As The Previous Post Demonstrates Why We Can No Longer Trust Teachers, Schools And The Agencies That Regulate Them, This Post Shows Why We Cannot Trust Journalists Or Those Who Employ And Train Them…Ever!

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

The newly tenured celebrity journalism professor at Howard University told CBS News, “All journalism is activism.”

Res ipsa loquitur. This statement is signature significance for a fake journalist who understands neither her profession, nor its function in a democracy, nor a professional’s ethical obligations, not just in journalism, but in any profession. No competent, qualified journalist would ever say such a thing out loud. No trustworthy journalist would even think it.

Yet this “journalist” will be teaching aspiring journalists in college that their chosen profession is the antithesis of what it was designed to be.

Oh! Did I forget to mention her name? It is New York Times Magazine reporter Nikole Hannah-Jones. Consider: journalism departments were fighting over who would get her to corrupt their students. She spurned the offer of an academic chair by the University of North Carolina, which we now know places higher priority on wokeness credentials than on, say, competence, to take the post with Howard.

The culprit responsible for the racist and anti-America fake history exercise called the “1619 Project” went on to tell CBS,

“When you look at the model of The Washington Post, right? ‘Democracy dies in darkness,’ that’s not a neutral position. But our methods of reporting have to be objective. We have to try to be fair and accurate. And I don’t know how you can be fair and accurate if you pretend publicly that you have no feelings about something that you clearly do.”

Combined with her statement that journalism is activism, Hannah-Jones provided smoking gun evidence of the staggering number of facts and concepts she doesn’t comprehend. (Again, she is going to be teaching students, and spreading her ignorance as pearls of wisdom.) Let’s see.

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Unethical Quote Of The Month: American Federation Of Teachers President Randi Weingarten [UPDATED]

/ Jack Marshall / 16 Comments

Public-School-Indoctrination

“Critical Race Theory is not taught in elementary schools or middle schools or high schools.”

—-AFT President Randi Weingarten, engaging in the now-routine leftist activist tactic of Rationalization #64, “It isn’t what it is.“

This claim is deceit, like “I did not have sex with that woman” (“because I don’t consider blow-jobs ‘sex.'”) A school does not have to teach the technical “Critical Race Theory” as it was originally formulated by Derek Bell and other politically-motivated academics to be teaching the substance and assumptions of the movement, which is that the United States is a racist nation and that white supremacy has been and continues to be a primary force causing systemic inequality and oppression of black Americans.

Weingarten and other progressive indoctrination proponents know this very well, and the deception is deliberate. Slavery, Jim Crow and the struggles of the civil rights movement are history, and legitimate topics for study in the schools. Using those historical events to advance a narrative of racial guilt and continuing oppression of African-Americans is not history, but sinister and divisive child abuse. The cavil that such a curriculum isn’t literally CRT is misdirection, and the fact that one of the major teachers unions would engage in such deceit is signature significance. Continue reading →

How Sloppy (Or Dishonest) Historical Research Can Deceive For Decades: The Daniel “Doc” Adams Affair

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

AdamsDoc

While we’re on the topic of “disinformation”….

Let’s have a show of hands, shall we? How many of you think that Civil War General Abner Doubleday invented baseball? Let’s see, one…two...thirty four…wow, that’s still a lot, especially since Doubleday’s connection to the game was thoroughly debunked almost a century ago and there is no evidence that he ever claimed any credit for the development of the game. Nevertheless, a commission appointed in 1905 to determine the origin of baseball announced in1907 that “the first scheme for playing baseball, according to the best evidence obtainable to date, was devised by Abner Doubleday at Cooperstown, New York, in 1839.”

We now know—well, some of us know—that the “best evidence” was, to put it technically, crap. Abner wasn’t much of a general either.

OK, now those who have heard of “Doc” Adams ( 1814 – 1899) and know he was one of the major contributors to the invention of baseball as it is played today raise your hands. One..one? That’s all? Documents show that all Adams did—he was an early baseball player and later a league executive who oversaw writing “The Laws of Baseball”—was to establish the distance between bases at 90 feet apart, settle the length of a game at 9 innings and define a baseball team as nine players rather than eight, ten or eleven. He also invented the position of “shortstop.”

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Everyday Ethics: The Pizza Mess

/ Jack Marshall / 29 Comments

ha-ha-nelson

Once again, we encounter the gratuitously hostile stranger phenomenon.

I was running a quick groceries errand today, and a young man right in front of me dropped a cardboard carton containing a hot slice of pizza on the floor. Naturally, it landed top down, and the pizza was smeared all over the linoleum. I was right beside him as he froze briefly, looking down at the mess forlornly.

“Oh, I’m so sorry,” I said, my Golden Rule reflex kicking in. I hate dropping food, especially ice cream cones and pizza; it brings back many childhood traumas. I genuinely empathized with the guy. And you know what? He completely blew me off. He didn’t look at me, acknowledge my expression of sympathy, or even grunt. He just left the dead pizza slice there, turned on his heels, and walked quickly off to call a staffer.

No, he didn’t have ear buds. He was just another rude SOB who has no interest in contributing to a congenial, mutually supportive society. Can you devise any excuse for this behavior? I don’t think there is an excuse. I think this is evidence that he is a member of the growing and thriving jerk component of American society. Why do so many bystanders refuse to demonstrate care for strangers in peril or stress? Reactions like I got is one of the reasons.

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Return Of The Hedgehog

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

Angry hedgehog

Recently I have been pondering whether Donald Trump, in the parlance of philosopher Isaiah Berlin in his famous essay “The Hedgehog and the Fox”, is a hedgehog, one who, in words of the Greek poet Archilochus, “knows one big thing,”or a fox, which knows many things. The thrust of the essay (and a later book) is that history teaches that the hedgehogs tend to prevail over the foxes.

In 2019, I announced that I had figured out that Trump was indeed a hedgehog, and that the one big thing he knew was that

“Despite decades of indoctrination to the contrary, most Americans are proud of their country and do not believe it has been a force for evil in the world. They recognize that capitalism has been responsible for the much of the nation’s success, and they do not want to emulate the European nanny states. Most Americans also regard the office of the Presidency as an inherently good institution. The Four Horsewomen of the Apocalypse, as the President now calls them, do not believe these things, and by clearly opposing a group that is deep, deep in negative territory on the scale, the President is certain to derive a net benefit. Although I have heard the Stage 5 Trump Deranged argue that he does not love his country and does not have its best interests at heart, that is an unsupportable position fueled by dislike alone. Nobody becomes President who isn’t a patriot, and no President wants to go down in history as a bad one. Now the entire Democratic Party is tying itself to these four repulsive, anti-American extremists, which is the equivalent of the party tying itself to an anchor on the [Cognitive Dissonance] Scale.”

For the record, I’m still not completely convinced that Trump isn’t a fox in spiny clothing.

Now the “Fox or Hedgehog?” game has emerged again in an essay by Lance Morrow in The Wall Street Journal. He attributes Critical Race Theory to hedgehogian reasoning. The One Big Thing: slavery was bad. He writes in part,

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Comment Of The Day: Afternoon Ethics Delights, 7/19/2021: The Follies [Item #4: Colorado’s Failed Vaccine Lottery]

/ Jack Marshall / 25 Comments

covid-19-death-toll-promo-1610661161402-superJumbo-v11

Relentless and esteemed Ethics Alarms commenter Michael Ejercito wants to know why I have yet to publish the finale to an Ethics Alarms series that began way back in May, 2020. This Comment of the Day, by another veteran commenter, Michael R, is why. All along and from the moment I wrote the May post, my intention has been to explain that from an ethics and U.S. cultural perspective, the lockdown was a mistake, a disaster, politically motivated, and wrong. But I cannot write that post competently without having some definitive statistics regarding pandemic deaths and the identity and demographics of the victims. Michael’s post contains a version of these stats that would allow me to go forward, but I have seen other statistics [See above] that point in exactly the opposite direction.

This is the consequence of the macro-ethics national crisis created by our untrustworthy news media and professions. It is, at this point, impossible to know what the objective facts are, and not only in this matter, but virtually all others.

Here is Michael R’s Comment of the Day on the post, “Afternoon Ethics Delights, 7/19/2021: The Follies,” focusing on the final item on Colorado’s vaccine lottery (and I forgive him for using the Trump-bashing motivated term “Covid 19” that was devised to advance the Big Lie that President Trump was “racist” to accurately call a Chinese virus a Chinese virus and to place the blame for this crisis squarely where it belonged…)

***

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Dear MSM And Indignant Pundits: It Isn’t Just Conservatives And Republicans Who Have Undermined Confidence In The Pandemic Vaccines…

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment

This isn’t “Whataboutism.” It’s “Stoplyingthroughyour#!%!@#teethism”.

Holden tweet

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Afternoon Ethics Delights, 7/19/2021: The Follies

/ Jack Marshall / 27 Comments

Summer

You thought I was going to play the damn song, didn’t you? (When Drew Barrymore’s hair moved like that in “Firestarter,” it meant she was about to fry someone…)

1. Good for Mike Judge, the school pal of Justice Kavanaugh, for not letting the disgusting smearing of the judge by Kamala Harris and other Democrats (and the media, of course) sink completely into the memory hole. Judge has another of several articles he’s written on the “Get Kavanaugh by any means necessary” hearings, and it’s as informative as it is infuriating. He writes,

When they got desperate, the left dragged out Julie Swetnick. Remember her? She was the pawn of then-lawyer, now-convicted-felon Michael Avenatti. She told the disgraceful Kate Snow of NBC News that she was gang raped at a party where Brett and I were also present. The claim? That she “saw boys gathered outside closed rooms at parties but did not know what was happening behind those closed doors until she says she herself was attacked around 1982.” Swetnick said she was drugged and then “shoved into a room” where she was “raped by more than one man.” Swetnick says Kavanaugh and his friend Mark Judge were in the same part of the house earlier that evening but she cannot be sure if they were involved. “I cannot specifically say that he was one of the ones who assaulted me,” she said.

...So what about that Swetnick police report? Jackie Calmes, a journalist at the Los Angeles Times, has tried to find it, [writing]: “County officials never did search for any Swetnick police filling. The 1982 records had not been digitized, and the county records custodian told me in September 2019 that no one, including Avenatti, would pay the $1,260 charge for looking through three thousand boxes of hundreds of microfiche files for the year. I paid the county to do so, but rescinded the work order when Swetnick, in a brief interview before the search began, retracted her claim that she was assaulted in 1982. She’d specified that year in both her sworn statement and her NBC appearance, but a year later told me it could have been 1980 or 1981.”

Wow. Not only was I a criminal mastermind at seventeen, I was wheeling and dealing early as fifteen. It was probably around the same time I was living at the Playboy mansion. There was a police report to prove it. Strangely enough, neither the media nor their hero Avenatti would bet $1,260 that it even existed.

I will never forget—nor forgive—the experience I had during the Kavanaugh fiasco, when two female Massachusetts attorneys and bar administrators, co-presenters with me in a bar program, smirked, rolled their eyes and gave each other “what a sexist!” winks and nods as I politely explained during lunch that Blasey-Ford’s unsubstantiated account of a conveniently-timed recollection of an alleged sexual assault at a time and place she couldn’t remember by a teen-age Brett Kavanaugh should never have been allowed before the Senate, and that the feminist and progressive assumptions that Kavanaugh was guilty because they wanted him to be was unconscionable. The two women were so insufferably smug and condescending, and they had nothing to justify their position but Leftist certitude.

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From The “I Don’t Understand This At All” Files: Why Should ‘Historically Black Colleges’ Be Getting A Surge In Donations?

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

Make no mistake: I know why they are getting a surge in donations: cynical virtue-signalling and mindless George Floyd Freakout tribute. However, like the historically black colleges themselves, the phenomenon of picking now to celebrate segregated education, and mostly inferior education, is self-contradictory. It also highlights the hypocrisy of the “antiracism” movement itself, and the incoherence of the “diversity” chants coming from the Left.

For these colleges are the opposite of diverse. They are, in fact, discriminatory in concept and execution, and to see them “thrive” while activists are demanding literal quotas in other institutions in order to create numerical demographic parity—at least—is a blazing example of how the George Floyd Ethics Train wreck is less a cultural awakening than it is an opportunistic and unethical power play fueled by white guilt and cowardice.

The front page article in the New York Times today is so full of head-banging-on-the-wall moments I ran out of head before I ran out of wall. Here are some…

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Ethics Hero Emeritus: Rose Valland (1898-1980)

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

Rose-Valland

The remarkable 2008 documentary “The Rape of Europa” tells the story of the Nazi plundering of fine art across Europe. It is full of many accounts of heroism, none more impressive than that of Rose Villand, a meek-looking librarian out of central casting, who is as perfect and example of how ordinary people can rise to extraordinary levels of courage and innovation in times of crisis.

Rose Valland was born in Saint-Étienne-de-Saint-Geoirs, France on November 1, 1898. She earned two degrees in the arts from the École des Beaux-Arts in Lyon and also studied at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, then added degrees in art history from both the École du Louvre and the Sorbonne. Her academic credentials, however, did not immediately advance her career, as Valland began work at the Jeu de Paume Museum in Paris as an unpaid volunteer.

In October 1940, during the Occupation of Paris, the Nazis commandeered the Jeu de Paume Museum and converted it into the headquarters of the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg, or ERR, the Nazi art looting organization created by frustrated artist Adolf Hitler. There The Nazis stored paintings and other works of art stolen from private French collectors and dealers, including thousands of works taken from Jewish-owned galleries. The museum’s collaborating curator, Andre Dézarrois, fell ill in the summer of 1941, and in a stroke of fate for civilization, Valland became the de facto director of the museum. Jacques Jaujard, Director of the French National Museums including the Louvre, gave Valland a daunting assignment: she was to use her post in the museum to spy on the Nazi art theft operation.

The Germans, as explained in “The Rape of Europa,” took scant notice of the “little mouse” of a woman who kept her head down, seldom spoke, and appeared to follow orders. They didn’t even realize that she spoke German, but under their noses she was acquiring crucial information from the conversations of drivers, guards, and packers relating to the looted art treasures…60,000 of them. Villand witnessed the frequent shopping trips of Nazi Reichsmarshal Hermann Goering as he made more than twenty separate visits to the Jeu de Paume to select works of art for Hitler’s planned Führermuseum in Linz, Austria, and his own personal collection. Possessing a remarkable memory for details, she recorded her discoveries regarding the movements, names of the victims, number of pieces and where they were going, names of the agents responsible for transfers, names of the carriers, brands of the boxes, numbers and dates of convoys,as well as the names of the artists and the dimensions of the pieces that passed before her. She relayed the information to Jaujard and the French Resistance while keeping her own meticulous records. She warned the Resistance of convoys containing important artworks so that they would be spared, all while knowing that she would be executed as a spy if her activities were discovered by the Nazis—and at least twice, they nearly caught her.

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