I think I know where I come out on this, but I may be wrong. Let’s see what you think…
Donna Johnston, a licensed social worker, said she was interviewing to teach sociology at Bridgewater State University in Connecticut last summer when she was asked by her interviewer to contemplate and defend her “white privilege” and told that “black students may not be able to relate” to her because of it. She took the questioning to mean that she had to defend being white, and alleges in a law suit that her “whiteness” cost her the job.
Johnston’s lawyer says that “If somebody had said to a black applicant, ‘let’s talk about your blackness, or how does your blackness affect something,’ there’d be outrage.” Yes, I think that’s a fair assumption. But the school claims, in its defense, that their questioning was appropriate as a way to give Johnston an “opportunity to show … how she would use her experience and teaching skills to overcome a common obstacle as a social worker and teacher.”
The issue is mainstream news media double standards, which are unethical in general and especially revolting in the news media’s protective stance toward President Biden no matter how badly he screws up in contrast to its coverage of Donald Trump, who could literally do no right in their jaundiced eyes. Yesterday Biden handed the news media a flaming IIPTDXTTNMIAFB, the convenient Ethics Alarms initials for “Imagine if President Trump did X that the news media is accepting from Biden.”
One of the most damaging and despicable Big Lies pushed relentlessly by the “resistance”/Democratic Party/ MSM alliance from the moment Trump was elected in 2016 was that he was a racist. If you asked an adherent of this slander to name any evidence, the “best” they could come up with was inevitably that Trump had vocally embraced the Birther smear about Barack Obama. But this only stands as proof that Trump is an asshole and a troll, about which there has never been any doubt. He made similar claims about Ted Cruz in order to derail his efforts to beat Trump for the 2016 GOP nomination. Trump plays dirty against all rivals. He’s an equal opportunity jerk, but he’s not a racist (or a white supremacist, a related Big Lie).
But the idea of planting these idea was “priming”: make sure “Trump is a racist” is sitting around rotting in the brains of gullible Americans, and let confirmation bias do the rest. So imagine if Trump had ever looked out over a Fort Worth, Texas, crowd at a VA clinic, and, referring to three Texas members of Congress who looked like Rep. Colin Allred (D), Rep. Marc Veasey (D), and Rep. Jake Ellzey (R) (above) who were in attendance, said,
“The three congressman you have here, two of them look like they really could and did play ball, and the other one looks like he can bomb you.”
1. How many times do I have to say that Twitter makes you stupid? Here’s a U.S. Senator publicly calling for the assassination of a foreign leader:
It is fine to think this or even to say it in private, as long as you are not Donald Trump and you know whoever you talk to will immediately leak it to the media. However, Executive Order 11905signed on February 18, 1976, by President Gerald Ford, banned political assassination.This EO was reinforced by Jimmy Carter’s Executive Order 12036 in 1978. It is still the law in the United States. Graham is a lawyer, and he knows that as a lawyer, it is an ethics breach to cause a third party to do what the lawyer cannot do himself.
Moreover, if such an act were to take place, Graham’s tweet would be justification for Russia to suspect, or even conclude, that the U.S. government was responsible. A foreign power assassinating or even attempting to assassinate a nation’s leader is an act of war.
2. Where’s Bandy Lee when you need her? It is unethical for a psychiatrist to diagnose anyone with mental illness without examining the patient in person. This is why the American Psychiatric Association’s Principles of Medical Ethics state that its members should not give a professional opinions about public figures whom they have not examined in person, and from whom they have not obtained consent to discuss their mental health in public statements. Never mind: Bandy Lee of Yale, a Professor of Psychiatry, made a brief career out of breaking the rule regarding President Trump, because hating Trump suspends all ethical obligations and values. MSNBC and CNN flocked to her; eventually, Yale fired her. Now, if it was unethical for a psychiatrist to be diagnosing a political figure as mentally ill from afar, and it is, what is it called when a non-psychiatrist goes on Fox News and claims to be convinces that something has snapped in Vladimir Putin’s head? That what Condoleeza Rice has done twice already. Her opinion on the topic of Putin’s sanity is no more authoritative than that of anyone else who hasn’t spoken to Putin face to face in years. Continue reading →
Few read Ethics Alarms on weekends (I guess I should write, “even fewer”), and I may start Mondays with more comment highlights from the Dead Zone past. This weekend was unusually lively. This Comment of the Day by Null Pointer took off from item number #2 of yesterday’s warm-up, regarding the GOP’s Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene and Rep. Paul Gosar speaking at white nationalist event, in which I quoted The National Review’s David Harsanyi:
“ On social media, conservatives grouse that there’s a double standard. Democrats, they say, never condemn their extremists, they celebrate them. That’s a double standard worth living with. After all, any denunciation of Omar, Tlaib, or any other Squad member lacks credibility if House Republicans can’t publicly take the position that hanging out with (actual) white supremacists is deplorable.”
White supremacy is bad. All forms of racial supremacy are bad. All forms of supremacy are bad.
Republicans need to jump on the “all forms of supremacy are bad” principle, hard. Otherwise you will see white supremacy taking off again.
No, you cannot have a double standard. If you have a double standard, you do not have a fair principle that addresses the problem equally across the entire spectrum of the problem. If you don’t have a fair principle, no one is going to listen to you. People will not agree to operate by unfair principles. Continue reading →
The caravan of protesting truckers is, we hear, now on the way to Washington, D.C., after thoroughly disrupting Calgary, Canada, and perceptions of Justin Trudeau as a relatively harmless boob. He is now being seen as a harmful boob. D.C., meanwhile, has established itself as a locale where disruptive and even violent protesters are honored by a giant painted endorsement on a public street by order of the mayor when their alleged cause is sufficiently “woke,” and violent protesters from the other side of the ideological spectrum are charged with felonies and held in prison for many months.
This should be interesting, in the old Chinese saying sense.
I think in the end, the best complaint available is the double-standards being applied. When protests are ostensibly in favor of a left-liberal position, they are protected speech no matter how much lawlessness is involved. That same protest involving the same level of lawlessness is considered worthy of an emergency act invocation if the protest is not favored by left-liberals.
I get your point about the trucks blocking traffic Jack, and I don’t disagree. I have always believed that interfering in lawful commerce is illegal (and tortious as well) and should be prosecuted both criminally and by civil action when it happens. The First Amendment, and whatever the Canadian equivalent is (however weakly codified) does not protect actions that interfere with lawful commerce or disturb the peace to the point of mischief. Continue reading →
This article in the Washington Post yesterday, authored by two “reports of color,” Cleve R. Wootson Jr., a White House reporter for the Post, and Marianna Sotomayor (no relation to that other Sotomayor) who now covers the House of Representatives for the Post after coming over from NBC, gained quite a bit of notice from the conservative news media (and none at all from the much larger other side, for this passage when it was first published:
Nice! The two post reporters managed to insult Thomas by reducing his legal opinions to knee-jerk bias, and to attack conservatives based on their race. The obvious rejoinder to this slur would be whether the Post would tolerate an article that criticized, say, Justice Kagan as issuing opinions that are in lockstep with the advocacy of “black progressives.” What does race have to do with either observation, the actual one or the hypothetical reverse negative?
I suppose it should not be a surprise that these most unethical of all Olympiads (since the Olympics should never have been held in this totalitarian, ethics-free nation to begin with) would feature the most unethical decision imaginable. If I cared one whit about the disgusting charade in China and who wins what, I might really be upset. As it is, I’m just going to point out, dispassionate, the ethics rot on display.
Fifteen-year-old Russian figure skater Kamila Valieva tested positive for trimetazidine, a banned substance that improves athletic performance, in the urine sample that Valieva submitted at the Russian national championship on Christmas. The drug, known as TMZ, is a heart medication that can increase endurance. But the result was not confirmed and relayed to Russian officials or to her for more than six weeks. Russia’s antidoping agency said it learned of the failed test on February 7. On that day, the teen led the Russians to a gold medal in the team event.
Let’s stop right there. She tested positive for a banned substance, and that should have stopped her from competing in the Olympics. It doesn’t matter why the test results were delayed (the Russians cheat, and have always cheated). It doesn’t matter whose fault it was. Valieva was ineligible, and whenever it was discovered that she was ineligible, the only fair and ethical response was to disqualify her. This also meant that her team would be disqualified, because a disqualified skater helped it win the team event.
Ethics can be hard, but this conclusion isn’t hard. It is obvious and irrefutable. Because she shouldn’t have been competing at all, and would not have been had either someone in Russia not cheated or was incredibly incompetent, the skater had no right to be skating, and any athlete or athlete who would have won had she not been illicitly permitted in the Games has been treated unfairly, robbed, cheated, pick your term.
That ought to have been the immediate decision. Instead, Olympic “arbitrators” (Arbitrators are supposed to have impeccable ethics alarms, and not the ethical instincts of Hillary Clinton. Who are these fools?) ruled that Valieva not only wouldn’t be disqualified but could continue competing, but that any medals in any event in which she places the top three will not be awarded. The question of who wins what medal, and whether Valieva wins any, will wait until after her doping case is definitively settled, which may take months.
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 →
Nothing like dancing camels to end a perfect day. If only this had been a perfect day…
Meanwhile, I’m so proud! Having told my undergraduate institution that it had so embarrassed me that I would not be attending my BIG reunion this Fall, which I once was looking forward to greatly, it was thrilling to see my law school alma mater, which I also worked for over the next four years after graduation (It liked me! It really liked me!), receive a major honor. Yes, The FIRE named Georgetown University Law Center one of the 10 Worst on its yearly list of educational institutions that do not adequately respect and bolster freedom of speech.
Congratulations, GULC! You’ve worked hard for this the last few years, and the honor is richly deserved.
1. Quit, Whoopi, but let me write your resignation letter. It is being reported that Whoopi Goldberg is furious that she was suspended by ABC for her dumb, ill-considered, offensive but provocative comments about the Holocaust on the dumb, ill-considered, offensive but provocative show “The View.” Her worst statement? I vote for “Well, this is white people doing it to white people. So, this is y’all go fight amongst yourselves.” That was part of her explanation of why the “Final Solution,” in which Hitler’s crazies decided to see the purification of the white race by exterminating “lesser races” like the Semites—just guess what would have happened to the Whoop’s people when Germany took over the U.S. by getting the A-Bomb first!—wasn’t about race. She feels, we are told,“humiliated” at being disciplined after she followed their advice to apologize. No, no, that’s not what Whoopi should quit over. Charles C.W. Cooke explains it well in “Whoopi Goldberg’s Suspension from The View Is Illiberal and Irrational” at the National Review. Meanwhile, many are asking the unanswerable question, how come Disney, who owns ABC, fired actress Gina Carano when she said on social media—not on TV, not under Disney’s banner, that the repressive political speech climate reminded her of Nazi Germany. The “Mandalorian” star was also dropped by talent agency UTA and Lucasfilms, leading some writers to compare her treatment to the Fifties blacklist. Whoopi got a relatively minor two-week suspension. Double standard there, obviously: Whoopi is a black progressive, Carano is a white conservative. Neither should be punished for an opinion unrelated to their competence at their job. If Whoopi quits, she could do some good by making it clear that it’s in defense of free speech and people being unafraid to speak freely. Continue reading →
Over the last week it has become clear to me that the nation’s #1 Democratic Party propaganda organ, the New York Times, is trying out a new strategy to mitigate the damage being inflicted on the party’s prospects by the daily botches of the Biden Presidency. I was struck on Sunday that the Times print edition, following a dreadful week for Biden including his bumbling press conference and the continuing fallout from his “Bull Connor” speech in Georgia that was roundly condemned by member of both parties, included no stories about Biden’s performance at all.
There was alleged good news for Biden—Omicron was “easing.” This was in the far right, above the fold column that during the Trump years was almost always some kind of attack on President Trump. There was a story about Russia’s nefarious plans regarding Ukraine (but no mention that Biden had virtually invited him to attack, as long as it was incremental) and China’s offensive Olympics (which Biden refused to boycott); there was the obligatory story about the Jan. 6 “insurrection,” and, at the bottom, a story headlined.” Did the Stimulus Fuel Inflation Rates? A Growing Policy Debate.” This one at least mentioned the President, once. None of the others did.
Today, President Biden’s name doesn’t appear even once on the front page of I don’t have the resources to check, but I doubt there was ever a day during the whole four years of the Trump administration when Trump’s name was not on the front page, usually in a negative headline. I doubt this has happened very often since World War II; maybe never.
To be fair, nothing happened yesterday that would reflect badly on…no wait. There was.
Ethics Alarms 