A third year law student decided it was appropriate to send an obscene, ranting letter to the entire student body of Yale Law School announcing that he hated “like 90%” of them, and also, in his words (after announcing that he is going to be a writer):
“…fuck you guys, you judgmental, uninformed pricks, patting yourselves on the back on top of your goddamn moral high horses. I realize I am killing my future political career. GOOD. If you’ve read The Republic, you know exactly what my opinion of politicians are. I realize I am burning bridges. EXCELLENT. If I succeed in my passions, I want to make damn sure it is without the help of any of you phony-ass shitdicks. I’ve ALREADY gotten compliments about how inspirational I am, and I haven’t even fucking started yet. That’s the biggest compliment I’ve ever received in my life. It’ll probably take you guys 10-20 years to get that even once, so good luck and keep up the good work!”
His name was included on his post, just to make certain that it keeps him from finding gainful employment with any potential supervisor who doesn’t have a death wish.
Ink Tank’s list of “happiest facts” is a trivia-fest of cute, charming, or otherwise amusing factoids, some of dubious reliability ( 25. Rats giggle when you tickle them…), some of historic interest ( “7. On the day of his assassination, Martin Luther King Jr. had a pillow-fight in his motel room”), some with “Awwww!” value (“15. Otters hold hands when sleeping so they don’t drift away from each other”), some with really dubious reliability (“47. Cows produce the most milk when listening to the song “Everybody Hurts” by REM”), some that are older than Methuselah (“31. It takes seventeen muscles to smile and forty-three to frown”), some snarky (“30. The next Star Wars will not be directed by George Lucas.”), and some that are just plain stupid (“46. At the time of your birth, you were, for a few seconds, the youngest person on the planet”). That’s all par for the course in these kinds of ubiquitous web lists.
#27., however, comes out of the blue like a drive-by shooting. What kind of person gets joy from the thought that somewhere in the world a stranger is suffering through one of life’s stinging tragedies, just as he is about to partake in one of life’s inimitable innocent pleasures? An ice cream cone! An iconic symbol of summer days, childhood, family excursions and fun! Taking the delicate, waffled cone in an eager hand, admiring the substance and swirl of the lovely confection, anticipating the bracing cold on the tongue and lips, the sweet creamy taste and then…plop!—all is ruined. I hate that! Who doesn’t hate that? When I worked for Baskin-Robins, we were told to always replace a fallen scoop of ice cream or a dropped cone gratis, whether the victim was 4 or 40. Since my ice cream shop days, I have bought replacement cones for other people’s children, because that stricken face of shock, hurt and disappointment the second the scoop hits the ground will haunt my nightmares if I don’t. Continue reading →
A newspaper columnist and an ESPN commentator both reaped the wild wind last month after statements in a column and on a televised panel that many, including me, took as irresponsible, unprofessional and worse. I wrote here about the column, a diatribe in Iowa’s Des Moines register by veteran Donald Kaul against guns, gun owners, the NRA and any politician who supported them. The panelist was ESPN’s Rob Parker, whom I didn’t write about simply because his racist rant against Redskins quarterback Robert Griffin was so obviously wrong that there was nothing much to say about it. If you missed it, African American Parker questioned Griffin’s bona fides as a black man because, among other offenses, he appeared to be a Republican and has a white girlfriend. I would have had a lot to write about ethical double standards if ESPN hadn’t finally fired Parker after suspending him, but he was let go yesterday.
Both Kaul and Parker now claim they were misunderstood, and thus treated unfairly. Kaul, who has been backed by his paper in an editorial, claimed in a recent column that his universally derided piece was obviously satire, and implying that anyone who didn’t catch the twinkle in his eye is illiterate:
“Gun owners seemed particularly upset at the suggestion that Boehner and McConnell be dragged [ by “a Chevy pickup truck… around a parking lot until they saw the light on gun control” ].The tactic, which dates back to the days of lynch mobs, became a more modern nightmare in the wake of the 1998 dragging murder of James Byrd by white supremacists in Texas. Many of the people I heard from said I should be arrested for threatening federal officials, and one said he had personally reported me to the FBI. Let me say this about that: That wasn’t a suggestion to be taken literally. I don’t believe Boehner and McConnell should be dragged. I was using it as a metaphor for making politicians pay a price for their inability to confront the gun lobby. It’s a literary device.
“Think of Jonathan Swift’s “A Modest Proposal,” written 200 years ago, in which he suggested that the Irish famine could be relieved if babies of poor families were confiscated at 12 months and sold to rich people, who could eat them. Swift, an Irishman, didn’t mean that literally. It was a satiric device to underline the misery that had been visited on the Irish by their English landlords. So too with my dragging of the Republican leaders.”
Yes, this hateful hack just compared himself to Jonathan Swift.
Parker, meanwhile, takes a different route: he tries that old stand-by, “it was taken out of context.” He told an interviewer he was shocked at the uproar his comments caused, saying,
“I mean, looking back at some of the comments, I can see how some people can take it out of context and run with it, but the response, and what happened over the past 30 days and everything was just shocking.”
Really. Well, here is the video of Parker’s attack on RG III. Tell me in what context such remarks would be considered appropriate, and not racist and mind-blowingly stupid:
Your Ethics Quiz Question:
Which of the two defenses, Kaul’s “It was satire!” or Parker’s “It was taken out of context!” is more unethical, unethical in this case meaning, “a pathetic lie and an insult to the intelligence of everyone who hears or reads it”? Continue reading →
Is there a more irresponsible, historically ignorant, un-American, First Amendment-offending, foolish, ignorant and ugly act than burning speech and art because you object to their content? They burned rock and roll records in the Bible Belt during the 1950s—that was stupid, disgusting and frightening. Hitler, you may recall, burned books; the USSR too. In 2013, consigning electronic media like videogames to the flames is indistinguishable from burning books. I would expect American citizens of normal intelligence to immediately realize that.
I guess I would be wrong.
The local group organizing the bonfire has put out some rationalization for it. I could not care less what sad reasoning and warped values motivate their book-burning. It is a symbolic insult to freedom of thought.
No question: book burnings are legal and protected speech. It is also conduct redolant of mob rule, ignorance, intolerance, fear, hate, and Ray Bradbury novels. Some activities have earned permanent revulsion, legal or not, in American culture because they are the traditional tools not of democracies, but of totalitarian governments, the enemies of democracy and free thought. Book burning is one of them.
And burning videogames is exactly the same thing.
Update: The news accounts eventually make it clear that the group will collect the various forms of violent entertainment in a dumpster, which will also include movies and recordings, and that the actual incineration will be performed by city workers, as part of their rubbish disposal duties. Is this better? Worse, because now the town government is participating? I don’t think it is useful or enlightening to play parsing games. I see this event as indistinguishable from a book-burning, and while The Guardian’s description of it as such could be called misleading (or inflammatory?), I salute them for correctly diagnosing what this is in its essence.
During the Ethics Alarms debates on various threads here about the response to the Sandy Hook Elementary shooting, the ever-reasonable commenter Ampersand wrote,
“I think that if you want a responsible discourse, you should seek out intelligent opposition and highlight it, rather than exclusively highlighting what you see as stupid and unethical opposition.”
I agree that this is usually a good course. The current public policy debate, however, isn’t being led or dominated by intelligent opposition to gun possession, but by emotion-driven, often hateful and hysterical diatribes from activists, demagogues and journalists who have decided that this, of all issues, is one that excuses them of their ethical obligation to be objective and to give views they don’t agree with due respect and fair analysis. Thus it is important to highlight the worst examples of these, not only because they are the most blatantly unethical (“Ethics Alarms,” you know) but also because it is dangerous to allow them to slant the discussion without calling attention to what’s wrong with them.
This brings us to the recent rant of Des Moines Register columnist Donald Kaul. Kaul is an extreme progressive, which is hunky dory, and he is respected as a serious commentator from that side of the ideological spectrum. He also writes for a newspaper with a tradition of serious and professional reporting. He is not Dave Barry, Chris Rock, Ann Coulter or even Lawrence O’Donnell: he is not a jester, a performance artist, or a shameless firebrand. Many reasonable people take what he says t0 heart.
Thus it is worthy of note that such a professional opinion journalist believes that it is appropriate to write a column that says things like this: Continue reading →
“A 20-year-old lunatic stole some guns and killed people. Who’s to blame? According to a lot of our supposedly rational and tolerant opinion leaders, it’s . . . the NRA, a civil-rights organization whose only crime was to oppose laws banning guns. (Ironically, it wasn’t even successful in Connecticut, which has some of the strictest gun laws in the nation.) The hatred was intense. One Rhode Island professor issued a call — later deleted — for NRA head Wayne LaPierre’s “head on a stick.” People like author Joyce Carol Oates and actress Marg Helgenberger wished for NRA members to be shot. So did Texas Democratic Party official John Cobarruvias, who also called the NRA a ‘terrorist organization,’ and Texas Republican congressman Louis Gohmert a “terror baby.” Nor were reporters, who are supposed to be neutral, much better. As The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg commented, ‘Reporters on my Twitter feed seem to hate the NRA more than anything else, ever. ‘Calling people murderers and wishing them to be shot sits oddly with claims to be against violence. The NRA — like the ACLU, the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers or Planned Parenthood — exists to advocate policies its members want. It’s free speech. The group-hate directed at the NRA is ugly and says ugly things about those consumed by it.”
–—-University of Tennessee law professor (and conservative blogging icon) Glenn Reynolds, in a USA Today op-ed piece called “Reflections on Newtown.”
I’m tempted to go further than Prof. Reynolds and suggest that this also says ugly things about what the extended recession has done to our culture, which once was characterized by the initiative, determination and innovation to solve problems, but now increasingly resorts to the useless strategy of pointing fingers. The tradition of picking out convenient public scapegoats to blame and demonize in response to complex societal problems is a long-running historical phenomenon around the world, but it seems to me that the United States has never before embraced it with the fervor we are seeing now.
This is the first of two informative Comments of the Day regarding this post. 49erDweet is correct, of course: the decision to honor Tiburcio Vasquez is a disgrace, and the comment shows that it is even more outrageous and irresponsible than I thought. I have read some of the claims on the web that Vasquez was “framed,” and that he didn’t commit the crimes attributed to him. None of them offer any proof other than the fact that mainstream scholars and historians, which naturally are biased against Mexicans, chronicled his activities, and none explain this mystery: if Vasquez didn’t commit all those crimes, what the heck did he do that was so remarkable? The only reason he is famous is because of his crimes. If he really was innocent, then he was a non-entity.
“The Alisal school district’s area is directly adjacent to mine but in the same community, so I’m a tiny bit familiar with the issue. I’ve disbelievingly read most of the few published responses of a couple of their board members and their superintendent. For some reason the other board members haven’t been available.
From what I’ve read it’s apparent the individuals involved, all of whom have Hispanic surnames, believe the available published history concerning California is biased and untrue, and Vasquez should be considered a popular hero in the same vein as was Robin Hood. For the crimes he committed against his own people, which they believe were minor, they readily forgive him. And to their way of thinking he’s a folk hero who should be idolized.
“I believe this is sad, bad community leadership, obviously a major ethics fail, and is more than passingly ironic because the area they represent is one of the major Mexican prison gang battlefields currently in crisis in California. They are preparing to hold up a killer, thief, robber and rapist as a person their future students should emulate. Which, for a gang area, should build up the prison population and a much shorter than normal life expectancy.
“My heart breaks for the students who will be negatively impacted by this dreadful decision.”
OK, so he was hanged for murder. Nobody’s perfect.
According to the University of Southern California historical archives, Tiburcio Vasquez (1835- 1875) was California’s second most notorious bandit. At the age of 14 he stabbed a constable, then embarked on a life of crime. He became the leader of his own gang, which ranged up and down central and southern California, robbing and killing. Vasquez was convicted of horse-stealing and sentenced to San Quentin prison in 1857, escaped, stole more horses, and was finally released in 1863, after playing a role in four prison breaks that resulted in the deaths of twenty inmates. For the next ten years he and his gang committed a string of burglaries, robberies and murders in the San Benito County area, finally ending with his capture in 1874. Convicted of two murders of the six attributed to him, Vadquez was sentenced to death, and executed by hanging the next year. Shortly before the noose was placed around his neck, Vasquez dictated an explanation for his actions:
“A spirit of hatred and revenge took possession of me. I had numerous fights in defense of what I believed to be my rights and those of my countrymen. I believed we were unjustly deprived of the social rights that belonged to us.”
I know what you must be thinking: “What a perfect historical figure for the Mexican-American community to honor by naming an elementary school him!” Continue reading →
Oh-oh. The American Family Association is losing it….
The American Family Association, which holds that it supports “traditional values,” has been feuding with the liberal, diversity and civil rights-minded Southern Poverty Law Center, which designated it a “hate group.” In turn, the AFA has called the SPLC some other nasty things. They really don’t like each other.
Not liking an adversary group is hardly unusual, but detesting one so much that it robs you of whatever common sense, rationality and proportion you have is both self-destructive and unprofessional, and a clear sign that the group’s judgment is poisoned by emotion and non-ethical considerations. This is what the American Family Association is demonstrating now.
It is difficult to imagine a school program less sinister than “Mix It Up at Lunch Day.” One of the efforts sponsored by Teaching Tolerance, the October 30 nationwide effort has encouraged schools for eleven years to urge students to sit with kids they don’t normally eat lunch with, giving members of different groups and cliques an opportunity to branch out, and to get to know students who are different from themselves. The phenomenon of high school gradually sorting itself into exclusive groups of various levels of social status was neatly captured in “Mean Girls,” where the school’s lunch table cliques were divided into “freshmen, ROTC guys
preps, J.V. jocks, Asian nerds, Cool Asians, Varsity jocks, Unfriendly black hotties, Girls who eat their feelings, Girls who don’t eat anything, Desperate wannabes, Burnouts, Sexually active band geeks,” and, of course, the dreaded Plastics, the social queens, and the Outcasts. “Mix It Up at Lunch Day,” properly handled, is a splendid idea.
But, you see, it is the inspiration of the dreaded Southern Poverty Law Center, so the AFA has decided that it must be evil. Pointing out that the Southern Poverty Law Center is a “fanatical pro-homosexual group, ” the association is urging parents to block their children’s schools’ efforts to hold “Mix It Up” day, by complaining, protesting and, if necessary, keeping their children home. Continue reading →
The Daily Caller found a previously uncirculated Barack Obama speech from 2007, and the conservative media has been giving it the “47%” treatment. No wonder. The speech is uncommonly ugly, with the future President channeling Rev. Wright and Kanye West, encouraging black anger and racial hate. Needless to say, he does not sound like a leader of “all the people” here.
I am on record as believing that such partisan audience speeches should be taken for what they are, and thus with several grains of salt, but never mind: the standard, a different one, has already been decreed by the mainstream news media, which treated Mitt Romney’s unscripted remarks about the government-dependent “47%” as more significant than the collapse of Obama’s foreign policy, the negligent death of our Ambassador, and a protracted White House cover-up of a terrorist attack. If they want to aspire to any fairness and even-handedness at all, it should devote a similar amount of attention and outrage to Obama’s remarks to black clergy, which were, in my view, far worse, because they were designed to exploit racial fears and divisiveness. They are also, like Romney’s comments, misleading and unfair.
I could argue that it is more reasonable to focus on Obama’s speech, because it was made in public, and presumably was fair game for criticism at the time. Why didn’t the reporters who witnessed it raise any alarms then? Wouldn’t such a racially divisive speech during the campaign (for the nomination) be at least as newsworthy in 2008 as the “47%” line by Romney 2012? Of course not—because the media was trying to elect Obama then, and it is trying to defeat Romney now.
A third year law student decided it was appropriate to send an obscene, ranting letter to the entire student body of Yale Law School announcing that he hated “like 90%” of them, and also, in his words (after announcing that he is going to be a writer):
Ethics Alarms 