The above political cartoon is from Alas! A Blog, where Ethics Alarms exile Barry Deutsch reigns. Barry was formerly a stand-out advocate for the Left on Ethics Alarms until he self-banished for reasons not relevant here. He’s a smart, ethics-savvy, informed, articulate and passionate straight down-the-agenda progressive; he’s also a political cartoonist by trade, an art form I believe has passed its pull date, and that now mostly serves as a device to make dishonest or simplistic arguments for knee-jerk partisans, kind of a visual Charles M. Blow column. I check in on Barry’s blog periodically, and when I did yesterday I was greeted by the above cartoon, drawn by Barry and written by his occasional collaborator Rachel Moore.
It surprised me, not because of its routine anti-Second Amendment message, for as I said, Barry’s progressivism checks every box. It surprised me because I find it astounding that anyone as informed as Barry would pick this, of all times, to unveil that cartoon.
Two days ago, the New York Times reported that the Ukranians were fending off the Russians in part because of armed civilians:
Here, as elsewhere in the fighting around Kyiv, the Ukrainian military achieved its battlefield success by deploying small, fast-moving units largely on foot that staged ambushes or defended sites with the benefit of local knowledge. Many such units are based in central Kyiv, commuting to the war zone by car.
This is not a perfect analogy to the situation that would arise should the United States government decide to “wipe out freedom,” but it certainly ought to be food for thought for those gun-hating zealots who ridicule the very idea that self-defense and the ability to present armed resistance to government tyranny are basic liberties worth protecting in the U.S. Continuing to make the most crude and insulting version of that argument at this time appears to expose an ideological position that is no longer susceptible to modification or reason.
If you like political cartoons, Barry is certainly a talented one , and you can support his art on Patreon.
The NFL’s near-complete dearth of ethics alarms is approaching comedic levels, if such a thing could be funny. This week the league that makes billions by paying young men to get a brain disease commanded all 32 NFL teams to hire a minority offensive assistant coach for the 2022 season, as, you’ve got it, another phase of the league’s “diversity” efforts.
The coach can be “a female or a member of an ethnic or racial minority,” according to the policy adopted by NFL owners during their annual meeting, and will be paid from a league-wide fund. That’s because they will all be tokens, you see, hired for PR purposes and to avoid lawsuits, so they really aren’t team hires. The new minority coaches “must work closely with the head coach and the offensive staff, with the goal of increasing minority participation in the pool of offensive coaches” that eventually produces the most sought-after candidates for head-coaching positions. In other words, they must receive remedial training because they would not have been hired based on their experience or demonstrated skills.
“It’s a recognition that at the moment, when you look at stepping stones for a head coach, they are the coordinator positions,” said Pittsburgh Steelers owner Art Rooney II, the chairman of the NFL Diversity, Equity and Inclusion committee. “We clearly have a trend where coaches are coming from the offensive side of the ball in recent years, and we clearly do not have as many minorities in the offensive coordinator [job].” A quota, he means.
And that’s what counts, not putting the best football team on the field. Or something.
In addition to the offensive assistant coach mandate, the new policies in “diversity” also added women to the language of the Rooney Rule at all levels. It will now read that women and/or people of color can satisfy the old Rooney Rule requirement to interview two external minorities for top positions, including head coach. Women are not required to be interviewed, but they are now included in the fulfillment process. It is possible that a team could interview two white women for an open head coach position to satisfy the Rooney Rule, and then make a hire without ever interviewing a person of color.
Why no “differently-abled” coaches? How about blind coaches? Gay coaches? Mentally ill coaches? Little people. Non-English speakers. Mentally-challenged. Surely a trans assistant coach would be historic. Can Lia Thomas play football? Continue reading →
UPDATE: 11:45, 3/30/45: Rock briefly addressed the Smith attack during his concert in Boston tonight, but said nothing substantive about it. “Soooo, how was your weekend?”, he began. After the crowd responded with a standing ovation, Rock continued: “Let me be all misty and shit.I don’t have a bunch of shit to say about that, so if you came here for that…I had written a whole show before this weekend. I’m still processing what happened, so at some point I’ll talk about that shit. It’ll be serious. It’ll be funny, but right now I’m going to tell some jokes.”
And he did.
***
Incredibly, Chris Rock has managed to stay off the Ethics Train Wreck that he unfairly was the catalyst for. Bravo, Chris. This alone makes him a worthy Ethics Hero. Consider:
He wisely and coolly resisted the impulse to defend himself physically when Will Smith ambushed him. It doesn’t matter that he’s a much smaller man and Smith had played Muhammad Ali. A couple months ago, Rock mused ruefully about his being bullied as a child, and regretted still letting people “walk all over him.” In the heat of the moment, he could have struck back at Smith, and might have even gained some support by doing so—and it would have wrecked the Oscars more than Smith, the fumbling, cowardly producers and the disgraceful audience in the auditorium wrecked it as it was.
He refused to file charges. He was well within his rights to do so, but withholding that indignity was a kindness to Smith and the Academy, neither of whom deserved it.
He has said nothing about the incident at all in public. Good. Literally nothing he said could do anything but make matters worse. Criticizing Smith would allow the media to promote a “feud,” obliterating the real issues. Accepting Smith’s bogus apology would be another example of letting bullies walk all over him: I’d criticize Rock for that, because it would validate Smith’s hypocrisy and attempt at an easy escape from accountability. Rocks brother says Smith has yet to contact Chris personally.
Chris Rock also wins the first Ethics Alarms “If” award, named for my father’s favorite poem. So far, he has embodied the first verse to the finest detail:
If you can keep your head when all about you Are losing theirs and blaming it on you; If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you, But make allowance for their doubting too; If you can wait and not be tired by waiting, Or, being lied about, don’t deal in lies, Or, being hated, don’t give way to hating, And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise;
Well, it looks like this is going to be All-Race Wednesday. Sorry: I wanted it to be “Don’t Say Gay” Wednesday, but I don’t completely control these things. Incidentally, I know everyone is thoroughly sick of the Will Smith matter. However, the cultural implications of what should have been a meaningless blip are significant, and both this morning’s first post the comments to it are worth reading.
***
The last time I relied on the Washington Free Beacon, I was hoaxed by an inappropriate “satire” article that, was subsequent events have sadly proved, was too close to reality to signal that it was fake. So I checked this Free Beacon exposé on Georgetown Law Center, my disgraceful alma mater, particularly carefully, hoping it was a bad joke. It isn’t.
Ironically, just yesterday two old friends emailed me about whether I would be attending the class reunion next month, a major one. After reluctantly telling them that I could not, for the many reasons I have discussed here and here, most lately the Dean’s suspension of professor Ilya Cohen for daring to suggest that limiting a Supreme Court nomination by race and gender was not the best way to ensure the most able jurist would replace Justice Breyer, I started having second thoughts. Was I just being an old poop, one of those alums who are bitter that things aren’t like the old days? Why not just accept it all and party with pals?
Then I saw the report. That graphic above is a slide from a First Year mandatory property course, one of many re-published by the Free Beacon. It reports in part, Continue reading →
Two graphics are called for to introduce this ethics horror. This:
..because I had hoped against hope that I wouldn’t have to write another post about Will Smith’s attack on Chris Rock during the Oscars broadcast. But it is obviously and ethics train wreck now, and I have no choice. And this…
…because I am stunned, shocked, and disgusted, and think, or perhaps hope, that we have reached a tipping point where the sensible people in this nation say, “Enough!”
Spuds had woken me from a sound sleep up to go outside, good boy that he is, and though I was ready to go back to bed, I made the mistake of picking up the New York Times from my lawn. Then I made the bigger mistake of taking it to the bathroom with me, and the bigger mistake yet of turning to the Arts section. And there it was: an epic, head-exploding, all-in screed by Times critic Wesley Morris explaining why Will Smith was not really to blame for his astounding, incredible, unethical, unprofessional, unjust, infantile, and criminal attack on comedian Chris Rock (who will get his Ethics Hero award from me today). but just about everyone else and everything else was.
I’m taking a pause now because my head feels ready to go off again…
They just couldn’t do it, could they? The Left, the race-baiters, black activists, the news media and the opinion-making elite could not stop themselves from turning an attack by one black celebrity on another into another bigoted weapon in the “antiracism” war against American culture. I’m such an idiot. With everything we’ve seen, I just didn’t see it coming. Oh, I expected the racists and bigots on the right to try to make Smith actions symbolic of something rotten and predictable in black culture; except for the hypocrisy of its source, I agree with the assessment of Bernice A. King,the daughter of Martin Luther King Jr. and Coretta Scott King wrote, “Anybody who thinks ‘Black people look bad’ after the #Oscars already thought Black people look bad.” But I should have seen this stage coming, the desperate need to make Smith the victim instead of Rock, and someone, something, the wrongdoer instead of Smith. The big clue was the Oscar audience giving Smith a huge ovation after he had slapped Rock for an award he should not have been allowed to accept. I should read what I write sometimes: I already mused in one post about how different the response would have been if it had been Alec Baldwin slapping Rock.
The 29th is another of those ill-starred days in U.S. ethics, topped off in 1973 by the U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam, the half-way war that was an ethics train wreck for decades. Two years earlier, on the same date, Lt. William L. Calley was found guilty of premeditated murder by a U.S. Army court-martial at Fort Benning, Georgia. Calley, a platoon leader, had led his men in a massacre of Vietnamese civilians including women and children on March 16, 1968. Ten years before Calley’s conviction, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were convicted of espionage for their role in passing atomic secrets to the Soviets during and after World War II. They were executed in 1953, a flashpoint in the schism between the American Left and Right that still is a sore point. (Ethel appears to have been a genuine villain.)
1. I thought this was a hoax. It’s not, unfortunately: someone got a photo of the cheat cheat for “talking points” that President Biden was holding when he massacred his explanation for his Russian regime change outburst in an exchange with Peter Doocy.
This does not fill me with confidence. You? The ethical value at issue is competence.
2. The propaganda and misinformation continues. Though some recently departed here could never grasp it, honest and trustworthy newspapers shouldn’t be publishing falsity and partisan propaganda in house opinion pieces. That’s when the opinion is offered using misleading or incomplete facts—deceit–and the New York Times does it almost every day. I can’t trust a group of editors who permit that. Examples:
It’s incredible how quickly we’ve normalized the fact that the last president tried to retain power despite losing the election and that a mob he incited stormed the Capitol. Many people took part in the effort to overturn the election — among them, we recently learned, the wife of a sitting Supreme Court justice, who hasn’t even recused himself in cases about the attempted coup.
The President in question wanted to challenge the results of an election he believed was the result of illegal manipulation, and as President, he had a duty to do that. I know Krugman isn’t a lawyer, but incitement is a term of art and a crime, and Trump did not “incite a mob” by addressing a crowd. Saying Justice Thomas “hasn’t even” recused himself because of the completely legal communications of his wife falsely implies that doing so is required or the justification for him to do so is undeniable. It isn’t. Editors should not allow such deliberately confusing and misleading opinion material Continue reading →
Such episodes are often useful as a way to gauge the ethics alarms, values, common sense and IQs of the public figures and others who comment on them. So it was yesterday. Before a survey, however, there was this provocative note from conservative site “Not the Bee”:
Will Smith’s aggressive defense of his wife on the Oscars stage occurs alongside his complete and utter spousal neglect of her off the stage. Smith has already admitted that he and his wife are in an “open marriage.” In other words, he allows other men to have sex with his wife. There are few more potent and enduring symbols of emasculated weakness—and of bad husbandship—than a man standing by while other guys hook up with his wife and make a mockery of their wedding vows. We should note that Will Smith presumably hooks up with women in his own right, but of course that simply degrades his own personal integrity even further—if you can’t defend your wife and your marriage from the impulses and the ego of your own sexual appetites, you’re not much of a man or a husband, whatever else you may be.
Getting back to the Round-Up…I believe we were up to #4?
4. The Smith’s son, actor Jaden Smith, tweeted, “That’s how we do it.” Ah! Attack people who make jokes we don’t think are funny! It looks like Will is teaching his offspring not to be the man he wants to be.
5. Of course there was a Trump connection, imagined by Trump-Deranged CNN analyst Assah Rangappa (last seen making a fool of herself here). Her tweet:
Yes, such is the quality of thought one gets from CNN analysts. In what universe would the natural reaction of an audience to Smith’s solo meltdown be to walk out of the ceremony. Did she think it was staged? How does she lay the conduct of black, progressive, Hollywood star on Donald Trump? Well, obviously, if something is bad, it’s his fault. Continue reading →
As Glenn Reynolds often says, “You’re going to need a bigger blog!” But there are many ethics alarms a-ring in this fiasco, so attention must be paid.
Let’s get to it:
1. Will Smith’s apology, posted last night on Instagram:
Violence in all of its forms is poisonous and destructive. My behavior at last night’s Academy Awards was unacceptable and inexcusable. Jokes at my expense are a part of the job, but a joke about Jada’s medical condition was too much for me to bear and I reacted emotionally.
I would like to publicly apologize to you, Chris. I was out of line and I was wrong. I am embarrassed and my actions were not indicative of the man I want to be. There is no place for violence in a world of love and kindness.
I would also like to apologize to the Academy, the producers of the show, all the attendees and everyone watching around the world. I would like to apologize to the Williams Family and my King Richard Family. I deeply regret that my behavior has stained what has been an otherwise gorgeous journey for all of us.
I am a work in progress.
There are some acts that cannot be apologized for, and this was one. “I’m sorry I hit a fellow performer in the face during the live TV broadcast’ is required pro forma, but nobody should treat it as anything more than that. The conduct can’t be excused or forgiven.
As Tim LeVier noted in his Comment of the Day yesterday, Smith is obligated to apologize to his victim, Chris Rock, face-to-face. He did not mention Rock in his half-mea culpa while accepting his Oscar. Rock will be professionally obligated to be gracious, of course, when and if that happens.
Do not think for a second that Smith composed that statement. I wonder how much he paid for it. I would have written him a better one for less. I’m sure.
I would have, for example, omitted: “Jokes at my expense are a part of the job, but a joke about Jada’s medical condition was too much for me to bear and I reacted emotionally.” Jokes at Jada’s expense are also part of her job: she’s a celebrity, actress and talk show host. Furthermore, the joke was abut her shaved haircut, not her “medical condition”—this advances the dishonest “It’s Chris Rock’s fault” spin the Smith lobby is pushing. Hair loss is a medical condition, but as I wrote yesterday as a target of bald jokes and before that, “losing your hair” jokes since my early 20s, women are not exempt, by their own rules.
Oh, you acted emotionally by dashing up on stage, smacking Rock, and then shouting for him to keep the name of your wife out of his “fucking mouth”? Thanks for that clarification. Continue reading →
I count this as a good day for Ethics Alarms. Mrs. Q even made an appearance, and any day in which she weigh in is a good one. There were excellent comments, and even the loss of two “echo chamber” counter-echoes of recent weeks couldn’t spoil the day. One broke the stated rules here, was given a chance to apologize and resume her often dubious commentary, and she refused: her 7 pm. deadline came and went. Too bad. The other thought he was so intrinsically indispensable to the proceedings here that he actually tried to force me to reinstate said rule-breaker lest he take his leave. For “A Friend,” he sure doesn’t know me very well.
There are a lot, and I mean a lot, of ethics related news regarding the Will Smith-Chris Rock slap, or as various members of our spinning rather than reporting news organizations called it, a “confrontation” or an “apparent” slap. I’m going to deal with as many of those as I can stand tomorrow, and leave this collection to other issues.
1. Jon Stewart, non-Ethics Hero. The former “clown nose on/clown nose off” star of “The Daily Show” made a play for integrity by using his Apple TV show, “The Problem With Jon Stewart,” to attack the coverage of the frame-up Mueller investigation as the orgy of dishonest and biased journalism that it was. News Busters reports, “On March 17’s edition…the comedian set his sights on the media as he spelled out how their outdated use of ratings coupled with perverse incentives were driving them into oblivion. And to make this point, Stewart focused on how the media was addicted to the largest story of the Trump presidency: Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into the 2016 election, aka the Russia collusion hoax.”
Conservative gad-fly blogger Don Surber called this one nicely, sneering,
I checked that posting’s date 3 times. Each time it came up 2022, not 2018 when the Mueller investigation was relevant.Had Stewart spoken up then, why Republicans might have done better in the midterm election and Nancy Pelosi would never have been speaker again. Of course, Stewart would have ticked a lot of people in the media off, and he never would have gotten his Apple gig. But now that Mueller and Trump are off the stage, Stewart knows it is safe to say what he should have said back then…
A real man of virtue who tells it like it is would take on the media’s refusal to call Will Thomas out as he broke women’s swimming records. A real man of virtue who tells it like it is would take on the media’s labeling the protest at the National Mall on January 6, 2021, an insurrection….
Now, 40 bucks short and 4 years too late, Jon Stewart dares to mock the media’s coverage of Mueller…I look forward to his mocking Judge Ketanji Jackson’s inability to define a woman in 2030.
That’s about right.
2. Speaking of “the insurrection”...The Washington Post, as I mentioned once today already, called the stupid and pointless riot on Jan. 6 an “insurrection,” keeping it in Big Lie territory, in the process of explaining why Chris Wallace jumped from Fox News to CNN. Wallace says he quit, the Post’s Greg Sargent writes, “in part because of Fox host Tucker Carlson’s depiction of the Jan. 6 insurrection attempt as a “false flag” operation….” Wallace quit because Tucker Carlson was making stuff up? This was a shock to him? Sargent’s piece uses the Times’ interview with Wallace that has this telling quote: “I’m fine with opinion: conservative opinion, liberal opinion. But when people start to question the truth — Who won the 2020 election? Was Jan. 6 an insurrection? — I found that unsustainable.” The TRUTH to Chris Wallace that must not denied is that Jan.6, 2021 was an insurrection: “an organized attempt by a group of people to defeat their government and take control of their country, usually by violence.” “Organized?” “Attempt?” “Defeat?” “Take control?” The Black Lives Matter riots of 2020 came a lot closer to that definition, and still didn’t make it. Chris Wallace thinks calling the riot by 300 drunks with sticks and bear spray an “insurrection” is unquestionable fact. No wonder he ended up at CNN.
3. Today’s IIPTDXTTNMIAFB, (“Imagine if President Trump did X that the news media is accepting from Biden.”) This exchange with Peter Doocy, who almost makes Fox News’ nepotism look good. (Almost.):
Doocy: “Are you worried that other leaders in the world are going to start to doubt that America is back if some of these big things that you say on the world stage keep getting walked back?”
Biden: “What getting walked back?”
Doocy: “It sounded like you told U.S. troops they were going Ukraine. It sounded like you said it was possible the U.S. would use a chemical weapon. And it sounded like you were calling for regime change in Russia and we know—”
Under normal circumstances—but what is normal any more?—my conclusion regarding whether Clarence Thomas should or should not recuse himself in any cases involving the January 6 riot (which the Washington Post again calls “an insurrection” today)because of his conservative activist wife’s vocal support of vigorous responses by the Trump White House in response to what she felt was a fraudulent 2020 election would follow the same reasoning that my analysis of Justice Scalia’s recusal controversy trod almost exactly 18 years ago. The question then was whether Scalia’s participation in a duck hunt with Vice-president Cheney and his pals created a sufficient conflict of interest to trigger the “appearance of impropriety” standard that is supposed to govern judicial decisions whether to recuse, since Cheney was technically—but only technically—a party to lawsuit that had ended up in the Supreme Court.
Scalia adamantly insisted that there was no conflict and no impropriety, and authored an impressive memorandum to support his position. He indeed judged that case. I wrote in part,
Those who have criticized Scalia for his stance on this controversy have an obligation to read the Justice’s memorandum. They are sure to learn some things, such as why it is unwise to trust media accounts regarding anything more complicated than your typical Sponge Bob Square Pants episode; what constitutes a legally persuasive argument and why even Scalia’s ideological foes admire his sharp intellect and lively writing….
[I make] no pretense of being able to match Justice Scalia’s intellect or knowledge of the law. And he makes one especially chilling point: is appearance of impropriety sufficient to force recusal when that appearance is a false illusion created by inaccurate reporting, sloppy analysis, and misinformed reading of the law? It looked like an easy call based on what appeared in the papers; Scalia’s memorandum is a clarification that shows that his position is not just a product of stubbornness, but of careful scholarship. He wins the debate, hands down.
He should still recuse himself….
Scalia is right: there is the potential here for more than one bad precedent, and justices should not permit themselves to be run out of deliberating on politically sensitive cases by partisan misinformation campaigns. But the damage is done. To most of the public, the raw circumstances of the Scalia-Cheney outing will call Scalia’s impartiality into question, and because it is a high profile case, this will damage the public’s faith in the Supreme Court. It isn’t worth it. Americans, even Americans that don’t comprehend the legal requirements of recusal, need to believe in the integrity of the Supreme Court.
Next, the Court should recognize the new political realities of its role, and devise a review system that would make the whole court the arbiter of whether one of the brethren has a conflict, or an unacceptable appearance of one. Such a system would have made Scalia’s current dilemma less of a lightning rod for criticism.
For now, though, Justice Scalia needs to face facts: he may be right on the law, but he’s a dead man walking.
I like that post a great deal; I think I was right. (I also look wistfully back at the time when I could spend up to a week a week polishing a single post.) The parallels between Justice Thomas’s Left-and-news media contrived conflict is similar to Scalia’s. But if you think that means that I now must side with those who are pushing for Thomas’s recusal, you are wrong. Continue reading →
