Slate

Progressives Have Settled On the Defenses For Their Indoctrinated College Students Supporting Terrorism and Acting Like Nazis…[Bad Link Fixed]

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

They are not persuasive. In fact, both are desperate, dishonest and predictable.

Defense #1 is, of course, “It isn’t what it is,” Rationalization #64 and the mantra of the 21st century Left when their delusions, plans, policies and plots blow up in their faces likeone of the Coyote’s bombs intended for the Road Runner. There’s nothing anti-Semitic about supporting Hamas after the October 7 terrorist attack on Israeli civilians! There’s no reason for Jewish students to feel threatened and unwelcome on their own campus when masked protesters wearing the garb of a group that has pledged to eliminate Israel march and chant “From the river to the sea..” And heck, that ditty is completely innocent, like “Mary had a little lamb…” It doesn’t necessary mean “we’re going to wipe you Jews off the map.” You know, just like “Pigs in a blanket, fry ’em like bacon” was just epicurean commentary. Besides, calling out lies about Jews (there is and has been no genocide; there is no apartheid, and there is no such thing as a “disproportional response” when a neighboring region starts a war with a surprise attack on a nation’s citizens and children) and verbally threatening them is just free speech. After all, these aren’t “true threats”—it’s not like anyone would ever actually try to do anything harmful to someone just because they are Jewish. That’s never happened. These demonstrations are just like all those campus marches with students wearing hoods and sheets, chanting “Back to Africa!” and carrying burning…okay, okay, those haven’t happened. And they would be different.

Defense #2 is “Conservatives made them do it.”

I could devote this whole website to featuring and debunking the increasingly hysterical, wildly dishonest, furiously contrived arguments of progressive pundits as they feel the metaphorical walls closing in this year. It’s tempting: I’ve written about a few, but their efforts to somehow separate themselves and their fellow travelers from the outbreak of antisemitism on campuses while simultaneously avoiding the simple statement: “This is wrong” along with the more difficult “And we’re substantially responsible” should be self-indicting.

Continue reading →

Unethical Quote Of The Month: Slate’s Joel Anderson

/ Jack Marshall / 18 Comments

“For Black employees, it’s an extremely small ask to not hear that particular slur and not have debate about whether it’s OK for white employees to use that particular slur.”

—Joel Anderson,host of Slate’s podcast “Slow Burn” and an African-American journalist.

Just ponder that statement a bit while I provide the context.

The online publication Slate suspended Mike Pesca, the host of “The Gist,” a podcast on news and culture. Why, you ask? Well, says the New York Times, he debated with colleagues on an interoffice messaging platform  over whether non-blacks  should “be able to quote a racial slur” in some contexts. Wait, new York Times–what “racial slur”? Isn’t that crucial to the story? Oh..oh..I get it. The Times also can’t quote a racial slur, whatever it is, even if the “context” is a news story about that slur! Got it.

This is so stupid it hurts.

Continue reading →

Sunday Evening Ethics, 5/31/2020: Riot Disinformation And Ethics Lunacy

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

Hot enough for ya?

1. Let’s see exactly how much disinformation the pubic will follow and tolerate.

  • Yesterday I and everyone else heard Saint Paul Mayor Melvin Carter and Minnesota Governor Tim Walz claim that most of the rioters were from out of state,  claiming that “the best estimates” were that “outsiders” comprised about 80% of the people arrested. It was nonsense. The arrest statistics showed the opposite was true. As of 11am CST on Saturday, a sample of data from the Hennepin County Jail’s showed that 86% of those arrested provided a Minnesota address to police. Later in the day, St. Paul released arrest information showing that two-thirds of people arrested since Thursday gave police in-state addresses.
  • CNN reporter Reza Aslan actually tweeted that Trump supporters were doing the rioting. Accountability for this ridiculous, straight up lie? None.
  • Cherry-picking isolated episodes from riot scenes around the country, Slate wrote that “Police Erupt in Violence Nationwide,” and that “law enforcement officers escalated the national unrest.”

2.  Let’s see exactly how much disinformation the pubic will follow and tolerate, (cont.) A typical effort: on Thursday, a New York Times front page story announced “Fury in Minneapolis Over The Latest in a Long Line of Police Killings.” What was that “long line”? It was nowhere to be found, at least not in the article. We are told that the Minneapolis police have received “many excessive force complaints, especially by black residents.” Complaints do not equal misconduct. We are told that “Mr. Floyd’s death — and the recent shooting death of Ahmaud Arbery in Georgia — has also prompted comparisons to previous killings involving the police and black people, including those of Eric Garner and Michael Brown.” Continue reading →

Addendum: To Be Fair, Elizabeth Warren Wasn’t The Only Democratic Presidential Candidate Who Lied About The Death Of Mike Brown Last Week. She Was Just The Worst…

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

Last week, on Friday and Saturday, Democratic Presidential candidates Elizabeth Warren, Rep. Tim Ryan,  Cory Booker, Kamala Harris, Beto O’Rourke, Kirsten Gillibrand, Bernie Sanders, and New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio all tweeted out deliberately false statements about the shooting of Michael Brown in Fergusen, Missouri 5 years ago, all apparently doing so to pander to African Americans, especially those who don’t read newspapers.

Ethics Alarms focused on Warren, being the biggest and most shameless demagogue of the group, in this post, which concluded,

“Warren isn’t intellectually lazy, or flummoxed by a false narrative. She is pandering. She is lying. She is doing what she evidently thinks will gain her power and the Presidency: saying what she thinks will attract needed support, even though she knows, knows, that it is false. Warren is a law professor and a litigator, and from all reports skilled in both roles. She knows that the facts made it obvious that Brown wasn’t murdered. She knows that competent, fair citizens must not call other citizens murderers when not only have they not been charged, tried, or duly convicted, but when authorities have concluded that there is insufficient evidence for an official accusation.The tweet isn’t a mistake or an opinion. It is a deliberate lie, a public and a defamatory one. I see no reason why Darren Wilson could not sue Warren and win.”

That is still accurate and true. Several Ethics Alarms readers pointed out that Kamala Harris also advanced the long de-bunked narrative that Mike Brown was a nice, friendly, “gentle giant” heading for college who was gunned down by a racist cop while holding up his hands and pleading for his life. Continue reading →

Easter Ethics Warm-Up, 4/21/19: As Ethics Lays Some Eggs…

/ Jack Marshall / 30 Comments

Happy Easter!

1.  A cultural note: there is no discernible Easter programming anywhere on TV, cable or network. Oh, TCM is playing “Easter Parade” and “King of Kings” in prime time, but that’s it. ‘Twas not always thus.

2. Speaking of TCM…Bravo for the classic movie network’s teaming with Fandango to offer big screen presentations of John Wayne’s “True Grit” in May. They could have justifiably chosen many other Westerns equally worthy or more so, like “Shane” or “High Noon.” I like to think that choosing the Duke’s Oscar winning performance is an intentional rebuke to the recent attack on Wayne’s legacy by the social media mob, a true “Fill your hand, you son of a bitch!” to the cultural airbrushers and statue-topplers.

I’ll be there, cheering Rooster on.

3. Other than journalists, have any other professionals debased themselves and their professional integrity more flagrantly that lawyers and law professors in their determination to Get Trump? This article in Slate by a law professor argues that asking or telling one’s lawyer to do something that the lawyer refuses to do—like firing Robert Mueller—can be criminal obstruction of justice. By this theory, every time a client says that he wants the lawyer to assist in an illegal act, it’s a crime.  But that’s not how attorney-client relationships work. The attorney is obligated to say, when appropriate, “No, you can’t do that, and I won’t do that for you, and here’s why.” In the end, it is indistinguishable from the client asking the lawyer’s advice, because clients only have the power to order a lawyer to do a very limited number of things, like accepting a settlement.

The professor’s argument also assumes that Trump firing Mueller would be obstruction of justice. Not only is this unprovable—that would have to be his intent—the President had a perfectly good reason to fire the special counsel, just as he had good reason to fire James Comey. Mueller’s investigation had been tainted many ways, and since Trump knew he was innocent, he saw the exercise as a calculated scheme to make it impossible for him to do his job. Firing Mueller and ending the investigation  would have been really, really stupid politically, but it wouldn’t be obstruction.

This, however, is how desperate “the resistance” is to bootstrap some kind of impeachment theory. Continue reading →

SCOTUS: There is No Right To Be Executed Painlessly

/ Jack Marshall / 36 Comments

Good.

Russell Bucklew’s   girlfriend broke up with him, so he threatened her. She ran to a neighbor’s house, but Bucklew chased her down. First he shot the neighbor dead. Then he beat his girlfriend and raped her. Police arrested him after a shootout, but Bucklew eventually escaped so he could attack his girlfriend’s mother with a hammer.

Bucklew was tried and convicted, then sentenced to death under Missouri law. Does this conduct, once proven in court, warrant the death penalty? Personally, I would prefer the bar to be set a bit higher, but I’m not disturbed, as a member of society, to be partially responsible for Bucklew’s demise. He made it clear that he has no intention of abiding by the social contract, and society has no obligation to let him keep breathing.

Two weeks before his schedule execution, Bucklew raised a medical condition as a unique barrier for the use on lethal injection on him, as described by the Court:

“Mr. Bucklew suffers from a disease called cavernous hemangioma, which causes vascular tumors— clumps of blood vessels—to grow in his head, neck, and throat. His complaint alleged that this condition could prevent the pentobarbital from circulating properly in his body; that the use of a chemical dye to flush the intrave- nous line could cause his blood pressure to spike and his tumors to rupture; and that pentobarbital could interact adversely with his other medications.”

Continue reading →

Oscar Ethics: Let Us Pause To Marvel At The Unapologetic Jerkism Of Director Spike Lee

/ Jack Marshall / 43 Comments

Director Spike Lee is a talented artist and an epic jerk, as he has proved too many times to mention. Lee reached his pinnacle of unethical grandstanding when he tweeted out what he thought was George Zimmerman’s address while the New Black Panthers were offering a bounty on Trayvon Martin’s shooter’s head. The man is an incurable race-baiter, as well as a constant catalyst for racial division. Last night’s Oscars put all of this on display, as well as a feature we don’t see that often so blatantly displayed: Lee has the sportsmanship and grace of a 9-year old.

When Green Book won the Oscar for Best Picture (as many had predicted),  Lee became visibly furious, then stood up and attempted to leave the Dolby Theater, the Associated Press reported. Lee stormed to the exit with his Oscar in hand, but was stopped by staffers who argued with him and eventually persuade him to  return to his seat. Lee’s film BlacKkKlansman was also nominated for Best Picture, and had won earlier in the night for its screenplay, which was co-written by Lee.

So far, nobody has been able to recall another nominee behaving so childishly and disrespectfully after losing in an Oscar race. Lee was defiantly unapologetic after the show, joking that he thought he was at a Knicks game and reacting to a ref’s “bad call.” That comment is also unethical, as the Oscars are supposed to be a collegial celebration of the art of movie-making, with all involved at least publicly supportive of the final awards, whoever they go to. Continue reading →

Unethical Quote Of The Week: Ruth Graham, In Slate.

/ Jack Marshall / 64 Comments

This is almost too easy, especially now, and others have flagged it too, but really, she can hardly be shunned enough for this…

“But I think the real reason the clip has spread is simpler: It’s the kid’s face. The face of self-satisfaction and certitude, of edginess expressed as cruelty. The face remains almost completely still as his peers hoot in awed delight at his bravado. The face is both punchable and untouchable. Many observers recognized it right away.”

Ruth Graham in her Slate piece, , “The MAGA Teenager Who Harassed a Native American Veteran Is Still Unnamed, but We’ve Seen His Face Before” an attack on Coventry Catholic school student Nick Sandmann based on what we now know was a politically motivated fake news smear based on a deceptively edited video and knee-jerk media bias against anyone daring to support the President.

Her post is still up.

I was going to include this in my hate-themed warm-up yesterday, but Graham deserves her own post, so utterly despicable is she. Ann Althouse’s son, also a blogger, issued two tweets that almost encompass her void of ethics and fairness, writing,

How is it OK to make a national news story out of not liking someone’s smile? Mocking someone’s smile is as bad as telling someone they have to smile more, and we’re all supposed to think the latter is blatantly offensive, right?,

and

Slate’s Facebook post of this article calls the kid’s facial expression “the smirk of evil.” I don’t know how adults can sleep at night after publicly trashing a kid and calling him “evil.”

Graham wasn’t alone. Here’s BuzzFeed writer Anne Helen Petersen on Twitter about Sandmann’s face:

One theme of the conversations over the past 24 hours = how deeply familiar this look is. It’s the look of white patriarchy, of course, but that familiarity — that banality — is part of what prompts the visceral reaction. This isn’t spectacular. It’s life in America.

After the more extensive videos acme out, Petersen, like many others, just refused to accept the fact that she was wrong, and the kids had been smeared:

I have watched all of the videos. You can understand that the situation was more complex than the first video and still recognize why the sight of that face caused a visceral reaction in so many.

Yeah, I understand why: Petersen is a bigot who is now incapable of accurate perception. She has absorbed the Big Lie that “Make America Great Again” is some kind of coded white supremacy slogan, along with the narrative that white men are viruses in society. The correct analogy is the “Hands up, Don’t shoot” lie. It was accepted as true by the news media and activists who wanted to hang the involved police officer to advance their propaganda that innocent young blacks were being gunned down in the streets, and even after the lie was exposed, many still repeat it as fact today. In that spirit of convenient denial,  Deadspin’s Laura Wagner wrote, “Don’t Doubt What You Saw With Your Own Eyes,” and accused the Covington student’s’ defenders “siding with some shithead MAGA teens and saying that 2+2=5 in the face of every bit of evidence there is to be had.” Continue reading →

You Know, Every Piece Of Sentimental Inspiration Doesn’t Have To Be Debunked: Of Dogs, Death, And “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance”

/ Jack Marshall / 35 Comments

There was a nice, heartwarming photo yesterday of George H.W. Bush’s service dog lying by his casket.  This was accorded the usual sniffling interpretation, which is fine: the image is moving. Nonetheless, Slate felt it necessary to publish “Don’t Spend Your Emotional Energy on Sully H.W. Bush/He’s a service dog who had been with the president for six months, not his lifelong companion.”

“It’s wonderful for Bush that he had a trained service animal like Sully available to him [for 6] months. It’s a good thing that the dog is moving on to another gig where he can be helpful to other people (rather than becoming another Bush family pet). But it’s a bit demented to project soul-wrenching grief onto a dog’s decision to lie down in front of a casket. Is Sully “heroic” for learning to obey the human beings who taught him to perform certain tasks? Does the photo say anything special about this dog’s particular loyalty or judgment, or is he just … there? Also, if dogs are subject to praise for obeying their masters, what do we do about the pets who eat their owners’ dead (or even just passed-out) bodies?…”

Oh, thank you, thank you SO much for that lovely image.

Of course the dog doesn’t understand that Bush is dead, or that he’s in the casket, or anything. So what? Anyone who knows anything about dogs can figure that out. Why was this snark necessary? Continue reading →

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

/ Jack Marshall / 18 Comments

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 →