Ethics Quote Of The Month: Jordan Gould, Earnest Vanderbilt Social Justice Warrior And Pathetic Sap

“Let’s turn the page. A word to the Vandy student government president-elect: You would be surprised to learn how aligned our interests are. I invite you to work with me as I renew my commitment to chair the student government Economic Inclusivity Committee. The pursuit of social justice takes hard work. Let’s meet this challenge together.”

The final, sad paragraph in Vanderbilt student Jordan Gould’s essay on Medium titled “When the Social Justice Mob Came for Me.”

I am not designating this an Ethics Quote of the Month because it expresses an ethical ideal or concept, for being a fool and a patsy is never ethical. Rather, Gould’s lunk-headed failure to learn the obvious lessons from his traumatic experience of running for student body president of his supposedly liberal college is symptomatic of what decades of leftist and anti-American indoctrination have done to our youth. Gould has been marginalized and vilified by those he thought were his allies and ideological compatriots, and he doesn’t even realize it.

The harrowing essay details how he was attacked for being white, Jewish, and belonging to a fraternity, in other words, male.  He writes,

Suddenly I started to get tweets and group messages where people told me to go to hell, that I was a white supremacist and a racist confederate. My senior advisor, a woman of color, was asked why she supported a Colonizer.The other candidates’ supporters tore down our posters and ripped my head off the pictures, a sinister warning of what was to come. My campaign was called the white supremacist campaign. False social media posts circulated that my fraternity had parties with confederate flags and chanted that the south would rise again. One message said, “White men are the absolute worst!” Soon after, the posts got even more terrifying — “Hitler got something right!” and “he should get dragged for it!” I began to fear for my safety. Why was this happening?

Why? Why? This is a smart young man, and he is asking that?

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Not QUITE Hypocrisy, But Close Enough For An Eye-Roll: The Democratic Attempt To Reverse An Iowa House Election

Democrats have only a razor-thin 219-211 advantage in the House of Representatives (with five current vacancies). Although state officials declared Republican Mariannette Miller-Meeks the winner in the state’s Second Congressional District after she won her race by just six votes out of nearly 400,000 cast, and though she took the oath of office in Washington in January, Nancy Pelosi set the ball rolling for the House of Representatives to overrule the state and award the seat to Miller-Meeks’ Democratic opponent, Rita Hart.

She has refused to concede the race, claiming that 22 disallowed ballots should have made her the winner if counted. The House has the rarely used power under the Constitution to arbitrate “elections, returns and qualifications of its own members,” and in 1969, Congress passed the Federal Contested Elections Act to set up a clear process governing how it should hear and decide such cases. So now Democrats have initiated an investigation by the House Administration Committee, a full-scale review into the election that could lead to impounding ballots, a hand recount and ultimately a vote by the full House to decide the election.

But…but… I thought members of the House and Senate refusing to accept the state-certified results of the 2020 Presidential election was an attack on democracy itself (although this too is allowed under the Constitution)! Well, that was Republicans, you see, and the complaining candidate was Donald Trump. Come on. Be reasonable. Besides, why would anyone suspect that the review of the Iowa House election would be subject to partisan bias and manipulation?

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Comment Of The Day: “Sunday Ethics Peeps, 3/28/21…Item #4: Qualified Immunity”

I’m trying to catch up on the Comments of the Day.

Here is Michael R’s entry regarding New York City’s recent elimination of qualified immunity for police officers, from #4 in the post, Sunday Ethics Peeps, 3/28/21: “Hey, Everybody! Free Gym Memberships!”:

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Morning Ethics Warm-Up, 3/30/21: Ready to Play Ball (Sigh)…Plus Leaks, GULC, Pandemic Deaths, China, And Narratives.

Well, I’m reluctantly back on board for the baseball season in general, and the Boston Red Sox rooting section specifically. It was touch and go for a while. For the first time since I was 11, I bailed on the baseball season completely with months to go last year. The reason was disgust. I was nauseated by the fake fans in the stands, the fake sounds emanating from the speakers, and the ridiculous rule experiments, like play-offs that admitted losing teams, seven inning games in double-headers and extra-innings beginning with runners on base for no discernible reason. Then there was MLB’s ostentatious suck-up to Black Lives Matter, with the Red Sox being prime offenders in that category, plastering giant salutes to anti-white racism in centerfield and outside Fenway Park.The final straw for me was the the spontaneous player walk-out to protest the “racism” of Breonna Taylor’s accidental death in a police shootout, which had nothing to do with race. MLB simply capitulated to a wildcat strike, players not only playing politics, but racial politics, partisan politics, and worst of all, ignorant politics. That did it. I didn’t watch a game or follow the team of my childhood for the rest of the season, nor any of the post-season. The Red Sox cooperated by stinking up the field as they hadn’t done since a couple of seasons in the Nineties.

I tried not to think about baseball during the off-season, because I dreaded having to make the decision of whether to stick with the game that had given me so much pleasure, excitement and wisdom since the first decade of my life. Further alienating me was Boston’s unethical (but popular!) choice to bring back Alex Cora as the team manager, despite his role in orchestrating season-long cheating in Houston as the 2017 Astros bench coach, and allowing a lesser but still significant cheating scheme to take place during the 2018 Red Sox season as my home team’s manager.

The first test came when I had to decide whether to pay for the Direct TV MLB broadcasts. I paid. Then Sirius-XM (the bastards) announced that the MLB radio channels would no longer be free with my satellite radio subscription, and that for the coming season I would have to pay an additional 6 bucks a month. I paid that too.

I’m not happy, and I am certainly not looking forward to the 2021 season, which starts in a few days, the way I once welcomed the “boys of summer.” In the end, the decision came down to loyalty, gratitude, forgiveness, and hope. As I already stated, baseball has given me many decades of joy and entertainment, and as I used to say on my professional biography, the Red Sox taught me much of what I believe about “the nature of good, evil, justice, and chaos.” I owe the team more than a personal “cancellation” over one misbegotten season.

1. More on the ongoing Georgetown University Law Center ethics meltdown…Professor Josh Blackmun has an analysis here; Ethics Alarms tracked this story earlier this month. Blackmun writes in his conclusion,

The Georgetown University Law Center is in a precarious state. Junior faculty members will be required to conform to standards inconsistent with free thought and exchange. Senior faculty members who resist will be forced out, quietly or overtly. And the most outraged students now have absolute control over the law school. Any demand they make, no matter how unreasonable, must be accommodated. Again, GULC is the canary in the coal mine. These changes will soon trickle down throughout the rankings–unless an administration is willing to say no to groups. I doubt many deans have that intestinal fortitude to say a student’s offense is unreasonable. Indeed, their own jobs may be on the line. I fear for the state of the legal academy.

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Law Vs. Ethics: The Minnesota Supreme Court Rules That Even A Stupid Law Has To be Followed

Law Ass

And the Court is right! But this is a really stupid law. According to Minnesota law, “‘mentally incapacitated’ means that a person under the influence of alcohol, a narcotic, anesthetic or any other substance, administered to that person without the person’s agreement, lacks the judgment to give a reasoned consent to sexual contact or sexual penetration.”

Wait, what? Does that really mean that a woman who is incapable of thinking straight or fighting off an amorous creep intent upon getting some cheap sex is mentally incapacitated and incapable of consent if she has been made blotto by a date who kept telling her she was drinking non-alcoholic punch that was really laced with vodka, but if she drank the exact same amount knowing what was in the punch, she isn’t “mentally incapacitated” even if she can barely speak or move to defend herself?

It does indeed. The law is, some Brit memorably said (but not Charles Dickens), an ass.

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Ex-Salt Lake County GOP Chairman Scott Miller For Governor Of NY!

Scott Miller

I jest.

Sort of.

Salt Lake County GOP Chairman Scott Miller has resigned his post after brushing off complaints from women in his party regarding Salt Lake County Republican Party communications director Dave Robinson’s pattern of harassment, body-shaming and more.

Miller, who was running for the state Republican chair, had trivialized the allegations as petty squabbling. It was pretty obviously more than that. For example, after Salt Lake County Council candidate Laurie Stringham created a campaign video for donors in which she said, “Support Laurie Stringham for Salt Lake County Council, so when Mayor [Jenny] Wilson says ‘more, more, more,’ we can say ‘no, no, no!’,” she said that Robinson called her to complain about the spot.

“You sound like you’re having an orgasm!” Robinson shouted at her over her car’s speakerphone. He then repeated her “more, more, more” catchphrase with obscene grunting sounds., and told her that if she wanted to “whore herself out, that was her choice.” Then, Stringham said, Robinson shouted, “I will make sure you never get elected! I will ruin you! And I will make sure the party never works with you! Get your shit together!’” and hung up.

Robinson, who is openly gay, was accused of similar abuse by several women, who said he referred to them in demeaning, derogatory and sexual terms, attempted to bully them, and even withheld important campaign resources unless they wrote opinion pieces about his favorite issues. Yet the party chair, Miller, refused to investigate or take their concerns seriously. To the contrary, he attacked Robinson’s critics on the county party’s official email last week, naming all of the women coming forward and questioning their motives.

“Are these persons and possibly their special interest backers attempting to embarrass and cancel me and our volunteers?” Miller asked in part. “I will not be CANCELLED.” Hilariously, after these remarks received condemnation from everyone (including Utah’s Republican governor) but Robinson, Miller performed a spectacular if unconvincing flip-flop, and tweeted,

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One More Time: Conservative Personal Liberty Faces Off Against Enforced Progressive Cant

Shawnee

This time, personal liberty won.

The Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in favor of Shawnee State professor Nicholas Meriwether, who had been reprimanded and disciplined because he “refused to refer to students by their ‘preferred pronouns. ‘” The small Ohio state school had issued a 2016 order that that any professor who “refused to use a pronoun that reflects a student’s self-asserted gender identity” would face discipline. When Meriwether asked if his own beliefs affected what he could call students, the official response was that he must call students what they demanded “regardless of” his own “convictions or views on the subject.” The student in question was male in appearance but identified as female. Meriwether maintained that his Christian faith forbade him from referring to a male in female terms; the student, according to Meriwether, threatened him if he refused to comply with the pronoun edict.  The court over-ruled a lower federal district court and held that university officials had violated the professor’s First Amendment rights to free speech and to the free exercise of his religion, thus attempting to“wield alarming power to compel ideological conformity.”

Normally, as in the Christian baker scenarios, I would take the position that, law aside—ethics, you know!—, this is an “asshole meets asshole” situation. How hard is it for either party to just yield a bit, respect the other’s sensitivities, extreme or not, and be accommodating? It is a Golden Rule opportunity. This time, however, it seems clear that the professor was willing to be reasonable, and the woke, non-binery, transitioning or whatever he or she was student was determined to go to extreme lengths to bend the professor to “her” will.

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Sunday Ethics Peeps, 3/28/21: “Hey, Everybody! Free Gym Memberships!”

Peeps

1. Speaking of useless awards shows: Here are the winners of the NAACP Image Awards, presented by Black Entertainment Television, which raises questions all by itself. Now someone explain to me how such awards are helpful, productive, and justified in the United States of America in 2021. As hard as I try, I cannot think of any words but hypocrisy, apartheid, and double standards.

I’d really appreciate an argument from an African-American reader.

2. An ethical firing at USA Today. After Ahmad Al Aliwi Alissa shot up a supermarket in Boulder, Hemal Jehaveri, who held the Orwellian post of “Race and Inclusion Editor,” proved her qualifications by tweeting “It’s always an angry white man, always.” This did not go over well, for several reasons.

Race tweet

First, “it” isn’t “always” a white man. Second, this particular shooting appears to be based on religious and ethnic hate, not race. Third, for a “race and inclusion” editor to announce racial bias of her own on social media would seem to be immediately disqualifying. Fourth, as a journalist, she needs to be trusted, and not tweet out false information on a whim.

Fifth, she’s a biased idiot.

She was fired. Good. Now she’s claiming that her firing was race-based:

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Unethical Tweet Of The Week: Matt Zoller Seitz, With An Assist From Ann Althouse, Sliming Principled Whistleblowers

Stoller tweet

Let me preface this commentary with some disjointed points:

  • When tweets are involved, I should probably call this category “Unethical Tweet Of The Hour.” Minute, even.
  • Matt Zoller Seitz is a hard-left critic and screenwriter who sometimes opines for the proudly Left-Lunatic “Daily Kos.”
  • Ann Althouse’s reaction to this—she gets the EA Pointer for finding the tweet—puts me in mind of Captain Von Trapp’s rebuke to his friend, the venal and principle-free theatrical producer Max, in “The Sound of Music” film when Max tries to rationalize the Anschluss by noting that it was “peaceful”: “You know, Max. . . . . .sometimes I don’t believe I know you.”
  • She also professed ignorance at the tweet’s reference to “the Bruenigs.” See the note immediately above: it took me ten seconds to check the reference, longer than it must have taken Ann to write that she didn’t understand it. Matt Bruenig is a Socialist pundit, and Elizabeth Bruenig is a former columnist at the Washington Post of similar ideological sympathies, now with the New York Times. The Bruenigs have a podcast called “The Bruenigs.”
  • The “tweets” Althouse refers to relates to a re-tweeter of the Seitz tweet who added this shot from a film I couldn’t identify:

Preppy assholes

Sietz is scummily implying that criticizing the now obvious turn by the American Left to totalitarian-style speech suppression and the mainstream news media’s complicity in the process is the equivalent of Fifties-style, white prep school  conservatism mocked in films like “Auntie Mame,” Animal House,” and “Trading Places.” In fact, Greenwald, Sullivan, Yglesias and, though unsmeared here, Matt Taibbi are all left-leaning journalists or pundits of long standing who have had the integrity to break with their biased and unethical employers to blow necessary whistles on their former colleagues, as mainstream journalism has abandoned any pretense of doing its job while following its own ethics rules.

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The Entertainment Awards Catch-22

They never had any integrity, but before the Great Stupid, they could at least pretend. That was good enough to serve the real purpose of such awards and their televised ceremonies. Now, since they can’t even pretend, the awards have no purpose, and increasingly, no audiences.

The Grammys were the latest televised awards show debacle. That show’s rating hit an all-time low, following similar results for the Golden Globes, the Emmys, the Academy Awards (with this year’s new low on the horizon), and nobody ever watched the Tonys anyway. This result was preordained as soon as the organizations sponsoring and running the various awards competitions, enthusiastically applauded by the woke news media, decided to make honoring minority , especially black, performers a new mission.

By doing so, the organizations were admitting that the awards were never objective assessments of quality in the first place. Of course they weren’t, but the contrary illusion was crucial to the commercial mission of such awards: to promote the product and its creators. Movies that win Oscars used to get a big bump in ticket sales. Songs that win Grammys are downloaded more. The individual artists gain prestige that helps their careers. All of this is dependent on consumers buying the myth that the awards, any of them, are reliable measures of quality, and especially superior quality.

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