Comment Of The Day: “Ethics And The Death Of Jordan Neely”

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

There are strong indications that the race-hucksters are revving up to make Jordan Neely the next George Floyd in time to re-charge the batteries of racial distrust in time for the 2024 Presidential campaign, so further attention must be paid. This is true, unfortunately, before the investigation of the tragic incident has been completed. The Federalist warns that the death of the black homeless man at the hands of a white former Marine attempting to protect fellow passengers is being primed for exploitation:

Penny’s fate will, as Peachy Keenan wrote in The Federalist, be a test of whether young American men should dare to act courageously when others are in peril. But there’s even more at stake in this case. With Neely being anointed as the new George Floyd, the questions of whether Penny was right to restrain Neely or if he used inappropriate force to do so are merely sidebars to a broader narrative about American racism. Floyd’s death became a metaphor for a myth about systemic police racism. Floyd’s actions the night of his death, his criminal record, and the fact that his body was full of what might have been a lethal dose of fentanyl were dismissed as irrelevant. The only thing that mattered was that he was a black man and that the cop who had, in an act of undoubted callous brutality, snuffed out his life was white. In the name of a belief, however mistaken, that Floyd’s death was just one of countless incidents in which blacks were being slaughtered with impunity, millions took to the streets in “mostly peaceful” riots that shook the nation.

More than that, it set off a moral panic in virtually every sector of American life that elevated the woke catechism of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) to a new secular religion — since accepted by the Biden administration as mandatory for every government agency and department — that treats color-blind policies and even the goal of equal opportunity as forms of racism that must be eradicated.

Read the whole thing…but first read Humble Talent’s Comment of the Day on the related Ethics Alarms post, “Ethics And The Death Of Jordan Neely”:

* * *

“It is true that Penny could not have known that history when he intervened; it is also relevant information now.”

I don’t know that this is right… There’s evidence that Neely was kind of known in the subway community – You ride the same car to and from work five days a week, 200 days a year, and you’ll probably eventually start to recognize a face or two, and the face of the lunatic getting violent, perhaps one famous for cracking the orbital bone of a 67 year old woman or trying to kidnap a 7 year old girl might be a face to remember. Penny might not have known about all 44 arrests, but I don’t think it’s impossible that he knew the guy was a violent problem.

This case is… sad. I don’t know that this is Neely’s fault, so much as I’m pretty convinced that fault, if we have to look at it that way, doesn’t lie with Penny. Neely was failed so many different ways – When it comes to mental health, you just cannot expect people to reason themselves to sanity. For the people that are able to, that great. For the people who think the oven is their shoe rack, their pristine house is covered in bugs, that their arm is not their arm, that their 80 pound frame is too fat, or whatever psychosis brings on to Neely’s position, there needs to be people in your life that care enough to help.

Continue reading →

Civic Debate Ethics Tip: Don’t Use Words As Accusations If You Don’t Know What They Mean [Missing Link Restored!]

/ Jack Marshall / 17 Comments

That’s the newly designed Utah state flag flying above this post. A bill signed into law in March adopted it to replace the 1911 version that has been the standard for over a century. It looked like this:

Now I’ve been involved in the equivalent of flag redesign controversies several times: logo changes. It is always a mess. No matter how stodgy or outdated the current logo was, people were used to it, and hated the idea of a new one. No matter how innovative or well-designed the potential replacement was, board members would subjectively conclude it was ugly. Inevitably someone with no artistic skill or background would whip out a pad and doodle his or her idea of a good logo.

However, the issue at hand is the term being used in ultra-conservative Utah to turn the public against the new flag. It is being accused of being “woke.”

“Woke”? The flag includes at its center a beehive, just like the old flag, honoring the pioneers who arrived in the Salt Lake Valley on July 24, 1847. Gov. Spencer Cox had declared that the beehive had to be prominent on any re-imagined flag, and promised to veto any design without it.

Continue reading →

Ethics Alarms Is Proud To Award A Lifetime Weasel Award To John Kerry

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

To be fair, this recognition of John Kerry’s remarkable career as a human representative of the genus Mustelidae is probably years too late. As you can see here and here, Kerry’s weasel credentials as proven by his Ethics Alarms dossier are outstanding. Most recently, Kerry mouthed some boilerplate climate change blather as the Biden administration’s “special envoy.” Before that, Kerry caught my attention by warning an audience that if Donald Trump was re-elected, there would be a “revolution” (speaking of ‘fear speech’!) and implying that the 2004 Presidential election was stolen from him by nefarious means.These, however, were standard fare for a career mediocrity and lifetime weasel; Kerry had established his bona fides long ago.

After all, he rose to political prominence by calling his former brothers in arms still fighting in the jungles of Vietnam war criminals. When he first ran for the Senate in Massachusetts, his campaign literature was festooned with shamrocks to appeal to the large Irish contingent in the state. Kerry isn’t Irish. Memorably, when called on the fact that he was running against President George Bush as a critic of the Iraq War despite having voted for it in the Senate, Kerry said, “I was against the war before I was for it.”

Continue reading →

Scholastic Was Right To Ask A Children’s Book Author To Edit Her Anti-American Introduction, But Nobody Will Admit It

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

Maggie Tokuda-Hall was indignant when Scholastic, a publishing giant that distributes books and resources to 90% of the nation’s schools, offered, to license her book, “Love in the Library,” but only on the condition that she edit her author’s note as indicated above. She went public with her accusations that this was an example of unconscionable capitulation to right-wing efforts to “censor” books in school libraries, and now Scholastic is groveling for forgiveness after ” an outcry among children’s book authors,” while several authors and educators consulted by Scholastic condemned the company’s actions, and demanded an overhaul of the editorial process.

Of course, this is an issue being engaged with by only one side of the political divide, whose analysis is wildly skewed by fealty to political correctness and the anti-American movement in public education, fueled in part by children’s book authors (see above) and industry consultants (see above). The New York Times’ “news report” on the matter is, predictably, completely biased, framing what should be an issue stuffed with legitimate arguments on both sides to one where the rights and wrongs of the episode have already been settled by the demands of Leftist orthodoxy. The headline, as is often the case in the Times, frames the story dishonestly: “Asked to Delete References to Racism From Her Book, an Author Refused.”

The author, a Japanese-America, quickly plays her own race-card, telling the Times, “We all see what’s happening with this rising culture of book bans. If we all know that the largest children’s publisher in the country, the one with the most access to schools, is capitulating behind closed doors and asking authors to change their works to accommodate those kinds of demands, there’s no way you as a marginalized author can find an audience.”

Sure there is. Write children’s books that don’t seek to indoctrinate kids and that don’t try to reduce complex historical events to simplistic and misleading narratives.

Continue reading →

Ethics And The Death Of Jordan Neely

/ Jack Marshall / 27 Comments

You know the story by now, presumably. A week ago, Jordan Neely, a homeless and mentally ill black man, was shouting at passengers riding with him in the subway. He was apparent getting in passengers’ faces and causing significant anxiety. A 24-year-old former Marine, Daniel Penny, decided that it was his civic duty to intervene, especially since there were no law enforcement authorities in the car. He tackled and restrained Neely (apparently some other riders assisted), put him in a chokehold, and held him until he became unconscious. Neely was later pronounced dead at a hospital. New York City’s medical examiner ruled that Neely died from compression of the neck and classified the death as a homicide, which does not automatically mean it was a crime. Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s office is investigating. So far, Penny has not been charged.

It is Penny’s misfortune to be white, so the usual race-bating activists and demagogues are framing the episode as “George Floyd II.” Fortunately Neely did not say “I can’t breathe” before passing out.

Ethics Observation #1: The presumed racial animus that was attached to the Floyd case will keep repeating itself in such incidents until it is decisively rejected. As the culture has been conditioned now, whenever a white man is involved in the death of a black man, the motive is presumed to be racism, and the crime a hate crime.

Penny, who was only officially named three days ago, released this statement through his lawyers:

Continue reading →

Ethics Quote Of The Week: Actor Richard Dreyfuss

/ Jack Marshall / 18 Comments

“Am I being told that I will never have a chance to play a black man? Is someone else being told that if they’re not Jewish, they shouldn’t play the Merchant of Venice? Are we crazy? Do we not know that art is art?…This is so patronizing. It’s so thoughtless and treating people like children.”

—-Actor Richard Dreyfuss, Academy Award-winner, lamenting the successful invasion of “diversity, equity and inclusion” into his profession and the movie industry.

Dreyfuss’s outburst was provoked when he was asked in an interview with PBS’s Firing Line about his opinion of the Academy of Motion Picture Sciences’ new DEI mandates, which will kick in for the 2025 Oscars. “They make me vomit,” the famously outspoken Hollywood liberal said. “No one should be telling me as an artist that I have to give in to the latest, most current idea of what morality is. What are we risking? Are we really risking hurting people’s feelings? You can’t legislate that. You have to let life be life and I’m sorry, I don’t think there is a minority or majority in the country that has to be catered to like that.”

The answers to Dreyfuss’s queries are, in order,

Continue reading →

Comment Of The Day: “Today’s Kentucky Derby Metaphor: Journalists May Be The Enemies Of Our Democracy, But Teachers Are Coming Up On The Inside Rail….”

/ Jack Marshall / 18 Comments

What I am looking for in the Ethics Alarms comments is constructive, literate expositions on opinions and conclusions regarding the ethics-related issues raised here. Regular commenters who have proven their seriousness and genuine interest in the topic have leave to leave the periodic facetious or non-substantive posts, but the conduct of lesser and inevitable short-tenured commenters whose technique consists of “no it isn’t” assertions without proffers of evidence, new information or fresh analysis, pollute the site and defeat its mission.

Recently I had to ban two practitioners of this dark art who were tirelessly pushing the progressive narrative that Tucker Carlson had proven himself to be a racist during his late Fox News show. I asked a simple question: What’s an example of this alleged racism? One answered—after calling Carlson racist!—that the word couldn’t be defined; the other said that the conclusion was justified by nothing in particular, just “deductive reasoning.” Baseball analyst Bill James once wrote that when someone says something is true because they just know it is, that’s a bullshit alarm. Those commenters were eventually banned for other misconduct, but flinging bullshit around the place is not going to be tolerated.

In contrast, we have the following Comment of the Day by Jim Hodgson, as he offers actual evidence of how the current values rot in our education system can be countered, and has been, at least in his community. Here it is, in response to the post, “Today’s Kentucky Derby Metaphor: Journalists May Be The Enemies Of Our Democracy, But Teachers Are Coming Up On The Inside Rail….”

***

Although I am helping homeschool my two grandsons, I am still confident that our local (county) school system is substantially “woke free,” for several reasons. One reason is our community values which are overwhelmingly conservative to moderate with only a smattering of loonies from our local (church affiliated) university and a few legacy Democrats. The second reason is aware and involved parents, grandparents and other taxpayers who keep the school board accountable. School board meetings are always packed, even when there is not a hint of controversy in the air. There are also a lot of parent and grandparent volunteers in our schools who keep up with everything that is going on in the classrooms.

Continue reading →

Ethics Observations On Joyce Carol Oates’ Twitter Humiliation

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

 

Oates, a prolific and much-honored writer as well as a college professor,deleted the tweet after merciless mockery. In case you are, like her, unfamiliar with Marvel Comics tropes, the intergalactic supervillain Thanos wields the Infinity Gauntlet,”one of the most powerful objects in the [Marvel] Universe.” It empowers the wearer to do anything and everything imaginable.

Observations:

Continue reading →

Next Up On The Rapidly Expanding List Of Speech Progressives Want To Censor: “Fear Speech”

/ Jack Marshall / 16 Comments

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,

Continue reading →

Signature Significance And The Julie Principle Confront “The Ethicist”

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

Kwame Anthony Appiah, “The Ethicist” of the New York Times Magazine, doesn’t read Ethics Alarms so he isn’t conversant in two core EA concepts: signature significance, the fact that a single example of conduct can be enough to make a definitive judgment about an individual’s unethical nature, and The Julie Principle, which holds that once you recognize an individual’s flaws, you can accept them and continue the relationship, or use them to decide the individual is too flawed to tolerate, but it is pointless to keep complaining about them.A question from a disillusioned wife this week raised both, and “The Ethicist” acquitted himself well without directly acknowledging either.

“Theresa” revealed that her husband had tossed a banana peel out the passenger’s side window while she was driving on a highway. She protested, emphasizing her objection to littering and his setting a bad example for their 13-year-old in the back seat. He rationalized that the banana peel would “biodegrade”,“ and as if that wasn’t lame enough, defaulted to “I’m an adult, so I’ll do as I want.” After the incident, “Theresa” showed him an article about the dangers of throwing garbage on the street, plus a copy of the Massachusetts law declaring his conduct illegal. Her husband responded with, “Don’t you have anything better to do with your time?”

“He refuses to acknowledge that he made a mistake or change his behavior,” “The Ethicist’s” inquirer wrote, adding that the deadlock on the issue is making her question her marriage.

At the outset, I have to agree that the episode might make me question the character of someone I had just met—not merely question it, in fact, but perhaps make a confident diagnosis: this guy is an asshole, and the sequence is signature significance. The only feature of the story that possibly rescues it from being signature significance is that it can be broken down into components:

Continue reading →