped forward to fix it—not the state, not the city, and not the New York Yankees, as they all point to each other and generally refuse to respond to the news media’s inquiries.
Ethically, the #1 villain is obvious, to me, anyway. The Yankees should clean up and maintain the park. It’s that team’s history that resides there, and there is no question that the Yankees can afford it without having to plow through the red tape the community would have to navigate to get results. The team pays 8 figure annual salaries to utility infielders. The state of its legacy field is a disgrace to the memory of the Babe, Joltin’ Joe, the Mick and Lou Gehrig. (Okay, I have to say it: naming the field after Elston Howard, the first black Yankee star, is DEI crap, and I loved Elston. But Yankee Stadium was long called “The House that Ruth Built,” and Babe was the greatest Yankee.
More “Woke 1”?
3. Speaking of baseball ethics and the hugely profitable sport being cheap, last week the Baltimore Orioles lost a game they thought they had won in dramatic fashionwhen an apparent home run by slugger Pete Alonso was ruled foul by the umpires. The potential home run ball was so high that it soared far over the left field foul pole, and the videos of the blast were inconclusive. The technology is available to make such calls with certitude, but stadiums haven’t installed it, presumable because it is expensive and the situation doesn’t arise that frequently. However, the outcome of single games can affect careers, seasons. championship and franchises. The story in The Athletic ends,
“Everyone acknowledges more needs to be done…No one was able to offer clear answers or timelines.This week, MLB players fumed at a fair/foul call like generations of ballplayers before them.In 1963, an umpire’s foul call on Willie McCovey’s towering ninth-inning fly ball elongated the game into a 16-inning marathon. “He didn’t make the call right away. I hit it so high and far, he waited until it landed … which was in Oakland,” McCovey said in 2013, still grumbling as the 50th anniversary of that epic game approached. “He was the only person in the ballpark who thought it was foul.”
…“It seems odd to me that we don’t have cameras on foul poles,” Guardians manager Stephen Vogt said. “That’s the one thing that is not different in every ballpark.” New York Yankees manager Aaron Boone acknowledged that while it’s natural to want to use every available tool to get calls right, it’s likely more complicated than a quick install that fixes everything.
Ryan Harkins contributed the second Comment of the Day to grace EA’s cyber-pages today, and like the earlier one by Humble Talent, it is excellent. Since the topic is Jason Arday, I believe I am allowed to give a brief update on this latest story of the academic world’s DEI disgrace:
In a substack essay, Max Klinger wrote about his experience in the Cambridge department that later hired Arday for its faculty. He wrote in part, “I studied in the academic department at Cambridge that later employed Jason Arday. Here’s just some of the crap I learned: For one module, I wrote a lengthy essay about how cultural products like kids’ cartoons and jazz songs serve as instruments of capitalist oppression. I got a top mark on that paper (despite knowing at the time that I was essentially regurgitating complete crap).While studying for another paper I had a debate with the professor, an eminent anthropologist, because she insisted that native tribes could fly through the trees – not metaphorically, but that they could literally fly because they believed they could fly. After all, who are we to question ‘indigenous ways of knowing’…For a different course, I read long ‘research papers’ which argued that the fact that black kids are excluded from schools more than white kids proves systemic racism exists in education. Crucially, they ignored the fact that white kids are excluded more than, e.g., Japanese kids, a statistic which, applying the exact same logic, would suggest that the education system is systemically biased in favour of, erm, Japanese kids (which obviously it isn’t)…”
The United States Mission to Belgium, under U.S. Ambassador Bill White, released a statement condemning Ghent University for retaliating against the American scholar who blew the metaphorical whistle on Arday’s plagiarism. “The United States government regularly funds and supports research, academic exchanges, and other engagements with overseas universities,” it said in part. “Dishonest, corrupt institutions that engage in, or reward, scapegoating mob behavior are not desirable partners for us. This is particularly true where the purpose and effect of the scapegoating is to punish accurate journalism unearthing academic dishonesty. We are therefore reviewing any relationships we have with Ghent University.” Good. No Democratic administration would do this, and you know why.
So far, there has been no report on what was Arday’s cause of death. Everyone assumes he took his own life, but no information has been forthcoming on how, if indeed he did. I find that strange. But then everything about this sad tale is strange.
I will grant this to some of my more Trump Deranged friends: they do give me some excellent ethics blog fodder.
One of them erupted in typical Trump deranged outrage because, as explained in this WaPo story, the Pentagon fired the publisher and the editor-in-chief of “Stars and Stripes,” the military news publication funded by the Department of Defense. This was, you see, another example of Trump “censorship.” In interviews with CBS, the fired editor insisted, “I am working for Stars and Stripes. Not for the Pentagon. Not for any administration. Not for any policymaker. I am here to cover the military community.” Another argued, “These firings are a shame for the institution and service members, who swore to defend the Constitution and deserve the right to a free and independent press.”
My Trump Deranged friend seems to believe that the Pentagon is obligated to employ “advocacy journalists” who are free to undermine the military command, including the Commander in Chief. If the Pentagon can fire editors of “Stars and Stripes,” and it can, then the publication can’t call itself independent. The military has no reason to tolerate or fund a publication that is critical of military command or the Commander in Chief, undermining military morale and general order.
In past eras, Stars and Stripes has always had an pro- military bias; of course it has. But now we have veterans in uniform disrupting Congressional hearings, and there is a war on. If “Stars and Stripes “wants the option of criticizing military command rather than reporting military news and promoting the Armed Services, great: let it find a funding source other than the Pentagon. Otherwise, it is beholden to the best interests of the military as the military command defines them.
The military is not a democracy. The Pentagon didn’t permit a “free and independent press” during World War II. It is disingenuous for a “Stars and Stripes” editor or reporter to say on CBS that she doesn’t work for the Pentagon when the Pentagon’s funds pay her salary.
Humble Talent’s Comment of the Day on the post “Another Trump Derangement Update!” is clear, perceptive, and helpful. It needs no more introduction from me, so here it is…
***
I remember during Trump’s first term, I made a Facebook post that tried to explain to lefties the concept of “resistance burnout”…. Basically, if you approach everything Trump does with the exact same amount of action and outrage, then you lose the ability to signal what is actually important, and everything just ends up sounding like an adult from Charlie Brown. I used how Trump muzzled the EPA’s Twitter account and how he appointed a man actively being sued by the EPA as head of the EPA as examples of something very low stakes and something legitimately bad.
Because there is some there there, and a sane resistance has a place. I’ll put it out there: I was absolutely more than willing to talk about how awful Biden was, and how the 25th was probably more appropriate for him than any other President in living memory. See: “Weekend at Biden’s” and “President Autopen”… That wasn’t normal either.
Because Trump isn’t normal, but just saying that is insufficient. “Normal” isn’t a moral state of being. What he does is important, and while I could be annoyed at all the capital projects, particularly during a cost of living crisis (I am), or his instinct to rhetorically pee on everything he can in an attempt to get his name on things (ditto), or his desire to add acreage to the American empire by floating ideas that are just… Never going to happen, as some kind of legacy project (also yes), these things are relatively unimportant. We need to be able to walk and chew gum, and separate the annoying things Trump does from the things that are actually problems.
Dan Koh is delusional. The frightening thing is that the there are a lot of brain-washed progressives in Massachusetts who are so far gone that they won’t realize how crazy and hypocritical that ad is.
First of all, to lead with dead-eyed Joe Biden saying Koh’s name because two syllables is probably all they could get him to utter after 34 takes and maybe some AI dubbing, isn’t what I would call a boffo opening. Then to follow with Kamala Harris—why would anyone vote for someone Harris endorses? She picked Knucklehead Tim Walz as her running mate! Next Koh boasts about being a senior White House advisor who was either so dim that he didn’t realize the President was a rutabaga, or so corrupt that he was part of the cover-up of Biden’s dementia. There is no third option. Biden’s term was the most disastrous in American Presidential history: what did Biden fix, with Koh’s expert counsel?
Then he ends by saying “Democrats you trust” endorse him, and there are Biden and Kamala again. I can’t think of many Democrats less trustworthy than those two. Oh, maybe Adam Schiff, Jamaal Bowman, Rep. Omar and a few other scumbags, but it’s close. Harris endorsed Black Lives Matter, and said she wanted redirect public resources away from the police but didn’t support defunding the police, a typical muddled Harris policy position. As a Presidential candidate Harris said she wouldn’t change anything Joe Biden did…you know, like opening the borders and appointing a DEI Cabinet of incompetents, lackeys and dolts. Kamal;a also swore she worked at a mysterious McDonalds that apparently appears for day and then vanishes into the mist, like Brigadoon.
Joe let his addict son use him as an influence peddling prop. He promised to be a moderate and to bring the nation together, then allowed the far Left to run his crippled Presidency. He insisted that he was sharp as a tack while refusing to have his cognition tested after his brain had retired to Boca Raton. True, he “beat Medicare.”
That ad is like something out of an alternate universe.
[Note of correction: Sloppily, carelessly and unforgivably, I stated in the post that Floyd was convicted of first degree murder, and he was not. Chauvin was convicted of unintentional second-degree murder, third-degree murder (which is manslaughter), and second-degree manslaughter and convicted on all of the charges, resulting in a 22.5 year prison sentence. That result is still unconscionable given the facts and equivocal evidence. But let’s get the facts right. My apologies.]
Derek Chauvin, who was convicted of murdering George Floyd for many reasons, none fair, valid or based on justice or civil rights, once again has a chance to see his kangaroo court conviction thrown out.
A new court filing by Chauvin’s lawyer, the third aimed at getting Chauvin’s indefensible murder conviction reversed, alleges, among other things, ‘illegal’ and ‘fraudulent’ conduct by Governor Tim Walz, Attorney General Keith Ellison, and the Hennepin County Attorney’s Office.” Greg Joseph contends that there were serious breaches of proper procedure and due process by authorities because the Black Lives Matter mob was so determined to use George Floyd’s death as a righteous rallying point to advance a social and political agenda.
Ya think?
Joseph contends that a grand jury was never convened to review the evidence behind the charges, because, as he rightly concludes, “Hennepin County’s unlawful charges against Mr. Chauvin were not severe enough for the mob.” Governor Tim Walz instead “referred the case to (Minnesota Attorney General and confirmed anti-white racist) Keith Ellison, who signed and e-filed a second unfounded complaint against Derek Chauvin that included the murder charge.”
Is anyone surprised that they did everything possible to cut corners to destroy Chauvin, and justice be damned? Not me.
Ethics Alarms 