Tag Archives: protests

October 19, 2017 · 7:30 pm

Comment Of The Day: “Your NFL Anthem Protest Ethics Train Wreck Update: Incompetent Quotes”

…or, in the alternative, are you ready for some vague, annoying protest by a scattering of players during the National Anthem, and THEN some football?

This Comment of the Day is from me, Jack Marshall, blog proprietor and moderator. 

I just finished writing it in response to a comment that I almost described as another incompetent quote; my comment begins with it. But that’s not really fair. What prompted this indeed is a spectacularly wrong quote, but still a useful one. This is the value (I hope) of discourse here. Even wildly misguided debate points can enlighten. This one enlightened me: now I know that the supporters of the NFL Kneelers are, beyond question, not processing reality, either out of confusion or ideological fervor. Their position does not make sense; it’s as simple as that.  I have to read a clear, purposeful expression of a bad argument sometimes to understand what exactly is so wrong with it.

This is a depersonalized version of what I just wrote in the comment thread, which was a bit mean. (It also had some typos, which I think I fixed, and a couple of other edits.) Luckily, I know that the recipient, unlike some people, won’t sue me for hurting his delicate feelings, if in fact I did.

Here is my Comment of the Day on the post, Your NFL Anthem Protest Ethics Train Wreck Update: Incompetent Quotes:

“Since when do one’s “deeply held convictions” give one the right to force others to live by them? No NFL viewer’s deeply held convictions are meaningfully threatened by this silent protest. They remain free to show respect to the flag in whatever way feels right to them. You are the one advocating for a restriction of the NFL players’ freedom of expression. And while that restriction is legal, it is neither ethical nor necessary. It is, in fact, petty and stupid.”

This is, honestly, willfully or naively obtuse.

The NFL players ARE restricted by the nature of their work and the business they work in. This is so simple.

I am a perfect example of the problem you seem incapable of grasping. I am the Customer. I go to entertainment, like everyone else who does, to be entertained. I do not go to be involuntarily shamed, “Woked”, harangued, persuaded, bitched to or proselytized, silently, verbally or symbolically. I’m not paying for that, and it interferes with my enjoyment, both substantively and as a matter of principle. If said entertainment advertises that “before the game/show.performance, the captive audience will be subjected to a brief but heart-felt statement by the players/actors/performers regarding [IT DOESN’T MATTER], I appreciate the candor, and I’m not buying a ticket. If establishments that grants me admission in exchange for my attention, patronage and hard-earned cash,  pollutes my entertainment by allowing  this non-entertaining content without notice, I regard it as a breach of our deal.

Remember, I ran a professional theater company, successfully, for 20 years. And the nice, often progressive actors, board members and staffers were always asking that we have a “curtain speech” urging the audience to contribute for this cause or that crisis, AIDS research,  to help a member of the theater community who had been attacked by wolves or something equally terrible, or even to raise money for my company. My answer was always the same.

NO. NEVER. We do not take advantage of our audience that way, and exploit the fact that they are seated expecting a performance to force a lobbying effort on them, and it doesn’t matter if I agree with the cause or not. It’s wrong, It is in fact, the Saint’s Excuse. (Everybody Does It was also often cited.)

I wasn’t limiting anyone’s freedom of expression then, and no one is advocating restriction of the NFL players’ freedom of expression now. They can say and write whatever dumb (or not) thing they choose when they are not doing the job their employer is paying them to do. Continue reading →

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October 18, 2017 · 8:58 pm

Your NFL Anthem Protest Ethics Train Wreck Update: Incompetent Quotes

The more NFL players, owners, brass, and other fellow travelers on the NAPETR talk about this fiasco, the worse it gets.

Incompetent Quote #1:

“What I see with the N.F.L. owners is a bunch of good old boys telling the players: Stay in your place.”

 ——Black Lives Matter demonstrator outside NFL headquarters.

Comment: “In their place”  in this context means“doing the job for which they are paid millions of dollars and not undermining the business of their bosses by irresponsible non-football activities on the field. “ Yup, telling employees to stay in their place is what all employers do,  must do, and have every right, indeed an obligation to do.

Calling such employers “good ol’ boys” is bigotry and race-baiting, which is what racist organizations like BLM do.

Incompetent Quote #2:

“We need to be above petty attacks from anybody, because racial and socioeconomic inequality has existed in this country for too long,”

 ——- Jed York,the chief executive and co-owner of the San Francisco 49ers, which started this mess. Continue reading →

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October 16, 2017 · 11:05 pm

The NFL Is In Ethics Zugswang, But It’s For A Good Cause

Remember this, the essay a University of North Carolina athlete submitted to one of his courses—he got an A—leaked to the news media in 2014?

On the evening of December Rosa Parks decided that she was going to sit in the  white people section on the bus in Montgomery, Alabama. During this time blacks had to give up there seats to whites when more whites got on the bus. Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat. Her and the bus driver began to talk and the conversation went like this. “Let me have those front seats” said the driver. She didn’t get up and told the driver that she was tired of giving her seat to white people. “I’m going to have you arrested,” said the driver. “You may do that,” Rosa Parks responded. Two white policemen came in and Rosa Parks asked them “why do you all push us around?” The police officer replied and said “I don’t know, but the law is the law and you’re under arrest.

I think about this when I’m reading manifestos from pro football players who think the on-field protests that they can’t adequately explain are vital to national discourse. The protests aren’t, and the protesters aren’t. All of the articles about how protests are inherently patriotic are revealed as lies when the protests they are extolling are this divisive, this costly, and this pointless. The Kneelers are almost entirely filthy rich, maleducated, pampered, narcissist dead-heads whose critical thinking skills are infantile, and whose literacy is dubious. What entitles them to a national canvas every Sunday upon which to scribble their graffitti? Nothing. And by continuing to scribble, they are gradually reducing the visibility of that canvas, as well as the viability of their own occupation, which is short-lived already.

The NFL, meanwhile, is stuck in ethics zugswang by its own incompetence. Allow the players to continue making a mindless Fall ritual of mob ecstasy over the visceral pleasures of watching behemoths in armor crush each other an exercise in cognitive dissonance, and the NFL betrays its ticket-buyers, business partners, sponsors and stock holders. Tell the players to protest on their own time, and the NFL is siding with a President who crossed a line by telling a private business how to manage its employees, and setting itself up as opposing “police brutality,” thus Black Lives Matter, thus African Americans.

Meanwhile, the liberal punditry and news media, which doesn’t give a fig about football, is cheering on the Kneelers even as it drives the NFL into cultural harikiri. It’s a little like some of the more disgusting of the anti-gun fanatics when they reacted to the Las Vegas shooting: “Well, it was a lot of conservatives, so who cares, as long as we can use it to ban more guns.” Same here: Liberals, who are far from the core audience for pro football, are quite happy to see the NFL form a circular firing squad if it furthers “the resistance” and progressive narratives, if even for a little while.

An instructive example was a column earlier this month from the Times’ latest hard left op-ed writer, David Leonardt. Called “The Choice Between Winning And Kneeling,” it purported to be a “protest smart” exhortation to the NFL kneelers, without ever articulating exactly what this foggiest of all protests is supposed to win.

Leonardt begins with five inspiring and completely irrelevant paragraphs about the civil rights protests on the Sixties. This is intended to sanctify the NFL kneelers’ grandstanding, but accomplishes the opposite. That protest movement had clear and specific goals. Blacks and fair Americans wanted an end to Jim Crow. They wanted blacks to be able to vote, as the law said they could. They wanted an end to segregation, and discrimination by public commodities. They wanted to have equal justice under law enforced.

Making the intellectually dishonest leap from Selma to the football field, Leonhardt states, “The professional athletes doing political battle with President Trump are heirs to the civil-rights movement. They are protesting government-sanctioned violence against African-Americans,” thus falling flat on his face immediately. Wait: are they opposing President Trump, or are they “protesting government-sanctioned violence against African-Americans”?  Is he suggesting that Trump favors violence against African-Americans?  Who and what is the protest about?

Well, some are protesting one, some are protesting the other, and some are just going along for the ride. By what measure does Leonardt make the factually false statement that violence against African American is “government-sanctioned”? The U.S. government encourages people to kill blacks? No,  it doesn’t.  Leonardt dishonestly links to the Washington Post data base on police shootings, as if this supports his slur.  Among other things, those statistics show more whites shot than blacks. Never mind. Leonardt is just trying to pretend the NFL players have a clue what they want.

We know what legislative and societal measures Martin Luther King wanted. What measures would address the Kneelers’ concerns? A law declaring that police must never shoot blacks when the officers felt threatened? Officers counting to five before using their gun if a suspect is black, and just to three if he’s white? Automatically pronouncing any officer who shoots and kills a black man as guilty of murder? Dispensing with juries when white officers are involved, and using “innocent until proven guilty” as the standard when black officers are involved? Colin Kaepernick thought that any officer who shoots a black man should be automatically suspended without pay, before any investigation. Is that the goal? As I have noted before, “ending systemic oppression”  is just a slogan. It is meaningless. If it is meaningless, so is the protest calling for “something” to be done about it.

Leonhardt doesn’t care. He just wants to promote societal division; it’s the Leftist Way. “From a moral standpoint, this issue is clear. The athletes are right — and have every right to protest as they have. Trump is wrong, about the scourge of police violence and about freedom of speech,” he writes. Really? What are the athletes “right” about? Even they don’t know.  The President has never said that police violence was or wasn’t a problem, but I thought Leonardt just wrote a few sentences before that the protest was about “government-sanctioned violence against African-Americans,” didn’t he? But he linked to a source about police shootings involving all races. Whatever! This is an op-ed for the choir, and not its brightest members, either: there’s no genuine analysis or reasoning, just shotgun endorsement of broad progressive cant. Blacks oppressed. Police bad. Guns bad. United States racist. Trump racist.

Trump, of course, is completely correct about freedom of speech in this matter: employees don’t have a right to turn the workplace into their own, personal Sixties college campus. But, you see, Trump is intrinsically “wrong,” so even when he’s right, it’s wrong. Continue reading →

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October 15, 2017 · 11:42 am

Morning Ethics Warm-Up, 10/15/2017: The All-Embarrassment Edition

Happy Sunday Morning!

(if I keep saying “good morning” the same way every day, you’ll think I’m insincere…)

1 I’m going to have a full post about the current status of the NFL Anthem Protest Ethics Train Wreck later today, but in general: when will the players and the NFL just shrivel up with embarrassment? I’m thinking of absurdist theater like this: CNN contributor Donte Stallworth said yesterday that the NFL kneeling protests aren’t just about police brutality and racism, but also about…wait for it… the “gender pay gap.” (Which is largely fictional, by the way.) Stallworth, is a former NFL wide receiver. He actually had the guts to say,

“The number one stated goal was to bring awareness to a lot of these issues and again, its a broad spectrum of issues. Again, it’s not just police brutality and community policing. It’s also, again from what I’m hearing from players directly involved in these talks–they’re telling me it’s also about the gender pay gap, it’s also about housing discrimination, they have so many things that they are interested in and advocating for and they want the NFL to take ownership in and help be able to use the NFL’s platform. Not just the players platform but the NFL’s platform and that from what I am hearing is a big conversation.”

Yes, that’s another CNN contributor who is too ridiculous for an ethical news source to allow in a studio. So let me get this straight: the kneeling NFL players aren’t protesting the anthem that they are refusing to respect by standing, not the flag, nation, history and values it represents, but they are protesting over issues that nobody involved has breathed a word about, like gender pay gaps. What else? LGTB rights? Wait, football players aren’t too keen on gays, forget that. Free college, Bernie style? No, all of these bozos already got their college free. Please, tell us what your protest means. Are you protesting against Harvey Weinstein yet? Maybe you have been all along!

Embarrassing.

2. I remember when Slate was a fresh, shiny, diverse, certainly left-leaning but often incisive commentary e-mag, Its founder, Mike Kinsley (he’s a college classmate of mine, though I didn’t know him except through my room mate’s stories) is less of an ideologue than a detached cynical nihilist with a great sense of humor. Now, however, his baby is just a shrill progressive scold. On the home page, Slate urged me, “Support Jamelle Bouie’s coverage of Trump’s America: Join Slate Plus Today!” As anyone could discover by searching for Bouie in the Ethics Alarms archives, the writer is a stone-cold anti-white racist and race-baiter who left his fairness and integrity in a taxi years ago. The only reason what he writes weekly isn’t protested as hate speech is that only conservatives are accused of hate speech, them’s the rules. Any publication that promotes a writer like Bouie as a reason to become a reader has decided that it is acceptable to insult more than half of America.

I often wonder what Kinsley thinks about this. He probably thinks it’s funny.

It’s not. It’s embarrassing.

3. Hillary’s book tour involves going everywhere and explaining that she wasn’t at fault for losing the election, but that she takes full responsibility. Both Clintons are ethics corrupters of long standing, but the distaff Clinton threatens to permanently warp the concept of accountability for anyone who listens to her or reads her book without breaking into giggles. In a a recent interview, there was this exchange, for example,

And, yes, I take responsibility. Obviously, there were things I must have been able to do differently in order to have won. But at the end, there was this really perfect storm, and so you had the Comey letter and you had the enormous impact of the Russian theft of emails, the release of them by WikiLeaks, basically now a part of the Russian intelligence apparatus, and the weaponization of that. These were all new phenomena.

“So you’re still blaming others more than yourself?” her British interviewer asked, unlike any US interviewer, since Clinton won’t subject herself to being cross-examined by anyone in the US that didn’t weep on election night.

“No, I take ultimate responsibility, I don’t blame others, but I think it’s important that people understand what happened. It easy to say, ‘Well, you know she wasn’t a good candidate.’ Then why did lead all the way to the end, why did I get nominated overwhelmingly?”

Memo to Hillary: You were a terrible candidate, and always have been; the pollsters were incompetent and biased; and you were nominated because the process was rigged from the beginning. Continue reading →

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October 12, 2017 · 11:48 pm

THIS Is CNN. How Embarrassing…For You, Me, Ted Turner, James Madison, Gutenberg, Australopithecus, Everyone

I watched this jaw-dropping exchange this morning on CNN’s New Day, unable to process what I was seeing. An alleged debate between two evidently paid CNN commentators, moderated by Alisyn Camerota, supposedly a professional broadcaster, the exchange was neither enlightening, informed or vaguely like anything the Founders could have recognized as “the press.” The level of logic and expression has been exceeded on multiple Jerry Springer episodes. The Kardashians could top it.. on a lucid day. Throughout the interminable segment, the “moderator” made no effort to control the rhetoric, correct screamingly obvious errors,or insist on decorum.

I think the best approach is to have you read it, if you can. When the transcript became available, I realized that what I had seen was even worse than I thought at the time. I was going to challenge you to pick out the most idiotic statements, but that’s too easy: closing your eyes and pointing at the screen would work. Here’s a more worthy test: see if you can identify an intelligent statement, one that wouldn’t be out of place in a bar debate between a soused kindergarten teaching assistant and truck driver recovering from a closed head injury.

But first,a word about Ana Navarro. When CNN started using her as its token conservative in studio panel discussions, I assumed it was one more example of the mainstream media stacking the deck to ensure that the liberal message prevailed by finding the lamest conservatives possible. She’s wishy-washy, inarticulate, and smug. Then Trump was nominated, and CNN found it had a Trump-hating Republican representing the Right on every issue: perfect! Navarro doesn’t even try to hide her hatred of Trump—the CNN anchors don’t try very hard, but they do a better job than Anna.

On the other hand, she not a persuasive advocate for anything, and ridiculous more often than not. As you shall see:

7:38 a.m. ET

BEN FERGUSON, CNN POLITICAL COMMENTATOR: You have a right to do a lot of things in this country, and there are consequences, and the NFL got it wrong. The NFL got out and tried to play both sides of this issue. And then they tried to say, “Oh, we’re America’s team, we’re America’s game, we’re America’s sport,” while allowing their employees to disrespect this country. You have the right to do it — there’s consequences. The NFL boycott is real —

ALISYN CAMEROTA: Listen, I just want to be very clear. They say they’re not disrespecting the country. They say that their protest is about the treatment —

FERGUSON: Well, that’s what they say.

CAMEROTA: They’re the sources. They’re doing the protesting. They’re the protesters.

FERGUSON: I have the right to disagree with them. I’ll say this. I think many of the NFL players are frauds. Most of them did not go and vote in the last election, including Colin Kaepernick who’s never voted in an election — while coming out and claiming —

ANA NAVARRO, CNN POLITICAL COMMENTATOR: Voting is not a requirement to protest. Voting is not a requirement to voice a political opinion.

FERGUSON: If you’re going to be the leader of a political statement, as Colin Kaepernick was —

NAVARRO: Donald Trump’s children didn’t vote, and they are advisors in the White House!

FERGUSON: And I criticized — and I criticized them for that. I’m consistent.

NAVARRO: Well, fine, you criticize them for everything, but don’t tell me, then, that they don’t have a right to protest when the senior advisors in the White House didn’t vote.

FERGUSON: Colin Kaepernick comes out and says, “I’m going to lead this group.” When was the last time he went to a Black Lives Matter — the guy saw a bunch of TVs and a bunch of cameras and said, “I’m going to kneel right now, but I’m not going to back it up.”

CAMEROTA: That’s his right.

FERGUSON: He has a right, but it also means you’re a fraud.

NAVARRO: Can I tell you something, Ben? Ben, how white of you to think that going to a Black Lives Matter rally —

FERGUSON: It’s not white — don’t even go there. Don’t even — I’m sorry — that’s absurd.

NAVARRO: No, no, who are you to tell a black person what makes them black — what makes them have black credible?

FERGUSON: Again, it has nothing to do with race.

NAVARRO: Look at yourself in the mirror. What he is saying might be more significant than what — than going to one of the rallies.

FERGUSON: If I go out there every day and I champion a cause and I never do it in real life, I’m a fraud.

NAVARRO: Who died and made you the judge of blackness — to tell Colin what’s’-his-name that the fact he voted or not allows him to have a political opinion?

FERGUSON: If you go out there every day and you fight for something that you say is so near and dear to your heart, and then I find out in reality you’re never involved in the issue other than being on national TV, you’re a fraud. You’re a fraud and a fake.

NAVARRO: Well, then talk to Ivanka Trump! Talk to Ivanka Trump who didn’t vote!

FERGUSON: Again, we’re talking about Colin Kaepernick.

NAVARRO: No, no, because you want to hold this one standard for this one set of people and another one for another set of people.

FERGUSON: I did. I said this. I said this. You should have voted in an election.

NAVARRO: Ivanka Trump and Donald Trump Jr. are frauds because they didn’t vote in the Republican primaries!

FERGUSON: They should have voted in elections. I said that. You also voted for Hillary Clinton, and you say you’re a Republican, so that’s a little bit of a fraud, isn’t it?

NAVARRO: No, no, no, there’s a lot of Republicans who did.

FERGUSON: By using your standard. You come on here and say you’re a Republican. You say you’re a Republican, and you voted for Hillary Clinton. So you’re not a Republican, by your standard.

NAVARRO: You voted for a man who was a Democrat and then an independent, and then when he was an opportunist, he became a Republican. So, really, don’t go there for me because I have been supporting Republican candidates for President probably when you were still in diapers!

FERGUSON: Again, you voted for Hillary Clinton, and you say you’re a Republican.

NAVARRO: I voted for Hillary Clinton because I refuse to vote for a racist, misogynist, even though he was a Republican nominee.

FERGUSON: And you have every right to do that.

NAVARRO: And it was the first time in my life that I did not support the Republican nominee because I found him absolutely disgusting, and I was going to put country over party! And you are nobody to question Colin Kaepernick what’s-his-name’s blackness or my Republican credentials, okay? You are not judge and or jury! You can do whatever you want for yourself — you cannot judge me — you cannot judge whether he is black enough!

FERGUSON: I can judge Colin Kaepernick. It doesn’t have anything to do with his blackness. This the weakest argument — let me finish, though —

NAVARRO: Oh, you’re saying — you’re saying he’s not black enough because he didn’t go to Black Lives Matter.

FERGUSON: Again, I’m going to finish my point here because it’s really important.

NAVARRO: And you are black because you went to a Black Lives Matter rally!

FERGUSON: Let me finish – let me finish — again, let me finish. Colin Kaepernick coming out and saying this is a big issue to him, but he never goes out into the community and is involved in it — doesn’t even care enough about the issue which he says everyone else should care about to go register to vote and vote. That is hypocrisy — it has nothing to do with being black or white. It’s called being a hypocrite.

Continue reading →

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October 12, 2017 · 12:01 am

Ethics Dunce: The NAACP. A Really Bad One…

The NAACP, once a heroic and invaluable champion of civil rights, has apparently completed its devolution into a hyper-partisan, race-baiting collection of venal, divisive  hacks. It has been said that every cause inevitably becomes a racket, and the NAACP is now a prime and tragic example.

How do we know this? We know this because the organization has called the decision (finally) by Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones to command his player to stick to what they are paid for—football and only football—when they are on the playing field, and to stand for the National Anthem “a public commitment by an NFL owner to violate his players’ Constitutional right to free speech.”

This is more than merely ignorant, though if genuine the statement would be unforgivably ignorant for a civil rights organization: a civil rights organization that doesn’t know what civil rights are and what the Bill of Rights means is useless as well as without credibility.

That, however, is impossible. The NAACP has lawyers; their lawyers aren’t idiots. They know that the First Amendment has no relevance or connection to the silly NFL players’ kneeling stunt during the National Anthem. The lawyers had to have informed the NAACP leadership of this, as if that was necessary, which it almost certainly was not. The leadership has to know better than to make this junior high school level civics mistake. No, in this case the NAACP is lying. It is deliberately misinforming the people who depend on it to lead on civil rights, and who trust the organization to be able to support its position with facts and law. It is doing this to inflame passions and worsen the racial divide. What other reason could there be? Continue reading →

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September 29, 2017 · 11:53 am

Morning Ethics Warm-Up, 9/29/2017: A Rude Librarian, Another Incoherent Knee, I Need To Start Listening To My Own Lectures, And Did YOU Know That “Green Eggs And Ham” Was Racist?

Good Morning!

1 In the middle of yesterday’s continuing legal education seminar on technology and legal ethics, I was telling the attendees about the dangers of all things Google. As I was explaining why lawyers should never, never do legal business on a gmail account, I added that they also have an obligation to tell their clients that there is not a sufficient expectation of privacy when they use gmail to communicate with their attorney. Then I literally froze and stared into space.

“I just realized that one of my recent consulting clients, a lawyer, has been sending all of his communications and documents to me using gmail,” I said. I had noticed it, but it still didn’t trigger the response that I have been teaching to others for at least three years.

As a wise man once said, “D’oh!”

2. In the “I can keep it up as long as they can” category: There is now a viral photo of some idiot taking a kneel  during Taps at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier.

Continue reading →

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