Observations On The Great “Libs Of TikTok” Affair And Doxxing Ethics

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

Let me begin by saying I hate this story. I hate it because it is, in part, web nerd inside baseball, and the answer to the retort, “Oh, who cares?” is hard to get out before the person asking has left to organize their sock drawer. Yet I have to write about it, not just because the conservative web is obsessed with it (that, and the fact that the mainstream media is ignoring it, thus branding the ugly mess as a “right wing story”—you know, a fantasy”) but because it explains just a bit more about how genuinely unscrupulous and ruthless the Warriors of Social Justice have become, at least to anyone who doesn’t know that already.

I’ll try to summarize the facts efficiently.

Ethics Alarms had posted a couple of the videos highlighted by the Twitter account Libs of TikTok, but I never focused on the account itself or its purpose, and because Twitter is an unethical platform that eats brains and censors opinions, I don’t hang out there. Ann Althouse is inexplicably fond of TikTok, which is a Chinese-owned social media platform on which members post videos. Now, thanks only to the current mess, I know that Libs of TikTok posts, often without comment, outrageous, crazy, hilarious or funny videos by radical progressives who are apparently unaware that their common sense, ethics alarms, and self-awareness have, in the immortal words of the Ghostbusters, “gone bye-bye.” This exposure holds the posters of these videos, as well as the ideologies that have rotted their brains, up for well-earned ridicule among the rational population. Progressives can’t stand that. The anonymous woman who posts as Libs of TikTok has also been a frequent guest of Tucker Carlson on Fox News, causing all Carlson-haters except critics like me to react to her mission like the hysterical lady from “The Birds”:

And so it was that the Washington Post—Nah, there’s no mainstream media bias!—assigned or allowed its tech reporter, Taylor Lorenz (formerly of the New York Times, which fired her as Ethics Alarms discussed here) to write and have published a furious attack on a humorous, if horrifying, Twitter account by a regular human being, even as you or I, because it regularly held ridiculous progressives up to well-deserved exposure and ridicule. An excerpt:

Libs of TikTok reposts a steady stream of TikTok videos and social media posts, primarily from LGBTQ+ people, often including incendiary framing designed to generate outrage. Videos shared from the account quickly find their way to the most influential names in right-wing media. The account has emerged as a powerful force on the Internet, shaping right-wing media, impacting anti-LGBTQ+ legislation and influencing millions by posting viral videos aimed at inciting outrage among the right.

The anonymous account’s impact is deep and far-reaching. Its content is amplified by high-profile media figures, politicians and right-wing influencers. Its tweets reach millions, with influence spreading far beyond its more than 648,000 Twitter followers. Libs of TikTok has become an agenda-setter in right-wing online discourse, and the content it surfaces shows a direct correlation with the recent push in legislation and rhetoric directly targeting the LGBTQ+ community.

Now, a responsible, ethical editor would stop reading right there and send the proposed article to the shredder. What is doing all of the dastardly things Lorenz is shouting “Fire!” about is not the account, but the deranged people who post the videos highlighted by the account. Libs of TikTok doesn’t call for action, or legislation, or anything but a smile or a slap to the head from those who watch what she found. Her posts seldom, at least the ones I’ve seen, include any commentary at all.

Continue reading →

Morning Ethics Warm-Up: April Really Is The Cruelest Month…

/ Jack Marshall / 17 Comments

What awful ethics stories have happened in April!

Today, for example, we note the anniversary of the massacre at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado, south of Denver, in 1999. At approximately 11:19 a.m., Dylan Klebold, 17, and Eric Harris, 18, dressed in trench coats, began shooting students outside the school before moving inside. Klebold and Harris murdered 12 fellow students and a teacher, while wounding 23 more. Then they killed themselves. The tragedy opened the chapter of school shootings for the nation and the culture, inspiring other maniacs, began the devolution of high schools into fortresses, and galvanized anti-Second Amendment activism. As is now routine, the news media distorted the tale to its own needs. For example, it was initially reported that one female student was asked by one of the shooter if she believed in God. When she said, “Yes,” she was shot to death. It was an inspiring human interest tale that led her parents to author a Christianity-centered book titled “She Said Yes,” while Klebold and Harris were pigeon-holed as anti-Christian bigots. We now know the question asked of another student who had already been shot. When that victim answered “Yes,” the shooter walked away. Nah, makes the killers seem less evil. “Print the legend.”

1. More “Mikado” political correctness desecration (and another reason to boycott my reunion). The Harvard Gilbert and Sullivan Players (which I and four other students saved from collapsing in 1971), rewrote the script of G&S’s greatest operetta, they claimed, “to avoid featuring Japanese stereotypes and racist interpretations.” The new plot is about, I kid you not, goat-herding in a future Chinese-dominated London. As a director, I applaud and encourage creative efforts to re-interpret classics, but to presume to improve upon Gilbert by a wholesale re-write is the height of hubris.

I would also expect an organization that has interpreted the works of the brilliant Victorian team since the 1920s to be able to explain to the knee-jerk cultural revolutionaries that there is nothing “racist” about “The Mikado,” which is a still funny satire on Victorian British society, set in a typical Gilbertian fantasy-land where characters behave absurdly, but oddly logically.

I would expect that, but I would be tragically wrong. [Pointer: Steve-O-in NJ]

2. Mask ethics update!

  • By now you know that a federal judge struck down the CDC’s transportation mask mandate, for the rather obvious reason that it didn’t have the power or authority to inflict it without going through the proper steps, which it did not. It doesn’t matter whether the rule is wise or not: lawmaking and rulemaking still have to follow due process. The Left no longer believes that, as we have seen repeatedly in recent years, notably in the 2020 Democratic Presidential Candidates debate, when Joe Biden was chided (by Kamala Harris among others) for rejecting a policy that he viewed as illegal.
  • Here is the New York Times headline this morning: “Masks Ditched To Jeers, Fears And Confusion.” That’s deliberate obfuscation: the most reported reaction on board planes to the announcement of the mask requirement’s demise was cheers. (The Times resorted to a fairer headline on its website.)
  • A telling snippet from the article: “Brooke Tansley, who was flying with two children too young to be vaccinated, said she felt scared as the passengers around her slipped off their masks. “All I could do was hope it’s going to be OK,” she said.” This is what two years of media fearmongering, political hyperbole and CDC incompetence has done to gullible and vulnerable Americans, and it will take longer to recover from this than the pandemic.
  • Broadway, meanwhile, is still making its audiences mask up to watch unmasked performers (except in “Phantom of the Opera,” of course). Anyone who would pay 100 bucks or more for a ticket to sit in discomfort, glasses fogging up, in unregulated cloth masks that are mostly useless is….well, I guess he or she is a rich progressive, which is who Broadway caters to. This edict is, I assert, more political than health-related.

Live theater is on the endangered species of entertainment list, and professional theater is in denial.

  • This relates to the previous post about the intellectual limitations of journalists…here is Slate journalist Mark Stern’s brilliant analysis:

Experts! You know, those health officials who said, in dizzying combinations, “masks not needed,” “wear masks,” “no masks if vaccinated,” “Masks don’t really do much good,” and “Never mind masks if you’re rioting for social justice, but better wear them at weddings.” Judges, meanwhile exist, and are trained, and are by definition experts in what is legal and what is not, no matter who appointed them, or how old they are. Continue reading →

Now THAT’S An Incompetent Journalist!

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

I have several large, complicated ethics issues to write about (like the LibsofTikTok fiasco) and I’m not looking forward to it, so I’m starting this morning with an easy call that confirms many of my deeply held convictions.

One is that journalists, as a group, just aren’t that sharp. There are exceptions, but they are exceptions: this is a field that has never attracted the best and the brightest, and it is a structural problem that has become a major problem in the age of the “new journalism,” which is advocacy journalism, as in unethical journalism. The people with the largest metaphorical megaphone lack the wisdom, acumen, education of critical thinking skills to justify their having it. Yet they really think they know best, and have the right and the duty to use a job that was supposed to be about informing the public to manipulate public opinion for what journalists think is “the greater good.” They don’t know what the greater good is. Most don’t know what “good” is.

Chris Cillizza isn’t just any journalist: he’s supposed to be one of the better ones. Horrible thought: he probably is. He’s an editor at CNN, and before that he wrote the daily political blog of The Washington Post, and was a regular writer for the Post on political issues as well as a frequent panelist on “Meet the Press.” He also has a long rap sheet on Ethics Alarms, despite the fact that I avoid following his regular forays into fake news, propaganda, and biased punditry. Who knows what I’ve missed. Continue reading →

Two From The Ethics Alarms “I Don’t Understand This At All” Files…Part II: The Bad Cop Catch-22

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

In 1995, Darryl Howard [above] was wrongfully convicted of murder and imprisoned for more than two decades, one of many egregious miscarriages of justice during that period in Durham, North Carolina. Mike NiFong, the infamous prosecutor who pursued the Duke Lacrosse case, prosecuted him, and a Durham detective named Darrell Dowdy fabricated evidence while doing a negligent investigation. The Innocence Project helped free Howard; in 2016, the convictions were vacated and the DA who succeeded NiFong dismissed the charges. In April 2021, Gov. Roy Cooper officially pardoned Howard, who sued the city and Dowdy, and in December, a federal jury found former Detective  Dowdy had indeed framed him. A jury awarded Howard $6 million.

Durham, however, is refusing to pay and wants Howard to pay the legal fees of of two city employees who were eventually dismissed from the suit.

“I proved my innocence. I went through every court. Every judge says what this was, even the governor,” Howard told the Raleigh News & Observer. “Now I have to fight again.” Durham’s employees robbed Howard of the prime years of his life, but the city has tried every legal tactic to avoid addressing the injustice it was responsible for inflicting on him. One of its arguments is that since Howard had a record of various crimes and convictions before he was wrongly sent to prison for murder, it shouldn’t have to compensate him as if he were a model citizen.

Head explosion time. That’s one of the most unethical and illogical arguments I’ve ever heard a government make. Continue reading →

Incompetent Elected Official Of The Month AND Unethical Tweet Of The Week: Mass. State Rep. Lindsay Sabadosa (D-1st Hampshire District)

/ Jack Marshall / 18 Comments

  • Do we really have more elected officials at the local, state and national levels who are spectacularly ignorant of basic civics and the U.S. Constitution, or does it just seem that way?
  • How typical is this idiot/totalitarian of Democrats generally?
  • How can anyone trust, never mind vote for, someone who thinks she won’t be pilloried for stating that government power should not be constrained by laws?
  • Incompetent elected officials like this are far, far more dangerous than Joy Behar, who thinks the Supreme Court passes bills. All Joy does is talk on TV. Sabadosa is in a position where her ignorance and fondness for government dictatorship can do real damage.

Morning Ethics Warm-Up, April 19, 2022: “A Good Day To Die” [With Easter Bunny Update!]

/ Jack Marshall / 36 Comments

The 19th of April is a violent ethics day in history.

—In 1775, on this date, the evening before had seen Paul Revere’s ride, and a few hours later, right about at dawn, 700 British troops marched through my home town of Arlington, Mass., then known as Menotomy, into Lexington. 77 armed minutemen under Captain John Parker waited for them on the town’s common green. Shots were exchanged, and when the Battle of Lexington ended a few minutes later, eight Americans were dead or dying and 10 others were wounded. No British soldier was killed and just one was injured, but the battle launched the Revolutionary War, for which most of us, and most of the world, are or ought to be grateful.

—In 1943 on April 19, the courageous but doomed Warsaw Ghetto Uprising began when Nazi forces attempting to clear out the Polish city’s Jewish ghetto were met by gunfire from Jewish resistance fighters. The surprised Germans withdrew but soon returned, and on April 24 launched an all-out attack against the Warsaw Jews, slaughtering thousands. The Nazi army progressed down the ghettos, blowing up buildings as they went. The resistance took to the sewers to continue the fight, but their command bunker fell to the Germans on May 8, and its leaders committed suicide. During the uprising, some 300 German soldiers were killed, and thousands of Warsaw Jews were massacred.

—In Waco, Texas on April 19, 1993, the Federal Bureau of Investigation launched a tear-gas assault on the home of the Branch Davidians, an armed religious cult, after a 51-day standoff. The compound was burned to the ground, with 80 Branch Davidians, including 22 children, dying as a result.

—April 19, 1995 saw the beginning of mass domestic terrorism here, as a massive truck bomb exploded outside the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. The blast instantly killed more than 100 people and trapped dozens more in the rubble. When the rescue effort finally ended two weeks later, the death toll stood at 168 people killed, including 19 children who were in the building’s day-care center at the time of the blast.

Liberal pundits and Democrats blamed Rush Limbaugh, among others, who had been vocally condemning the government since the election of Bill Clinton.

1. When did Derek Chauvin get appointed to the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals? In this case, the 5th Circuit ruled that an officer who deliberately caused pain to a woman because she was being “uncooperative” was in the clear. She had been arrested and was in custody, but refused to respond to the officer’s questions about her name and age. In response, the officer raised her handcuffed arms behind her back, causing, the woman said, “[e]xcruciating pain.” This was captured on the officer’s camera, and wasn’t disputed. The woman sued for violations of her Fourth Amendment rights. In ruling on an appeal, The Fifth Circuit held that such conduct by the officer—deliberately inflicting pain on a subject in custody to force compliance—was acceptable:

Nor did Martin violate Hymond’s Fourth Amendment rights. Hymond was shouting at Martin throughout the entire confrontation. She did not comply with any of Martin’s commands or instructions. Only after Hymond refused to provide Martin with her name did Martin employ any force against her. Martin’s use of force—lifting Hymond’s handcuffed arms behind her back—was relatively minimal. Hymond continued to verbally deride Martin while Martin was lifting her arms and immediately after he put her arms down. Given Hymond’s continued resistance, Martin’s use of force against Hymond was not objectively unreasonable.

The opinion literally excuses a police officer’s inflicting pain on a subject in handcuffs in response to verbal abuse and a lack of cooperation.

2. Watch: she’ll probably be elected, too. Here you can read former sex-worker and stripper Alexandra Hunt’s argument for being elected to Congress. It nicely ticks off all the boxes necessary for progressive love. I think this paragraph’s my favorite:

One does not need to boast a law degree to see how criminalization has become about a person’s identity rather than any grievance they may have committed. The prison-industrial complex has come to serve the purity model of white supremacy and places individuals into egregious living conditions if their identity deviates from white supremacy in anyway ― their race, their sexuality, their gender identity, their economic status, their nationality, or their occupation.

In fact, not having a law degree assists reaching that asinine and counter-factual conclusion. (So does hitting yourself in the head repeatedly with a frozen leg of lamb.) Elsewhere, explaining her abortion when she was 18, Hunt engages in one of my all-time most reviled rationalizations for abortion:

“I as a person was not ready to bring a child into this world, but also the world was not in a state — and is not, 10 years later, is not in a state — that I wanted to bring a child into yet, which is my decision to make. My generation faces a lack of jobs, a lack of living wage, a housing crisis, an affordable housing crisis, a student debt crisis, the climate emergency, the prison-industrial complex, and the list goes on and on. And I wanted to offer my child better.”

Actually, Alexandra, you wanted to offer your next child better. The first one you decided was better off being rubbed out of existence than getting a chance to live in the less-than-perfect world you seem to be enjoying. I’m pretty certain all potential human beings, asked whether they would prefer an imperfect life than none at all, would like their shot.

3. And now for something completely stupid…This nicely illustrates the quality of American punditry. Matt Yglesias has been a long-time progressive pundit for Slate and Vox among other platforms. He tweeted this brilliant revelation yesterday:

Continue reading →

Ethics Verdict: Non-Math Propaganda Does Not Belong In Math Textbooks

/ Jack Marshall / 31 Comments

The New York Times reports that Florida has rejected 42 of 132 math textbooks proposed for use in public school classrooms because they “incorporate prohibited topics or unsolicited strategies” including social-emotional learning and critical race theory, according to the state’s Department of Education.

Good.

The tone of the Times article is framed to advance the “Wow, look at what radical conservative hate-mongering Neanderthals they have running the asylum in Florida, with that racist, transphobic Ron DeSantis as governor!” narrative. But this is only a partisan issue because one party’s core ideology, the Democratic Party, has, in “Happy Days” parlance, “jumped the shark,” or in my parlance, is in the process of sliding toward totalitarianism.

Here’s reporter Dana Goldstein’s second paragraph:

But Florida has a new law, which goes into effect in July, limiting the way that sexual orientation, gender identity and social-emotional skills are taught. Gov. Ron DeSantis is also expected to sign legislation, known as the “Stop W.O.K.E. Act,” prohibiting instruction that could prompt students to feel discomfort about a historical event because of their race, sex or national origin.

What does that have to do with a Department of Education deciding that mathematics textbooks should be entirely–not substantially, not mostly, but entirely, about mathematics? It doesn’t matter, or shouldn’t, what distractions, pet agendas, tangential advocacy or ideological indoctrination is in a math textbook. It doesn’t belong there. Standing for that rather simple and, I would think, obvious principle is not a partisan position, unless one party is interested, indeed invested, indeed determined to advance in something other than education. That something is indoctrination, and indoctrination of the young is essential for totalitarianism to grab a nation, culture, society and people by the throat. Continue reading →

Two From The Ethics Alarms “I Don’t Understand This At All” Files…Part I: The Birthday Party Freakout

/ Jack Marshall / 20 Comments

[Part 2 is here…]

Kevin Berling had been working at a medical laboratory, Gravity Diagnostics in Covington, Kentucky for about 10 months when he asked the office manager not to throw him a birthday party because he had a social anxiety disorder. He was freaked out because he had learned that his co-workers had planned a little lunchtime celebration with a cake and gag gifts in the break room. When the party went on as planned, Berling decided to hide in his car and have lunch there.

The next day, Kevin had what he called a panic attack during a meeting with two superiors, who expressed concerns about his behavior. His demeanor, they said later, frightened the supervisors, who sent him home and followed the company’s “workplace violence policy,” de-escalating the situation, removing his access to his office, and sending out security reminders to ensure he could not re-enter the building. Three days later he was fired on the stated grounds that Berling posed a threat to his co-workers’ safety.

 Berling sued the company for disability discrimination and won, with the  concluding that he had been discriminated against because of “a disability.” He was awarded $150,000 in lost wages and benefits and $300,000 for suffering, embarrassment and loss of self-esteem. Continue reading →

This Week’s Ethics Alarms Monday Retrospective: The Best Of 4/11-4/17

/ Jack Marshall / Leave a comment

I liked a lot of last week’s Ethics Alarms posts.

Here are five highlights that you might want to check out if you missed them…

From 4/11: And especially relevant today, as they are now running the Boston Marathon as I type this.

From 4/13: It’s getting to the point that I can barely believe the things I read coming out of the Northwest

From 4/13: In which the woman who not only was responsible for the Black Lives Matter fundraising arm but who also illicitly spent donors’ money says that requiring charities to be transparent and accountable is racist.

From 4/15: It doesn’t matter if you don’t care about baseball. Everyone should care about Jackie Robinson.

From 4/17: Opening the door to a series of ethics issues more nuanced than “Don’t Say Gay!” vs. “OK, Groomer!”

From The Ethics Alarms “How Stupid Do Democrats Think The Public is?” Files: Inflation Denial Games

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

This will be an interesting test of the gullibility and brain mass of the American public. Faced with epic inflation greatly worsened by the Democrat’s wild spending sprees, incompetent handling of supply chain disruptions, and virtue-signaling suppression of oil production that cannot possibly have any ameliorating effects on global climate change whatsoever, the Donkey High Command has apparently decided on a carpet-bombing “Jumbo” strategy: “Inflation? What inflation?”

We have discussed already the “Putin price hike” mantra Jen Psaki keeps repeating. Last week, I saw a White House release admitting the inflation explosion but noting that if you took out food and gas prices, the rate of inflation increase had declined thanks to deft Biden policies. This, of course, brought back memories of former D.C. Mayor Marion Barry’s immortal statement that if you didn’t include all the murders, D.C. crime rate was actually pretty good! Nancy Pelosi, Psaki and Biden have all distorted the meaning of a letter from a group of acclaimed economists endorsing the trillion dollar infrastructure bill to falsely claim that they said spending all that money would reduce inflation, so, SEE? It’s can’t be Biden’s fault! (The letter actually said, correctly, that repairing and upgrading the infrastructure would make commerce more efficient and less costly in the long-term. As the Washington Post confirmed, they were not making any statement about current inflation.)

Last week we learned that the Biden new military budget assumes only 2% inflation, meaning that its numbers are fictional.

Continue reading →