“black lives matter”

Unethical Website Of The Month: “Above The Law”

/ Jack Marshall / 21 Comments

above-the-law

Stay classy, Above The Law!

Above The Law, which styles itself a legal profession gossip site and half-baked professional ethics watchdog, has been a useful resource for me on occasion, though the commentary of its writers, particularly lead writer Elie Mystal, has often left a lot to be desired ethically and logically. My last four posts regarding Above the Law, going back a year, have been Ethics Dunce entries, and there easily could have been more.

I used to get Above the Law’s stories sent to my in box, as I had subscribed several years ago. Then I noticed that I wasn’t getting them any more, so I subscribed again. I got notices for a few days, then they stopped. Again I subscribed. Again, my subscription vanished.

I just re-subscribed today, and expect that I will again be cut off.

Ethics Alarms has, it seemed, been “unfriended” by Above The Law, because I have had the impertinence to point out the increasingly lunk-headed ethics confusion and partisan bias of the site. Wow, that’s petty!  That’s also cowardly: the site seems to think that if I don’t know about their frequently misguided posts, I wouldn’t be able to criticize them. In fact, they are mostly right. I have now more than once gone many weeks without noticing the lack of the site’s notices in my e-mail. Life without “Above the Law’ is still rich and full of joy.

I did check today, however, which is when I discovered my latest subscription was gone with the wind. While I was responding positively to the site’s invitation to me to subscribe (for the 4th time), I checked the most recent posts, and saw this, from Elie, naturally…

Praising a recent post by a professor who was criticized for openly supporting Black Lives Matter—a group that declares on its website that the deaths of “Alton Sterling and Philando Castile at the hands of police” were “murders” before any investigation or assessment of the events leading up to the shootings has been completed—Mystal’s post, titled “To Be Honest, I’m In No Mood To Explain #BlackLivesMatter To White People Today” reads in part… Continue reading →

Ethics Hero (And Author Of Perhaps The Best Facebook Post Ever): Palm Beach Florida African-American Police Officer Jay Stalien

/ Jack Marshall / 102 Comments

Jay Stalien

When I read published quotes from police officer Jay Stalien’s Facebook page post, now deservedly in the process of going viral, my immediate reaction was that it was a hoax, a measured and well-researched explanation of the racial unrest surrounding police shootings and the Black Lives Matter movement written by a professional pundit  and placed in the metaphorical mouth of a black police officer to give it added power and credibility. It was, in short, too good to be true.

It is true, however, as well as good. To be presented at this time is an act of courage and civic responsibility by Stalien, and his effort redeems the existence of Facebook and social media, not to mention the internet, as few posts have. In the past, someone like Stalien would have to submit a column to a newspaper editor, and agree to cuts and edits that reduced its effectiveness, if his important observations were to have any impact beyond his living room or workplace. Now he can publish himself. The First Amendment has seldom been better served.

The post is very long, but you should read it all, here.  I will only point out some highlights.

He begins, in part…

The following may be a shock to some coming from an African American, but the mere fact that it may be shocking to some is prima facie evidence of the sad state of affairs that we are in as Humans.

I used to be so torn inside growing up. Here I am, a young African-American born and raised in Brooklyn, NY wanting to be a cop. I watched and lived through the crime that took place in the hood. My own black people killing others over nothing….I used to be woken up in the middle of the night by the sound of gun fire, only to look outside and see that it was 2 African Americans shooting at each other.

It never sat right with me. I wanted to help my community and stop watching the blood of African Americans spilled on the street at the hands of a fellow black man. I became a cop because black lives in my community, along with ALL lives, mattered to me, and wanted to help stop the bloodshed.

As time went by in my law enforcement career, I quickly began to realize something. I remember the countless times I stood 2 inches from a young black man, around my age, laying on his back, gasping for air as blood filled his lungs. I remember them bleeding profusely with the unforgettable smell of deoxygenated dark red blood in the air, as it leaked from the bullet holes in his body on to the hot sidewalk on a summer day. I remember the countless family members who attacked me, spit on me, cursed me out, as I put up crime scene tape to cordon off the crime scene, yelling and screaming out of pain and anger at the sight of their loved ones taking their last breath. I never took it personally, I knew they were hurting. I remember the countless times I had to order new uniforms, because the ones I had on, were bloody from the blood of another black victim…of black on black crime. I remember the countless times I got back in my patrol car, distraught after having watched another black male die in front me, having to start my preliminary report something like this:

Suspect- Black/ Male, Victim-Black /Male.

Then Officer Stalien, in the same powerful style, proceeds to answer typical complaints from the black community by presenting  “FACTS” that too many African-Americans, elected officials, journalists and partisans refuse to believe, accept, or comprehend: Continue reading →

Ethics Quote Of The Day: Ann Althouse

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

politifact_photos_Obama_speaking_in_Poland

Why is racial discord the problem of the summer 2016? If anyone has what it takes to unify the country over race it is Barack Obama, who is President right now and who had been President for 7 1/2 years. If it makes any sense to be deciding the current presidential election on this issue, if this longed-for capacity is something that can possibly exist, then Barack Obama would be doing it now and would have been doing it for years.

Before you push us to judge whether Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump would do better in bringing us together in racial harmony, Mr. Healy, please say a few words about why President Obama has failed. Of course, neither Clinton nor Trump inspires hope for a new opportunity at racial harmony. That’s what Obama did in 2008. He was ideal for that issue and we voted for the hope. Now, so many years later, things seem even worse. Can you analyze how that happened? Because that did happen. I don’t see how we can begin to think about what more Trump or Clinton could do unless we understand why President Obama failed.

—–Law professor Ann Althouse, on her blog, responding to an op-ed piece in the New York Times by Pat Healy bemoaning the inability of either Trump of Clinton to respond to the Dallas shootings in a manner that unifies rather than divides.

1. I admit it: sometimes I look for other commentators who have discerned what I have discerned and use their quotes to state what I would normally be writing myself. Althouse is a left-leaning eccentric moderate who is not overtly political, and who is skilled at overcoming her own biases. She voted for Obama (at least once), and she plies her craft as a law professor in Madison, Wisconsin, as progressive a community as there is. I have found Obama’s leadership ability and Presidential performance wanting in almost all respects since early in his administration and have explained my analysis here.  The price I pay for this is that those who are in denial over what should be obvious (though terribly disappointing and sad) feel that my consistent  criticism gives them the opportunity to mask their denial by  labeling me an Obama-hater, a partisan (as if I wouldn’t be equally critical of an incompetent Republican President with a flat learning curve) and even a racist. A quote like Althouse’s is not so much an appeal to authority—I disagree with Professor Althouse a lot, though not her dislike of men wearing shorts—but choosing to allow someone else to say well what I may not have said any better, and to prove that I’m not the only one coming to such conclusions.

2. The President’s comments on the shooting deaths of officer-involved deaths of Alton Sterling in Baton Rouge, Louisiana and Philando Castile, in Falcon Heights, Minnesota were irresponsible, inflammatory, and typical of his approach to race relations from the very beginning, when he stuck his influential nose into a controversy between a competent white Cambridge police officer and a race-baiting black Harvard professor. Then, without knowing any of the underlying facts, he suggested that the white police officer was at fault and the black professor (a friend of his) was blameless. His remarks about the police shootings in Louisiana and Minnesota issued from the same bias. I’ll just comment on the beginning of his statement, which is enough to make the point: Continue reading →

No, Don’t Fire Jesse Williams; Just Mark Him As The Ignorant, Racist Hate Merchant He Is

/ Jack Marshall / 103 Comments
He may be a racist asshole, but he doesn't play one on TV...

He may be a racist asshole, but he doesn’t play one on TV…

African-American actor Jesse Williams attracted national attention at the BET Awards last month as he accepted the  BET Humanitarian Award. Williams launched into the racist black activist version of Authentic Frontier Gibberish, sending out sufficiently loud anti-white dog-whistles that he received a standing ovation from the throng. In response, a petition was placed on Change.org demanding that he be fired from his role on the inexplicably long running ABC medical drama “Grey’s Anatomy”:

“Jesse Williams spewed a racist, hate speech against law enforcement and white people at the BET awards. If this was a white person making the same speech about an African American, they would have been fired and globally chastised, as they should be, but there has been no consequences to Williams’ actions. There’s been no companies making a stand against his racist remarks and no swift action condemning his negative attitude. Why was Burke’s character fired from Grey’s Anatomy after his inappropriate homophobic slur, but nothing for Jesse Williams? Why the one-way street? Why the support for a hater? Why the hypocrisy? #AllLivesMatter All humans bleed the same color. #EqualConsequences4RacistBehavior”

The reference to “Burke’s character” ( Helpful Tip: When you are making a pitch in a petition, take the time to check your facts so people know what the heck you are talking about) was a reference to African-American actor Isaiah Washington, who was fired from his role as Dr. Preston Burke on  “Grey’s Anatomy”  in 2007 for using homophobic slurs in public, including The Golden Globes telecast, and on the show’s set.

Petitioning to have someone fired for their political opinions is an ethically-dubious enterprise at best, but the allegation of a double standard is apt, because it is a double-standard. The culture nourished by Barack Obama and his political-correctness obsessed regime accepts anti-white rants as legitimate and honorable, but holds the expressing of anti-gay sentiment as grounds for shunning and destruction. Writes professional gossip columnist, celebrity worshiper  and silly person Perez Hilton:

“True, Isaiah Washington did ultimately get fired for saying hateful homophobic slurs — but comparing that to Williams’ uplifting speech about equality (that had everything to do with why he was on stage accepting his humanitarian award in the first place) doesn’t make much sense at all.”

Let’s clean that up a bit, shall we? Hilton, who is not only gay but incredibly gay, thinks that homophobic slurs are disgusting and therefore should forfeit the right to make a living, but anti-white diatribes are “uplifting,” so the comparison doesn’t make sense to him.

Here is what Williams said at the BET Awards; let’s see if you find it uplifting. I’ll interject the comments I might have shouted out during the speech had I been there and was willing to be pummeled to death, including notes, probably unnecessary, where Williams descends into Authentic Frontier Gibberish (AFG), social justice warrior dialect class: Continue reading →

Ethics Dunce: ESPN

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

protest-mizzou

ESPN has announced it will give the University of Missouri (MU), a.k.a Mizzou, football team a special humanitarian award in July to honor the team for its strike  in 2015. You know the one, right?  If you did, then you are probably retching.

This was the Black Lives Matter-esque fuse that caused over a hundred universities to explode in racial unrest and cave in to pressure from black student groups to yield to demands supposedly addressing various imagined, concocted or politically exploited race-related problems on campuses, ranging from microagressions, to inadequate race-consciousness, to unidentified people saying mean things.

That last, in fact, was what caused the Mizzou foolishness. There, three unrelated episodes caused the “crisis”:

  • Payton Head, MU senior and president of MSA,  published a Facebook saying that he was walking around campus when the passenger of a pickup repeatedly shouted the “nigger at him.

No one confirmed his claim.

  • The Legion of Black Collegians posted on social media that the group was rehearsing for a performance at the University’s Traditions Plaza when a “young man” talking on his cellphone walked up to the group, was politely asked to leave, and hurled “racial slurs” at LBC members.

Was he a student? Nobody knows.

  • Someone draw a swastika using human feces inside Mizzou’s Gateway Hall.

Funny, I think of the swastika as an anti-Semitic symbol, not anti-black one, but hey, whatever it takes, right?

None of these involved perpetrators who were identified, or who were shown to be students. None of them  were remotely within the control of the University; nor were they coordinated in any way.  Black groups on campus, however, harassed the school’s president, Tim Wolfe,  and demanded that he resign. A black graduate student began a hunger strike, promising to forgo all food and nutrition until Wolfe was ousted. Finally, black University of Missouri football players announced that they would not participate in team activities or games until the university yielded to various demands, including Wolfe’s dismissal. The coach and the rest of the team backed the black players, and the university caved.

In addition to sparking many other conflicts on other campuses, disrupting students’ education, making U.S. ccolleges look like the inmates were running the asylums (because they were) and increasing racial tensions, the episode had the effect of  causing a huge drop in enrollment that has cost Mizzou about $32 million.

Isn’t that great?

Good job, everybody!

Apparently ESPN think so, anyway. Continue reading →

Ethics Quote Of The Day: Baltimore Judge Barry G. Williams

/ Jack Marshall / Leave a comment
Prosecutors are not supposed to play this game...

Prosecutors are not supposed to play this game…

“I’m not saying you did anything nefariously, I’m saying you don’t know what exculpatory means.”

—- Judge Barry G. Williams, presiding in the Baltimore trial of Officer Caesar Goodson Jr for his alleged role in the death of Freddie Gray, excoriating the prosecution for illegally withholding Brady evidence from the defense.

There is more evidence that the Baltimore prosecution of six police officers for the death of Freddie Gray a year ago is less a matter of seeking justice than it is a sacrificial offering of  innocent law enforcement professionals to avoid civil unrest.

I have already chronicled the disturbing pattern of the prosecution in this case, where premature and dubious charges were brought against the officers in the wake of destructive rioting and threats from African-American activists. Now it appears that a statement supporting the officers by Donta Allen, the man sharing the police van with Gray—who ended his trip fatally injured—was never made available to the defense. Because  the statement was potentially supportive of the officers in their defense, the material had to be handed over by prosecutors under the Supreme Court decision in Brady v. Maryland,  the landmark 1963 case holding in 1963 that “the suppression by the prosecution of evidence favorable to an accused upon request violates due process where the evidence is material either to guilt or to punishment, irrespective of the good faith or bad faith of the prosecution.”

There were only two people present during Ray’s final ride, other than Gray himself:  Goodson, the driver, and Donta Allen, another arrested subject who was  separated from Gray by a thin metal screen.

Allen has  made wildly conflicting statements about what transpired. He initially told police that Gray was “trying to knock himself out” in the back of the van, then later denied that statement to the news media. However, Allen had a second session with police investigators a year ago, shortly after the charges against the officers were brought by City Attorney Marilyn Mosely. In that meeting, Allen reiterated and confirmed his original statement that suggested Gray was trying to injure himself. Prosecutors never brought his second statement to the attention of the defense.
Continue reading →

Read ‘Em And Weep: The Jefferson Muzzle Awards

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

muzzle-banner

 Thomas Jefferson Center for the Protection of Free Expression (TJC) hands out yearly “awards” to  government agencies that show themselves hostile to free speech.  This year, however, the Jefferson Muzzle Awards were reserved for various colleges, as the increasingly radical left institutions of higher learning, spurred by such groups as Black Lives Matters and the craven administrators who quiver in fear of them, have scarred freedom of expression over the past year in a multitude of ways.

Fifty schools got their ceremonial muzzles—the Muzzies?—in five categories:

1. Censorship of Students
2. Censorship by Students
3. Efforts to Limit Press Access
4. Threats to Academic Freedom, and
5. Censorship of Outside Speakers

Here they are.

And it’s not funny.

_______________________

Pointer: Instapundit

All Fictional TV Characters’ Lives Matter

/ Jack Marshall / 42 Comments
Ouch. But what REALLY hurt was that she was a lesbian...

Ouch. But what REALLY hurt was that she was a lesbian…

Apparently LGBT TV fans are up in arms over characters sharing their sexual orientation getting killed off now and then on various dramas. They are, it seems, keeping score.

 

I knew our culture’s fracturing was tilting us toward this social Armageddon, but I had hoped we would regain sanity before it reached this point.

I first noticed that many LGBT fans embrace the view that Gay Lives Matter (more) on TV dramas when “The Walking Dead”  killed off one of its two lesbian characters, Dr. Denise Cloyd (Merritt Wever) with an arrow through the eye (from behind…TWD doesn’t fool around) and articles about the “problem” started popping up. Protests and fan freak-outs over the demise of fictional characters are nothing new, of course, but I didn’t realize that it wasn’t enough to have diversity in casting and individual characters on TV, and that groups with calculators were measuring happiness, success, heroism, villainy, life, death, good luck, bad luck and skin rashes by EEOC categories as well. This is neither compassionate, democratic, American nor healthy.

One TV show’s LGBT aficionados are in revolt over the death of a gay character. “The 100″  killed off Lexa, an openly gay major character, and her similarly gay fans are enraged and offended. They were unable to sleep, they said.   Some threatened to harm themselves; the writer of the deadly episode published a list of self-help hotlines. During the episode following Lexa’s death, the show’s fans created the topic #LGBT Fans Deserve Better on Twitter, which has since become an international LGBT phenomenon. Later, fans tweeted with Bury Tropes Not Us, opposing the alleged “trend” of TV shows creating gay characters only to kill them off later. Autostraddle, a lesbian and bisexual website,  compiled a list of 150 lesbian and bisexual characters in TV roles who have been killed, going back to 1976.

The ironic aspect of this—I will call it nonsense because it is nonsense, though it is also dangerous nonsense—nonsense is that the shows under fire are the same ones progressives have saluted for having diverse characters to begin with. Then, because those color-blind, gender-blind, age-blind, disability-blind, ethnicity-blind writers treat the diverse characters like they do any other characters—that is, they kill them when it advances the plot, creates buzz, or just because they feel like it, being gods in this make-believe universe, the shows are boycotted and derided for bigotry.You can bet that the much acclaimed and over-rated trans actress on Netflix’s Orange Is The New Black has a job for the life of the series, because getting rid of her would be considered proof-positive of anti-trans hatred.

You have to feel sorry for “The Walking Dead,” which ended its latest season by leaving its audience in doubt regarding which character just got his or her brains beat out with a baseball bat, splattering blood on the camera lens. No matter whom the victim turns out to be, it will have offended some “tribe” and opened itself to accusations of bias. The possible victims include a black heterosexual woman, a mixed-race woman, a possibly gay adult white male, an Asian-American adult male, a white pregnant female (and her baby/fetus/ inhuman set of parasitic cells, depending on your point of view), a white juvenile male, and the show’s hero, an idiot. No matter who it is, some group will have evidence of antipathy, hate and bias by the writers, just as Black Lives Matters and its allies like Al Sharpton and the Congressional Black Caucus take the position that any time a black perp or suspect is killed by police, it is per se evidence of racism. Continue reading →

Observations On The Hillary/de Blasio “CPT” Skit Uproar

/ Jack Marshall / 29 Comments

beaver-crushed-by-his-own-treeOut of trivial occurrences  enlightenment may flow.

In a skit last weekend in the Inner Circle show, annual charity event put on by the New York press corps to roast the Mayor, Hillary Clinton joined de Blasio as a surprise guest and chided him for delaying his endorsement of her presidential campaign.

“Thanks for the endorsement. Took you long enough,” Clinton said

“Sorry, Hillary. I was running on C.P. Time,” de Blasio replied. Little gasps were heard in the audience, for C.P. Time, more correctly “CPT”—you know, like EST?—means “Colored People Time,” referring to the alleged proclivity of African American and Hispanics to have a casual regard for punctuality.

Black “Hamilton” star Leslie Odom Jr., who plays Aaron Burr in the hit musical, was on stage as part of the skit, and admonished the  mayor, saying, “I don’t like jokes like that, Bill.”

Hillary then intervened and said, “Cautious Politician Time. I’ve been there.”

I’ll let you compose yourself after the that hilarious joke before continuing.

OK, now? Good. Continue reading →

The Washington College Of Law’s Embarrassing “All Lives Matter” Freak-Out

/ Jack Marshall / 26 Comments
"I can't believe you would say that!"

“I can’t believe you would say that!”

A law professor at D.C.’s  Washington College of Law at American University, who is identified with civil rights issues, discovered that someone had posted a handwritten flyer reading “All Lives Matter” on his door.

The Horror.

A normal, proportionate, hinged, response would be to ponder the multifaceted nuances of those three words, muse quickly about why anyone would feel moved to leave such a message anonymously, and worry about the Nationals starting pitching, perhaps.  Ah, but this is 2016, so hinged is uncool and so 2008. Thus the faculty member complained to the Dean and the faculty, who both felt that writing  “all lives matter” on a flyer is perilously close to hanging a noose or writing KKK or burning a cross:  Racial harassment and intimidation!

Quoth Claudio Grossman, the Dean: Continue reading →