How Can Schools Teach Students About Citizenship And Rights When They Don’t Know What Rights Students Have?

April 4, 2015 / Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

Sorry about this, Tiffany, but your school definitely can’t suspend ME…

Today’s example of totalitarian school tactics committed by administrators who should be attending classes rather than overseeing them comes to us from Memphis, Tennessee. Highland Oaks Middle School suspended three students for posting a teacher’s mugshot on Instagram. Eighth grade teacher Tiffany Jackson had been arrested for driving with a suspended license, and a student discovered her mugshot online. He posted it, and many more students re-posted the picture.

How could students posting public information on their own Instagram accounts be grounds for punishing them? It isn’t. The school has no right to do this, and suspending students for such protected conduct just serves to intimidate them and other students from exercising their rights as citizens.

That, of course, is the idea.

I agree that it wasn’t kind or fair of the students to set out to embarrass a teacher, but that’s a matter for discussion—education, perhaps— not discipline.

There has been a disturbing amount of deliberate or ignorant trampling on student speech lately, notably the University of Oklahoma expelling students for a constitutionally-protected racist chant, but also in high schools across the country where personal social media posts have been and are being treated as grounds for discipline. This is not to be tolerated from educational institutions in a democracy. Schools are fond of n0-tolerance: I can’t think of any conduct that should be less tolerated than teachers and administrators trying to control legal conduct and protected speech by students that occur off school grounds. We need to raise citizens who understand and respect individual rights, not burgeoning fascists who think that authority can and should shut down speech and conduct it doesn’t like.

At Highland Oaks Middle School, administrators eventually overturned the suspensions. I don’t care: fire them.

For this has to stop.

Meanwhile, welcome to the Streisand Effect, Ms. Jackson! Thanks to your employers trying to cover-up your offense by muzzling your students, everyone is seeing your mugshot. Just trying to do my part to discourage this blatant abuse of power….

_________________________

Pointer: Res Ipsa Loquitur

Facts: WNC Action 5

Well-Earned But Wrong: The Parody Website And The Attack On Memories Pizza

April 2, 2015 / Jack Marshall / 66 Comments

It is difficult to work up much sympathy for Memories Pizza, the Indiana pizza place that rushed to be known as the first business to announce that it plans on refusing to serve gay customers under the cover of Indiana’s new and poorly thought-out religious freedom law. Oh, I agree that it was thoughtful of the owners to help show that the law, regardless of the neutral words used, was intended to be a rallying point for anti-gay advocates who want to fight back against what they see as a frightening cultural shift that they don’t understand and can’t accept, but the owners are still, to be blunt, morons.

Announcing that the law would allow them to refuse to cater a gay wedding, they injected their biases into a debate they were neither legally, ethically, morally or intellectually equipped to participate in. Crystal O’Connor, whose family owns the small-town pizzeria, spouted off that “If a gay couple came in and wanted us to provide pizzas for their wedding, we would have to say no,” as the national debate over the law was heating up. Well, no, Crystal, you wouldn’t have to, and the law probably wouldn’t protect you if you did. Baking pizza is not the exercise of religion, and nothing in the Bible says “Thou shalt not send pizza to the reception of a wedding you disapprove of.”

I just heard one of the law’s supporters from a “family values” group that spends much of its time, words and money attacking homosexuality swear to Chris Cuomo on CNN that the law has nothing whatsoever to do with Indiana embracing anti-gay bigots (and tricking them into thinking that stunts like Crystal’s are acceptable). “It’s about conscience, ” he intoned, without giggling. But the law says nothing about conscience either.It prevents the government from substantially burdening the exercise of religion. Catering an event, religious or not, is not a religious act, nor is a wedding reception a religious ceremony. It is no more legitimate to say that your conscience forbids you from selling pizza to strangers than it is to say that your conscience forbids you from letting a transsexual into your cab. O’Connor, not surprisingly, doesn’t comprehend the law. Continue reading →

Should Google Be Trusted To Censor Websites According To What It Determines To Be “True”?

March 14, 2015March 15, 2015 / Jack Marshall / 38 Comments

Here’s irony for you: when Google says it can develop software to decide who’s not telling the truth, it’s lying.

Google’s motto is “Don’t be evil.” It’s well-debased by now: agreeing to help China censor the internet modeled a non-existent distinction between “don’t be evil” and “don’t assist evil.” I’m not ready to call Google’s looming truth algorithm “evil,” but it is certainly sinister and dangerous.

Google’s search engine rose to dominate the field by using the number of incoming links to a web page to determine where it appears in search results. Pages that many other sites link to are ranked higher. “The downside is that websites full of misinformation can rise up the rankings, if enough people link to them,” says Newscientist.

Now a Google research team is altering the system to measure the trustworthiness of a page, rather than its web popularity. Instead of counting incoming links, the proposed new system would count the number of “incorrect” facts within a page. “A source that has few false facts is considered to be trustworthy,” says the team. Each page will get its computer-determined Knowledge-Based Trust score, which the software will derive by tapping into Google’s Knowledge Vault, a repository of what Google’s claims is Absolute Truth based on web consensus. Web pages that contain contradictory information will be bumped down the rankings, so fewer minds will be warped by non-conforming information.

Naturally, the Left, assuming that its view of the universe is the unassailably correct and virtuous one, loves this idea. That should put that”climate change denialists” in their places–at the bottom of web searches. Says Salon, which never met a conservative argument that wasn’t a lie (NEVER met? Oh, oh. There goes Ethics Alarms down the search results!), “Even though the former program is just in the research stage, some anti-science advocates are upset about the potential development, likely because their websites will become buried under content that is, well, true.” Continue reading →

Unethical App: Yik Yak

March 12, 2015 / Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

The cute Yik Yak mascot, hanging out at a fraternity, where ethics go to die.

Yik Yak is a suddenly surging social media app that is running viral on college campuses. The app allows users to post anonymous messages (“yaks”) that only appear to users within a 1.5-mile radius. The New York Times called it “ a virtual community bulletin board—or maybe a virtual bathroom wall at the student union.”

Yik Yak is unethical.

There.

Yik Yak was created in late 2013 by Tyler Droll and Brooks Buffington, fraternity brothers (and based on their names, escapees from a Dickens novel) who came up with the idea after seeing that there were only a handful of popular Twitter accounts at Furman College, where they were frat brothers, almost all belonging to campus big shots and athletes. With Yik Yak, they say, they hoped to create a more “democratic social media network” where users didn’t need a large number of followers or friends to have one’s thoughts read widely. Continue reading →

Finalizing The Sadly Useful School Anti-Violence No-Tolerance Insanity Scale

February 25, 2015February 25, 2015 / Jack Marshall / 24 Comments

Alas, the deadly pizza gun is only a #5 now…

In January 2013, I realized I had used “Now this is the worst example of insane no-tolerance school conduct that there can ever be!” multiple times, and that it was time to make some close calls. I asked readers to rank the following real examples of child abuse by schools, in which children of various ages were punished cruelly and excessively for harmless conduct that violated a poorly envisioned no-tolerance rule. This was the list:

1. Biting pizza into the shape of a gun.

2. Pointing a finger in the shape of a gun and saying “Bang!”

3. Threatening to shoot a student with a bubble gun.

4. A deaf child who makes the obvious sign-language symbol for gun, to “say” his own name, because his first name is “Hunter”

5. Expelling a student and bringing charges of criminal assault for shooting another student with a spitball through a straw

6. Accidentally bringing a paring knife to school in a lunch box

7. Drawing a picture of your father holding a gun

8. Playing with a LEGO figure carrying a LEGO automatic weapon

9. Drawing a picture of a gun

10. Writing a poem about the Newtown shooting.

I received a lot of responses on the blog, more off-site. I never published the final results, however, which also takes into consideration my own positions. Here, from most defensible to most insane, is the current order, and why each entry landed where it did: Continue reading →

KABOOM! ARGHHH! How Can This Happen In The United States? How Can Any University Think This Is Legal, Fair, Ethical Or Rational? How Can A UNiversity That Acts This Way Be Trusted To Teach Anyone Anything, Other Than How To Be A Fascist?

February 15, 2015February 15, 2015 / Jack Marshall / 38 Comments

Thank-you, University of Tulsa…

I really didn’t need another KABOOM! so soon after the last one.

From The Foundation For Individual Rights in Education, with my brainless reactions in bold and brackets:

TU suspended student George “Trey” Barnett last October for three Facebook posts [ It’s unethical and probably illegal to punish Barnett for his own Facebook posts…] published by his husband that criticized another student and two TU faculty members. […but it is beyond belief for the school to punish him for what someone else, regardless of who, posts to his page.] None of the Facebook posts came from Barnett’s account; the statements were posted by his husband, who either tagged Barnett or posted them directly to Barnett’s Facebook page. Barnett’s husband later submitted a sworn affidavit attesting to his sole authorship of the posts. Nevertheless, shortly after TU professor Susan Barrett filed a complaint against Barnett arguing that Barnett could not “avoid responsibility” because someone else was responsible for the posts. [This is Kafaesque. Do these even people know how Facebook works? ] TU Senior Vice Provost Winona Tanaka imposed eight restrictive interim measures against Barnett. The sanctions included suspending his participation in certain courses and activities and even barring him from speaking about certain individuals. [University administrators can not bar whom a citizen may speak to; only judges can do things like that, and only rarely.]

Without affording him the hearing he was entitled to under TU’s University Student Conduct Policies & Procedures, and despite his husband’s affidavit, Tanaka found Barnett responsible for “harassment.” Tanaka also found Barnett guilty of retaliation and violating confidentiality requirements for speaking about the disciplinary charges with his husband—who was also his exculpatory witness. [ What??? WHAT??? Due Process? Rights of the accused? Procedures? Policies? ]

Less than two months before Barnett was set to graduate, Tanaka not only suspended him until at least 2016 but also permanently banned him from receiving a degree in his major even upon his re-enrollment. Barnett was forced to wait two months for TU to respond to his appeal, which the university summarily denied on January 9 without explanation—leaving Barnett unable to earn his theater degree as planned. [ All of this for what someone else wrote on the student’s Facebook page! My key question in ethics scenarios is “What’s going on here?” What’s going on here? I have no idea. An illicit relationship between the apparently fat faculty member Barrett and Tanaka? Insanity?]

…TU has also threatened … its independent student newspaper, The Collegian, which this week reported on Barnett’s suspension and criticized his treatment. The Collegian reports that after contacting TU administrators for comment, student reporters were told by TU’s director of marketing and communications that if “anything that the university deems to be confidential” is “published or shared, (that) could violate university policies.” The university refused to explain what might constitute “confidential” information and, come press time, the journalists were unsure what action the university might take against them. [ OK, let’s just stipulate that the University of Tulsa doesn’t accept the principles underlying the First Amendment. I will await its next abuse of power being aimed at impending worship requirements and a ban on assembly.]

Continue reading →

Facebook’s Unconstitutional News Hoax Policy

January 21, 2015 / Jack Marshall / 34 Comments

I’ve got your backs, you contemptible jerks…

Boy, there’s a lot of pro-censorship sentiment going around these days. I wonder why?

The latest comes from Facebook, which now is going to attempt to shield us from “hoaxes.” I don’t trust the government to decide what I should read and I don’t trust Facebook to do it either. Nobody should.

Back in the sixties, Economist John Kenneth Galbraith wrote papers and books asserting that large corporations were becoming the new nations and states, and that it was their power, not elected governments, that would decide how we lived. Galbraith wasn’t the best professor I aver had (he was the tallest), and his assertions in this realm were certainly exaggerated, but a lot of what he foresaw has come to pass. It is true that the First Amendment prohibition against government censorship of expressive speech doesn’t apply to private entities, but it is also true that huge corporations like Facebook weren’t even a twinkle in the eye of the Founders when that core American value was articulated. Any corporate entity that has the power to decide what millions of Americans get to post on the web is ethically obligated to embrace the same balance of rights over expediency that the Constitution demands of the state, specifically free speech over expediency, period, exclamation point, no exceptions. Embodying Clarence Darrow’s statement that in order for us to have enough freedom, it is necessary to have too much, the Supreme Court has even pronounced outright lies to be protected speech.

For this reason, Facebook’s well-intentioned anti-hoax policies—boy, there’s also a lot of well-intentioned lousy policies going around these days, being applauded for their goals whether they work or not. I wonder why?—add one more offense to core American ideals.

You can read Facebook’s new policy here. The key section: Continue reading →

The Bill Cosby Follies: Idiotic Blog Post, Atrocious Apology, Lame Justification…Thanks, “TheWrap,” For This Lesson In First Amendment Abuse

November 24, 2014 / Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

TheWrap is a web Hollywood news and gossip site. Picture TMZ crossed with Gawker. It published an immediate candidate for the most unethical blog post of the year, always a closely contested category, a piece of cyber-offal by an industry writer named Rich Stellar that issued a combined attack on the women coming forward to prove Bill Cosby is a serial rapist, and the media’s coverage of it. I was happily unaware of Stellar, barely aware of The Wrap and definitely unaware of this utter crap until it was flagged in a Salon piece, which was in turn flagged by one of my indispensable scouts, Fred. What unfolded before me was a horrible spectacle of a despicably and dumber than a box of rocks opinion piece that no competent editor should allow to avoid the trash, a subsequent apology of sorts from the writer that shows such an ethics deficit that he should probably have a 24-hour keeper, and, finally, his editor’s defense of her wretched editorial judgment based on the theory of the First Amendment, which she appears to think means “You have to publish any garbage any fool writes no matter how poorly conceived or reasoned, or you are unAmerican.” But I am getting ahead of myself.

The Blog Post.

Read it all if you dare. Here’s Stellar’s money quote, which distills most of the cretinism without forcing you into Hell: Continue reading →

How Constitutional Government Censorship Works In Obama’s America

August 14, 2014 / Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

Sarah Durand, a senior editor at a division of Simon & Schuster, Atria Books, informed the literary agents of one of the U.S. soldiers who had submitted a book proposal about the conduct of Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl—the controversial Taliban prisoner who was freed in a costly prisoner exchange and then hailed as a “hero” by the Obama administration— that the publishing house was not interested in pursuing the project. The soldiers, comrades of Bergdahl, allege that he is a traitor.

Maybe the book proposal was poor; maybe it isn’t what Atria Books is looking for at this time. Getting any book published is difficult for first-time authors, and there is no obligation for a publishing company to print anything.

However, this is what Durand wrote to explain the rejection:

“I’m not sure we can publish this book without the Right using it to their ends..the Conservatives are all over Bergdahl and using it against Obama and my concern is that this book will have to become a kind of ‘Swift Boat Veterans for Truth'”

In other words, a professional, supposedly non-partisan conduit for free speech and communication is restricting that speech for political and partisan reasons, and specifically to protect the government currently in power.

I would never argue that refusing to publish the book is unethical. That reason, however, if it is the only reason, is unethical, and also chilling. The only difference between the government censoring political speech and private enterprise censoring speech critical of the government is that the former is prohibited by the Constitution, and the latter is protected by the Constitution, since the freedom not to say something is the same as the freedom to say it. Durant and Atria, appear to be using that freedom to do exactly what a censoring government would do if it could. And how do we know that a Simon & Schuster executive didn’t contact the White House for guidance, and were told to bury the book for “future considerations”? We don’t. Yet this is the kind of suspicion and distrust engendered when communications entities behave like this.

Note that Durand doesn’t challenge the truth of the soldiers’ assertions about Bergdahl. Her concern is how it will be used by political opponents of President Obama. The fact that she would feel that this is a legitimate factor to be considered in publishing a book to the extent that she wouldn’t see the danger of expressing it in an e-mail is as disturbing as the sentiment itself. The book editor sees her duty as protecting the state from opposition and criticism, apparently. How many other gate-keepers of our free speech feel the same way?

_______________________________

Pointer: Newsbusters

Source: Yahoo!

So Whoopi Goldberg Is A Hypocrite, A Bully And A Racist: Who Is Going To Hold Her Accountable?

June 29, 2014June 29, 2014 / Jack Marshall / 33 Comments

Or fine her two million dollars?

“Whoopie, you ignorant slut…”

Donald Sterling expresses racist sentiments in a private conversation in his home and his bedroom, and becomes a national pariah. he is fined millions, and forced to sell his property, his NBA team. He is attacked in columns, blogs and news broadcasts as “disgusting”..”vile”..”the worst of the worst.” His players threaten to refuse to play.

Whoopi Goldberg expresses racist sentiments on a nationally broadcast TV show. Industry sources say that her “clout” on the view is getting stronger; she is the only host who is not fired, or leaving for other reasons.

Yes, it really is that simple. Like Sterling,Whoopi Goldberg is a racist. She has far more visibility and negative influence on the culture than Donald Sterling. Why doesn’t ABC regard her as a detriment to its reputation and business as much as the NBA does Sterling? There are several reasons:

The media and too much of the public accepts a blatant, hypocritical double standard.

African-American celebrities, politicians and artists, as well as women, are given far more leniency and held to far less accountability for their offensive, racist and sexist statements and conduct. Such lower standards are degrading to them, if useful. Habitual big mouthed bullies like Goldberg exploit the license habitually. The only differences between Goldberg and Alec Baldwin are pigmentation and a y-chromosome. That’s enough to get Baldwin fired from his gigs, and Whoopie extended in hers.

White celebrities and colleagues, unlike Sterling’s black team members, have yet to show the integrity and courage to challenge Goldberg, call her what she his, condemn her racism, and refuse to work with her. They should.

The mostly liberal pundits are hypocrites, and refuse to condemn one of their own.

Debating, of all things, political correctness on The View with conservative commentator Will Cain, Whoopi was getting thrashed, because her reasoning abilities, education and experience lag far behind her arrogance, certitude, and emotionalism. So, naturally, she indulged in an ad hominem attack as well as racial and gender stereotyping, denigrating Cain’s argument and suggesting bias with the slur, “That is spoken like a true white guy.”

The attack, by the way, was called a “quip” by the flagrantly biased Huffington Post. If Cain had come back with “And spoken like a true, black high school drop-out, Whoopi!,” would that also have been a “quip”? Continue reading →

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this: