“fighting words”

Ethics Dunce, “Racially-Charged Epithets” Division: NBC Baseball Writer Craig Calcaterra, And Anyone Who Agrees With Him

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

See above. Ick.  This is your brain on political correctness and convoluted social justice double standards. It’s not pretty.

Last week, Wednesday White Sox shortstop Tim Anderson was thrown out of a game and suspended after a fight broke out on the baseball field between his team and the Kansas City Royals. The cause doesn’t matter here, but the Royals pitcher, Brad Keller, threw at Anderson for being flamboyantly demonstrative after hitting a home run.

Anderson was also suspended by MLB, and it turned out that the reason for his punishment was that during the fight he called Keller a “weak-ass fucking nigger.”

Here is Anderson…

This is Keller.

Continue reading →

Unethical Quote of the Week: Vice Provost for Student Affairs Inge-Lise Ameer

/ Jack Marshall / 47 Comments

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rTac1q3Y1Xo

“The protest was a wonderful, beautiful thing.”

—Dartmouth Vice Provost for Student Affairs Inge-Lise Ameer during a campus student meeting discussion of last week’s  Black Lives Matter protest in the student library. Ameer proclaimed her support for the protesters, their conduct and their demands.

The student protest she was so thrilled with is described here and here. Ethics Alarms also referenced the protest, including these memorable statements that black students screamed in the faces of white students:

“Fuck you, you filthy white fucks!”

“Fuck you and your comfort!” 

“Fuck you, you racist shit!

When a female student began to cry as a result of the confrontation, the protester shouted, “Fuck your white tears!”

This is what a Dartmouth administrator described as “a wonderful, beautiful thing.”

Of course, she should be summarily fired, and the students responsible for the assault ought to be suspended or expelled. They won’t be.

The kind of speech direct at the students by the racist Black Lives Matter members (I know that’s redundant; indulge me) was what the Supreme Court has called “fighting words,” especially when combined with the conduct of getting into a student’s space in a hostile attitude.  It is a miracle there wasn’t a fight; there should have been. Students should not tolerate this kind of unjustified, anti-white conduct while they are studying, or any other time.

Note that the mainstream media doesn’t feel this is worthy of coverage or comment.

Today I will add The College Fix and Campus Reform to the links.

____________________

Sources: The Dartmouth, Tab, The Dartmouth Review.

De’Andre Johnson Ethics Quiz: Is It Ever Ethical For A Male Athlete To Punch A Woman?

/ Jack Marshall / 115 Comments

deandre

Nineteen year-old De’Andre Johnson was kicked off the Florida State team after “The Tallahassee Democrat” obtained a video showing Johnson punching a young woman in the face in an altercation at a bar in June. He has also been charged with battery. Johnson’s lawyer says that woman was taunting him with racial epithets and hit him twice before he punched her.

Lawyer Jose Baez told NBC News that Johnson “tried to deescalate the situation” but the woman “kneed him in the groin area” and “took another swing before he retaliated.”  “It wasn’t until she struck him twice that he reacted,” Baez said. “But he is very regretful that he didn’t turn around and walk away immediately.” Baez added, however that his client “makes no excuses for what happened.”

The video above does not seem to support Johnson’s defense, but never mind.  After the Ray Rice episode, no football player who lays a hand on a woman in anger will be able to avoid severe punishment. All athletes, and football players particularly, are on notice that as far as hitting women goes, it is strict liability unless the men’s lives are in danger, and maybe not even then.

But hypothetically, I’m curious. Racial epithets are fighting words. If a black athlete punched a white man, even a much smaller white man, after racial abuse and a knee to the groin, there would probably be no charges filed, and not much criticism either. How different, if different at all, should the ethical judgement be if the individual engaging in the abuse is a woman? What if she shows no signs of stopping unless she is physically stopped? What if she looks like this…

Gina Davis

 

Or. say, THIS…

Katka2

Or even this…

hope-solo

Hope is over six feet tall, you’ll recall and is rumored to have a penchant for striking people off the athletic field.

Thus your Ethics Alarms Ethics Quiz of the Day is this:

Is it always unethical for  any male athlete to punch any woman in a situation not involving the male’s mortal peril?

ADDENDUM…lest we forget: what if the woman is this former Olympic medal winner…

caitlyn-jenner

?

 

CNN’s Chris Cuomo Gets An Ethics Dunce Hat Trick: Law, Journalism And Civics

/ Jack Marshall / 22 Comments

dunce capBad day at CNN. First John Berman turns the morning news into frat boy jokes about “big stones” —a testicles reference! HAR!–and then CNN’s AM Big Kahuna Chris Cuomo humiliates himself and everyone associated with him by tweeting,

“Hate speech is excluded from protection. Don’t just say you love the Constitution…read it.”

Wow. Not only is Cuomo spectacularly wrong, but he was smug and arrogant about it. Much as censorious fake liberals who want to impose speech and thought codes on us all would like it to be the case, “hate speech” has no special status in the Constitution at all, other than its status as “speech.” Reason, in a rebuke to Cuomo that drips with appropriate but still somehow inadequate contempt, points out:

Okay, let’s take Cuomo’s challenge. Let’s read the speech part of the Constitution. (I hope this doesn’t take too long; I hate reading.) Oh, good, the speech stuff is right there at the beginning of the “things you can do” section:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances. My copy of the Constitution seems to be missing this fabled “except hate speech, none of that” clause.

Well, then, it must be an exception found by the Supreme Court, right? Uh, no…Reason continues its schooling: Continue reading →

Ethics Hero: Tampa Bay Rays Manager Joe Maddon

/ Jack Marshall / Leave a comment

Joe Maddon, fulfilling his duty to confront racist jerks

During a Sunday Spring Training game at Charlotte Sports Park in Florida, Tampa Bay Rays  manager Joe Maddon heard a fan berating Rays centerfielder B.J. Upton with a racial insult. Maddon summoned stadium security and had the fan thrown out of the park.

This may have happened before, but I can’t recall a similar incident. Racist catcalls and epithets are rarer at baseball games than they once were; they are far from gone. Baseball players have to endure a certain amount of abuse, true, but not this kind. Heaping racist insults on an athlete from the safety of the stands is cowardly as well as uncivil, and the First Amendment doesn’t extend to “fighting words” in a private venue.  Every manager, coach, usher and spectator should follow Madden’s lead.

The fan, by the way, denies Maddon’s account. Since baseball managers are not in the habit of ejecting fans for nothing, I find the denial less than credible.

“Lethal Advocacy”: Not Ethical, and Not Protected Speech, Either

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

"Go ahead! Jump! You know you want to!"

William Melchert-Dinkel, aged 48, posed as a female nurse in internet chat rooms and preyed on depressed people by talking them into killing themselves.  A misguided mission? A perverted hobby? A salesmanship challenge? Who knows. But occasionally, he was successful.

Melchert-Dinkel was charged with assisting suicides after he encouraged IT technician Mark Drybrough, of Hillfields, Minnesota, to kill himself. Drybrough, who was recovering from a nervous breakdown, received e-mails from Melchert-Dinkel, found on his computer, containing detailed advice on how Drybrough could hang himself. He used that advice to commit suicide in 2005. Melchert-Dinkel also provided encouragement and guidance to Canadian Nadia Kajouji,  18, who drowned herself by leaping into an icy river in 2008. Continue reading →

Now THIS is Incivility!

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

Michael Rausch, a 46-year-old Cherry Hill, N.J., lawyer, threw three punches at a Scranton lawyer who, he said, called him stupid and bald.

The fisticuffs occurred in July at the Lackawanna County Courthouse during a civil suit regrading a car accident. Lawyer Rausch was placed on probation, and he resigned from his law firm as a result of the incident.

Hey…what’s wrong with being called “bald”?