“chink in the armor”

CNN Presents The Carol Costello Rule: If A Network Issues One Unethical Suspension Of An Innocent Employee Based On Deranged Political Correctness, It Is Obligated To Issue Another

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments
Smug, dishonest, unprofessional, illogical, unfair, biased, unethical: "THIS is CNN."

Smug, dishonest, unprofessional, illogical, unfair, biased, unethical: “THIS is CNN.”

I just have to stop watching CNN is the morning, because it places everyone in my house at risk for head shrapnel.

The main danger is the smug, biased, ethically-jumbled Carol Costello, CNN’s late morning anchor after the New York governor’s telegenic brother has finished indoctrinating us into his view of the world. Today, Costello was taking a victory lap, implying that she helped get Stephen A. Smith suspended by ESPN for daring to suggest that women bear some responsibility for avoiding placing themselves within range of an abuser’s fists. (Interestingly, Costello had no similar directives for ABC, which quietly allowed Whoopie Goldberg to make the same (valid) point on “The View” with no adverse actions whatsoever. See, a woman is allowed to state some uncomfortable truths, but the same truth in the mouth of a man is offensive. Learn the rules, for heaven’s sake!) Then Costello played a clip of her earlier argument why ESPN was wrong not to suspend Smith. She said …

“It’s nice that Smith apologized, but I wonder if the network will do what it ought to do and suspend Smith. Look, in 2012, the management of ESPN expressed outrage when two employees used the phrase “a chink in the armor” when referencing  Jeremy Linn, the Asian Basketball player. One employee was suspended for 30 days and the other was fired. So why is ESPN giving Smith a pass?”

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Ethics Quote Of The Week: Prof. William Jacobson

/ Jack Marshall / 30 Comments

“The incessant attempt to turn race-neutral phrases into racial testing grounds is part of a larger political war in which race agitators seek to turn everything into a discussion of race all the time in every sphere of life…Equating the race-neutral phrase “brown bag” used in the context of bringing lunch to work with some esoteric past-practice of inter-black skin tone testing is so ludicrous that it may have revealed a chink in the armor of the language police, which can be exploited by the vast majority of Americans of all races and colors who just want to get on with the conversation.”

—–Prof. William Jacobson, deriding yet another outbreak of mind-numbingly ridiculous political correctness word-censorship, an edict against using the term “brown bag” in Seattle, and the unwelcome return of one of the all-time silliest imaginary offenses, a CNBC reporter being criticized for using the phrase “chink in the armor.”

My family thanks you, Prof. Jacobson. This could have been me. And might yet...

My family thanks you, Prof. Jacobson. This could have been me. And might yet…

I (and my loving family, which really, really likes me) need to thank Professor Jacobson, the author of the blog Legal Insurrection, for writing his post about this topic—one I truly hate—-before I learned myself about the “brown bag” memo and especially the unwelcome sequel to the Jeremy Lin “chink in the armor” controversy. For one thing, after a long and infuriating day of traffic jams and car trouble, had I read the reports of these embarrassments to the human species in straight news accounts, some aneurism deep in my brain might well have popped, killing me on the spot. For another, he invested such obvious contempt and exasperation in his excellent post that I don’t have to risk death by working myself into a head-exploding rant-producing fury to do this continuing outrage justice. Jacobson pretty much knocks this hanging curveball right out of the park.

Among other things, he links to his discussions of previous examples of perfectly good, innocent and useful words, idioms and phrases that have been attacked by political correctness fanatics (which, unfortunately, includes a disturbingly large percentage of U.S. Democrats), including such “offensive” terms as black list, “Baa Baa Black Sheep,” rejigger, Providence Plantations, Black Friday, gobbledygook, illegal immigrant, undocumented immigrant, and master bedroom. Inexplicably, the professor left out the grandaddy  of them all and my personal favorite, “niggardly,”  the perfectly good word meaning “stingy” the use of which  once got a supervisor in the D.C. government fired, and which spawned Ethics Alarms’ indispensable Niggardly Principles, 1 and 2. He also chose to omit the long list of various words and phrases MSNBC’s Chris Matthews has declared as racist, including urban, “monkeying around,” welfare, food stamps, and even Chicago, but these are cynical “gotcha’s,” devised to show that every opponent of President Obama is secretly motivated by racial hate. Continue reading →

Assignment For The Righteous Persecutors of ESPN’s Max Bretos: Learn “The Niggardly Principles”

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

I'd advise staying away from "niggardly" too, Max.

Ethics Alarms first promulgated the Niggardly Principles in the midst of the so-called Ground Zero Mosque controversy. The Principles are named after the embarrassing controversy that roiled the Washington D.C. government more than a decade ago, in which a supervisor who used the good, old English word “niggardly” meaning “penurious or cheap” was fired for racial insensitivity after an African-American who hadn’t kept up on her Reader’s Digest “It Pays To Increase Your Word Power” complained that he had made a racist remark. The outcry in D.C. over this capitulation to ignorance was so great that the D.C. government reversed itself, though there remained some, like those supporting ESPN’s decision to fire Bretos for an innocent and appropriate application of the idiom ” a chink in the armor” today, who argued that the supervisor should have chosen his words so as not to offend those too ignorant and hair-trigger grievance-minded to comprehend them.

The First Niggardly Principle, therefore, is this:

“No one should be criticized or penalized because someone takes racial, ethnic, religious or other offense at their conduct or speech due to the ignorance, bias or misunderstanding of the offended party.”

A corollary of the FNP is that violating it unconscionably empowers the kind of people who should not be empowered in a free, fair and intelligent society: bullies, race-baiters, grievance police, censors of free expression, and the shamelessly ignorant. That was the theme of a disgraceful incident in which Hallmark pulled an “offensive”card because some African-Americans complained that the term “black hole”—as in Stephen Hawking and “Star Trek”—sounded too much like “black ho”—I’m not making this up— and was thus a racial slur. Hallmark’s craven capitulation was off the charts as First Niggardly Principle breaches go, but in some ways ESPN’s breach was worse; at least Hallmark didn’t pick an employee’s pockets and finger him as a closet racist. Continue reading →