The mail has been favoring “Ethics Villain,” which I have used before, as the proper designation when Ethics Dunce is too mild, and luckily the opportunity has arisen to try it out.
Garrett Epps, a legal scholar of note who has taught at several major law schools, authored a piece for The Washington Monthly with the headline, “Donald Trump Promised He Wouldn’t Nominate a Black Woman to the Supreme Court.” No, this isn’t one of those too-common examples of a publication placing a click-bait headline on an article that doesn’t fit it. Epps himself writes, right up front, “On May 18, 2016—and again in September of that year—Trump promised his supporters explicitly that, if elected, he would not appoint a Black woman to the U.S. Supreme Court.”
That is a lie. Flat out, straight up. And Epps, a lawyer and law professor, unquestionably knows it’s a lie. Later in the same article, he even contradicts his own statement, writing, “Trump said nothing about excluding Black female judges. He just did it.”
Just from casual observation and also from having to comb the news and opinion sites, I think people are going nuts, and there are other people in high, powerful and influential places trying to keep them that way, since they will be all the more receptive to irrational ideas.
February 8 is an appropriate date to remember, not just in Black History Month (we should not have months that favor single races, genders and ethnicities, first, because there are only 12, and second, because it is divisive and discriminatory, and therefor unethical), always. This was the date of the Orangeburg Massacre in1968, when police officers in Orangeburg, South Carolina open fire on a mostly black crowd of youths during a protest against racial segregation. Three were killed and about 30 were wounded; one of the dead was a high school student siting on a curb waiting for his mother to pick him up.
It all began when activists in Orangeburg pointed out that Harry Floyd’s bowling alley was segregated despite the 1964 Civil Rights Act making such a policy illegal. Floyd refused to obey the law, and authorities in Orangeburg refused to enforce it. A protest followed and extended into days. After a window was smashed in the bowling alley by protesters, police responded with clubs and arrests. Then the protest spread to South Carolina State University, one of the “historically black colleges.” (These are also an anachronism and inherently hypocritical.) When a report of a fire on campus set by protesters caused the Highway Patrol to respond, one protester threw a piece of wood at the officers, who opened fire. Several investigations failed to back up the Highway Patrol’s claim that the demonstrators had attacked them with fire bombs and sniper fire.
With everything else that happened in 1968, still one of the most cataclysmic years in U.S. history, the Orangeburg Massacre has been relatively neglected in our collective memory. While researching the event today, I noticed this statement on the History Channel site:
Shootings on college and high school campuses continue to plague the United States, as does police violence against African Americans—nearly 1,000 people are killed by police every year, and Black people are 2.5 times more likely to die at the hands of law enforcement than white people.
It is unethical for a history website to spin and distort facts like that. The campus “shootings” referred to are not police shootings. Since 1968, every campus shooting—I count eight— has been at the hands of someone who was mentally ill. Eight in 53 years is not a “plague.” After mentioning “police violence against African Americans,” itself a loaded phrase, the article jumps to the total number killed by police, which includes whites, and the 2.5 number is deceptive without context: blacks are 2.5 times more likely to have confrontations with the police, and not just because they are black.
These are anti-gun, anti-police, Black Lives Matter talking points, not “history.”
1. Of course they will. The New York Times notes that the tactics of Nancy Pelosi’s partisan witch hunt, the Jan. 6 Panel, will guarantee that Republicans will return the criminalization of politics in kind when they are in power. “The House select committee scrutinizing the Jan. 6 assault on the Capitol is borrowing techniques from federal prosecutions, employing aggressive tactics typically used against mobsters and terrorists…[to] develop evidence that could prompt a criminal case,” the article begins.
What the article doesn’t say, but what is screamingly obvious, is that the primary objective of the 100% biased investigation is to try to stop Donald Trump and his allies from gaining power in 2024. If they can lock him up, all the better. The Times does say that using the House investigative process this way is unprecedented. Wait! I thought defying “democratic norms” was what made Trump a threat to democracy! I’m so confused!
Seeking to find reasons to imprison political opponents is banana republic-style politics, and while Trump audiences may have chanted to lock Hillary up, it is the Democrats who are actually seeking to prosecute an opponent they hate and fear. They are also using a rigged investigation to do it: it’s bipartisan in name only. Republicans are angry, and should be, as should be anyone who is really interested in protecting democracy. The GOP, however, will not take the ethical course and take steps to prevent future House Star Chambers. You know it won’t. It will take that broken norm, and turn it on the party that broke it. Continue reading →
I saw this ridiculous article on the front page of the New York Times: “Climate Change Enters the Therapy Room/Ten years ago, psychologists proposed that a wide range of people would suffer anxiety and grief over climate. Skepticism about that idea is gone” by Ellen Barry. I wasn’t going to post on it, though I was tempted to ask, “Why is this pathetic, paranoid women made crazy by exactly the kind of climate change hysteria propagated by the Times worthy of such attention, or any attention at all?” However, I’m buried in more useful issues already. Then Ann Althouse, for some reason, blogged about it, with a long quote including “They came wrapped in plastic, often in layers of it, that she imagined leaving her house and traveling to a landfill, where it would remain through her lifetime and the lifetime of her children. She longed, really longed, to make less of a mark on the earth. But she had also had a baby in diapers, and a full-time job, and a 5-year-old who wanted snacks. At the age of 37, these conflicting forces were slowly closing on her, like a set of jaws…”
As she often does, Althouse just teed up the thing for her commenters to swing at. Had I written about it, I would have concentrated on how the Times, like the rest of the media, takes no responsibility for its role in driving once normal people like the woman in the story nuts. The exact same phenomenon is occurring regarding the Wuhan virus. The mindless terror the news media seeded about Donald Trump–still is seeding–is another example.
I was going to comment on the photo above anyway, not realizing that it had set off an online controversy. Abrams is one of the most shameless power-seeking phonies among the many phonies America is inflicted with right now; the hypocrisy in the photo is hardly unique. President Biden had such an episode over the weekend; Democratic mayors, governors and other officials have made their “rules are for the gullible peons” photos and videos an art form. Most have had the sense to say, “I’m sorry,” or “I forgot,” or “I won’t do it again.” Not the Abrams campaign (she’s running for Georgia governor again).
It responded to criticism of the photo by—guess what!—accusing critics of being racist:
“It is shameful that our opponents are using a Black History Month reading event for Georgia children as the impetus for a false political attack, and it is pitiful and predictable that our opponents continue to look for opportunities to distract from their failed records when it comes to protecting public health during the pandemic.”
Wait, is there a law that says you can’t criticize a black politician during Black History Month? I did not know that! Boy, I wish that my people—you know, bald Anglo-Greek lawyers—had a month like that! Continue reading →
Is this an Ethics Train Wreck, defined as a situation where everyone involved in in the wrong? If it isn’t, to paraphrase Tommy Lee Jones’s burned-out sheriff in “No Country for Old Men,” it will do until a real one shows up.
We begin with the impetus for the protest. Truckers, alone in their cabs, pose no danger to anyone whether they are vaccinated or not, masked or not. Social distancing is enough when you’re alone inside a moving truck. The pandemic restrictions are increasingly obnoxious and irrational—unethical in short, “following the science” of experts who have been wrong (or lying) so often it would be funny if it hasn’t been so disastrous. Ethics Alarms is on record as holding that most protests are pointless and unethical, but not all. There is ample justification for truckers to protest what is, for them, oppressive government edicts.
BUT…this protest is violating the law, as well as inconveniencing and harming citizens who are not at fault for the policies the truckers are protesting. The truckers have paralyzed traffic, disrupted business and unsettled residential neighborhoods, as truckers parked their vehicles in intersections and across busy thoroughfares. “Someone is going to get killed or seriously injured because of the irresponsible behavior of some of these people,” Jim Watson, Ottawa’s mayor, said as he declared the situation a state of emergency. I don’t see how anyone can dispute that conclusion, and sympathy with the truckers’ position shouldn’t translate into acceptance of their mode of protest, Continue reading →
A week ago, early on a Sunday should have been like any other for a Santa Fe, New Mexico family, 34-year-old Teral Christesson, armed with an AR-15 rifle, broke a window and invaded their home. Once inside, he slept, had some beer and shrimp out of the fridge, and took a bath.
When the surprised and alarmed residents returned to their home later to find a stranger with a duffel bag and an AR-15 scoped rifle there, Christesson expressed great embarrassment and apologized profusely. He then gave them $200 to make it all better, or at least to pay for the window he broke. Then he said goodbye, and left.
What a nice young man!
He was arrested the next day when police found Christesson after responding to a report of a man attempting to hijack a car. He reportedly told investigators he still “felt bad” about breaking that window. Now he’s facing charges of aggravated burglary, larceny, and criminal damage to property.
I probably don’t pay enough attention to right-wing conspiracy theories, but I mostly find them so silly that it astounds me that anyone takes them seriously. Alex Jones? How could anyone take Alex Jones seriously, especially after he stated in court documents that he didn’t take his own stuff seriously? Long ago, I learned a lot from a fun tome called “Web of Conspiracy” by mystery writer/historian Theodore Roscoe. It was a detailed account of the evidence assembled by many Lincoln assassination conspiracy buffs, and I loved it, racing through its 800 pages or so and thousands of footnotes as fast as I could. But I was 11; my Dad warned me that the author was cheating, and I couldn’t see it. After the book was out of print, I paid a fortune to acquire a used copy and tried to read it again. I couldn’t get through the damn thing, it was so full of innuendo, and dishonest arguments.
I thought about that book when some well-meaning readers sent me a substack essay by Emerald Robinson asserting in Theodore Roscoe prose that Mike Pence was really trying to get Trump kicked out of office so he could take over. Let’s say I’m dubious, and I’m no Pence admirer. VP’s have been accused of that since John Adams; I walked out of “JFK”—and I’ll sit through almost anything—when Oliver Stone started telling audiences that LBJ was behind Kennedy’s assassination. Moreover, Robinson has long been on my “don’t waste time reading” list, as I view the tweet that got her fired from Newsmax as signature significance. She tweeted,
“Dear Christians: the vaccines contain a bioluminescent marker called LUCIFERASE so that you can be tracked. Read the last book of the New Testament to see how this ends.
Twitter removed the tweet as a violation of safety rules, which is the kind of stupidity that explains why I quit Twitter. Everyone needs to see tweets like that. Highlight them, don’t hide them. Otherwise you might take a nut like Robinson seriously.
Bloomberg’s financial news site accidentally reported that Russia had invaded Ukraine last week afternoon with the headline above on its homepage. apparently nobody at Bloomberg reads the site, it stayed up for about 30 minutes. Olga Lautman, a Russian analyst, posted the message on social media.
What would Fred Dalton Thompson say about the toxic combination of news media incompetence and instant communications technology? Take it, Fred!
I will only offer observations at this point because there are so many questions to be asked that it’s premature to say exactly what happened, or in Ethics Alarms-ese, “What’s going on here?’ I stumbled across this current story by accident, while preparing a preliminary outline and seminar description for a program I’ll be doing as I have been for two decades for the annual Washington Non-Profit Legal and Tax Conference in March. What recent non-profit and charity ethics problems have arisen in the last year or so? And up popped the jaw-dropping message above.
