Thank you, Washington Post
Now somebody tell Black Lives Matter, all of the copycat activist groups, and all the progressive, pandering politicians, like Bernie Sanders, currently giving deference and respect to such groups that still tacitly use Dorian Johnson’s Big Lie in their literature and demonstrations. Somebody tell the Democratic National Committee, which endorses Black Lives Matters, shameless race-baiters that they are. Is the antecedent ambiguous? Never mind: race-baiters applies to both.
Most of all, somebody tell America’s African Americans, most of whom have been conditioned to believe the lie, and thus to believe that young Mike Brown was executed on the streets of Ferguson because he was black. They have been thus taught so they distrust whites, law enforcement and their nation, and so they will vote Democratic.
Here was the original debunking of the lie, in March. I’ve been tracking the lie since before then: it was evoked in Farrakhan’s march on Washington and in August’s Ferguson demonstration. In both cases, the news media soft-peddled the implicit endorsement of a vile falsehood for its value in spreading distrust, fear and hate. Continue reading
—-The Democratic National Committee, in a resolution passed last week endorsing #Black Lives Matter”
You think that having Donald Trump running (temporarily and momentarily) as a front-runner in the race for the 2016 Republican Presidential nomination is embarrassing for Republicans? That’s nothin’! The official endorsement of the racist, violence-promoting, anti-police and anti-rule of law movement Black Lives Matter ought to disqualify the Democratic Party as a trustworthy political organization until it stops pandering and apologizes for this statement.
Black Lives Matter is a racist, anti-white, hate-fueled organization that considers any law enforcement involving black criminals presumptively racist. The movement continues to rely on false and discredited media and activist narratives (“Hands up! Don’t shoot!”), citing “victims” like Michael Brown as the justification for its existence, presuming guilt in cases where the facts are uncertain or in legitimate dispute (Eric Garner was not “choked to death,” nor was he intentionally killed; Sonny Gray’s death is still unexplained; there is no evidence that Tamir Rice’s death was related to race). The primary result of the group’s efforts so far have been to increase racial tensions, to spark deadly attacks on police officers, and to cause a catastrophic rise in urban murders as police avoid proactive methods and stops involving black suspects to avoid becoming the next Darren Wilson. Continue reading
From The Hill:
Two out of three black people prefer the term “all lives matter” to “black lives matter,” according to a Rasmussen poll released Thursday. Only 31 percent of black people surveyed said that the statement “black lives matter” most closely comports to their own beliefs, compared to 64 percent who chose “all lives matter.”Seventy-eight percent of total respondents also chose “all lives matter,” including 81 percent of white and 76 percent of minority respondents, according to the poll.
Now that is genuinely good news, and after the last couple Ethics Alarms posts, I bet you needed some.
Quick, you pandering, pusillanimous, finger-in-the-air, weak-kneed, race-baiting politicians like Martin O’Malley—better retract those apologies for not flagging down the racist #BlackLivesMatter train to board fast enough…at least until the next poll, then you can flip again.
___________________________
Pointer: Instapundit.
That’s the tipping point for Ethics Alarms. “Black Lives Matter” is unethical, and those who use it are unethical. And politicians who grovel to those who criticize them for not embracing it are contemptible.
The Martin O’Malley embarrassment over the weekend clinched it for me. Demonstrators interrupted the former Maryland governor, mounting a pathetic campaign against Hillary Clinton for the Democratic presidential nomination, as he was speaking at the Netroots Nation conference. When they shouted, “Black lives matter!” a rallying cry of protests that has superseded “Hands Up! Don’t Shoot!” because that one was eventually exposed as a lie, O’Malley—the naive, racist fool!!!!— responded: “Black lives matter. White lives matter. All lives matter.”
The activists responded by jeering him and refusing to let him speak. .Later in the day, O’Malley, “showing the firm commitment to leadership in the face of adversity that we expect in a presidential candidate,” as one wag put it on Jonathan Turley’s blog—apologized, saying…
“I meant no disrespect. That was a mistake on my part and I meant no disrespect. I did not mean to be insensitive in any way or communicate that I did not understand the tremendous passion, commitment and feeling and depth of feeling that all of us should be attaching to this issue.”
I bent over backwards to defend Smith College President Kathleen McCartney when she apologized for using the phrase “all lives matter” in December of 2014. I wrote:
If an activist says to me, “too many children go to bed hungry!” and my retort is, “Too many people go to bed hungry!”, the unspoken argument is “So stop acting like children are a special problem!” If I say, “We need peace in Syria,” and a friend’s response is “We need to end war, period!”, I view that as an effort to minimize my concerns by launching it from the realm of a specific issue into vague, generic territory. “Black Lives Matter!” in the context of recent police episodes where African Americans died under circumstances that many believe show police callousness and excessive force against blacks is a distinct assertion that suggests that the law enforcement and justice systems do not currently function as if black lives matter as much as white lives. It is true that “All Lives Matter” includes the larger subset “black lives matter”; it is also true that it blurs the issue at hand, and dilutes the protesters’ point. It is not inappropriate for President McCartney to apologize in this context…unless, of course, she intended a rebuttal, in which case she is indeed spineless.
I still believe that made sense in December, but “Black Lives Matter” means something very different now, after six police officers were charged with murder to quell a Baltimore mob after Freddie Gray’s death, and after President Obama decided that the merciless shooting of a young white woman in San Francisco by an illegal immigrant wasn’t worthy of the same attention he has given other deaths when it was a black life that had been lost. Continue reading
Witness 128…
Today’s Washington Post Fact Checker column finally weighs in on whether of not “Hands Up! Don’t Shoot!” is a lie. I won’t keep you in suspense: Of course it is.
As I had no ideological reason to pretend that it was otherwise, I identified the phrase as such last November. Since then, it has been wielded by athletes, journalists, members of Congress, protesters, talking heads, professional athletes, and pop stars, while contributing to getting some police officers shot. There was no need for this verdict to take so long. “Better late than never,” you say? How about better responsibly on time, as in when the facts were available to anyone with the integrity to reject a useful catch-phrase that was without basis in fact?
For some reason this is not the regular Post Fact Checker. Maybe Glenn Kessler, a partisan who makes a reasonable effort to overcome his biases, couldn’t get around them this time, or is sick or dead or something. This Fact Checker is Michelle Ye Hee Lee, and she hardly leaves any room for doubt as she lays the blame for the whole scam squarely on the head of the late Mike Brown’s pal, Dorian Johnson, a.k.a. Witness 128. To be fair, “Hands Up” was not a lie for those who used it profligately after Johnson’s false accounts, for they sincerely, if recklessly and negligently, believed it to be true. This was Johnson’s lie, and though it was obviously self-serving, and though he was as unreliable a source as it was possible to be, confirmation bias allowed all of these good people—well, some of them are good—-beginning with Brown’s parents, to accept it as truth. It was easier for them to believe that white police officers gun down unarmed, gentle giants in the street for no reason other than their color than to question the word of Brown’s scuzzy, criminal friend. Continue reading
You read that right: the slogan, which Rebok printed up for use by an affiliated gym in Germany and which quickly went viral on the web, is
“CHEAT ON YOUR GIRLFRIEND, NOT ON YOUR WORKOUT!”
As blatantly unethical exhortations in pursuit of commerce go, this one is pretty spectacular. Consider:
That’s a remarkable amount of bad ethics in just eight words. A masterpiece of economical cultural poison. Bravo! Continue reading
Advertising Ethics: KFC is marketing its new “Double Down” chicken sandwich by paying college co-eds—who must meet some secret standard of butt-comeliness—to wear sweat pants with “Double-Down” printed on the seats. The National Organization of Women objects: “It’s so obnoxious to once again be using women’s bodies to sell fundamentally unhealthy products,” says Terry O’Neill, NOW’s president. What an odd comment: is it all right in NOW’s view to use women’s body to sell healthy products? Is O’Neill saying that (not to give KFC any ideas) paying buxom co-eds to wear tight T-shirts advertizing fried chicken breasts would be wrong, but the same campaign for healthy, broiled breasts would be just fine?
I am tempted to say that any ethical condemnation of the “buns as billboards” method is attributable to the “Ick Factor,” not ethics. Continue reading
Ethics Alarms 
Steve-O-in NJ’s Comment of the Day inspired by the discussion of “Black Lives Matter” (and Black Lives Matter without quotes, which thrives on the confusion) requires no introduction. Here it is, a comment on “Ethics Quote Of The Week: American Thinker…(With A Flashback And Regrets)”:
***
“There is no god but God, and Muhammad is His Prophet!”
“Deus vult!”
“Workers of the World, Unite!”
“The World Must Be Made Safe for Democracy!”
“Peace, Bread and Land!”
“Asia for the Asians!”
“Make Love, not War!”
“Give Peace a Chance!”
“Black Lives Matter!”
On their faces, all these slogans sound benign and inspirational. Maybe even the intent behind them was good, or at least the true believers thought so. Muhammad was looking to move the Arab world, forward, not back, when he introduced his own brand of monotheism, and I don’t doubt he thought he was creating a framework for a good and honest life when he wrote it all down and proclaimed this the complete record, with nothing more to come. However, there is no doubt he was also using it to cement his own power, and the evil that was later done in his name and that of his early slogan is history.
When Pope Urban shouted “Deus vult!” (God wills it!) on that hill outside Clermont, there is no doubt he thought that he was doing the right thing by rallying the attending nobles and knights to form and army and take back the Holy Land from the Muslims, who had stolen it away from the Byzantines and were not respecting the rights of Christians there. History also tells us what happened after that, and none of it is humanity at its best.
When Karl Marx wrote “Workers of the World, unite!” he probably meant it, but it was clear he hadn’t really thought it through. He himself was no working-class hero, just an expatriated writer and philosopher who avoided bankruptcy more than once because his well-to-do fellow traveler Friedrich Engels bailed him out. In 1848 he published the Communist Manifesto, fuel to the fire of the already smoldering problems that became the Revolutions of 1848, which you can look up. We all know what came later as a result of his crazy and unrealistic ideas.
“The World must be Made Safe for Democracy!” So shouted Woodrow Wilson to Congress as he led this country into a war that he had campaigned months before to keep it out of. I don’t doubt he really meant to do this world some good as a missionary for his rigid, hypocritical morality. I also don’t doubt that America’s contribution to WWI was a net positive for many people in Europe who would have suffered longer or more without it. However, it was also the first of a series of dominoes that led this world into a lot bigger problems later on, and arguably made the world less self for democracy in the long run.
Continue reading →