The story told by former Department of Justice attorney J. Christian Adams is shocking in many ways. It shows an abject refusal of Attorney General Holder’s D.O.J. to enforce the law equally with black and white. It shows sympathy within the Obama Administration for, of all, groups, the Black Panthers, a racist organization. It details perjury by high-ranking officials, and a hard breach of President Obama’s pledges to uphold the rule of law, embrace transparency, and to embody a post-racial philosophy. Finally, it shows the same kind of manipulation of law enforcement by ideological zealots that stained the Bush Department of Justice. Continue reading
racism
“Seattle Cop Punches Girl In Face!” Ethical?
YouTube is a wonderful resource that enriches our entertainment, makes us laugh, holds people in the public eye accountable for their actions, and give us better access to current events than ever before. In the area of police conduct, it has exposed abuses that might have otherwise escaped scrutiny. It is also eventually going to get a police officer killed.
The viral video of a Seattle cop punching a teenaged girl in the face has been getting the Rodney King treatment from the broadcast media and the web, with the immediate assumption that his actions are per se proof of police brutality and excessive force. All the societal hot buttons are stacked against the cop: he punches a woman (“You don’t hit a girl!“); she’s a teen (It’s an adult beating a child!); she’s black, and he’s white (Racism!); the underlying offense that triggered the incident was as minor as you can get. (“Jaywalking?”) Predictable, the sensation-hunting news outlets and the usual knee-jerk critics of the police (the N.A.A.C.P. and the A.C.L.U.) have pounced. This is neither a fair nor a competent way to examine a complex incident. Continue reading
Helen Thomas, Bias, and the Demon Pazuzu
Let me be clear: there is nothing wrong with superannuated newswoman Helen Thomas believing that the Jews should “get the hell out of Palestine” and return to Germany and Poland. An if she believes it, there is nothing wrong with her saying so, as she did to a questioning rabbi. It’s good to know. Since we now know her biases on the matter, we can better assess her credibility when she writes about Middle East politics. As Joe Gandleman writes on “The Moderate Voice:
“Just saying “Go back to where you come from” is the same as the misguided, empty-headed Americans who shout “Go back to Africa” to blacks or “Go back to Mexico” to American born Latinos when they know they are American born Latinos. It shows her so hopelessly biased and lacking realistic perspective that stories written by her beg to be skipped over…. on the Middle East story, how can anyone think that when she asks questions she is seeking information to flesh out a story (unless it was a special on airfares so Jews can fly out of Israel)?”
As I said: good to know. What is wrong and dishonest, however, is Thomas’s “apology” after it began to sink in that her candidly expressed and crude bias could be a career-ender. So, emulating that eminent anti-Semite, Mel Gibson, Helen released this: Continue reading
The Ethics of Giving Up on Ethics
Paul Daugherty, a sportswriter for the Cincinnati Enquirer,recently wrote a column expressing a theme I hear all too often regarding politics, government, education, and society generally. Motivated by the steroid allegations against yet another hero, Lance Armstrong, Daugherty penned his surrender to a culture that doesn’t seem to care about ethics. Daugherty wrote:
“Everyone wants sports to be equitable. We all desire the level field. No one wants sports to be as drugged up as Woodstock in 1969. But it is. We’ve fought the ethical fight. We’ve lost. It could be time to let it go.
Even the athletes who lose still win. Mark McGwire got his, Barry Bonds got his, Brian Cushing got his. If you wait enough, deny enough, then rationalize believably, you get yours. Disgrace fades. Only Olympic athletes wear the stink of doping longer than the average 5-year-old’s attention span. In one respect, it’s not unlike the fight against legalizing marijuana. It has lasted so long, and now seems so pointless, I can’t even remember what we’ve been arguing about. We’ve become numb to it….It’s only a little outrageous now to suggest that a professional athlete be allowed to use performance-enhancing substances to his (enlarged) heart’s content, as long as he’s doing it legally….So what’s the point?”
“What’s the point?” Continue reading
Ethics Dunce: Rand Paul
The demise of the Tea Party movement may well come when it actually has to put individual candidates before the electorate and the media to carry its message. At least, that is what the ascendancy of Rand Paul, now the Republican nominee for the U.S. Senate in Kentucky after his primary victory this week, portends. Paul, before his first week as the nominee is up, has managed to expose himself as unacceptably challenged by the task of reconciling the deceptively simplistic philosophy of libertarians with real world ethics. Specifically, he has declared that he does not support the 1964 Civil Rights Act’s requirement that private businesses serve all members of the public, irrespective of race, nationality, religion and sexual orientation. This position Rand haltingly clung to despite withering interviews on National Public Radio and MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow Show. You can see the latter, in two parts, here and here. Continue reading
The Ethics of Silencing Hate
Good and just people are not just bothered by the bad things people do, but also by the bad things they may be thinking while they do it. This is reasonable, on its face, because a lot of the time (though far from always), misconduct arises from ideas, emotions, motives and intentions that are not very admirable and sometimes despicable. The indisputable connection between what we think and what we do increasingly is fueling the idea that we can and should try to control people’s thoughts—not by encouraging good ones through education, culture, philosophy, role models and positive reinforcement, but by preventing bad thoughts through punishment, enforced conformity, censorship, and linguistic controls.
The civil rights movement, once dedicated to wiping out discrimination, which is a kind of conduct, now focuses on eliminating bigotry and bias, a form of thought. Hate crime legislation extends penalties for criminal acts beyond the act itself to what the criminal was thinking while he committed it. The term “hate speech” is frequently used to describe any intense negative opinion as a way of both suppressing and de-legitimizing political opinion. The label effectively argues that an opinion, even a reasonable opinion by itself, should be shunned and even suppressed based on the “illegitimacy” of the thought process used to arrive at it.
As many predicted, this device or tendency (which you call it depends in part on how cynical you are) has intensified with the election of our first African American president, allowing the kind of intense opposition rhetoric, satire, condemnation, hyperbole and ridicule that has been directed at virtually every president before him to now be characterized as hate speech, or proof of racial prejudice. People, of course, have a right to engage in this tactic, but it is wrong.
Over on Facebook, over a million people have joined a fan page called “DEAR LORD, THIS YEAR YOU TOOK MY FAVORITE ACTOR, PATRICK SWAYZIE. YOU TOOK MY FAVORITE ACTRESS, FARAH FAWCETT. YOU TOOK MY FAVORITE SINGER, MICHAEL JACKSON. I JUST WANTED TO LET YOU KNOW, MY FAVORITE PRESIDENT IS BARACK OBAMA. AMEN”, inspired by a joke that is a lot older than Barack Obama, and probably older than Millard Fillmore. Continue reading
The Amazing Segregated Field Trip
Dicken Elementary School in Ann Arbor decided to take only its African American students on a field trip to meet and listen to a rocket scientist, leaving all the white students behind. When the parents of some of the white students excluded from the trip complained, the school’s principal replied, in part:
“The intent of our field trip was not to segregate or exclude students as has been reported, but rather to address the societal issues, roadblocks and challenges that our African American children will face as they pursue a successful academic education here in our community.” Continue reading
Misrepresentation, Manipulation and Lies About Arizona, E-Mails and More, Brought to Us By Those We Trust
Within a span of about three minutes two days ago, I heard Tony Kornheiser on his sports radio show and Joy Behar on her whatever-the-heck-it-is cable show describe the new illegal immigration statute in Arizona in almost exactly the same words: “So the police can go up to anybody for any reason at all, ask them to prove their citizenship, and arrest them if they can’t.” Now, the law specifies “reasonable suspicion,” so whatever the Arizona law permits, Tony and Joy’s version is clearly not it. Nonetheless, this is what a large proportion of the public believes, because this is what they are being told by reporters, bloggers and elected officials…and, disgracefully, the President of the United States, who once pledged to use his gifts and power to unite rather than divide us. Speaking about the Arizona law, Obama said.. Continue reading
The Ethics Of Harvard’s “Racist E-mail” Scandal
The whole sad, sordid story of a Harvard Law student’s racially provocative e-mail that is now circling the web like the deadly virus in The Stand can be read over at Above the Law. The simple facts are these: At a dinner discussion at Harvard Law School, a law student expressed openness to the possibility of future research showing that blacks were, as a group, genetically inferior to whites in intellectual ability. After dinner, she made a fateful decision to elaborate on her views in an e-mail to two “friends” who had been involved in the discussion.
The e-mail said, in part…
“…I absolutely do not rule out the possibility that African Americans are, on average, genetically predisposed to be less intelligent. I could also obviously be convinced that by controlling for the right variables, we would see that they are, in fact, as intelligent as white people under the same circumstances. The fact is, some things are genetic. African Americans tend to have darker skin. Irish people are more likely to have red hair…” Continue reading
Complaint Ethics, With A Dash of Bias
My wife had to deliver some documents to my son’s school, one of those large mega-magnet schools that are locked up tighter than Alcatraz during school hours to keep out drug-dealers, assassins, and street mimes. After being blocked at “Entrance One” by a big guy in shades and a starter jacket (he looked like a club bouncer), she was sent to “Entrance Two.” There she encountered another security obstacle, a desk commanded by an imposing looking woman. There were four others seeking access. One of them, a suited gentleman, presented identification. One was identified by the woman at the desk as someone “who went to school here last year,” and he was allowed to pass the checkpoint on her recognizance alone. Another woman, who said she was a parent, also said was there to pick up something. She had no I.D., however “I’m not going to make you go back for your purse,” she was told. “Go on in.” My wife, also without her purse, was told she did have to present I.D., and had to hike back to the car and return with her driver’s license.
Should my wife report this arbitrary and obviously flawed execution of security procedures to school administrators? And a harder question..
Should she make an issue of the fact that both the woman at the desk and the parent she allowed to pass without I.D. were African American, and my wife is not? Continue reading
Ethics Alarms 