This isn’t “Whataboutism.” It’s “Stoplyingthroughyour#!%!@#teethism”.
hypocrisy
From The “I Don’t Understand This At All” Files: Why Should ‘Historically Black Colleges’ Be Getting A Surge In Donations?
Make no mistake: I know why they are getting a surge in donations: cynical virtue-signalling and mindless George Floyd Freakout tribute. However, like the historically black colleges themselves, the phenomenon of picking now to celebrate segregated education, and mostly inferior education, is self-contradictory. It also highlights the hypocrisy of the “antiracism” movement itself, and the incoherence of the “diversity” chants coming from the Left.
For these colleges are the opposite of diverse. They are, in fact, discriminatory in concept and execution, and to see them “thrive” while activists are demanding literal quotas in other institutions in order to create numerical demographic parity—at least—is a blazing example of how the George Floyd Ethics Train wreck is less a cultural awakening than it is an opportunistic and unethical power play fueled by white guilt and cowardice.
The front page article in the New York Times today is so full of head-banging-on-the-wall moments I ran out of head before I ran out of wall. Here are some…
“Systemic Racism” Update
I need a graphic for “The Great Stupid,” but until I get one, that clip above from Ed Wood’s masterpiece, “Plan Nine From Outer Space,” will have to do. I have to check back and find out which generous reader sent me this after I asked if there was a “Stupid, stupid!” equivalent of the “Madness! Madness!” clip from “Bridge Over The River Kwai.” That’s the immortal Dudley Manlove uttering those words, by the way. And that was his real name!
Update: Commenter Wallphone found the “Plan Nine” clip, and has my enduring gratitude.
Here are some especially annoying recent developments on the incoherent “systemic racism” front.
1. Philonase Floyd, the brother of the late, great,George Floyd, said, following the sentencing of Derek Chauvin, “I just want to reiterate: not just black lives matter, all lives matter.” Strangely, he was not immediately condemned as a racist or racially insensitive and forced to apologize like so many others who were hounded mercilessly for saying “all lives matter.” Of course, the explanation is that Floyd’s skin shade gives him license to say “all lives matter.”
I only want to know the rules, that’s all. That seems like a reasonable request. But the systemic racism scam is truly Calvinball.The rules are made up and changed according to whatever is expedient at the time. Incidentally, there is a politician named Calvin Ball who is the county executive of Howard County, Maryland. Guess his party and race. [Hint: He’s allowed to say “All lives matter.”]
2. There has to be some designation for the cowards and enablers of rising totalitarianism that accurately describes sniveling traitors to democracy like Charlette LeFevre and Philip Lipson, the directors of Capitol Hill Pride in Seattle. I was considering the “Winston Smith Award,” but that seems unfair to Orwell’s tragic hero.
The two sent a letter to the Seattle Human Rights Commission that said,
“It has come to our attention that an event called ‘Take B(l)ack Pride’ at the Jimi Hendrix public park June 26th is charging Whites only admission as reparations. We consider this reverse discrimination in its worse form and we feel we are being attacked for not supporting due to disparaging and hostile e-mails. We will never charge admission over the color of a person’s skin and we resent being attacked for standing in those values.”
No Good Guys Or Innocent Victims In The Tucker Carlson-New York Times Spat
Apparently the New York Times got tired of Tucker Carlson’s two faces, so media reporter Ben Smith did a hit piece on the Fox News star. He revealed that Tucker, despite his oft-expressed disdain for the mainstream media and its reporters, “spends his time when he’s not denouncing the liberal media trading gossip with them. He’s the go-to guy for sometimes-unflattering stories about Donald J. Trump and for coverage of the internal politics of Fox News (not to mention stories about Mr. Carlson himself).” Smith adds, “I won’t talk here about any off-the-record conversations I may have had with him. But 16 other journalists (none from The Times; it would put my colleagues in a weird position if I asked them) told me on background that he has been, as three of them put it, ‘a great source.’”
In other words, Carlson is a hypocritical double agent. condemning the mainstream media on his TV show and doing favors for them behind the scenes. One especially nauseating tale is how Tucker related a private conversation with President Trump that made Carlson look good and Trump look foolish for an coming book by the Wall Street Journal reporter Michael Bender, “Frankly, We Did Win This Election: The Inside Story of How Trump Lost.” Since only two people were on the line, and Trump didn’t reveal it, Carlson is the only possible source. But the whole article is nauseating, including the casual way all the participants excuse such “double games” as business as usual. Everybody does it, you see, so it’s OK. “It’s so unknown in the general public how much he plays both sides,” one reporter for a prominent publication who gets dirt from Carlson regularly told Smith. Another Washington journalist explained how Carlson benefits by assisting the same reporters he says he “hates,” saying, “If you open yourself up as a resource to mainstream media reporters, you don’t even have to ask them to go soft on you.”
Ethics Heroes: The US Conference of Catholic Bishops
It is unusual to call an organization’s decision to follow its own rules heroic, but I have low expectations of the Roman Catholic Church. The US Conference of Catholic Bishops voted 168-55 to draft a document on “Eucharistic coherence,” because the Church has been anything but coherent regarding the status of allegedly devout Catholics who support abortion.
Catholics are forbidden from participating in the ritual of the Eucharist if they are in a state of sin. Abortion is considered a very serious sin in the Catholic Church, which holds that life begins at conception. Thus a public figure, indeed an elected official, indeed a President, who openly supports abortion cannot take holy communion, because he is endorsing and enabling a serious sin. This isn’t hard. The much publicized “controversy” over the Bishops’ decision to follow their own Church’s ancient rules ( and those of the New Testament: “Wherefore whosoever shall eat this bread, and drink this cup of the Lord, unworthily, shall be guilty of the body and blood of the Lord. But let a man examine himself, and so let him eat of that bread, and drink of that cup. For he that eateth and drinketh unworthily, eateth and drinketh damnation to himself, not discerning the Lord’s body. For this cause many are weak and sickly among you, and many sleep.” — 1 Corinthians 11:27-30 ) resembles the current controversy in baseball over the MLB decision to enforce the hundred-year-old rule against pitchers doctoring the ball.
I know, everything reminds me of baseball, which has played a much greater role in my life than religion. But this is the same situation at its essence. The Catholic Church ducked, weaved and looked the other way while many U.S. politicians professed their belief in Catholicism as they openly and directly contradicted and actively undermined the Church’s core beliefs. They sought to have the benefit of appealing to the religious while simultaneously advocating a practice that their own Church condemns.
The New York Times—my wife keeps asking me why we pay 80 bucks a month for this shameless propaganda device, and I am running out of reasons—says that the Bishops’ vote is a “move to target a president, who regularly attends Mass and has spent a lifetime steeped in Christian rituals and practices, is striking coming from leaders of the president’s own faith, particularly after many conservative Catholics turned a blind eye to the sexual improprieties of former President Donald J. Trump because they supported his political agenda.”
Ethics Catch-Up, 6/10/2021 (But I Keep Falling Further Behind!)
That’s not me, by the way. I would never wear a shirt like that…
1. Not substantiated, but worth mentioning: Fulton County, Georgia, poll manager Suzi Voyles says that when she sorted through a stack of mail-in ballots last November, she noticed strange uniformity in the markings on ballots favoring Joe. Biden. All the absentee votes contained perfectly filled-in ovals for Biden, except that each of the darkened bubbles featured an identical white space inside them in the shape of a tiny crescent, indicating they had been marked with toner ink instead of a pen or pencil. All of these ballots were printed on different stock paper than the others she handled as part of a statewide hand recount of the 2020 Presidential election, and none were folded or creased, as mail-in ballots usually are. To her, the Biden votes looked like they’d been duplicated by a copying machine. At least three other poll workers observed the same thing in stacks of absentee ballots for Biden they handled, have joined Voyles in swearing under penalty of perjury that they something was—is—seriously amiss. A state judge has ordered that all of the 147,000 mail-in ballots counted in Fulton be unsealed to allow a closer inspection of the Biden ballots for evidence of counterfeiting. Observations:
- Why is this only happening now, rather than before the results were certified?
- Even if the audit show that Trump “won” Georgia, indeed even if similar audits show that he should have won the election, nothing will change as far as the current government is concerned. You can’t unring that bell. Congratulate the Democrats: it worked!
- Even the Georgia audit alone, if it turned up sufficient counterfeit ballots, would still force some accountability on the news media and progressive pundits, who have rather too vigorously insisted that the election was as pure as the driven snow.
- So far, the mainstream media has ignored this story, and will continue to if it comes to nothing. Right now, it’s officially just more conservative conspiracy theory.
- I am certain that there are many in authority who believe that even if there was widespread fraud in 2020, it shouldn’t be revealed because that knowledge would cause civil unrest. I almost feel that way myself, except that Democrats and news media have been shouting from the rafters that complaints about the loose controls on mail-in ballots are fanciful, and that Trump is “lying” when he says the election was stolen. Now the truth has to be determined, so that highly dubious narrative doesn’t prevent essential reforms.
- If the Xeroxed ballot accusation turns out to be legitimate, things will get ugly. At that point, maybe they have to.
2. Accountability Ethics, Baseball Division. The last two nights, the Houston Astros were booed lustily in Boston by fans indignant about that team’s cheating in 2017, including during a close play-off series with the Red Sox on the way to the Astros’ World Championship. There’s a disconnect here: the primary villain in the cheating scandal is the current Red Sox manager, Alex Cora, who engineered the sign-stealing scheme the team used to help it’s hitters all season. Cora, of course, hasn’t bee jeered at all. Alex said that the booing of his former team made him uncomfortable. Good! He told the press after the game in part,
“Tough to hear it. Because at the end, I was part of that. I was part of the 2017 Astros, and I was part of the whole sign-stealing situation and them being booed and screamed at … I was part of that, too. I know there’s a lot of people in this town who are fans of the Boston Red Sox that don’t agree that I’m the manager [Note: Like me…] There’s others that yeah, they’re OK with it and others, they’re just happy that we have this [winning] record. But that was something I was wondering for a while — how people were going to treat them — because at the end, we were part of it. [Clarification: Not “part of it,” Alex. You were the instigator of it.] Me and [current Red Sox player] Marwin [Gonzalez] were part of that, and it was a tough one last night. When I got home, I thought about it. I was like, ‘Wow.’ It was tough. It was a tough night.”
Not tough enough. I also liked how he threw his own player under the metaphorical bus. Most Boston fans had forgotten that Gonzales, now with the Sox , was one of the Astros’ sign-stealing cheats. I’m sure he was happy to hear his manager remind everyone in his new city.
Tuesday Afternoon Ethics Tunes, 6/8/21: The Mean Fundraiser, And More
Quite a while ago—I’m afraid to check—I asked readers to submit nominees for popular songs with an ethics theme or lesson. Lorne Greene’s one hit recording ( his vocal version of the “Bonanza” song did not fly off the shelves) was “Ringo,” a pretty blatant rip-off of Jimmy Dean’s “Big John,” was one of the first on the list. I received quite a few suggested songs but events overtook me, and I never finished the project. It is in a growing list of promised future content that I have yet to deliver, including missing parts to multi-part posts. I apologize to readers for all of them, but I also intend to make good on all of them, though the ethics songs compilation is understandably low priority. I was happy to finally finish the Ethics Guide to “Miracle on 34th Street” after it languished for a year. The top priorities on the catch-up list right now are Part II of Three Ethics Metaphors: The Rise, The Presidency And The Fall Of Donald J. Trump—that will be on the “Animal House” parade plot metaphor for Trump’s election—and, of course, the long-delayed Part III of The Pandemic Creates A Classic And Difficult Ethics Conflict, But The Resolution Is Clear.
Back to Lorne: I met him once, on a Santa Monica beach. He was in swimming trunks, and with his family, extremely friendly, tanned and wearing his hairpiece, which was fantastic. Like several other stars I have met in person, Greene was so strikingly attractive that he would make anyone turn their heads on a street even if you had no idea who he was. Unlike most of the others, he appeared to be a genuinely nice guy.
1. Proud to be off Twitter, Reason #569: After Twitter received notice of its noncompliance with India’s information technology laws, demanding that the company remove content critical of the government’s handling of the pandemic and about farmers’ protests, including tweets by journalists, activists and politicians, Twitter pulled itself up to its full metaphorical height, puffed itself up like blowfish, and protested in part, “We are concerned by recent events regarding our employees in India and the potential threat to freedom of expression for the people we serve.”
Twitter actually said that it cares about freedom of expression! Then, last week, after Nigeria blocked Twitter, it had the gall to tweet…
This, from the platform that censored the Hunter Biden laptop story and banned President Trump. The Hanlon’s Razor question of whether these are bad people or just stupid people now becomes irrelevant. It’s unethical to operate a powerful communications platform when you are so stupid.
Dear Red Sox: That Was An Unethical Banner, But You Asked For It
During yesterday’s late afternoon game Red Sox game against the Miami Marlins in Fenway Park, some fans unfurled a huge “Trump won — Save America” banner over the centerfield wall during the fourth inning. The banner was confiscated and the fans ejected from the game. Some of the players and quite a few spectators were amused. Similar messages appeared on banners unfurled during Mets and Yankees games in recent weeks.
The Red Sox have long had a policy prohibiting large signs and banners in the park, though I have seen some appear without the park staff taking action. Political signs have always been taboo. In 2017, this sign…
Addendum To “Stop Making Me Defend Chris Cuomo!”…
Apparently I wasn’t clear enough in the previous post, so allow me to address that.
Just as it is hypocritical in the extreme for any journalist, and certainly CNN, to tut-tut at Chris Cuomo for behaving exactly as biased, partisan, unethical and dead ethics-alarmed journalists do, it is absurd and self-defeating for alleged critics of our ethics-free journalism to stomp on Cuomo as if he did anything anyone paying attention should have known he would do without a second thought. (I assumed that the clip from “Casablanca” would make that sufficiently obvious. Guess not.)
The point is not to claim that Cuomo advising his high elected official brother in an official, if private, meeting of his aides is what an ethical journalist can or should do. Of course an ethical journalist shouldn’t do it. The point is that there are no ethical journalists; the journalism “profession”—the quotes are because professionals must be trustworthy, and anyone who trusts today’s fake journalists is a sucker—no longer has any ethical standards. Therefore a member of the “profession” who violates what are already dead letters cannot be said to have breached any “norm;” and we should not allow phony criticism of Cuomo to delude us into thinking otherwise.
The Rest Of The Story, From The Ethics Alarms “What An Idiot!” Files: Mayor Lighfoot’s Justification For Her Racial Discrimination
That was Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot’s “defense” of her action yesterday announcing that she would only do interviews with black and other non-white colored reporters. Once again, I am tempted to leave this letter from Chicago Mayor Lightfoot free of any further commentary from me, since what makes it not just unethical but a stunning demonstration of so many other deficits on her part should be screamingly, stenchingly, head-explodingly obvious. Maybe I should, in my respect for readers here who I assume can recognize the trail of a toxic dolt when they see one, just let what is res ipsa loquitur “speak for itself.” I feel like the Duke, trying to stay calm when provoked in “McClintock!” and reaching the same moment of surrender:
