The Chicago Police Department is establishing a new policy prohibiting its officers from chasing runaway suspects…not in cars, but on foot—you know, like NYPD Danny Reagan does just about every episode of “Blue Bloods.” Now suspects can run away from police, and the cops just have to stand there. Or as blogger Ed Driscoll deftly put it, now the police will have to say, “Stop! Or I’ll…have to tell you to stop again!
The policy also encourages cops to “consider alternatives” to pursuing someone who “is visibly armed with a firearm.” Yelling mean names sometimes works, I hear. Officers may give chase if they believe a person is committing or is about to commit a felony, a Class A misdemeanor like domestic battery, or a serious traffic offense that could risk injuring others, such as drunken driving or street racing. However, chasing a suspect because he or she runs away and appears to have a reason for doing so is out.
Let this be a lesson to me: even what seems to be an obvious case of someone applying emotion, bias and ignorance when informed consideration is called for should not be dismissed out of hand without, well, informed consideration.
This Comment of the Day by Sarah B. was a consensus smash hit with Ethics Alarms commentariat, because she is experienced and knowledgeable on the topic, and educated us all.
I was an engineer at a refinery. Now as a woman, my boss’s boss thought that I was incompetent (and was known to say that women should be in a home making her man happy instead of in an engineering department) and spent an inordinate amount of time trying to teach me mostly stuff I already knew. However, one day, his lecture was on the financials of the refining world and it rocked my whole world view. I’ll share it to emphasize the stupidity of this man and his protest.
I hate to call comic Dave Chappelle a weenie and a political correctness panderer, so instead I’ll settle for Ethics Dunce. He badly miscalculated here.
Duke Ellington School of the Arts in Washington D.C. had planned to rename its performance theater —I once co-wrote directed a show there!—after alumnus Dave Chappelle for his “ongoing commitment and service to the school.” Chappell, fresh off of his controversial Netflix concert that was attacked for its jokes about transsexual activism, appeared at the school in November and faced a barrage of criticism from predictably oriented students. He challenged opponents of his work and his advocates to compete to raise the most money for Duke Ellington, promising to abide by the winning group’s wishes regarding the performing space’s new name.
Well, his fans out-raised the pro-trans mob, but nonetheless, at the dedication of the newly-named theater this week, Chappelle announced that he would refuse the honor, and declared that the theater would be henceforward called “the Theater for Artistic Freedom and Expression.”
1. It’s a joke!!! That tweet is just the tip of the moronic iceberg for Republican Senate candidate in Missouri Eric Greitens. In a new fundraising video for his U.S. Senate campaign released this week, Greitens, a former Missouri governor who resigned before he could be impeached on multiple grounds including sexual assault, holds a pump-action shotgun and introduces himself as a Navy SEAL. (He is not a Seal: he resigned shortly before announcing his Senate run this year.) The video then shows him with a group of men in tactical gear hunting “RINOs”—Republicans who are not conservative enough for his tastes. He says, “Join the MAGA crew! Get a RINO hunting permit. There’s no bagging limit, no tagging limit, and it doesn’t expire until we save our country!”
And Sarah Palin was once accused of inciting murder by having little gun-sights on a campaign map!
Predictably, the irresponsible ad is being used by the mainstream news media and Democrats to characterize all conservatives and Republicans while hyping more anti-gun hysteria. Here’s CNN:
Some of history’s leading fascist movements used the strategy of armed volunteer militias intimidating, threatening and attacking political opponents. And the implications of Greitens’ ad are stunning: Line up behind the most extreme right-wing policies — and implicitly behind former President Donald Trump — or be hunted down by armed, jackbooted thugs.
Right. The implications of Greitens’ ad are that he’s a liar and an asshole, and that he is only slightly more fit to serve in the Senate than Herschel Walker, who defines the bottom of the bottom of the barrel… but presumably Missouri voters know that already. The ad and Greitens himself are metaphorical albatrosses around the GOP’s neck, but the party hung them there. He has been endorsed by several GOP luminaries, though so far, not by Trump.
2. Poll check: President Biden’s latest Civiqs approval rating hit 32%, with 56% disapproving of Joe. Again I ask: Who are those 32% that approve of Biden? What is it they approve of? What democracy can function if fully a third of the electorate have the IQs of flatworms and are happy to see the country rot?
I can’t assign this to The Great Stupid files, but it’s still astoundingly stupid.
Ren Gladu, owner of Ren’s Mobile Gas Station in the college town of Amherst, Massachusetts (Hampshire College, Amherst and UMass are nearby), announced that he will stop selling gas to protest high gas prices.
“I don’t want to be part of it anymore,” Ren Gladu, owner of Ren’s Mobile, told the Daily Hampshire Gazette. “This is the biggest ripoff that ever has happened to people in my lifetime.”
Gradu decided he would not charge customers any higher than $4.75 earlier this month, and when ExxonMobil increased the price per gallon by 20 cents for two consecutive days, Gradu put up signs that read “Out of Gas.”
“Dealing with Mobil, they don’t think through their pricing policies anymore,” Gradu stated. “I’ve served their product, but I refuse to do it anymore, because they’re only getting richer.”
Mobil hasn’t thought through its pricing policies? Won’t one of those well-educated college students drop by and explain supply and demand to this poor guy? They might also try to explain that he needs to stop listening to people like Joe Biden, Bernie Sanders and Rep. Ocasio-Cortez as they try to spin their party out of its self-inflicted inflation disaster.
The CVS on Quaker Lane in Alexandria, scene of many ethics adventures…
I am still at war with CVS, which has so far ducked all of my efforts to seek an appropriate response for our local branch’s unethical treatment of a 30-year regular customer (me) last year. I still haven’t gotten around to moving all of my drug prescriptions to Walgreen’s, Harris Teeter or Safeway, however, so yesterday I was once again involved in a long, complicated mess regarding the filling of one of my more crucial pharmaceutical needs. (My CVS doesn’t do well with its pharmacy service either, especially since it used the Wuhan freakout to justify cutting staff down below a minimum level.)
Luckily, I was dealing with my favorite member of the current staff, a smart, young African-American assistant pharmacist with superb interpersonal skills. In the course of our discussion, I mentioned that most of the stores were closed (this is Northern Virginia) since the state was one of those making the Monday after Juneteenth’s arrival on a Sunday a holiday.
Father’s Day naturally got me thinking about Jack Marshall, Sr., and it was he who explained The Julie Principle to me. The context was one of his best friends from childhood, an obvious sociopath. It puzzled me that my father, who was literally dedicated to all of the virtues in the Boy Scout Creed and whom I witnessed placing his values over his self-interest repeatedly throughout his life, would remain friends 60 years with someone who so clearly was the opposite of my father, a deceptive, self-centered, even cruel individual who never showed any hint of remorse or contrition.
As I have related here more than once, Dad, tone-deaf as always, responded to my puzzlement by singing the opening lines from the famous “Show Boat” ballad, “Can’t Help Lovin’ That Man of Mine,”sung by the tragic mulatto, Julie : “Fish gotta swim, birds gotta fly.” He then explained, “I decided long ago that it was a waste of time and emotion to keep complaining or criticizing someone for conduct they will never change. You have too choices: either accept that a person will do what he does, like a bird or a fish, or decide that you can’t stand the way he or she is and cut them out of your life. But to keep getting angry or upset when someone simply acts as you know they will is pointless.”
I wrote the first post here designating my father’s philosophy as the Jule Principle in 2013. Looking back, I officially applied the JP to the late Washington, D.C. Mayor Marion Barry, and Donald Trump (both before and after his election), writing shortly after his surprise victory,
Donald Trump, more than any national figure in my lifetime, requires a careful, measured application of The Julie Principle to serve everyone’s best interest. Screaming “TRUMP IS TRUMP! ARRGHHHHH!” for four years will do no good at all. Find a way to co-exist with him so his negative proclivities do as little damage as possible and his positive ones have a chance to thrive, and save the explosions of indignation for substantive matters where opposition is essential.
Note that nobody heeded my advice, but I was right. But I digress: Joe Biden got Julied here both before and after his election, also “The View,” Hillary Clinton, and most recently, poor, addled Larry Tribe. Looking back, there are many other individuals who have earned Julie’s pass, and I’ll take nominations. I also see that following the lesson of Julie is hard. I have frequently forgotten the fishiness of several Julie designees.
The subject of this Ethics Quiz, however, is Kamala Harris. I gave her a sort of half-Julie Principle nod regarding her general sliminess and lack of integrity, writing,
If, as many seem to assume, Harris is making stuff up to pander to the crowd, why fixate on this episode? We all know, or should, that the woman is shallow, has no core, and that saying whatever she thinks will endear herself to the most people at the moment is her defining characteristic. As Julie sang, “Fish gotta swim, birds gotta fly”: Kamala’s gotta make stuff up to pretend she’s something she’s not for the gullible, the naive, the hopeful and the blind.
That, however, evoked Julie in the context of Harris’s deplorable ethics, and before she took office as the woman a “heartbeat from the Presidency.” Over the 18 months since then, we have also learned that Harris is a babbling, incoherent fool, and I have frequently expressed horror at such gibberish coming from someone who was chosen by Biden to fill her critical role in the Administration.
She did it again today: speaking to a group of about two dozen elementary school-aged children at the National Museum of African American History & Culture in Washington, Harris said,
“I think that we all know today is a day to celebrate the principle of freedom. And think about it in terms of the context of history, knowing that black people in America were not free for 400 years of slavery. Let this be a day that is a day to celebrate the principle of freedom, but to speak about it honestly and accurately, both in the context of history and current application. With the Emancipation Proclamation and Civil War, it required America to really ask itself, who is free? How do we define freedom? Freedom in terms of the autonomy one should have? Is freedom given to us or are we born with freedom? Right? I would argue it is our God-given right to have freedom. It is your birthright to have freedom. And then during slavery, freedom was taken. And so we’re not going to celebrate being given back what God gave us anyway, right? We should think about it also in terms of current application, asking is everyone we know free? Do we know anyone who is not free? Around the world do all people have freedom? Are there those who are without freedom? When we talk about freedom, are we talking about freedom from — or are we talking about the freedom to?”
What the hell?
Your Ethics Alarms Ethics Quiz of the Day:
Does Harris deserve a Julie Principle pass for her evident inability to think and speak in addition to one for her appalling lack of integrity?
Now do cycling, weightlifting, wrestling and running.
The world governing body for swimming voted to bar transgender women from the highest levels of women’s international competition, bringing expertise, authority and common sense to a debate that had been distorted by the Mad Left’s inexplicable commitment to radical transexual ideology.
FINA administers international competitions in water sports, and now definitively prohibits transgender women from competing unless they began medical treatments to suppress production of testosterone before going through one of the early stages of puberty, or by age 12, whichever occurred later. This is now one of the strictest rules against transgender participation in international sports, and with any luck and some courage elsewhere, it will have the necessary effect on other sports as well. Going through male puberty gives transgender women a massive physical advantage over most athletes born female, as the pool exploits of University of Pennsylvania’s unethical swimming champion Lia Thomas made obvious. Continue reading →
To my shock and amazement, my 27 year old son appeared yesterday to wish me a happy Father’s Day. He gave me a big hug, and like his father and his father before him, he is not a hugger. It meant a lot more to me than any damn tie…
1. “Evil” is back streaming for a third season, and return of the odd and creepy drama created by Robert and Michelle King of “The Good Wife” fame reminded me of an unethical ploy by the series’ protagonist in its first season that I neglected to note in 2019. Katja Herbers as Dr. Kristen Bouchard was convinced that her professional rival, Dr. Leland Townsend (gradually revealed over the path of the series to be an agent of evil), had a vendetta against her and a young man facing incarceration. She surreptitiously taped a conversation with him in which he made damning statements, but for some reason only her side of the exchange registered on the recording device. To have his testimony in a hearing discredited, she asked a tech whiz associate to “deep fake” Townsend’s missing answers on the tape based on her (truthful and accurate, of course) memory of them. Then she played the altered tape for the judge.
Her rationalization afterwards was that the faked recording was a small wrong, but that without it a young man’s life would be destroyed and the evil plan of her rival would succeed. Since it’s quite possible that Townsend is the Devil himself or at least some denizen of Hell, the incident literally contradicted my favorite exchange from “A Man For All Seasons”…
It also illustrates the seductiveness of extreme utilitarianism.
2. The weekend debut of the latest installment of Pixar-Disney’s “Toy Story” franchise, which I wrote about here, bombed, with about half the box office that its predecessors had in their first outings. As with the all-female “Ghostbusters” reboot, the culture wars divide is offering contrasting reasons for the flop that support their respective narratives. Conservative writers argue that parents don’t want to take their kids to see animated films that promote gay relationships, and that Disney’s ham-handed woke politics has over-reached, alienating a substantial portion of the public. The other end of the spectrum blames conservatives for poisoning the market for the film by over-emphasizing “the Kiss.” Me? I felt my ideological arm being twisted uncomfortably hard in “Toy Story 4,” as each of the original’s sequels were more and more aimed at progressive messaging.
Disney has a problem. It successfully rose to domination in part because its products appealed to mainstream American values and aspirations, and was viewed as bolstering and supporting them. Recently, it has been betting, like many corporations, most of the media and of course the Democratic Party, that the Great Progressive Borg will assimilate all, and that resistance is futile. It has to pick sides, because cultural power has always been Disney’s engine. However, Walt had an uncanny understanding of the American zeitgeist. I don’t think his current successors do.
3. And speaking of Disney’s quarrel over Florida declaring that gay and trans teachers should keep their sexual histories, practices and activism out of the classroom, here’s a fun story. Alden Bunag, who described himself as “socialist high school teacher” in Hawaii, had a Twitter rant in which he accused conservatives who agreed with the recent prohibitions in Florida and elsewhere of “projecting.” “You’re fucking acting like we want to show kids porn or something, but something I’ve learned through the years is that whenever right-wingers accuse others of something, it’s DEFINITELY because they’re projecting”, he wrote…and then was arrested and charged with sending child porn pictures and video to another teacher and having sex with a 13-year-old student.
4. Oh no! Not “the p-word”! Ivanka’s chief of staff, Julie Radford, told the January 6 Star Chamber that President Trump referred to Vice President Pence using the “p-word.” What the hell is the “p-word?” Or maybe I should say “What the f-word is the p-word?” I actually thought they were talking about “pansy” until CNN’s Jake Tapper, to his great and glorious credit, said the word they were taking about: “pussy.” Ah! Of course!
“Pussy,” you know, doesn’t have to be “the p-word” if the ones using it are members of the feminist Pussy Squad wearing their pussy hats, but when Donald Trump uses the word (allegedly) not to refer to the female anatomy at all but to mean “weenie,” then it has to be referred to as the “p-word.”
There was a character on “The Sopranos” called “Big Pussy.” Did newspaper critics call him “Big P-word”? I don’t recall.
In its horror of “hate speech,” the emerging crazy Left will have us using so much coded speech that communication itself will be impossible, which is the idea. Lizzo recently released a single called “GRRRLS” with the Yeats-like lyrics,
“Hold my bag, bitch. Hold my bag/ Do you see this shit?/ I’m a spaz/ I’m about to knock somebody out/ Yo, where my best friend?/ She the only one I know to talk me off the deep end.”
A single angry tweeter, disability activist, Hannah Diviney, declared that Lizzo’s use of the word “spaz” was offensive and an ableist slur. Lizzo then immediately removed the word from the song. (Must…Obey.. the Mob…) In her case as well, the word (which many news accounts communicated as “s—“) wasn’t used to mean what the complainer was referencing, but never mind. So is “spaz” now the “s-word”? I thought the s-word was “shit,” which is in the same song. Guess not. Does that also mean that “bitch” isn’t the “b-word” any more? What is?
We need a glossary of all the words that the Left wants us to never say, unless we have their permission.
Bad, bad Ann. I’m very disappointed and surprised. In a post this morning, the usually reliable if eccentric law professor bloggress highlighted the anti-“pit bull” propaganda of DogsBite.org, an Ethics Alarms Unethical Website of the Month, and a vile purveyor of bad information that shares responsibility for the destructive “dangerous breed” laws around the country, discriminatory home-owners insurance rates, and the deaths of thousands and upon thousands of innocent, loving dogs.
Like the execrable website and the incompetent Times article it highlights, Althouse never clarifies the critical fact that there is no such breed as “a pit bull.” American Pit Bull Terriers, American Staffordshire Terriers, Staffordshire Bull Terrier, and any mixture thereof, plus a number of breeds like American Bullys, Corso Canes, Doggo de Argentino, and especially American Bull Dogs are all lumped together as “pit bulls” by ignorant reporters and police, and even veterinarians, making the website’s assertion that a disproportionate number of dog attacks come from that “breed” a statistical whopper. Yet Althouse, whose husband once had a blog dedicated to dog photos and who is a dog-lover herself, just goes along with the deception, and worse for a lawyer, never points out the “evidence” is absurdly flawed. If you combine many breeds into a single “breed,” of course that “breed” will have a disproportionate share of whatever dog incident one is counting.
Ethics Alarms 