Two Open Letters…

/ Jack Marshall / 25 Comments

 

 From the sublime to the absurd…

Yesterday, RealClearPolitics published an open letter from Brown University professor Glenn Loury and the founder of The Woodson Center, Robert Woodson Sr., denouncing the  attacks aimed at Justice Clarence Thomas following the Supreme Court’s Dobbs ruling and Thomas’ provocative concurring opinion. It’s a nicely direct and necessary condemnation:

White progressives do not have the moral authority to excommunicate a black man from his race because they disagree with him. And those – regardless of background – who join in the charade or remain silent are guilty of enabling this abuse.

We, the undersigned, condemn the barrage of racist, vicious, and ugly personal attacks that we are witnessing on Clarence Thomas – a sitting Supreme Court justice. Whether it is calling him a racist slur, an “Uncle Tom” or questioning his “blackness” over his jurisprudence, the disparagement of this man, of his faith and of his character, is abominable.

Regardless of where one stands on Justice Thomas’ personal or legal opinions, he is among the pantheon of black trailblazers throughout American history and is a model of integrity, scholarship, steadfastness, resilience, and commitment to the Constitution of the United States of America.

For three decades Justice Thomas has served as a model for our children. He has long been honored and celebrated by black people in this country and his attackers do not speak for the majority of blacks.He is entirely undeserving of the vitriol directed at him.

Character assassination has become too convenient a tool for eviscerating those who dare dissent from the prevailing agenda, especially when it is a black man who is dissenting.This is not about the content of the court’s decisions or Justice Thomas’ personal views; some of the undersigned agree with his judicial decisions and some do not.

We speak out – as black people and Americans – to condemn these attacks and support Justice Thomas, because to remain silent would be to implicitly endorse these poisonous schemes as well as his destruction.

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The Victoria’s Secret Smoking Gun: The New York Times Doesn’t Just Use Unethical Reporting To Push Its Political Agenda…It Does It To Push A Social Agenda As Well

/ Jack Marshall / 27 Comments

The Times article yesterday was headlined, “Victoria’s Secret and What’s Sexy Now: A rebranding and a new documentary have the lingerie company back in the cultural cross hairs.” The piece emits barely-restrained enthusiasm for VS’s controversial rebranding and implies that the effort, while having to overcome much bias and cultural headwinds, is succeeding….and should. The final words written by NYT fashion maven Vanessa Friedman are these:

[P]erhaps the real takeaway from all of this is that no one person or brand or size or shape gets to say what’s sexy — and that should be seen as a good thing.

That sexy in the end has to do with feeling at ease in your skin, rather than in any single garment. That there are as many definitions of the term as there are people in the world. And that actual empowerment doesn’t come in a bra and panty set. It comes out of it.

Her article begins by saying that when the fantasy female bedroom attire company announced, in a fit of wokeness, that it would “become a champion of female empowerment, replacing its bevy of supermodel angels with the VS Collective, ten women of great accomplishment as well as varying ages and body types — the news was met, generally (and understandably), with raised eyebrows.” Among those virtual eyebrows were those of this blog, which observed at the time in part [Item #3]:

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Comment Of The Day: “The Mark Of A Totalitarian: Michael Moore’s ‘Replacement’ For The Second Amendment”

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

I assumed Michael Moore’s epic idiocy in the form of a “new amendment” would provoke some lively responses. Among the liveliest was this Comment of the Day from one of longest running active commenter (and one of few I’ve had the pleasure to meet face-to-face, Tim LeVier.

Tim makes the timely observation that Moore doesn’t understand what a “right” is in American tradition, and indeed there’s a lot of that going around. Part of the Left’s fury over not only the SCOTUS opinion reaffirming the Second Amendment but its long-overdue erasure of the imaginary “right to abortion.” Numerous ideological scholars are now attacking the Founders and their Constitution as archaic because they didn’t understand the more expansive concept of “rights” favored by progressives. They want recognition of a right to make a living wage, a right to have a home, a right to have enough food, and so on, ad infinitem. That inflated concept of “rights” is the predominant one in socialist and communist societies. They don’t work, you know. Usually the nations gulled into either system fail spectacularly. However, all those “rights” sound great in theory: the problem is that all require an efficient, trustworthy government that won’t abuse the almost limitless power maintaining such a society requires. Isn’t there an old saying about that? I seem to remember one.

The first stirrings of serious socialist aspirations in high places emanated from none other than President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who always had a dangerous measure of dictatorial aspirations in his soul. In his famous Four Freedoms speech, he endorsed loose talk about “Freedom from Fear” and “Freedom from Want” to accompany the basic First Amendment rights of free speech and freedom the worship. “Freedom from Fear” sums up Moore’s insidious “28th Amendment” and “Freedom from Want” is an open invitation to the nanny state., or worse. FDR was pandering when he launched this irresponsible rhetoric, at a time when poverty was rampant, there was an unhealthy and growing popular attachment to Communism, and when he was also rallying support for a war against Nazi Germany. Calling these universal freedoms that all people possess—in other words, rights— was metaphorically playing with dynamite that could blow up democracy.

It still is.

Here is Tim LeVier’s Comment of the Day on the post, “The Mark Of A Totalitarian: Michael Moore’s “Replacement” For The Second Amendment.”

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Too bad he doesn’t understand what a “right” is. You have a right to exist and create safe conditions for yourself, but you do not have a “right” to protection. If we had a “right to protection”, the Uvalde police officers would be on death row at this moment. No. Police a.k.a. the government, is for maintaining the peace if possible, but restoring peace and cleaning up after tragedy is more correct to their mission. Continue reading →

Broadway’s “Funny Girl” Fiasco’s Conflicted Agent

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

You can be forgiven if you haven’t followed the massive Broadway crack-up saga of the “Funny Girl” revival; after all, Broadway is an elite, increasingly culturally irrelevant dinosaur where 80% of those on stage are gay, 90% of those in those in audience can afford hundred dollar tickets, and half of the shows first premiered when Joe Biden was in braces. You can be excused even more if you missed the massive ethics scandal at the crack-up’s core; after all, most theater reporters have no ethics alarms, just like most theater professionals. Still, to quote a character in an ancient Broadway classic that had an significant ethical impact, “Attention must be paid.”

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The Mark Of A Totalitarian: Michael Moore’s “Replacement” For The Second Amendment

/ Jack Marshall / 33 Comments

Michael Moore, the socialist/communist documentary-maker and progressive hero, published an article on substack laying out what he called a “28th Amendment” that he wants to present to the 117th United States Congress. Since it’s not funny, I have to assume that his proposal is serious. It begins,

“The inalienable right of a free people to be kept safe from gun violence and the fear thereof must not be infringed and shall be protected by the Congress and the States. This Amendment thus repeals and replaces the Second Amendment.”

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Wikipedia Ethics, But First A Riddle: “How Is Wikipedia Like American Journalism?”

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

The answer is: Because its information seems accurate in inverse proportion to how much you know about the subject matter already.

A recent example from China: Yifan, a Chinese fantasy novelist, started browsing Chinese Wikipedia for inspiration for a new book. happening upon Russian medieval history, the writer learned about the great Kashin silver mine, originally owned by the Tver, an independent state from the 13th to 15th centuries, and then by the Grand Duchy of Moscow, until it closed down in the 18th century after the silver was all mined out. The Kashin silver mine, the articles revealed, were operated some 30,000 slaves and 10,000 freedmen at its peak. Wars and human drama surrounded its history, and Yifan felt this might be a fertile topic for a novel. After the Kashin information was as exhausted on Chinese Wikipedia as the silver was in the mine’s dying days, he turned to the Russian version of Wikipedia, but he was surprised to see that the Russian Wikipedia. Strangely, most of what he had read about the famous silver mine wasn’t there at all, and this was Russian history.

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Unethical Quote Of The Week: UC Berkeley Law Prof. Khiara Bridges

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

“I’m answering a more interesting question to me”

—-Insufferably arrogant and disrespectful witness Prof. Khiara Bridges, after being told  by Senator John Cornyn (R-Tx) during today’s Senate hearing,regarding the fall of Roe v. Wade via the Dobbs decision, that she hadn’t answered the question he asked.

The question Cornyn asked was, “Do you think that a baby that is not yet born has value?” She answered, “I believe that a person with a capacity for pregnancy has value.”

And there it is. A flat-out, defiant refusal to acknowledge the existence of the other life in the abortion equation. Her response to Cornyn’s protest that she hadn’t asked the question insulted both the Senator and the professor’s supposed area of expertise, the law. No witness in a trial could say that she was answering a question of her own conceit that interested her more than the one she was asked. No witness at a Congressional hearing can ethically do it either. Nor could a law student in class or on an exam. Continue reading →

Apology Ethics: Proxy Apologies Don’t Count

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

The apology, if you missed it, is for the First Lady comparing her Hispanic audience to “breakfast tacos.”

This is pretty basic, and I’m surprised that the First Lady and the White House doesn’t know it: an apology must come from the individual responsible for the words or conduct being apologized for. Isn’t that obvious?

A relay apology by a lackey is itself an insult. It says that the aggrieved parties aren’t deemed sufficiently important for the alleged apologizer to address directly. Jill Biden’s dodge reminded me of the Sid Caesar-inspired character in “My Favorite Year,” who would regularly abuse his staff and then order his secretary to “send the guy something from me…like a new set of tires.”

To call this a perfunctory, cheap apology is being too kind. It’s cowardly, arrogant, and obnoxious, failing all of the goals a sincere apology should strive for.

Morning Ethics Warm-Up, 7/12/2022: Hispandering, Self-Checkout, And Other Adventures…

/ Jack Marshall / 22 Comments

Today is the anniversary of a regrettable ethics precedent: Walter Mondale chose the forgettable and undistinguished Congresswoman Geraldine Ferraro as his running-mate on the 1984 Democratic Presidential ticket to vie against President Reagan in his bid for re-election Literally nothing qualified Ferraro for the position except her lack of a Y chromosome, but that was enough, in the early raisingof the ugly head of “equity, diversity and inclusion,” to justify placing a mediocrity “a heartbeat from the Presidency.” It was historic, you see. Well, at least she was a more responsible choice than Kamala Harris.

I am also reminded (Pointer to JutGory) that on this date in 1979, Major League Baseball had one of its more irresponsible and idiotic episodes. Chicago White Sox executive Mike Veeck, in the spirit of his father Bill Veeck who was best known in baseball lore for sending little person Eddie Gaedel up to the plate in an official game, agreed to schedule “Disco Demolition Night,” in which two Chicago disc jockeys would blow up a pile of disco records on the Comiskey Park field between games of a double header. Fans were urged to bring disco records to add to the pile, but the team never collected the platters as promised. First, members of the 40,000+ crowd began flinging the records like killer Frisbees. Then, after the promised detonation., thousands of the disco-haters rushed onto the field, tearing up the grass, lighting bonfires on the diamond, and generally engaging in what Democrats call “an insurrection.” Efforts to clear the field failed, and the visiting Detroit Tigers were awarded a win over the ChiSox by forfeit.

1. More school ignorance of that First Amendment thingy…The Cherry Creek School District in Denver suspended, then expelled, 15-year-old “C.G.” over a Snapchat post showing him in a Nazi military cap with the caption “Me and the boys bout to exterminate the Jews.” C.G. deleted the post and apologized for it within an hour, but it had already been seen by a classmate and shared with parents, who forwarded it to the Cherry Creek School District, resulting in the discipline. His parents sued. The Snapchat message was sent off campus outside of school hours, did not identify the school or target any student, and was sent on a personal cellphone to a private circle of followers. Nevertheless, federal judge dismissed the case in August 2020, finding the school properly disciplined him. For an obviously facetious social media post. That was none of the school’s business. Appropriately a 10th Circuit panel ruled last week that the suit should go forward after all. “Plaintiff has properly alleged that defendants’ discipline of C.G. for his off-campus speech is a First Amendment violation that cannot be dismissed at this stage,” Senior U.S. Circuit Judge Paul Kelly wrote in a 21-page opinion.

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Ethics Dunces: Kathryn Rubino, And, As Usual, “Above The Law”

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment

What a vile website Above the Law is! The legal gossip cyber-rag, which belched forth the hateful Elie Mystal (who once argued on the site that black jurors should always refuse to vote “guilty” regarding black defendants regardless of the crime or the evidence), covers the progressively rotting legal profession with gusto, and does everything it can to make the profession even more left-biased than it already is. As a recent article by one of Elie’s successors, Kathryn Rubino, shows, a lack of fairness and decency helps the rotting process a lot.

The headline that caught my eye was “On Second Thought, Maybe Federal Judges Shouldn’t Have Hired The Law School Student Famously Accused Of Saying ‘I HATE BLACK PEOPLE’” I was immediately tempted to headline this post, “On Third Thought, Maybe A Site Run By Lawyers Shouldn’t Promote The Concept That Accusations Alone Justify Wrecking A Lawyer’s Career.”

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